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MIAMI - The Biden administration’s plan to remove a Colombian rebel group from a list of foreign terrorist organizations barely caused a ripple outside Washington when the news broke this week. But in Florida, home to an estimated 150,000 Colombian American voters, it’s a different story. Biden’s policy is reverberating loudly among Democrats, leading some of the state’s top elected officials, strategists and activists to rail against the decision. “This is terrible. It’s bad policy. It’s bad politics,” said Florida state Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate who’s Colombian American. Calling the news “outrageous,” Taddeo criticized the Biden administration...

An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday, announcing a rare success in U.S.-Taliban talks since the militant group took power a little more than a year ago Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban associate convicted...

Colombia, which is America's strongest ally, has always had the most level-headed voters in the region. They've had two conservative parties, sometimes at once, and voters there have always rejected the crazy left, which in their case, is a Castro-grade revolutionary crazy grade of left, with Bill Ayers-types on steroids. They did, after all, fight a 60-year war against Marxist narcoterrorists, with only a few university wokesters defending them. So it was shocking news that on Sunday, Colombians went and elected just about the worst leftist of this stripe, a former M-19 narcoguerrilla named Gustavo Petro, president, turning one of...

Anonymous alleged “U.S. and congressional officials” told the Wall Street Journal this week President Joe Biden is planning to remove the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a nearly 60-year-old terrorist organization responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, from America’s list of designated foreign terrorist groups. The FARC, a communist group, has been responsible for a wide variety of human rights atrocities in Colombia since its founding in 1964 that include mass killings, kidnappings, child rape, forced abortions, the use of child soldiers, and one of the world’s most lucrative drug trafficking operations. The government of then-President Juan Manuel...

A North Carolina Spanish teacher and coach reportedly had a secret life and was killed during a shootout with a drug cartel last week, according to the police. Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson said Barney Harris along with a friend, Steven Alexander Stewart, shot and killed an 18-year-old member of the Sinaloa New Generation Cartel, which led to a shootout with other cartel members, local outlet WSOC-TV reported.... ...Harris, the head coach for his school’s men’s basketball and track team, was attempting to steal drugs and money from the cartel in a mobile home park in...

A Chinese national was sentenced today to five years in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $4.2 million for laundering drug proceeds generated by large-scale cocaine trafficking in the United States.Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia; Special Agent in Charge Wendy C. Woolcock for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Special Operations Division; Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey T. Scott of DEA's Louisville, Kentucky Field Division; Chief Jason Crosby of the Criminal Investigations Division of the U.S. Department of State’s...

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the administration was launching an all out assault on Mexican drug cartels using the U.S. Military.  “As governments and nations focus on the Coronavirus, there is a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists, and other malign actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain and we must not let that happen,” Trump said. “We will never let that happen. Today the United States is launching enhanced counter narcotics operations in the western hemisphere to protect the American people from the deadly scourge of illegal narcotics.”“We must not let the drug...

Washington, DC ~ Wednesday, March 11, 2020 Remarks as Prepared for DeliveryGood afternoon, everyone.  Thank you for joining us.Today, we are announcing the results of Project Python, a multilateral interagency operation targeting the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, also known as CJNG.  This operation was led by the DEA, and on behalf of the Department, I want to thank Acting Administrator Dhillon for his strong leadership in the fight against transnational organized crime. And I want to express my appreciation for the courageous law enforcement professionals of the DEA – the men and women who, day in and day out, put...

President Donald Trump decided Friday not to officially designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, deferring instead to Mexico. “We will temporarily hold off this designation and step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!” Trump wrote on Twitter. The president said that although he was fully prepared to take the tough step against the cartels, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked him not to. Trump said he liked and respected President Obrador, who has been working with him to help stop the flow of migrants crossing the Southern border of the United...

Mexicans have endured a week of gas shortages as the government takes drastic action to combat narco fuel thieves. Several states in the center of the country, including the capital Mexico City, have seen hundreds of petrol stations closed and long lines at those left open. {snip} The government of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, has cut off the gas supply in a number of key pipelines transporting fuel from refineries. The aim is take the fight to the "huachicoleros" as the fuel thieves are known. Many are affiliated with larger drug cartels, who for years have been...

