Trump order could put American tourists in the crossfire at vacation hotspots

Donald Trump is risking violence against American tourists in Mexico with one of his first executive orders, according to experts.

The president issued an executive order shortly after he was sworn in that officially designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, and the Pentagon deployed 1,500 active-duty troops to the border – and experts say that Trump risks significant blowback if he carries through on sending special forces into the neighboring country, reported The Guardian.

“The persistent talk of unilateral U.S. military intervention in Mexico is dangerous,” said John P. Sullivan, a former law enforcement officer in Los Angeles and a senior fellow at the Small Wars Journal-El Centro.

Well-armed Mexican cartels could retaliate to U.S. military action by attacking American tourists in vacation hotspots like Cancún, where their networks are already established, or by carrying out violence in border communities.

“There is certainly a possibility that airstrikes and raids could eventually occur,” said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism and a research fellow at the Soufan Center. “Cartels may retaliate by hitting soft targets such as tourists or diplomatic targets in Mexico, possibly the soldiers the Trump administration is deploying at the shared border, or even tap networks inside the U.S. itself.”

The type of operations Trump has described resemble past missions against the Islamic State and al-Qaida, where elite units such as Seal Team 6 and airstrikes under the U.S. Special Operations Command (Socom) are used to target operatives on foreign soil at a cost of billions of dollars, and civilian deaths were so commonplace they drove the rise of Isis in the first place.

“While targeting cartel leadership in ‘kingpin’ operations is politically attractive, it is operationally precarious,” Sullivan said.

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“Often, the displacement of capos creates a leadership vacuum, triggering infighting among cartel factions vying to replace the last leader, resulting in an elevated state of violence and insecurity in the resulting quest for power and competitive control," Sullivan added.

Cartels have been hesitant to directly confront U.S. law enforcement, but they have a history of attacking Mexican law enforcement, judges, elected officials and journalists, but Sullivan does not see an imminent threat at this point against American civilians visiting or working in Mexico.

“It is clear that Mexican cartels have a history of using terrorist tactics as symbolic and instrumental tools of asserting power and influencing state actions in a form of violent lobbying,” Sullivan said. “Such actions directed against American tourists are rare.”