Time to Sanction the Mexican Government for Violating Public Safety

In July of 2019: Mexico’s Congress passed an asset forfeiture bill; there were no additional changes to Mexico’s counterterrorism legislation in 2019. The government lacked adequate laws prohibiting material support to terrorists and relied on counterterrorism regimes in other countries to thwart potential threats. Additional reading here.

CARTEL monsters have hung nine bodies from a bridge in a chilling warning to rival gangs amid a bloody Mexico turf war.

A tenth victim was also found on a nearby road by horrified residents in the Zacatecas municipality of Cuauhtémoc on Thursday at around 6am.

Nine bodies were found suspended from a bridge in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc on Thursday

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Nine bodies were found suspended from a bridge in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc on ThursdayCredit: Reuters
Officials believe the gruesome display is related to a dispute between cartels in the area

Officials believe the gruesome display is related to a dispute between cartels in the area Credit: AP

Officials warned the disturbing display was likely to be linked to a savage dispute between ruthless criminal gangs that operate in the area.

The nine bodies were eventually removed from the overpass by police at around 10am local time, as locals went about their day.

According to local media, the majority of the deceased were identified as residents of the small town Cuauhtémoc, which has a population of just 6,660.

“They pay for the sins of others, it is not fair that they do this to us because they pay for the sinners,” one spooked local told TV Azteca Noticias.

Another added: “It’s scary to go out at night. You have to go to sleep early and every night there is noise, motorcycles, screaming, things like that.”

An “intense investigation” was underway, the local government said, although no arrests have yet been made.

***

“Operation Lone Star,” is Gov. Greg Abbott’s evolving and expensive plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border using thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guardsmen. The operation, launched in March, was initially billed by Abbott as an effort to “deny Mexican Cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas,” but has since become a sprawling and controversial experiment in the use of state power to secure an international border.

Democrats have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional, and called for a Justice Department investigation. Republicans have praised Abbott for taking a stand and pushing the envelope.

Abbott has not asked the Biden administration for permission because he does not believe he needs it. Indeed, the entire operation has been designed to operate exclusively with state resources and agencies, and within the existing confines of state law. That’s both a strength of Abbott’s approach and, as I saw for myself in Del Rio, Texas, a major weakness.

Abbott’s Border Operation Is A Bureaucratic Morass

It’s a weakness because it severely limits what the operation can achieve. The basic idea is that Texas state troopers and National Guard troops will arrest illegal immigrants, who will in turn be prosecuted for misdemeanor criminal trespass in hopes that such prosecutions will serve as a deterrent. Whatever the merits of this approach to border security, it comes with a host of caveats and constraints.

To begin with, Texas is only arresting single adult men, not women, children, or family units, which means the state is targeting the migrant population most likely to be quickly expelled to Mexico under Title 42, the pandemic public health order that allows federal immigration officials to send migrants back over the border with minimal processing. The migrant men arrested by Texas law enforcement, by contrast, will remain in state custody for weeks or longer, rather than being sent back to Mexico.

Up until last week, migrant men arrested under Operation Lone Star who posted bond would be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would typically expel them under Title 42. But last week ICE told the state it would no longer take custody of these migrants. That means Texas will have to transfer them to U.S. Border Patrol, and as of this writing it remains an open question whether Border Patrol will expel them as they would have under Title 42, had federal agents arrested them, or process them as asylum-seekers.

If the latter, then Operation Lone Star might have the unintended effect of rewarding migrants caught by state authorities: once they’re processed and released by Border Patrol to pursue their asylum claims, migrants have legal status, are allowed to work, and can remain in the United States as their case wends its way through federal immigration courts — a process that can take up to five years.

But even before these problems arise there are strict conditions that have to be met before state authorities can even make an arrest. Migrants can only be arrested on private land where landowners have agreed to press charges, and only on those parcels of land where the Texas National Guard has managed to erect temporary barriers, usually some arrangement of concertina wire that migrants must cut or go over, to ensure the trespass charges will stick.

