In December 2016, despite intelligence warnings that lifting visas would “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ended the visa requirement for Mexican visitors.
They would include “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launderers and foot soldiers,” the Canada Border Services Agency’s Intelligence Section wrote in a report dated April 2016, two months before Trudeau announced the visa exemption.
h/t SC
The leaders of Canada and Mexico, the United States’ two largest trading partners, will meet on Thursday — without their U.S. counterpart — after eight months of chaotic trade talks and threats of tariffs.
The talks, between Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, are expected to focus on trade, as well as investments in areas like mining, agriculture and natural gas.
Both leaders will also discuss preserving their free trade partnership with the United States, which has so far limited the effect of President Trump’s tariffs on their economies. On Tuesday, the three countries opened public consultations on the trade pact, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, or the U.S.M.C.A., the first step in a review of the agreement.
… As reported previously by The Bureau in coverage of a sweeping FinTRAC warning on Chinese underground banking in Toronto, FinCEN is now raising similar alarms. The Treasury said so-called “money mules” often rely on falsified jobs and identities to gain access to the banking system, disguise unexplained wealth, and buy residential properties. In cases where these mules opened accounts, they frequently listed occupations such as “student,” “housewife,” “retired,” or “laborer” — roles that would not normally involve large volumes of financial activity — yet the accounts showed high-value deposits and transactions consistent with laundering.
Mexico has extradited 26 high-ranking cartel figures to the US in the latest major deal with the Trump administration as US authorities ratchet up pressure on criminal networks sending drugs across the border.
Authorities sent 26 prisoners who were wanted in the US for ties to drug-trafficking groups, Mexico’s attorney general’s office and security ministry said in a joint statement on Tuesday. The transfers were carried out after a promise from the US justice department that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty in any of the cases.
Those being handed over to US custody include Abigael González Valencia, a leader of “Los Cuinis” a group closely aligned with notorious Jalisco New Generation cartel or CJNG. Another person, Roberto Salazar, is accused of participating in the 2008 killing of a Los Angeles county sheriff’s deputy, the person said.
CELAYA, Mexico — On a sunny spring day last year, a young attorney named Gisela Gaytán kicked off her campaign for mayor in this gritty Mexican city.
Under her blouse she wore a ballistic vest.
Celaya had become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war, with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and a local police force that appeared powerless to stop it.
“We must recover the security that we so long for,” Gaytán, 38, wrote on social media before setting out that day.
Although there’s no evidence of any significant flows of fentanyl into the United States from Canada, an American authority on “criminal supply chains” warned Friday that that could change abruptly if U.S. efforts to better seal its border with Mexico are successful.
Jonathan Caulkins, who researches supply chains that support illegal markets for the Manhattan Institute think tank and Carnegie Mellon University. said the drug cartels that control the North American fentanyl trade may well shift large chunks of their operations to Canada if the northern border becomes the path of least resistance.
Four decapitated corpses hanging from a bridge are the latest symbol of a civil war tearing apart the violent global drug powerhouse, the Sinaloa Cartel.
And the bloodshed has dire implications for Canada, where the cartel has been allowed to fester and grow in a twisted branch plant endeavour to fuel the world with fentanyl.
20 bodies found in Mexico after horrific cartel violence — including 4 headless corpses hanging from bridge
Hacker working for cartel run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was also able to access phone records of an FBI legal attaché at the US embassy in Mexico City
A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice department report.
The incident was disclosed in a justice department inspector general’s audit of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical surveillance”, a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.
Gunmen have killed the mayor of the Mexican municipality of San Mateo Piñas in the latest deadly attack on local officials.
Witnesses said four armed men arrived on motorcycles, stormed the village hall and opened fire on the mayor, Lilia Gema García Soto, and a local official who was in a meeting with her, Eli García Ramírez.
Two municipal police officers were also injured in the attack.
Our valued trading partner.
We all know that Mexico has become an incredibly violent place, especially over the last decade, due to a rise in cartel activity and organized crime. So, what has the Mexican government done to combat this? Well, not much, but back in 2021, it decided it would sue several gun makers and distributors here in the United States for at least $10 billion.
With Factories on Six Nations Land, Mexican Cartels Are Using Canada to Smuggle Counterfeit Goods Into the U.S. and Mexico
OTTAWA — “Project Panda,” a major Ontario gang taskforce takedown in May targeting a counterfeit tobacco factory on the Six Nations Reserve near Hamilton and Buffalo, exposes a long-ignored reality: Mexican cartel networks have deeply embedded themselves in Canadian territory near the U.S. border—and are expanding in tandem with Chinese state-linked crime partners, using Indigenous land for counterfeit production and cross-border smuggling.
This is no longer just a policing matter. It is a national security crisis—one that exploits Indigenous communities, land, and jurisdictional protections that have inadvertently shielded criminal networks now designated as terrorist threats. Worse still, the threat has long been known to Canadian, American, and Mexican authorities. Yet Ottawa has failed to act.
h/t handy n handsome
MEXICO CITY — After years of confiscating rising amounts of fentanyl, the opioid that has fueled the most lethal drug epidemic in American history, U.S. officials are confronting a new and puzzling reality at the Mexican border.
Fentanyl seizures are plummeting.
The phenomenon has received little notice in Washington, where the Trump administration has made fentanyl-trafficking cartels a national-security priority. “Narcotics of all kinds are pouring across our borders,” said a White House statement in March, announcing stiff tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
The cartels have switched from the Mexican border to the Canadian border
Donald Trump has declared war on the cartels. The southern border is now patrolled by the military, the wall is rapidly expanding and US intelligence is helping to target crime bosses on Mexican soil. Illegal crossings and drug seizures at key points have dropped by more than 70 percent in the last year.
But, contrary to appearances, the cartels have not surrendered – instead, they have pivoted, applying Sun Tzu’s principle: attack your enemy’s weaknesses, not his strengths.
Led by the blood-soaked and ultra violent Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel they are exploiting the soft 5,525-mile long northern border with Canada and its sparse surveillance, dense forests, inadequately staffed crossings and neglected checkpoints.
The usual suspects will be making profit from policy no doubt.
Once the U.S. began taking border security more seriously, the cartels simply changed direction, literally. They went around it.
The Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, vast and largely unguarded expanses of open water, have become the new superhighways of the Mexican drug trade. No more tunnels. No more coyotes bribing border agents.
FBI Director Kash Patel dropped a major bombshell on Sunday by accusing Canada of allowing drugs and terrorists to flow over the northern border into the U.S.
Patel is turning his attention to Canada and demanding the country do more to stop illegal activity at the border.
He said that Mexico has done more to partner with Washington, D.C. to stop those on the terrorist watch list and other bad actors from getting over the border, and he told Canada to ‘step up’ to the plate.
Canada gets torched and exposed by FBI Director Kash Patel.
Canada has become a major drug trafficking and terrorism hub and most of the terrorists that crossed into the US came via Canada;
"Where is all the fentanyl coming from still? Where is all the trafficking coming from… pic.twitter.com/iFEi2Fw86l
— Kirk Lubimov (@KirkLubimov) May 18, 2025
