The Free Press
Margarito “Jay” Flores Jr. and his twin brother Pedro (a.k.a. “Pete”) were helping their father smuggle marijuana and other contraband across the Mexican border by the age of 7. Around the time they turned 17, Jay and Pete started their own drug-trafficking enterprise. By 18, they were millionaires.
Their work trafficking marijuana, cocaine, and heroin made billions that they sent back to Mexico, much of it going directly to the Sinaloa cartel, including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán himself.
But they also did business with the Beltrán-Leyva cartel, and when the two cartels, on the verge of war, told the Flores twins they had to choose between the two, they took a different course: They became federal informants.
“We cooperated with the government against the biggest drug lords in the world,” Jay Flores told The Free Press, and the twins’ cooperation helped put El Chapo away. After serving “12 solid years” of his sentence, Flores was released in 2020 and now runs a business called Kingpin to Educator, educating members of law enforcement, tech companies, and government agencies on the inner workings of cartels.
Which is why he has a very strong opinion about the State Department’s decision in late February to designate eight cartels and transnational organizations as foreign terrorist organizations. It was, Jay Flores said, “the best thing that has ever happened” in the war against the cartels.
The designation gives the federal government powers it didn’t previously have. For instance, the government can legally seize assets and accounts that are associated with groups labeled as terrorist organizations, thus halting the tens of billions of dollars that flow from the U.S. and into cartel hands each year. According to the State Department, the designation denies cartels access to the U.S. financial system “and the resources they need to carry out attacks,” like assassinating South and Central American government officials, sometimes using improvised explosive devices and drones. It also means the U.S. can operate on cartel turf well beyond the U.S., in countries like Mexico or El Salvador, putting pressure on those countries to crack down on these gangs.
Rep. Brad Knott (R-NC), a member of the Homeland Security Committee and former organized crime prosecutor with the Department of Justice, told The Free Press that the foreign terrorist designation comes at a time when the cartel threat to North America has become too grave to ignore.
“The designation is concerning for Mexico and other countries because it highlights significant failures on their part,” Knott said. “They have a huge failure on their hands as a state, whether it’s from a law enforcement capacity, a criminal justice perspective, anti-corruption, or culturally. These states have been compromised to the point where they are either unable or unwilling to address the problem.”
An expert on cartels who consulted with the government as it prepared the terrorism designation—and who asked to remain anonymous—said that the label also means that cartel members will be added to the no-fly list, which limits their mobility not just in the U.S. but all over the world.
The designation means one other thing, perhaps the most important of all: Prosecutors can seek the death penalty for cartel members now that they’re considered terrorists. In late February, the Trump administration sought the expulsion of 29 alleged cartel bosses from Mexico to face the U.S. justice system, including Miguel and Omar Treviño Morales, former Los Zetas cartel leaders accused of murder and torture. In the past, Mexico has extradited criminals to the U.S. only under the condition that they not be executed. But this time, it agreed knowing the death penalty is a real possibility.
According to Flores, just being extradited to the U.S. sends a serious warning to cartel members in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere. “More than anything, cartel operatives fear American laws and federal prisons,” said Flores. “They would rather die in battle than face a prison sentence in America.”
Knott echoed this. “In my experience, the only thing that gets through to hardened criminals is serious time. It deters members of that organization from continuing their criminal activity. And secondly, it encourages or incentivizes those who are in our custody to cooperate, which accelerates law enforcement’s ability to learn, apprehend, combat, and stop other members of that organization who are continuing to inflict harm in the country.”
In March, the Trump administration, after striking a deal with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, deported nearly 300 MS-13 and Tren de Aragua members—two newly designated foreign terrorist organizations—to be incarcerated at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center for which the U.S. is paying $6 million per year.
The deportations caused controversy when U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg ordered the planes en route to El Salvador to turn around, as he questioned the legality of using a 1798 law as a means to deport the alleged terrorists. In response, President Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said the deportations would continue. In an unusual rebuke, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called Trump’s impeachment demands “not an appropriate response.”
With border crossings at a historic low since President Trump’s inauguration, cartel revenue is down billions of dollars. And, according to the expert who spoke to The Free Press, the Pentagon has deployed thousands of troops to the border to “hold the line” and stop the flow of drugs.
The real strategy, the cartel expert said, is to peel back the layers of these criminal enterprises to reveal their inner workings. Expelling the 29 alleged cartel leaders exposes the lawyers, accountants, and others who work for cartels to pay off corrupt Mexican government officials.
Still, it’s going to take more than deportations and harsh prison sentences to remove the cartel footprint from the American economy. According to Knott, the government is tracking “legal means and enterprises that enable cartels to ship their products with great efficacy” all over North America.
“Businesses like UPS, Amazon, and FedEx,” according to Flores, “are the biggest drug distributors in the country.”
The New York Times reported that designating the cartels as terrorist groups could affect the U.S. economy because they “are now embedded in a wide swath of the legal economy, from avocado farming to the country’s billion-dollar tourism industry, making it hard to be absolutely sure that American companies are isolated from cartel activities.”
Knott compared the cartel operations to a “cancer,” saying, “The hard part about this is that cartels have very astutely masked criminal activity with seemingly legitimate daily activities and that is a very hard thing to root out.” He added, “We cannot tolerate their existence in our country.”
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