And before Texas National Guardsmen in particular can arrest anyone, they’re supposed to go through 40 hours of police training (in practice, I’m told that it’s more like a day-long training). Also, the migrants who are arrested have to be transported to state prisons that have been retrofitted to comply with state jail standards, since migrants are being held in pretrial confinement. That in turn means all the corrections officers have to be trained as jailers.

On top of all these requirements, the entire operation depends on the willingness of local county attorneys to prosecute a deluge of misdemeanor criminal trespass cases arising from all these arrests. In Kinney County, which has a population of less than 4,000, the county attorney is a young man named Brent Smith who just took office in January and has never before worked as a prosecutor. He now has about 1,300 cases and counting thanks to Operation Lone Star. (For context, in normal times the Kinney County prosecutor would only take on a couple dozen cases per year.)

By contrast, in neighboring Val Verde County, the local prosecutor, David Martinez, a Democrat, has rejected nearly half the cases that have come through his office from Operation Lone Star. Last month, Martinez told a local news station he rejected the cases either because the migrants in question were seeking asylum or because there was some other problem with the case. (He cited one case in which state troopers re-directed a group of migrants to cross onto private property so they could arrest them for trespassing.)

For all this, out of about 1,500 criminal trespass cases filed since July through Operation Lone Star, only about 3 percent have resulted in convictions, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, which also cited court records showing that of the 170 Operation Lone Star cases resolved as of November 1, about 70 percent were dismissed, declined, or dropped. The remaining cases ended in plea agreements, with most migrants sentenced to time already served.

Meanwhile, all of this is costing Texas hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier this year, Abbott shifted about $250 million in the state budget to launch the operation, and the GOP-led state legislature later approved an additional $3 billion. In Del Rio, you can see these dollars at work all over town: every hotel parking lot is full of Texas state trooper trucks and SUVs. Uniformed National Guardsmen drive around in armored Humvees. Along some stretches of private land  near the Rio Grande, sparkling new chain-link fencing topped by concertina wire stretches out for miles.

Locals seem to appreciate the effort and money being poured into their communities, especially landowners who feel betrayed and abandoned by the Biden administration. One woman told me her family’s ranch has been repeatedly vandalized this year by migrants — trashed, in fact, for the first time in generations. When they called Border Patrol, the answer came back that no one could be spared to come out and investigate. Their advice was, stay away from your ranch, or move. Their message was, incredibly, we can’t protect you.

Indeed, under the direction of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Border Patrol has for the past ten months been overwhelmed with the endless task of processing and releasing migrants as fast as it possibly can, with little time or personnel available for patrolling the border. In Del Rio, I spoke to former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott, who was forced out by the Biden administration in August, and he said agents are demoralized because they’re unable to do their jobs. Instead of intercepting drug and human traffickers or arresting criminals trying to evade detection — the actual job of Border Patrol agents — they’re stuck processing and transporting asylum-seekers.

Scott sees the border as a “national security issue,” but says the Biden administration has a completely different set of priorities. “Unfortunately since January 20, I haven’t seen a single action or even a single conversation while I was still in the chief’s position, to try to slow the flow to actually create a deterrent to illegal entry,” he says. “Every single action has been to basically be more welcoming. How can we process faster? And that’s just going to continue to be an invitation worldwide.”

Is Operation Lone Star Elaborate Political Theater?

Texas, then, really is on its own. Abbott is right that under the circumstances something must be done by the state, but so far his solution seems overly lawyerly and cautious, designed specifically to pass legal muster and win lawsuits rather than create a real deterrent to illegal immigration.

 

A cynic might suspect that Operation Lone Star, for all its complex interagency coordination and mass deployment of manpower and expensive price tag, is in the end mostly political theater. Its purpose might not be to secure the border so much as to secure Abbott’s right flank against a pair of Republican primary challengers, former GOP Texas Chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines, who accuse Abbott of being too soft on the border.

