COLORADO SPRINGS — The Mexican drug cartels, which have set up shop in hundreds of U.S. cities, pose a “real national security threat,” the nation’s commander of homeland defense told a congressional committee today.
Gen. Gene Renuart testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee with three other unified command chiefs who addressed issues ranging from piracy off the Somalian coast to Russian naval exercises.
Renuart said Northern Command, based at Peterson Air Force Base, is working with other commands, the Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement to help Mexico defeat the cartels.
Renuart said Phoenix has seen spillover violence as the U.S. efforts put pressure on the drug trade.
“It is a real security concern for our country,” he said.
But the committee quizzed commanders about what’s being done to curb the Mexican drug cartels and asked what defines the trigger point for more military involvement.
“I think we’ve had the trigger,” Renuart said, citing 1,700 drug-related murders in the border town of Juarez in the last year and a steady flow of firearms from the U.S.
“That kind of violence that close to our border was the sounding horn for the need for an integrated approach,” he said.
Renuart said a planning team of national defense, security, law enforcement experts and diplomats is forming a strategy and will determine how much and what type of personnel will be deployed and when.
The U.S. already provides technology to detect cartel activity from the air and identify underground tunnels under the Mexican/U.S. border and helps train Mexican forces to “conduct raids on the cartels,” he said.
Renuart said Mexican authorities complain about guns flowing from the U.S. or being brokered by people in the U.S.
An initial lack of cooperation from Mexico hindered the U.S. from identifying the weapons’ sources, but that has changed, Renuart said.
“We are now getting much more of that information, and that is allowing us to take legal action with some success,” he said. “We’re building confidence with our partners in Mexico that we will do something if they share information.”
