On the chutzpah front, it's hard to top Mexico's rulers.
Here's the latest from la presidenta, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has advice for President Trump, the leader is getting rid of her country's cartel problem for her.
According to CBS News:
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday said she would ask the United States to share the $15 billion it expects to extract from convicted Mexican drug lord Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada with her country's poor.
Sinaloa drug cartel co-founder Zambada pleaded guilty in a New York court on Monday to murder and drug trafficking, particularly of fentanyl — a powerful narcotic responsible for tens of thousands of US overdose deaths annually.
In pleading guilty, the 77-year-old avoided the possibility of the death penalty but still faces life imprisonment at a sentencing hearing due at a later date.
As part of the deal, Zambada, who had initially pleaded not guilty, agreed to forfeit $15 billion in ill-gotten gains.
Addressing her regular morning press conference, Sheinbaum said: "If the United States government were to recover resources, then we would be asking for them to be given to Mexico for the poorest people.
Which is quite the nerve from her.
After all, whose job was it to capture Zambada, who, according to the story, fed his cartel rivals to hungry tigers and the like.
And more important, who sat on her hands while he was amassing this fortune, only to see it lost when the U.S. apparently tricked him into flying into Texas, where he was picked up by authorities? That $15 billion was just waiting for her and she did nothing.
Trump had to do the dirty work of capturing this beast. Now she wants the beast's money, ostensibly for the poor of Mexico, as if Mexico didn't have that kind of money from illegal alien remittances to throw around for the poor if they really wanted to.
As with the U.S., it's likely she means money for NGOs, which have a record of keeping most of the cash for their salaries. The poor wouldn't see much of this cash even if in the unlikely event it were released to the Sheinbaum government for distribution.
Make no mistake, Mexican officials could have caught this guy, and many others, if they had wanted to, and had they not been so addicted to the payoffs from the gang, allowing it to continue and grow in power and influence in exchange for a 'today' reward for the party faithful holding sinecures.
How many years has nothing been done, other than "hugs, not bullets" for cartel members, which was the policy under Sheinbaum's mentor and predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and apparently her, too, although she has extradited a couple dozen drug dealers to the U.S. in exchange for lower tariffs on Mexican products into the U.S. How many years.
More to the point, why did this monster's money pile grow so big?
Did his shipment of drugs into the country, often through illegal alien "mules" have something to do with this? Maybe the cash pile ought to go towards compensating blameless victims of the fentanyl crisis or putting the plagues-on-society dotting city streets into involuntary treatment? That would be a reasonable use of the beast's billions.
Better still, how much cash did this beast take from illegal aliens for "crossing fees"? Better than handing it out for fentanyl cleanup, it should be used to alleviate repatriation costs for Mexico's and other countries' nationals who used cartel "services" during the Biden border surge. Spend it on deportations for illegals and the money comes full circle.
That would be an appropriate use of the cartel cash.
The good news for Sheinbaum is that cleaning up cartels sets the stage for ordinary Mexicans to go from poor to rich. A stable security backdrop is essential for prosperity to take root. If she can drop taxes and regulations, the prosperity will get even higher and there won't be much of any poor to subsidize in the first place.
Here's the other good news: The CBS report says that aside from Zambada, there are a lot more of them for Mexico to harvest wealth from. If Trump doesn't get them first, they're hers, them and all their money if she'll just go get them. She's still free to raid the toads' nests with all she's got -- and after that she can then spend the cash any way she wants. It's waiting for her until Trump figures out a way to lure them out of their holes and snaps them up for the U.S. Finders, keepers.
It's time to get a clue, Claudia.
Image: Screen shot from X / TikTok video