Given the resources at Abbott’s disposal, West and Huffines — along with plenty of Texas conservatives who are frustrated about the ongoing border crisis — arguably have a point. Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who led U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Trump, has argued that border states have a strong constitutional case for securing their own international borders in the face of federal inaction. Cuccinelli and others cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that no state can engage in diplomacy or war without the consent of Congress, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”

The ongoing border crisis, which has seen a record 1.7 million arrests at the southwest border in the last 12 months, constitutes both an invasion and an imminent danger that will not admit delay, the argument goes, and states have a right to act. Not only could border state governors like Abbott invoke emergency powers to return illegal immigrants directly to Mexico, state legislatures could pass laws making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to remain in those states, mostly through strict licensure and screening requirements for sponsors and refugee resettlement organizations.

All of these things, and much else besides, lie far outside the scope of what Abbott is doing in Texas. There is no question at this point that Operation Lone Star, whatever its merits, will not significantly change the situation along the Rio Grande. The border crisis created by the Biden administration is here to stay — a new normal along the southwest border for as long as the White House desires it.

What could change that? Texas could. Abbott could. He has already demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize and deploy thousands of Texas law enforcement and military personnel, along with every manner of vehicles, barriers, and transports. Nothing like Operation Lone Star has ever been undertaken, yet it is too little, too late — too pinched and small-minded a response to a rolling crisis that now appears to be permanent.

Abbott could wield these tools to press the constitutional question about what border states can do when the federal government leaves them to their own devices. If he doesn’t, he might find the people of Texas are ready to listen to someone who will. source

103,000 Dead in One Year From Fentanyl, Biden Admin Ignores the Crisis

Drug Cartels 1 Biden 0

 

The Biden administration is silent on the crisis and this deadly crisis was not a covered topic at all during the summit the White House held with the presidents of Mexico and Canada. The White House tells us to listen as they listen to the CDC…but it is selective listening.

Furthermore, Biden allegedly spent 3.5 hours in a virtual summit meeting with President Xi of China and never bothered to discuss the manufacture of illicit trafficking of fentanyl to Mexico and that deadly partnership.

The DEA published a factual report on this crisis last year.

So here is a CDC report:

More Americans died of drug overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021 than in any previous yearlong period, the Centers for Disease Control reported Wednesday.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that more than 100,000 Americans died of overdosing, a nearly 30 percent spike from the year before and more than double the number of deaths in 2015.

“These are numbers we have never seen before,” National Institute on Drug Abuse director Dr. Nora Volkow told the New York Times.

The Times reported that the spike in deaths was largely caused by increased use of fentanyl, a powerful opioid. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday that Customs and Border Protection in October captured nearly 1,050 pounds of fentanyl, the fifth-highest amount in three years.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official told the Free Beacon that drug cartels are “exploiting the migrant crisis” to smuggle drugs into the United States. Many of the states hardest hit by the overdoses have put the blame on President Joe Biden, who rolled back many of former president Donald Trump’s border policies.

Biden’s policies have contributed to the “devastating deadly flood of fentanyl across the southwest border,” attorneys for West Virginia wrote in the state’s lawsuit against DHS.

*** Fentanyl seizures at border double over past year: report enough to kill us all….read that again…kill us all. Furthermore, it is being secreted in other drugs so you may not even know you’re taking it. This begins in China and ends in the United States through Mexico. How many more will die?

A close friend of mine Derek Maltz has been leading the mission on dealing with the crisis and has given testimony before Congress and still no advancing of any kind of legislation to stop the crisis at our southern border.

But you need to see the faces, the real faces of victims of fentanyl.

