Death threat: Mexican cartel forces witness to cancel congressional testimony

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A Mexican drug cartel used death threats to force a tribal leader to back out of testifying to Congress this week, according to another tribal leader who did show up to tell lawmakers just how much power the drug lords have accumulated.

Jeffrey Stiffarm, president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana, said he didn’t want to name the fellow leader who backed out, but he said the threat seemed real and credible.

“One thing that we really seem to overlook all the time is the threats, the death threats we get from cartel leaders,” he told the House Natural Resources Committee. “We had the tribal leader from Montana, that declined to testify here today because he received death threats that he was going to testify.”

The committee held a hearing Wednesday to examine cartel operations on reservations.

The revelation that cartel threats had interfered with lawmakers’ business shocked the members.

“The cartels have threatened them with death?” asked Rep. Bruce Westerman, chairman of the committee. “That’s horrible to think that an American citizen has been threatened by a foreign cartel if they come to Congress and testify about what they’re doing.”

The committee said it had contacted other potential witnesses who declined to testify for safety reasons.

Mr. Stiffarm’s community is in northern Montana, far from the southern border. But he said the Mexican cartels control the drug activity and everything around it.

“We’re fighting a losing battle and the cartels are winning. The drug dealers are winning. They’re overrunning our reservations,” he said.

Jessica Vaughan, an expert at the Center for Immigration Studies who filled in as a witness after the tribal leader backed out, said the threats were a worrying yardstick for the cartels’ growth and reach.

“It shows these aren’t benign small-time organizations,” she said. “These are criminal enterprises that are actively seeking to expand, that are attracted by the opportunity to sell drugs in the United States and are willing to use violent tactics to succeed.”

“This is a problem on so many levels,” she said. “It’s a problem that they’ve been able to infiltrate these communities and it’s a problem that these public officials feel so intimidated by them. This is creating a huge threat to our civil society that has really only been very isolated and rare in the United States of America before now.”

The cartels have drawn increasing attention with the chaos at the southern border, which experts say have enriched the organizations that control both the drug and human smuggling routes from Mexico into the U.S.

Experts say the cartels have benefited in extraordinary ways from the border chaos and now make as much money off smuggling people across the border as they do off smuggling drugs. Proceeds from human smuggling help fuel fentanyl production and other cartel activities.

That’s long been a problem for Mexico, but the cartels’ growing money and power are giving them new reach in the U.S.

Mr. Stiffarm, in an interview with The Washington Times, pointed to a double homicide last month in Box Elder, just to the west of Fort Belknap, which he said was cartel-connected. The suspects came from California to carry out what authorities are calling a targeted killing.

Mr. Stiffarm said reservations attract the cartels because they have more ability to operate there. For one thing, he said, cartel members “blend in” with tribal members given similar skin and hair color. They also take advantage of jurisdictional complications involving tribal authorities, and the remoteness and lack of resources.

He said cartel operatives will use distractions to move drugs — a 911 call reporting a car crash in a far corner of the reservation to draw labor away, for example. It’s the same sort of tactic Border Patrol agents see when cartels sneak drugs across the southern border.

And then there’s the money to be made. A fentanyl pill that sells for 50 cents near the U.S.-Mexico border can go for $100 in Montana.

Bryce Kirk, an executive board member of the Fort Peck Tribes, also in Montana, told lawmakers that people will get hooked and start doing up to 25 pills a day. To afford that, they end up being frontmen for the cartels.

“They come in and harm these people. They come in and beat them because they have a debt to them,” Mr. Kirk said.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told a different congressional committee on Thursday that in much of the country, the cartels use local gangs for street-level distribution.

He said when agents do takedowns of gangs, “almost without exception” they also seize fentanyl.

Mr. Wray said the FBI has 400 current investigations into cartel leaders.

The tribal leaders said they’ve asked for more resources for their police, and more effort from federal agencies such as the FBI, Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Administration. They haven’t received it.

Mr. Stiffarm questioned the federal government’s priorities.

“To me it seems like they’re more concerned about the immigrants coming across the border than concerned about what they’re doing here once they get here, concerned about their own citizens of this country, and to me more importantly, the first people of this country where they’re coming into,” Mr. Stiffarm said.

Mr. Kirk agreed.

“Start looking inward instead of outward. Start worrying about the fight here for us trying to save our people, and stop looking to save others when all we’re doing is trying to save our people too,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Rep. Bruce Westerman.