EXCLUSIVE — Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso will brief members of Congress on Wednesday on the lessons his country has learned from its battle with Mexico’s drug cartels.
According to an advisory obtained by the Washington Examiner, Lasso will brief the Congressional Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels, which is led by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). The briefing will take place on Wednesday at 8 a.m. in the Capitol and will be a roundtable-style briefing on the fentanyl and drug trafficking crisis in America. A portion of it will be open to the media.
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Earlier this year, the New York Times reported how Ecuador has become the “drug trade’s gold rush state, with major cartels from as far as Mexico and Albania joining forces with prison and street gangs, unleashing a wave of violence unlike anything in the country’s recent history.”
Lasso will speak to how his country has combated these cartels and will take questions from members of the task force.
The task force was created after Crenshaw and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed that if Crenshaw voted for H.R. 2, the House’s border security bill, the House would start a task force to combat drug cartels.
Crenshaw was originally against the bill because he said it didn’t do enough to combat the cartels, a threat he said Congress “has not taken this threat seriously.” McCarthy then allowed him to head up the task force, focused on “neutralizing the Mexican drug cartels.”
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“The cartels have operational control over our southern border, facilitate and take advantage of our immigration crisis, and are killing tens of thousands of Americans every year with fentanyl,” Crenshaw said in a statement when the task force was created.
The goal of the task force is to issue a full report on the cartels and how to combat them with legislation.