WATCH: Moms Stop The Harm respond to opioid crisis – Victoria News

There are a thousand more faces…. Derek Maltz has 25 pages of faces just like the one above….
***
With international travel limited, synthetics that are easier to manufacture and more concentrated were likely more efficient to smuggle across borders, Volkow said.
The US government has seized enough fentanyl this year to give every American a lethal dose, Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram said Wednesday at a White House press briefing, calling the overdose epidemic in the US “a national crisis” that “knows no geographical boundaries, and it continues to get worse.”
The new federal data shows that overdose deaths from methamphetamine and other psychostimulants also increased significantly, up 48% in the year ending April 2021 compared to the year before. They accounted for more than a quarter of all overdose deaths in the latest 12-month period.
While fentanyl was once more popular on the East Coast and methamphetamine on the West Coast, Volkow says both have now proliferated nationwide.
***

While seemingly dominated by two large criminal groups in Mexico, the fentanyl trade requires vast networks of smaller subcontractors who specialize in importing, producing, and transporting synthetic drugs. Both large and small organizations appear to be taking advantage of the surge in popularity of the drug, which is increasingly laced into other substances such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana—very often without the end-user knowing it. To be sure, rising seizures of counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl illustrate that the market is maturing in other ways as well.

Fentanyl’s potency also opens the door to entrepreneurs who bypass Mexico altogether, obtaining their supplies directly from China and selling them on the dark web. There is little public understanding of the prevalence of this part of the trade and even less of its medium- and long-term implications. The low barrier of entry into this market and its high returns make for a frightening future in which synthetic drugs of all types could proliferate. This full report is found here.

 

Mexico Cartels Use Video Games to Recruit Children

Beyond the constant threat of Tik Tok, Facebook and Instagram there are at least 2 video games, World of Warcraft and Second Life. Parents, are you managing this or paying attention…globally?

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm | RPG Site.Second Life Review | Game Rankings & Reviews

Beyond parents…what about State Attorneys General or the Department of Justice? crickets….

In full:

Mexican criminal groups have hit on a new way to recruit vulnerable young people into their ranks: reaching out to them while they play video games.

On October 11, authorities in the southern state of Oaxaca announced they had rescued three children, between the ages of 11 and 14, who had reportedly been convinced to run away from home by a human trafficking ring after being contacted through a video game named Free Fire.

The three were found at a home in the town of Santa Lucia de Camino, where they were being held and were set to be sent to Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo León. They had left their homes a couple of days earlier after receiving messages from a trafficker, posing as a 13-year-old boy in the game.

Earlier in October, a young girl was also rescued after having been lured by a human trafficking group in the western state of Jalisco.

This was far from the most sophisticated such scheme to be discovered in Mexico this year. In September, Mexican investigative journalist Óscar Balderas revealed how one of the country’s foremost criminal actors is trying to recruit children through the most popular video games in the world.

On September 18, a teenage boy playing Grand Theft Auto V online at 3 a.m. received a message from a gamer purporting to be a young man, wearing a bulletproof vest and a military-style helmet in his profile picture. The boy was invited to an in-game event named “RECLUTAMIENTO ABIERTO CDN-ZETAZ VIEJA ESCUELA-35 BATALLON.” The Northeast Cartel (Cartel del Noreste – CDN) and the Old School Zetas (Zetas Vieja Escuela) are both splinter groups of the Zetas, which have been involved in some of Mexico’s worst violence in recent years.

SEE ALSO: Colombia’s Ongoing Child Recruitment Crisis

This fits a pattern reported by numerous young gamers in Mexico in recent months. According to Balderas, messages are sent in the early hours of the morning, when parents are unlikely to be supervising their children’s online activity, openly inviting young gamers to join criminal groups and selling this as a glamorous lifestyle. Some messages alleged that they were being sent by the Sinaloa Cartel or the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG).

In an interview with InSight Crime, Balderas stated that after contacting young people online, the representatives of criminal groups invite them to in-person meetings where they are abducted and forced to join.

And it seems this tactic is more widespread. Since this story broke in September, around ten families have come forward to tell the journalist about similar experiences with online recruitment.

Criminal groups in Mexico routinely abuse numerous children and teenagers and force them to serve in a range of roles, including as hitmen, drug runners or to work in drug manufacturing facilities.

InSight Crime Analysis

Reaching out to impressionable teenagers through video games is fitting for the times.