A municipal police officer in Chihuahua who was kidnapped by cartel gunmen on October 18 was found murdered Wednesday after appearing in a forced interrogation video released on social media. A municipal police officer identified as Jesus Andrade Chagoya, 24, was found murdered early Wednesday morning in colonia Ex Agrícola San Antonio, Cuauhtémoc. Officer Chagoya was kidnapped by a group of gunmen in front of his residence after completing a shift and was later found in a vacant lot dressed in uniform with a gunshot wound to the head. Several hours later, a video was uploaded onto various social media...

Yesterday on Face the Nation, I responded to questions about the migrant separations from their children under the Trump Administration’s policy announced last month by trying to shift the focus to what drives these migrations in the first place – something that can’t be addressed by a simple band-aid piece of legislation paving the way for more lax border requirements.

Albanian-American roofer Florin Krasniqi has been living in Brooklyn and smuggling American guns into Kosovo to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army--this time for war against its erstwhile saviors, NATO and the UN. The KLA are the bin Laden-trained, Iran-backed narco-terrorists whose 1999 jihad against the Christian Serbs we helped fight, abetting secession and creating a mono-ethnic terror haven and future Islamic republic in Europe. Krasniqi, who raised $30 million from fellow Albanian-Americans to help finance the KLA's war, is the subject of a documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns, titled "The Brooklyn Connection," which will air Tuesday night at 10...

The Trump administration is slapping sanctions on Venezuela’s new Vice President Tareck El Aissami and accusing him of playing a major role in international drug trafficking. (snip) The U.S. is also sanctioning Samark Bello, a wealthy businessman connected to El Aissami who has held significant business interests in the U.S. The U.S. says Bello provided assistance or support to El Aissami’s trafficking activities.

Colombian voters rejected a peace deal with FARC rebels Sunday, in a surprise outcome that risks prolonging a 52-year-old armed conflict and plunges the country’s future into uncertainty. By a razor-thin margin of 50.25 to 49.75 percent, Colombians voted against the peace accord, in a Brexit-style backlash that defied pollsters’ predictions and left supporters of the deal in tears. After nearly six years of negotiations, many handshakes and ceremonial signatures, a ­half-century war that has killed 220,000 and displaced 7 million Colombians from their homes is not over.

The European Union could remove Colombian guerilla movement FARC from its list of known terrorists, pending the signing of the peace agreement between the group and the country’s government. EurActiv Spain reports.Ahead of a formalization of the deal between FARC and the Colombian government, the EU indicated that it could soon remove the group from its terrorist blacklist. “FARC currently sits on the list of terrorist organizations in Colombia,” confirmed European Commission spokesperson Maja Kocijancic today (26 September), adding that the EU “has strongly supported the Colombia peace deal”. […] The European Court of Justice last week recommended that Hamas...

Beth Wilkinson (NBC, David Gregory's wife) is a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington. A top counter-terrorism official in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader. But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda. Timochenko is a...

Secretary of State John Kerry got upset that Obama was stealing the treason spotlight from him on the Cuban getaway. So he decided to pull a Sean Penn and meet with a Marxist terror group that is on his own State Department's list of Terror organizations. Here's the terror group's Twitter account promoting the meeting. FARC is a Marxist terror group that has kidnapped and murdered Americans. "En fecha no lejana le daremos la buena nueva al país y al mundo que Colombia ha llegado a la paz" #VamosPorLaPaz pic.twitter.com/36QHzW2XzP — Diálogos Paz FARC (@FARC_EPaz) March 22, 2016 Translation: "In...

Mexican drug cartels continue to fascinate the minds of Americans who tend to idolize outlaw gunmen with fast cash, fancy cars, guns and women. However, few realize that Mexican drug cartels are as ruthless and sadistic as Middle Eastern terror groups like ISIS with whom they actually have many tactics in common. For most in America, the closest they have come to a drug cartel is the small-time drug peddler in the street corner, the glamorous TV shows, or the Mexican narco-ballads. However, taking a step back and looking at their entire structure, and how those drugs got from Central...