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--:-- Host: From border towns to large metropolitan cities to even rural counties, the influence of Mexican drug cartels here in the United States is inescapable, most glaringly evidenced by the skyrocketing overdose rate of young Americans. And now, a chilling execution-style murder of a family in rural California puts a new focus on the crisis. For this Sunday edition of Morning Wire, we discussed the shocking murders in Goshen, California, cartel operations in Mexico and the U.S., and one sheriff's urgent plea for better policy starting in D.C. Thanks for waking up with us. It's February 5th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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--:-- Host: Here to discuss the interconnected issues of cartel violence, border security, and the drug crisis is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigiacomo. So Amanda, can you first tell us about this truly horrifying incident in Goshen?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Sure, John. Six family members, including a 16-year-old mother and her 10-month-old child, were shot assassination style in the early morning hours of January 17th. The young mother, Alyssa Perez, was apparently trying to flee the violence and protect her baby, Nicholas, before they were both shot in the back of the head. Rosa Perez's 72-year-old grandmother was murdered in her sleep. Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreau confirmed last month that this was a targeted hit and suspected to be related to drugs with potential affiliation to a cartel.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: So we don't know if it is a gang-affiliated shooting, a cartel affiliation, or if the two are combined. But what we can tell you is the manner in which this has occurred is definitely one of the two, if not combined. One of the victims, Eladio Perez Jr., was a convicted felon with a lengthy rap sheet, which included possession of illegal firearms and drugs. Earlier in January, Eladio was arrested after police found weapons and methamphetamine inside the home, but he was released on bail four days later.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Sheriff Bourdieu cited soft-on-crime policies during a press conference about the murder. California has taken a very soft-on-crime approach. We have to begin holding people accountable for violent crimes. People who use guns who are criminals need to be held accountable for using guns and being criminals. He also highlighted policies at the southern border. I can tell you, cartels are here. They are here for multiple reasons. Selling drugs is lucrative. There's a lot of money to be made. The other is that we have a very unsecured border right now.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: There a lot of back and forth when it comes to cartels and free movement up and down the state and across the border. The public received an update on the case during a press conference on Friday. Sheriff Boudreau announced that two males, 35-year-old Angel Uriati and 25-year-old Noah Beard, were both charged with six counts of murder and other crimes in connection to the massacre.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Boudreau made a direct plea to Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to lift the death penalty moratorium in California. Yeah. My message to Governor Newsom. Governor, we've arrested the perpetrators. We've done our part. We're asking that you do your part. We need to look at death, sick, and justice for those who kill the innocence of the innocent.
--:-- Host: Now, this family murder in California was widely covered in the press after the local sheriff said he believed it was cartel-related. Has there been an uptick in cartel-linked violence in the U.S., specifically in these rural areas?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Well, it sort of depends on how you're defining it, but the short answer is yes. Basically, these cartels have had access points all over the United States and almost every big city for decades. Right now, the two most dominant in the U.S. are the Sinaloa Cartel and the far newer Jalisco New Generation Cartel. They have ties in cities across the nation.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: DEA data indicates that some of the top cartel hubs include Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago. What's happening is this organized drug trafficking is growing and expanding to every inch of America, including these more rural areas. Some analysts have suggested this move toward rural America is due to cartels looking to evade more sophisticated law enforcement that's found along the border in larger cities.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Dr. Pablo Caldron-Martinez, author and assistant professor of politics and international relations at Northeastern University London, he told me that might be a contributing factor. But generally, it's because drug cartels are just expanding to new markets like any other big business with enormous resources would do. It's like any other business, right? They see where the demand is. They have better information than any of us because criminal organizations, an organization that sells drugs, is going to know what people buying drugs want and where they want them.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Because that's their job to understand these drug use patterns. And they will get it known before we do. So yeah they will go where the demand takes them and they will try to push their products as any other business in the world does right as you know the same way coca-cola reach every tiny little corner in the world you can ever go to a town small enough pretty much anywhere in the world that doesn't sell coca-cola you know criminal organization the same way right they're going to be wherever there might be people that want their products and they're gonna try to drive demands.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: They operate like any other business, and they have huge amounts of resources to fulfill that demand. So with the expanding illicit drug market comes more addiction, overdose deaths, destroyed families, and sometimes this direct violence. I'll stress that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, in a report released in 2020, said there was, quote, minimal spillover of cartel violence here in the States.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: They're talking about direct violence like murder and shootouts with police that we really see in Mexico all the time. So in other words, we're not seeing the kinds of open violence on this side of the border like we see in Mexico from the cartels. Yeah, exactly. Cartels know this would be bad for business. They don't want to be detected or scrutinized by our law enforcement which is far more powerful than anything they going to face in Mexico.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: They want to continue to profit off illegal drugs under the radar. Mexican drug cartels just the value of cocaine and I not talking about any other drug just cocaine that moves through Mexico, that is controlled by Mexican drug cartels in some way, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It's massive, right? So they control a huge amount of resources.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: And it's impossible for any one government, And particularly for local sort of police forces, they simply cannot compete with the resources available to discriminatory organizations. In the United States, we know for a fact that, you know, police forces are much better equipped and they have much better resources than any Mexican or any other police force in the world.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: So, yeah, it would definitely be bad for business. Why? Because, you know, whilst you can challenge the local police or the state police in Sinaloa, to some extent, you simply cannot do the same with, you know, the California state police or even more, you know, the DEA or any other federal law enforcement agency. It's just not going to happen.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Drug conflicts and criminal conflicts, there's only one way of solving them. And if there is a conflict big enough, then it's going to be solved by violence. It's going to be solved by violence.
