The U.S. military should be used to help defeat Mexican criminal cartels, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Bretibart in an interview published on Monday.
"I think we should explore very seriously something along the lines of what we did in Colombia… where President George W. Bush worked with President Uribe to target the cartels and take them out," Cruz told Breitbart's Brandon Darby.
"It was treated less as a law enforcement matter than as a military matter. Where our military went into Colombia and helped destroy the cartels."
The senator said he thought this would be an appropriate action, because "crime and kidnapping becomes almost routine and the corruption that goes hand-in-hand with billions of dollars of illegal narcotic trafficking resources combined with vicious violent transnational criminal cartels has done enormous damage to Mexico and enormous damage to America."
Cruz emphasized that he was not suggesting unilateral moves, because "we should not engage in a military action in Mexico without the active cooperation of the duly elected government there."
When asked how it is possible to get cooperation from the Mexican government when so much of it is intertwined with cartels, Cruz acknowledged that it indeed would be very problematic, but "we need American leadership to try to work to find Mexican government officials willing to do so and we need to use the tools we have in our country to secure the borders and shut down the trafficking…
"And do everything we can to protect the American citizenry from the enormous damage being inflicted by the cartels."
Cruz recently introduced a bill that proposes to pay for the wall President Donald Trump wants to build on the Mexican border by using billions of dollars seized from Mexican drug-cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is in American custody, and money seized from other drug lords, the El Paso Times reported.
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