CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING — On January 20, the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump formally labeled Mexico’s crime cartels as international terrorists. Last month, in a sharp break from past assessments, the U.S. intelligence community's annual briefing on national security threats put narcotrafficking at the top of the list. Multiple reports indicated that the CIA was stepping up surveillance drone flights deep into Mexican cartel-dominated territory.
All these actions have raised questions about whether U.S. unilateral drone strikes or special operations raids against the cartels would soon follow.
The CIA and U.S. military have ample technological capability to launch air strikes deep inside Mexico against infamous cartel kingpins. But leaving aside the political consequences of staging attacks on the territory of the U.S.’s top trading partner – can military strikes get the job done? Could the U.S. stop Mexico’s formidable crime cartels, now the world’s richest, most powerful transnational criminal organizations, with unilateral military incursions and targeted assassinations on the territory of its neighbor to the South?
That’s not at all clear, according to experts who have spent decades analyzing and investigating the cartels.
“I think military strikes would impact the current leadership of the cartels, but unlike traditional terror groups, drug trafficking is about money and power,” Ray Donovan, formerly the DEA’s chief of operations, told The Cipher Brief. “Others will replace those positions.”
Experts also note that the cartels have moved to urban and industrial areas, and that intelligence sharing between the U.S. and Mexico remains uneven at best. Added to all this is the friction caused by the recent U.S. tariffs imposed against Mexico – and whether those will make it less likely that the government in Mexico will wish to cooperate with the U.S.
Finding the kingpins
Given Washington’s inability to break the cartels’ hold on the Southwest border thorough either law enforcement or diplomacy, coupled with Mexican leaders’ history of corruption and inaction, the Trump administration may be tempted to resort to military force, over the objections of Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum vowed recently that "the people of Mexico will not, under any circumstances, accept intervention, interference, or any other act from abroad.”
The Pentagon has not expressed an appetite for military strikes but has not rejected the idea out of hand. On April 8, according to theAssociated Press and Stars and Stripes, Colby Jenkins, acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, testified before a Senate armed services subcommittee that special operations forces do not have the authority to launch drone attacks against drug cartels in Mexico, but that the military can provide options to the White House if Trump wants to do more to protect the border.
Any such mission would face significant challenges. Mexico’s cartels are now industrialized and globalized, much like Big Pharma. In contrast to the situation decades ago, when crude heroin labs in the Sierra Madre mountains and vast fields of marijuana were relatively easy to spot from the air, Donovan said, “Now you have synthetic labs that are in the cities, in industrial areas that are mass-producing millions upon millions of fentanyl pills and pounds of methamphetamine.” Pinpointing the right structures without killing innocent bystanders would require far more specific intelligence than the U.S. possesses or can get without Mexican government involvement. Precise intelligence would also be needed to assassinate cartel kingpins.
Intelligence cooperation between the two nations has been a hot-button issue for years. In 2020, after the DEA’s arrest of former Mexican Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos for allegedly conspiring with Sinaloa traffickers, Mexican lawmakers passed a law limiting intelligence sharing with the U.S., especially with the DEA. Although U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr ordered Cienfuegos released to Mexico, the government of PresidentAndrés Manuel López Obrador took a hard line against working with the U.S. Even if Sheinbaum changes that policy, many U.S. officials doubt that Mexico’s military and security apparatus can be quickly rid of endemic corruption.
“We have to have the will of the government in Mexico, because we cannot act unilaterally,” said Michael Chavarria, a former senior DEA agent who was posted to Mexico City, Guadalajara, the border and Houston, where he led investigations of the Gulf and Zetas cartels.
“We would pass on exact specific intelligence [to the military] where to go to grab people like [Sinaloa kingpin] Chapo Guzmán," Chavarria said. "We called him Casper the Ghost, because every time we passed information to… the military, they would have just missed him. The teapot was still hot, food on the table, but no Chapo. It really became obvious that … the operations were compromised.”
The Trump administration may hope that by designating the cartels as terrorists, prominent Mexicans will take a stand against them, so that both Washington and Mexico City avoid a debilitating debate over a U.S. violation of Mexico’s sovereignty. Such a dispute might have geopolitical reverberations beyond this hemisphere, by muddying the U.S. position that Russia has violated international norms with its invasion of Ukraine.
The cartels – and the next generation
A different question involves the resilience of the cartels. Donovan believes that when a new generation of criminal leaders moves in to replace fallen drug lords, “they will be younger and more tech savvy. And they’ll have a higher awareness towards operational security.” Which means that their organizations will march on, possibly even flourishing once gray-bearded leaders are out of the picture.
