Cotton: Trump could have US forces impose ‘world of hurt’ on Mexican cartels

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) doubled down on comments he had made earlier in the week about cartel violence in Mexico, declaring on Fox News that the U.S. “may have to take matters into our own hands.”

{mosads}”If the Mexican government cannot protect American citizens in Mexico, then the United States may have to take matters into our own hands,” Cotton told Fox News’s Dana Perino on Wednesday, referring to the American Mormon family that was murdered by cartel gunmen just south of the U.S. border.

In his interview with Perino, Cotton, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reiterated much of what he had told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto the day before.

If the Mexican government cannot protect American citizens in Mexico, then the United States may have to take matters into our own hands. pic.twitter.com/1yH52AJBxj

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) November 5, 2019

When asked if he considered the crime to be a standalone incident, Cotton answered, “This is not an individual incident. This is the depraved massacre of three women and six children, including infants.”

Cotton also laid into Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy, saying that the only way to fight the cartels was with “more bullets and bigger bullets.”

“Look, our special operations forces were able to take down [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi in Syria a couple weeks ago,” Cotton said. “They did it to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan eight years ago.”

He added, “I have every confidence that if the president directed them to do so, that they could impose a world of hurt on these cartels.”

On a phone call with López Obrador on Tuesday, Trump offered to help “wage war on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” but the Mexican president declined, saying that Mexico would independently bring the perpetrators of the crime to justice.