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.
On the other hand, President Trump has used a far older law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, to designate the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a hostile enemy within the territories of the United States. Tren de Aragua may not have extermination camps that we know of, but they’re just as odious as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel or any other cartel for that matter.
Murderers. Robbers. Drug dealers. Human traffickers. Pimps.
The Alien Enemies Act has been used sparingly over the last 200 years, but it has tremendous application. During the First and Second World Wars, it was used to round up and intern suspected foreign sympathisers, including Japanese citizens and Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Empowered by the Alien Enemies Act, President Trump can arrest and deport people without the niceties of due process. Because they’re alien enemies, they can be cuffed, chucked on a plane and flown somewhere far away from the United States and left there—like El Salvador, for example.
And that’s exactly what happened within hours of President Trump invoking the Act last weekend: Two planes left the US carrying hundreds of Venezuela’s finest, lifted straight off America’s streets. One plane was bound for El Salvador, to deposit its cargo of human filth in President Bukele’s mega-latrine otherwise known as the Center for Terrorist Confinement (CECOT).
As soon as word broke that this was happening, an Obama judge, James Boasberg, issued an emergency injunction to stop the deportations. He even ordered the planes to turn around and come back. They didn’t, thankfully. The White House was unrepentant, and stuck to the line that it was not defying Judge Boasberg’s order and, in any case, what right does a district-court judge have to determine the foreign policy of the United States of America? The White House has promised to dispute the injunction in the Supreme Court.
To add to the admin’s well-documented problems with district judges, leakers have now released confidential information which The New York Times in its wisdom claims throws into doubt the basis for calling Tren de Aragua alien enemies at all. The information is an official assessment that the Maduro regime in Venezuela is not controlling Tren de Aragua in any direct sense; ergo, gang members aren’t actually agents of a foreign power.
That may be so, but frankly, a lot has changed in 200 years, including the nature of sovereign power. Criminal gangs wield power in their own countries in ways that make them rivals to the official state—states within a state if you will. According to the classic definition of the state given by the sociologist Max Weber, a state monopolizes the use of force within a given territory, but in Maduro’s Venezuela and Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico, that simply isn’t so. Criminal groups like Tren de Aragua maintain standing armies of thousands of troops who control significant portions of territory as if the official state didn’t even exist. They enforce their own forms of taxation and “justice,” however primitive and sordid the latter may be. They make billions of dollars. They rule.
When the case reaches the Supreme Court, which it will, I don’t think the Trump admin will have too much trouble convincing the Bench that Tren de Aragua fit the definition of alien enemies.
More broadly, though, the Trump administration should go all in on the language of moral struggle in its bid to defeat the foreign cartels and gangs that have preyed on the American people for far too long.
And one thing the Trump admin should make perfectly clear to every American is that activist judges like James Boasberg are making a clear choice. They’re choosing the side of evil, and that makes them accomplices to it. Not alien enemies, but domestic ones—and no less dangerous.