Abbott vs. El Chapo Battle Lines Drawn
with Order Tailor-Made for DPS Director

Capitol Inside
September 23, 2022

Texas Governor Greg Abbott flexed his massive political muscle when he picked a fight this week with the world's most powerful drug smuggling organization in an executive order that targets the Sinaloa Cartel that the notorious narcotics lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán controlled for more than 20 years.

Seizing on record fentanyl deaths and seizures by police, Abbott branded the Sinaloa organization as a foreign terrorist organization in the decree that he issued on Wednesday with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as the only other target that he named. The Republican governor ordered the Department of Public Safety to take immediate actions to shut down the designated cartels' operations in Texas.

Executive Order GA-42 could set the stage for an epic battle between the state police that the Texas Rangers made famous and the two biggest and most violent drug organizations on the planet. The new war on drugs that Abbott launched with the edict will give the DPS an opportunity to bounce back after a meltdown at a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde and subsequent cover-up that effectively destroyed a local police officer's career before it eventually unraveled.

After having 91 officers who failed to take on an 18-year-old gunman to save dying children in Uvalde, the state police have ample cause to be concerned now that the governor is sending them on a suicide mission by aggressively trying to interfere with the designated cartels' business in Texas. But DPS Director Steve McCraw is one of the nation's foremost experts on the confluence of terrorism and the criminal underworld - having testified to Congress on the subject multiple times as an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the aftermath of 9/11 before taking over as the Texas homeland security chief almost 20 years ago.

McCraw gave President Joe Biden substantial credit for the leading role that he'd had in the fight against terrorism in Congress in an appearance before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2003 when the nation's current leader had been a member. McCraw, who was chairing the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Task Force, told senators that Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremist allies were the number one threat to the U.S. at the time.

As the state's Homeland Security director, McCraw explained at a meeting with buiness and political leaders in the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen in 2007 that a border wall would be a waste of money and have no effect on the flow of drugs into Texas. Republican Rick Perry, who'd enlisted McCraw for the post in his first term as governor, had called a border a "preposterious" proposal the year before.

"Amen, absolutely," McCraw said when asked if he agreed with the locals that a border wall was a bad idea, according to a report in the Rio Grande Guardian in October that year. "As they say, if we build a 22-foot fence, the business for 24-foot ladders goes up."

While McCraw has gone 180-degrees on a border wall with Abbott as his boss, the veteran law enforcement official may see the new assignment taking down Mexican cartels in Texas as the fruition of his life work despite the potential for significant casualties in a fight that his troops may have no chance to win.

Abbott and McCraw might not be worried about El Chapo in light of the fact that he's doing life in a federal prison in Colorado where he was sent after a conviction in 2019 for crimes as the Sinaloa Cartel chief. The group is led now by Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García and three of Guzmán's sons.

The New Generation Cartel had been an ally of the Sinaloa Cartel until a split about five years ago. Mexican officials consider the organization that's based in Jalisco as the most dangerous group of drug dealers on the globe.

Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin filed legislation in 2019 that would have labeled the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the rival Gulf Cartel and a faction within the Los Zetas as foreign terrorist organizations. But the measure fizzled after then-President Donald Trump pulled his support in the face of opposition from officials in Mexico City.

After resurrecting Trump's border wall on a stretch of the Rio Grande in Texas, Abbott is picking up the slack the ex-president left behind in the fight against terrorism with the powers afforded to him as the governor.

Abbott declined to include the Gulf Cartel or the Juarez Cartel in the executive order that seeks to kill their business in the Lone Star State. The Gulf Cartel is headquartered in Matamoros across the border from the Rio Grande Valley and is active in Nuevo Laredo.

Abbott signed historic border security agrements in April with two Mexican border state governors who have been tied to Gulf Cartel. Abbott forged an almost identical pact with the governor of Chihuahua across the river from El Paso in Ciudad Juarez. The Juarez Cartel has been fighting to survive in recent years with the Sinaloa and New Generation cartels competing for that particular corridor into the U.S.