The fallout over the murder of two Americans in Mexico has heightened tensions between the United States and its southern neighbor. There are growing calls for the White House to label Mexico’s notorious drug cartels as terror groups. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, is claiming his country is safer than the U.S. after the Texas Department of Public Safety advised residents to avoid travel to Mexico during spring break. Obrador is also being accused of trying to meddle in U.S. elections by campaigning to get Mexican Americans to vote against Republicans.

Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich says the cartel violence has put both countries on the verge of potential conflict.

It’s a very strange moment and one that everybody should pay attention to. We are on the edge of having a huge long-term conflict with a neighbor of 126 million people. And it’s a conflict borne out of the rise of the cartels, who now control somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of Mexico, literally. It’s as though your local police force were actually loyal to the cartel, not to you. And the result is that the current president of Mexico, President Obrador, or as he calls himself, AMLO, is totally committed to the cartels.

And I think that the result is that Mexico is rapidly becoming a narco state, and that people are going to find greater and greater and greater danger. And so I urge everybody to pay attention to what’s going on, to recognize that we may be about to see Mexico become our third most important national security concern, after China and Russia. 

And for the first time, literally in something [like] 100 years, we may begin to have to pay attention to Mexico as a place from which comes very, very serious threats. 

And remember, the cartels have people all across America who are distributing their drugs. So in a real conflict, the cartels have the capacity to cause a great deal of trouble inside the United States. This is a serious moment and one which every American should be aware of.