“It could seem like a pretty inefficient way of getting one or two more sicarios (hitmen) but it’s a silent way of recruiting. If they go ahead and kidnap kids or teenagers in person, this will draw attention. But this is a way of inviting teenagers of their own free will, of getting their loyalty,” Balderas explained to InSight Crime.

It’s also a very low-risk way of proceeding. It appears the recruiters create profiles located in Mexican cities and then send out invitations to all players currently online in a certain radius. The vast majority will probably ignore such messages as spam but a few curious players will accept and get in touch.

Those contacted in this way state that the recruiters appeal to their sense of adventure, promising them excitement, action, money and possessions.

SEE ALSO: Going Door to Door: Mexico City’s Response To Child Recruitment

Islamic terror groups have used this technique for years, with leaks from former National Security Agency (NSA) operative in 2013 revealing how extremists had turned to video games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life.

And the COVID-19 pandemic has only made this strategy more attractive. With schools closed, children have been forced to study online but access to learning platforms and monitoring of their activities by parents and teachers has ranged widely.

Also in September, a Wall Street Journal investigation unveiled how Facebook leadership knew the CJNG was recruiting “aspiring cartel hitmen” via the social network. Despite warnings from a specialized team, pages advertising the CJNG on Facebook and Instagram remained up for up to five months. When they were taken down, new ones soon popped up.

It hasn’t helped. A search on Instagram, the day before this article was published, immediately turned up multiple accounts showing young children carrying weapons, wearing military-style gear or singing the praises of criminal groups in Mexico.

Useful Details/Laws about the Migrant Chaos at the Southern Border

As a primer:

America’s Founders were concerned about invasion. It was mentioned it four times in the Constitution, though the term was never explicitly defined.

Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 15: The Congress shall have the Power (to) provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2: The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Article I, Section 10, Paragraph 3: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article IV, Section 4, Paragraph 1: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestics Violence.

So, as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Mayorkas admits at least 13,000 Haitians were admitted into the United States to clear Del Rio, no one can deny this is an invasion. Further, that number only refers to those under that bridge in Del Rio, it does not include the 1.2 million that already passed into the United States or the unknown number of ‘gotaways’. Miles and miles of other parts of the Southern border goes unprotected or managed due to the overwhelming volume.

In June of 2021, Congressman Jody Arrington (R-TX) introduced legislation that further explains the lawlessness that Congress must address.

H.J.Res.50 – Recognizing that Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution explicitly reserves to the States the sovereign power to repel an invasion and defend their citizenry from the overwhelming and “imminent danger” posed by paramilitary, narco-terrorist cartels who have seized control of our southern border.

Read the proposed legislation here. 

Of course under Speaker Nancy Pelosi there will be no movement to this legislation or others in the pipeline.

Even more crazy is the fact that the Haitians were already given residency status in several countries in Latin America going back to as far as 2010, directly after the earthquake.

After the earthquake of 2010, thousands of Haitians began migration to the country, in hopes of finding a new life. According to Atlanta Blackstar, the United Nations reported “an unprecedented number of people displaced from their homes—one in 113 people in the world—migration and asylum has once again come under the spotlight.”

In 2015, the Brazilian government granted residency to almost 44, 000 Haitians. source

Haitians Flee To Brazil To Escape Getty Images

In part from an NBC affiliate: Most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil but were not seeking the same from Mexico, according to Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, Marcelo Ebrard. “What they are asking for is to be allowed to pass freely through Mexico to the United States,” Ebrard said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a stark warning during a news conference Monday. “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” he said. The DHS says some who are being released are given legal documents summoning them to a court date.

“Individuals who are not immediately repatriated are either placed in Alternatives to Detention, detained in an ICE facility, or released with a legal document (either a Notice to Appear in court or a notice to report to an ICE office for further immigration processing),” DHS spokesman Eduardo Maia Silva told Sinclair Broadcast Group in an emailed statement. (this obviously has turned out to be a lie)

 

 

.