As Donovan and other current and former law enforcement officials assess the cartels, based on decades of reports from human informants recruited through long-term penetrations, they see Mexico’s crime bosses as pragmatic, calculating, cynical and selfish. Their junior partners and likely heirs are considered equally cold-eyed, and generally better educated. In contrast to terrorist leaders driven by religious or ideological fervor, cartel leaders and their lieutenants are in it for the money, period, the experts say. They’re skilled at workaday business tasks such as complicated logistics, and not particularly visionary. They have no intention of dying for a cause. They switch at will from moving drugs to people to avocados to stolen cars.
The military advantage
There are arguments to suggest that military strikes would have at least some impact.
For one thing, U.S. technological prowess in the air is unrivaled. Unilateral air strikes have succeeded against more difficult targets in far more remote locations. Famously, on September 30, 2011, U.S. drones controlled by the CIA and U.S. military zeroed in on a group of men finishing breakfast near a cluster of trucks in Yemen’s Jawf Province. Hellfire missiles unleashed by drone pilots half a world away obliterated, among others, Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Samir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Saudi Arabia who published Inspire, a hate-filled recruiting magazine for jihadists. President Barack Obama, speaking at a military ceremony hours after the strike, expressed no remorse that the dead included American citizens, and declared that the successful operation constituted “further proof that al-Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.”
Then there was the pinpoint U.S. drone strike that assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Quds Force. Soleimani’s sedan, and his body, were cut to ribbons by a Hellfire missile moments after he landed at Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020. President Donald Trump declared that “at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike...Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”
Iranian leaders responded with multiple plots, detailed by The Cipher Brief, to assassinate Trump.
The circumstances in Mexico are different in many ways, and again, finding the drugs and targeting the traffickers may prove even more challenging than the pursuit of terrorists on the other side of the world.
Meanwhile, the drugs keep coming
When it comes to the way the cartels smuggle illicit drugs into the U.S., American border control officers are often overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Last year, according to the U.S. Transportation Department, U.S. commercial trucks made 6 million crossings from Mexico into the U.S., and personal cars and trucks made nearly 40 million crossings northward. (Many of those vehicles crossed the border multiple times.) An unknown but undoubtedly significant number of those vehicles delivered drugs as well as legitimate cargo.
“Ninety percent of the fentanyl is coming through the ports of entry,” Chavarria said. “We're not catching very much of it because it’s coming through in big conveyances like tractor-trailers, with sophisticated hydraulic systems that it would take hours to search.”
Technology can help to some extent. The Customs and Border Patrol agency has installed 309 large-scale, non-intrusive inspection (NII) systems that use X-ray and Gamma-ray imaging systems that can look into cargo, supplemented by portable and handheld technologies. On April 11, CBP officers at the Pharr International Bridge cargo facility that connects McAllen, Texas, to Reynoso, a headquarters for the Gulf Cartel, used imaging technology and a canine team to inspect a tractor-trailer heading north. Underneath a load of Mexican bell peppers and cucumbers were nearly 1,700 pounds of methamphetamines worth $14 million on the street in the U.S. With that seizure, CBP has seized more than 62,000 pounds of meth, 36,000 pounds of cocaine and 7,000 pounds of fentanyl in the fiscal year that began October 1. The DEA’s latest statistics show that in 2024, the DEA seized more than 60 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and nearly 8,000 pounds of fentanyl powder; so far this year, seizures have amounted to 13.5 million fentanyl-laced pills and 2,132 pounds of fentanyl.
Yet, according to DEA agents, street prices remain moderate, a discouraging sign that tons of drugs seized haven’t translated into scarcities.
Ultimately, U.S. officials say, nothing will change until Mexico’s elites want it changed. “To be able to challenge the cartels [has] meant in some cases challenging the establishment behind the cartels,” Donovan told The Cipher Brief. “That means the corrupt politicians and officials that support and in many cases are the backbone to the cartels at the local level, the state level and even a national level…[The terror] designation also puts a tremendous focus on that, on who's behind the cartels, who's allowed them to thrive for so many years.”
For many prominent Mexicans, as important as the threat of U.S. military force may be the fear that Mexico’s increasingly independent press will expose them as supporters of terrorism.
As theWall Street Journal reported Monday, two Mexican governors have been extradited to the U.S. and pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges, and former Mexican Security Minister Genaro García Luna was sent to prison in the U.S. after being convicted for helping the Sinaloa cartel smuggle more than 50 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Now Sinaloa state Gov. Rubén Rocha is under pressure to quit on account of alleged ties to local drug bosses. “I’m not a criminal,” Rocha told reporters last October. Yet the Sinaloa cartel is believed to be one of his state’s main employers.
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