--:-- Host: I also spoke to Sheriff Samuel Page of Rockingham County in North Carolina, specifically about cartel violence and drug trafficking. Now, North Carolina in particular is notable since the DEA in 2021 identified the state as housing one of the top hubs for cartel activity in the nation.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: In Rockingham County alone, Sheriff Page told me 17 people died of overdose deaths just last year. In America, when 108,000 people die due to overdoses, due to fentanyl and heroin overdoses in America, I think that's pretty dang significant. I think that tells you that there is a direct cartel involvement in those deaths.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: They may not be using bullets, but they're using fentanyl and heroin, and that kills you just as dead. Sheriff Page said when he first visited the southern border to check out some of these issues about a decade ago, he made a prediction that, unfortunately, has come to fruition.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: I've been quoted making a comment, and I truly believe this today, that I said if we fail to secure our borders, every sheriff in America will become a border sheriff. And I hold true today, we are border sheriffs. There's not a sheriff in this country, across this nation, that's not been affected by the byproduct of the cartel, which is the fentanyl, the heroin, and the human trafficking.
--:-- Host: As we've discussed here before, overdose deaths of young people have just exploded in the U.S. As noted by Sheriff Page last year alone, it's estimated that around 110,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, and this was largely affecting people from 18 to 45 years old.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Here's Ohio Governor Mike DeWine while visiting the border with nine other governors about a year ago. In Ohio, at least 80 percent of our overdose deaths every week are caused by fentanyl. It is being mixed into everything. This crisis at the southern border is a humanitarian crisis. It's also a drug crisis. It's a fentanyl crisis. And while we're discussing this within the context of Mexico and the United States, we have to keep in mind that this issue is even far more global than that.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: A lot of the supplies and chemical supplies and sort of the raw materials that you need to create your fentanyl, a lot of them come from China and they enter from China to Mexico. And then fentanyl is prepared in Mexico in clandestine labs. And then it moved from Mexico and from other parts in Latin America to the United States. And that more or less the supply chain.
--:-- Host: So the question then becomes how do we stem the tide? What measures can be taken to effectively slow cartel activity and the fatal havoc they wreak?
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: Sheriff Page told me we need to start from the top down. We've got to reduce demand with a person with addictions in our communities and our country. But we also have to go after the persons that are marketing the trafficking of humans and drugs, and that's the cartel. And I don't see enough of that activity between us and our communications.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: The president just recently went down to Mexico City, but I didn't hear enough about that conversation about what is Mexico doing to secure its borders and to go after the cartel, and what are we doing to enhance and work with them. I'm not hearing enough about that. If they continue to go unchecked, it's no telling how many lives we'll lose in 2023 due to the cartel's efforts of moving fentanyl and other drugs and other persons that may have the intent to do harm to our citizens here.
--:-- Host: Dr. Caldron-Martinez emphasized that work must be done on both sides of the border. There is no easy answer. This is really a shared problem for Mexico and the United States, right? And there cannot be a solution that is taken just by one side because we have to tackle both sides of the problem, right? And the both sides of the problem is drug consumption and the changing patterns in drug consumption. And of course, the supply of these drugs, right? But you have to tackle them both at the same time.
--:-- Host: Now, what are we seeing in terms of action on the federal level about this problem? Well, one of the latest congressional efforts to address the fentanyl crisis is the introduction of the Republican-sponsored HALT Act.
--:-- Amanda Prestigiacomo: The legislation seeks to permanently keep fentanyl and fentanyl analogs under the Schedule I category of the Controlled Substances Act, in addition to granting researchers the ability to conduct studies on these substances. Regarding the physical border, Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced Monday that he's created and filled the new position of Texas border czar to oversee border security in, quote, President Joe Biden's absence.
--:-- Host: In last year, 26 governors teamed up to create the American Governor's Border Strike Force. This is a multi-state partnership designed to disrupt and dismantle the transnational criminal organizations taking advantage of the open border with Mexico.
--:-- Host: Well, the increasingly aggressive action being taken by the states definitely highlights just how dire the situation has become. Yeah, it really has. Amanda, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Host: That was Daily Wire reporter Amanda Presta-Giacomo, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.
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