Alien Enemies?

Activist judges are revealing their true colours by siding with foreign gangs and cartels

Judge James Boasberg

The pretty young waitress eyed me nervously. It took a second or three for her to speak. “Is, er, everything okay?”

For a moment, I wasn’t in a quaint little English market town, sipping a flat white and reading the paper. I had been transported to a God-forsaken place somewhere in Mexico: a dusty encampment, abandoned now, where hundreds of innocent people lost their lives; where desperate parents haunt the ruins, looking for any evidence they can find of their missing children, however small. A backpack. A scrap of clothing. A shoe…

And then I was back—and suddenly aware of just how hard I was frowning. I uncrumpled my face.

“Oh yes, reading some awful story… The coffee’s very good, by the way.”

The waitress did that strange non-smile thing Zoomer kids do, tinted with disgust, and went on her way.

This was a story I had first encountered last week. I didn’t pay too much attention to it then, but now I was reading about it in today’s international edition of The New York Times, where it graces the front page. I suppose the Toilet Paper of Record is still good for some things.

“A camp for killing in Mexico,” is the headline, beneath a picture of Irma Gonzalez, a mother who travelled to the camp to look for her son Jossel. She holds a picture of him. Her face is wracked with pain.

The camp is situated in La Estanzuela, in western Mexico, a small village close to Guadalajara, Jalisco State. That puts it firmly in the territory of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a group that has a reputation for unusual brutality, even among some of the most brutal, bloodthirsty criminals Satan has ever belched forth from his lair.

After the camp was discovered, police and local volunteers, including a group called “Searching Warriors of Jalisco,” moved in and began discovering “traces of unimaginable violence”:“cremation ovens, burned human remains and bone shards. Discarded personal items and hundreds of shoes.” Over 1500 personal items have been documented, suggesting that hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand, people met their end in this little slice of Hell in the Mexican sun.

The authorities have not identified any of those people yet or even given them a number, but they believe the camp was not just a killing place. It was also a training ground where initiates to the New Generation Cartel were made to torture and kill to prove their worth.

How many more sites there are like this, nobody knows. Locals claimed they knew nothing about it—a familiar refrain that has echoed through the atrocities of the last hundred years, from the bloodlands of Eastern Europe to the killing fields of South-East Asia.

I’m sure there are many, many more. Between 2018 and 2023, the Mexican government recorded 2,710 clandestine grave sites across the country, containing anything from the remains of a single person to the pathetic vestiges of dozens. One site discovered in the same week as the camp at La Estanzuela, a residential property in Guadalajara, yielded 13 bags of buried human bones.

The scale of the evil taking place in Mexico is staggering. And it is, without a doubt, evil in the true metaphysical sense.

The Trump admin has sought, quite rightly, to recognise this moral fact, and to use it to fight the groups perpetrating such evil—and others like them—all the more effectively, since they are killing tens of thousands of American citizens too.

On the one hand, the Trump admin has reached for the familiar language and legal framework of terrorism to peg the cartels as an existential threat rather than run-of-the-mill criminals. Seven Latin American cartels, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, have been added to the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, opening the way to new, sharper methods of dealing with them, including the use of the full might of the American military. Naturally, this has worried the regime in Mexico, which is hand in glove with the cartels—as if that needed saying.

In our relativistic, disenchanted age, the label “terrorist” is perhaps the closest we come to calling anyone pure evil, beyond the pale, and making their elimination a moral imperative. A war on terrorism helped to launch a modern-day, generational crusade through Afghanistan and Iraq, costing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives; although that’s precisely the kind of righteous conflict Donald Trump wants to avoid with his America First agenda. I agree: the War on Terror was a big bloody mess.

But used properly, and applied to the correct groups, “terrorist” has an exceptional power that should be wielded to its full extent.