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Trump Says U.S. Will Designate Mexican Cartels as Terror Groups

Trump Says U.S. Will Designate Mexican Cartels as Terror Groups

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump said the U.S. government intends to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups in the near future, and declined to say whether he was considering taking military action like drone strikes against the groups.

“I don’t want to say what I’m going to do, but they will be designated,” Trump told former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in an interview on Tuesday.

Trump Says U.S. Will Designate Mexican Cartels as Terror Groups

Trump said that he had already offered Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador assistance but that his counterpart had declined the offer.

“I’ve actually offered him to let us go in and clean it out,” Trump said. “He so far has rejected the offer, but at some point something has to be done.

Trump said he had been working on the efforts to formally designate cartels as a terror group “for the last 90 days.”

“We’re well into that process,” he said

Trump was outraged earlier this month when nine members of a Mormon family with dual American-Mexican citizenship were killed in an attack by cartel gunmen in northern Mexico. Trump said in a tweet after the attack that it was time “for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels.

The Mexican president, known as AMLO, told Trump that justice would be done but declined the offer of U.S. assistance, his foreign minister said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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