Should the U.S. boast about facing down terrorists — or apologize for arming them up?
By Tim Padgett
February 26, 2026 at 10:41 AM EST
COMMENTARY The U.S. is great at designating criminal groups as terrorists — but it's a hypocritical failure at preventing the trafficking of guns that aids those terrorists, including Mexico's narco-cartels.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the meeting of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, on Wednesday, he hailed the U.S.’s crackdown on the hemisphere’s terrorists, from the gangs ruling Haiti to the narcos horrifying Mexico.
What Rubio didn’t do, but could have, was apologize to the CARICOM heads of government gathered in St. Kitts and Nevis — and to other leaders in the Americas — for all the weapons assistance the U.S. as a nation ends up giving those terrorists.
The timing would have been especially apt, too, coming in the same week that Mexico’s leviathan drug cartel, Jalisco Nueva Generación, erupted in an orgy of arson and murder after security forces there killed its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, aka El Mencho.
The high-power guns that killed more than 60 people during Nueva Generación’s rampage — including 25 Mexican soldiers — were almost certainly trafficked into Mexico from the U.S.
READ MORE: Beware, Florida gun traffickers: the Trump Doctrine makes you missile targets, too
Just two weeks ago, Mexico’s defense ministry announced that of the 18,000 firearms confiscated since President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October 2024 — among them hundreds of the military-grade Barrett sniper rifles that are a Nueva Generación favorite — 78% originated in the U.S.
Just days before that, a New York Times investigation found that U.S. manufacturers have made ammunition for weapons like the Barrett remarkably available for civilian retail purchase — and therefore more easily resold across the U.S. southern border to customers like El Mencho.
The CARICOM leaders would have been even more grateful for an American mea culpa about the flowing “iron river” of guns from U.S. states like Florida — especially Florida — to the violent gangs in Haiti and other vulnerable Caribbean nations.
Members of Haiti’s gang confederation, Viv Ansanm, wave their U.S.-sourced assault rifles on social media like kids endorsing Nintendo.
Our lax and cavalier attitude toward gun responsibility means lethal weapons slither beyond our borders as easily as COVID slips through a cheap mask.
St. Kitts and Nevis itself has been plagued by one of the world’s highest homicide rates, thanks largely to gang-related violence carried out with illegally trafficked arms. Ditto several of its neighbors in the Caribbean — where, according the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 73% of the guns seized there can be traced back to the U.S.
And lest we forget, more than half the guns the once omnipotent MS-13 or Mara Salvatrucha gang in El Salvador locked and loaded came from the U.S.
Macho theater
What Nueva Generación, Viv Ansanm and Mara Salvatrucha share is that they’ve been designated as foreign terrorist groups by the Trump administration. And I can’t say I disagree with the labeling.
Members of Mexico's Jalisco Nueva Generacion drug cartel pose with assault rifles. (850x567, AR: 1.4991181657848325)
Standard criminal activity and violence — pushing deadly drugs, gunning down rival hoods, extorting neighborhood businesses — is of course evil. But it doesn’t constitute terrorism.
Terrorizing civilian populations and assassinating political figures to gain social and economic control over a country, however, can.
It could when drug lord Pablo Escobar, FARC guerrillas and AUC paramilitaries once blew up shopping malls, kidnapped government officials and massacred innocents in Colombia to advance their power.
And it can now as Nueva Generación, Viv Ansanm and Mara Salvatrucha wreak similar, militarized horror across Mexico, Haiti and Central America to augment theirs.
But since I take Rubio and the Trump administration seriously when they brand those groups as terrorists, I also espouse the corresponding principle they demand other nations adhere to: preventing direct or indirect aid to those terrorists.
The U.S. is a hypocritical failure on that score. Thanks to our lax and cavalier attitude toward gun responsibility, lethal weapons slither beyond our borders as easily as the COVID virus slips through a cheap mask.
Given how loudly the Trump administration boasts about facing down terrorists, you’d think it would work as hard to keep M16s from leaving the U.S. illegally as it does preventing migrants from entering it illegally.
That, though, would offend the gun lobby. What Trump’s doing instead is law-violating macho theater: militarily bombing suspected drug vessels carrying suspected drug traffickers he falsely calls “narco-terrorists” — they may be outlaws, but they’re civilian outlaws to be arrested, not executed — while actual terrorists like Viv Ansanm keep building arsenals.