“The reason Haitian migrants discard their Chilean and Brazilian ID cards over here on the Mex side is to obscure from asylum reviewers that they were already safely and prosperously situated for years and years before coming for the American upgrades,” explained Bensman.

Fox News journalist Bill Melugin also published photographs of documents discarded by the migrants, and among the findings, he discovered that some of them had already been processed by the United States.

 

It should be recalled that according to the Daily Mail, a recent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) does not have the resources to assess the health of migrants entering its custody and relies on public health systems in surrounding cities to do so.

“Without stronger COVID-19 prevention measures in place, DHS is putting its workforce, support staff, communities, and migrants at greater risk of contracting the virus,” wrote the DHS Office of Inspector General. source

Now back to that pesky Constitution…right? Not for anyone part of the Biden administration.

Facebook Internal Documents Show Stasi Operations Including Murder

What about Apple and Tim Cook?

  • Apple threatened to remove Facebook from its App Store after a report about an online slave market.
  • The BBC in 2019 reported that human traffickers were using Facebook’s services to sell domestic workers.

    Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    The paper viewed company documents that show a Facebook investigation team was tracking down a human trafficking market in the Middle East whose organizers were using Facebook’s services. What appeared to be employment agencies were advertising domestic workers that they could supply against their will, per the Journal.

    The BBC published a sweeping undercover investigation of the practice, prompting Apple to threaten to remove Facebook from its store, the paper said.

    An internal memo found that Facebook was aware of the practice even before then: A Facebook researcher wrote in a report dated 2019, “was this issue known to Facebook before BBC inquiry and Apple escalation?,” per the Journal.

    Underneath the question reads, “Yes. Throughout 2018 and H1 2019 we conducted the global Understanding Exercise in order to fully understand how domestic servitude manifests no our platform across its entire life cycle: recruitment, facilitation, and exploitation.”

    Apple and Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    The Wall Street Journal on Thursday also reported how Facebook’s AI content moderators cannot detect most languages used on the platform, a needed skill if the company is going to monitor content in foreign markets where it has expanded. source

Source: The dozens of internal Facebook documents obtained by the outlet showed how employees have expressed concerns about how the social media giant is being used in countries across the globe and how Facebook has failed to properly respond to these issues.

Some of the documents reportedly showed that Facebook employees raised concerns about human trafficking organizations in the Middle East that used Facebook to attract women. Other documents showed Facebook employees alerting their higher-ups of groups involved in organ selling and pornography.

The news outlet reported that while some of the groups and pages flagged by employees have been taken down, dozens of others remain active on the social media site.

Mexican cartels that are feeding America's drug habit ... source

Another document detailed a Facebook employee’s investigation into a Mexican drug cartel that was active on the social media site. The employee, who was a former police officer, was able to identify the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s network of accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The employee wrote in the report that his team had found Facebook messages between cartel recruiters and potential recruits “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp.”

México: Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación lanzó un video ... source

The documents reportedly showed that the cartel was open about its criminal activity, with several pages on the social media site showing “gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes.”The Wall Street Journal reported that even after the employee recommended Facebook increase its enforcement on the groups, documents showed that Facebook didn’t completely remove the cartel from its site and instead said that it removed content tied to the group. Just nine days after the report from the employee, his team found a new Instagram account tied to the cartel, which included several violent posts.

Many of the documents apparently showed employees raising concerns about how the social media giant was being used in developing countries, such as militant groups in Ethiopia using Facebook to promote violence against minority groups.

Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that the social media site sees these issues in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business.”

“There is very rarely a significant, concerted effort to invest in fixing those areas,” Boland said.

In a statement sent to Newsweek, a Facebook spokesperson said: “In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact-checkers to keep people safe.”

In a series of tweets on Thursday, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone wrote, “As the Wall Street Journal itself makes clear, we have a team of experts who help us uncover patterns of harmful behavior so we can disrupt it. We’ve got arguably more experts and resources dedicated to this work than any other consumer technology company in the world.”