Surge in Mexican cartel violence driving US migrant crisis

A surge in drug cartel violence along the Mexican border is terrorizing locals south of the Rio Grande — and driving more migrants north into the US, according to reports.

The ruthless gangs have unleashed a reign of terror in Mexican towns like Juarez that is so commonplace that 40% of adults have witnessed cartel violence over the previous three months, according to Border Report.

With border crossings surging, their turf wars are now over human smuggling routes, not just drug trafficking.

“Whatever the commodity is that’s flowing in either direction is controlled by whoever controls that territory,” Gary Hale, a nonresident fellow in drug policy and Mexican studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute told The Post.

“They were already taxing migrants coming through Mexico, but now there are so many migrants [and] they have done everything they can to control them as much as possible,” said Hale, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

He said two Mexican gangs — the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels — control about half of the US border with Mexico, and that nothing and no-one gets across unless they get a cut.

Helping drive the exodus is the unchecked violence in Juarez and the surrounding area, according to reports.

Severed heads have been dumped inside coolers in local parks and dismembered bodies in apartment building parking lots or stuffed in storm drains, according to Border Report.

While government officials downplay the majority of the violence as gang-on-gang, residents told the outlet civilians are often caught in the line of fire, sometimes with fatal consequences.

“One of the worst things I have seen is a shooting where two children were murdered,” said Roxanna Gallegos, who works in the Riberas del Bravo neighborhood. “People came, shot the father dead and there were two children in the car. They also killed the children.”

Other Mexican states like Guanajuato and Baja California, have also been plagued by cartel bloodshed.

“This violence is largely perpetrated by gangs and drug cartels, but the [Mexican] state has also committed human rights violations in its war against these groups,” the Council on Foreign Relations said in a report in August. “Civilians bear the greatest impact, which drives migrants to the US border.”

Last month, the Arizona Daily Star reported one Mexican border town, Sasabe, in Sonora, had been so wracked by gang violence it has become a virtual ghost town.

The town, about 75 miles south of Tucson, Arizona, has seen its population drop from about 2,500 residents to less than 100 due to violence, the outlet said.

Drug gangs also exploit the migrant crisis by sending huge mobs of asylum-seekers to the border in large numbers to overwhelm federal agents — thereby leaving other parts of the border understaffed, making it easier to get drugs and other contraband into the US.

Hale said human smuggling has been a major part of the cartels’ playbooks since about 2005 when Los Zetas, once the ruthless bodyguards for Mexican narcotraffickers, broke away on their own and began peddling everything from guns to people.

The surge in migrants flooding over the border has only made them a more lucrative commodity.

“They were doing it before, but now they’re continuing to do it on a grander scale because there are more people coming, so they make more money,” Hale said. “That is a gratuitous increase in cartel revenue, and that gratuitous increase is attributed more to US immigration policy than it is to the cartels.

“You’ve got Biden ignoring immigration just like you have [Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador] ignoring drug trafficking and production,” he said. “You’re just looking the other way and letting it happen. Who knows why Biden is letting it happen.

“But because he’s letting it happen, that creates a tremendous opportunity to the cartel to exploit it, and that’s what’s happening.”