Two days before Rubio visited the Caribbean, the U.S. struck another boat in the Caribbean, killing three.
Experts say it’ll do little to reduce the flow of drugs into America.
That, they know, would require blocking the flow of guns out of America.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the meeting of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, on Wednesday, he hailed the U.S.’s crackdown on the hemisphere’s terrorists, from the gangs ruling Haiti to the narcos horrifying Mexico.
What Rubio didn’t do, but could have, was apologize to the CARICOM heads of government gathered in St. Kitts and Nevis — and to other leaders in the Americas — for all the weapons assistance the U.S. as a nation ends up giving those terrorists.
The timing would have been especially apt, too, coming in the same week that Mexico’s leviathan drug cartel, Jalisco Nueva Generación, erupted in an orgy of arson and murder after security forces there killed its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, aka El Mencho.
The high-power guns that killed more than 60 people during Nueva Generación’s rampage — including 25 Mexican soldiers — were almost certainly trafficked into Mexico from the U.S.
READ MORE: Beware, Florida gun traffickers: the Trump Doctrine makes you missile targets, too
Just two weeks ago, Mexico’s defense ministry announced that of the 18,000 firearms confiscated since President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October 2024 — among them hundreds of the military-grade Barrett sniper rifles that are a Nueva Generación favorite — 78% originated in the U.S.
Just days before that, a New York Times investigation found that U.S. manufacturers have made ammunition for weapons like the Barrett remarkably available for civilian retail purchase — and therefore more easily resold across the U.S. southern border to customers like El Mencho.
The CARICOM leaders would have been even more grateful for an American mea culpa about the flowing “iron river” of guns from U.S. states like Florida — especially Florida — to the violent gangs in Haiti and other vulnerable Caribbean nations.
Members of Haiti’s gang confederation, Viv Ansanm, wave their U.S.-sourced assault rifles on social media like kids endorsing Nintendo.
Our lax and cavalier attitude toward gun responsibility means lethal weapons slither beyond our borders as easily as COVID slips through a cheap mask.
St. Kitts and Nevis itself has been plagued by one of the world’s highest homicide rates, thanks largely to gang-related violence carried out with illegally trafficked arms. Ditto several of its neighbors in the Caribbean — where, according the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 73% of the guns seized there can be traced back to the U.S.
And lest we forget, more than half the guns the once omnipotent MS-13 or Mara Salvatrucha gang in El Salvador locked and loaded came from the U.S.
Macho theater
What Nueva Generación, Viv Ansanm and Mara Salvatrucha share is that they’ve been designated as foreign terrorist groups by the Trump administration. And I can’t say I disagree with the labeling.
Members of Mexico's Jalisco Nueva Generacion drug cartel pose with assault rifles. (850x567, AR: 1.4991181657848325)
Standard criminal activity and violence — pushing deadly drugs, gunning down rival hoods, extorting neighborhood businesses — is of course evil. But it doesn’t constitute terrorism.
Terrorizing civilian populations and assassinating political figures to gain social and economic control over a country, however, can.
It could when drug lord Pablo Escobar, FARC guerrillas and AUC paramilitaries once blew up shopping malls, kidnapped government officials and massacred innocents in Colombia to advance their power.
And it can now as Nueva Generación, Viv Ansanm and Mara Salvatrucha wreak similar, militarized horror across Mexico, Haiti and Central America to augment theirs.
But since I take Rubio and the Trump administration seriously when they brand those groups as terrorists, I also espouse the corresponding principle they demand other nations adhere to: preventing direct or indirect aid to those terrorists.
The U.S. is a hypocritical failure on that score. Thanks to our lax and cavalier attitude toward gun responsibility, lethal weapons slither beyond our borders as easily as the COVID virus slips through a cheap mask.
Given how loudly the Trump administration boasts about facing down terrorists, you’d think it would work as hard to keep M16s from leaving the U.S. illegally as it does preventing migrants from entering it illegally.
That, though, would offend the gun lobby. What Trump’s doing instead is law-violating macho theater: militarily bombing suspected drug vessels carrying suspected drug traffickers he falsely calls “narco-terrorists” — they may be outlaws, but they’re civilian outlaws to be arrested, not executed — while actual terrorists like Viv Ansanm keep building arsenals.
Two days before Rubio visited the Caribbean, the U.S. struck another boat in the Caribbean, killing three.
Experts say it’ll do little to reduce the flow of drugs into America.
That, they know, would require blocking the flow of guns out of America.