By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Wrong Way to Fight the Cartels

Since returning to the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to defeat the Western Hemisphere’s violent drug traffickers by any means necessary. In a March address to Congress, Trump declared, “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Over the last several months, his administration has designated 13 cartels and criminal groups, including six based in Mexico and two in Venezuela, as foreign terrorist organizations. It has also surged troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, declared several tracts of land near the border to be military zones, directed the Central Intelligence Agency to step up reconnaissance drone missions over Mexico, and ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to draw up plans to assess potential collateral damage from airstrikes in Mexico.

Washington has left behind its traditional conception of the fight against transnational criminal organizations as a matter of law enforcement, with its threats of “war” and consideration of military action against the cartels. In July, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare such plans. Then, in September, the U.S. military struck what administration officials claimed was a vessel used by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to smuggle drugs, killing 11. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the strikes on the basis that the U.S. president has the authority “under exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

A militarized approach may be a politically attractive way for Trump to project strength. And indeed, the United States can, and should, draw on many valuable lessons from the last two decades of counterterrorism missions during the “war on terror” in its campaign against the cartels. But there is a more productive path forward than drastically shifting the rules of engagement with transnational criminal groups. In Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Washington may have a genuine partner in containing the cartels that pose the most direct threat to the United States. More extensive border measures, increased bilateral security coordination, and more frequent (but not more lethal) maritime interdiction efforts can accomplish just as much as unilateral U.S. military interventions using drones and special operations forces would, all while limiting risk to U.S. personnel and mitigating blowback.

 

New Sheriff in Town

Fueled by a weak Mexican state capacity (and by complicity), demand for illicit drugs in the United States, and a steady flow of guns south, violent transnational criminal groups have morphed from relatively small-scale trafficking operations to sophisticated organizations, combining the financial networks and political influence of multinational corporations with the lethality of private military contractors.

Although Mexico, with U.S. assistance, has achieved many operational successes in its decades-long battle against the cartels, the fight is, at best, at a stalemate. Mexico’s 2006 “kingpin strategy,” which targeted cartel leaders, actually increased violence. In 2008, when the Mérida Initiative institutionalized U.S.-Mexican security cooperation, Mexico’s homicide rate stood at about eight murders per 100,000 inhabitants. By 2017, it had mushroomed to 26 per 100,000, largely driven by the growth of organized crime. Abuses by Mexican security forces further eroded public support for a militarized approach to public safety. In reaction to the state’s failure to stem rising violence, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered office in 2018, declaring the death of the Mérida Initiative, replacing it with a “hugs, not bullets” policy that prioritized social programs and poverty reduction over direct military confrontation with the cartels. “Hugs, not bullets” was no more successful than the Mérida Initiative, however, eventually becoming a byword for government passivity in the face of spiraling criminal violence.

Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s successor, has forged a different path. Under her leadership, Mexico has mobilized its intelligence services, army, and national guard against the cartels, setting new records in fentanyl seizures; deployed 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border; and extradited 55 cartel operatives to the United States. Although Sheinbaum’s government may have calibrated these moves in part to reduce tariff pressure from the United States, they nonetheless signal a departure from the approach of the López Obrador administration, which at times denied the very existence of fentanyl production in Mexico.

Mexico remains highly cautious of U.S. security interventions. In August, Sheinbaum announced that, although her government will “cooperate” and “collaborate” with the United States, “there will be no invasion.” That option, she said, is “off the table, absolutely off the table.” Still, Sheinbaum’s commitment to fighting the cartels presents opportunities for the United States.

 

The Old Playbook

For its part, the Trump administration has aimed to reinstate the legal classification of cartels to signal a shift in the U.S. approach to fighting transnational criminal organizations. On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order that described cartels as national security risks to the United States and vowed their “total elimination.” The subsequent designation of several transnational criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations made available new legal tools to bring charges against those who provide financial or other material support to these groups. The Department of Justice has previously brought material support charges against individuals in the United States who have provided time, labor, or financial assistance to help suspected members of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. The cartels share many traits with the terrorists and insurgents that the United States fought in the post-9/11 era. Like insurgents in Afghanistan and Somalia, the cartels are nonstate actors that take advantage of state failure to exert authority over large swaths of territory. Rank-and-file cartel members, many of whom are part-time participants, are mixed into the population, making it hard to sort the guilty from the innocent. Like the Islamic State (ISIS), cartels use violence to spread fear and achieve their goals through intimidation. And like many terrorist groups, cartels are organized as networks of smaller cells, often with international links.

There are limits to the comparison, however. Unlike the Islamist groups of the post-9/11 period, cartels are generally motivated by profit, not ideology, a characteristic that lowers barriers to recruitment and widens the appeal of membership. In most cases, they seek less to replace the government than to intimidate, subvert, and corrupt it. Furthermore, Mexico is not a faraway country but a U.S. neighbor, with much deeper cultural, historical, and diplomatic ties to the United States than Afghanistan or Iraq have. U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency methods, if they are used, must be modified to reflect these differences.

 

Operational Insecurity

Past U.S. counterterrorism campaigns have benefited from intelligence sharing and cooperation with allies, who can use local police and security services to monitor potential terrorists and arrest them. In Mexico, many cartels exhibit poor operational security, enabling intelligence agencies to intercept their communications, track their movements, and compile information about organization membership, hierarchy, activities, operating structure, and patterns of behavior. Intelligence collected mostly by U.S. agencies can then be used by Mexican military, intelligence, and police forces to capture or kill cartel leaders and strike the groups’ training camps and facilities. Once cartel members are captured, intelligence is also necessary to prosecute them in courts of law. Monitoring cartels’ financing, furthermore, can eventually lead to the arrest of financiers and enable the Treasury Department to cut off correspondent banking with financial institutions in the United States or target and seize individual cartel members’ bank accounts, denying them access to payment networks and effectively halting the flow of money into the groups’ coffers. In June, for example, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network identified three Mexican financial institutions suspected of involvement in cartel-related money laundering, prohibiting certain economic transactions involving these banks.

Historically, U.S.-Mexican intelligence cooperation has been rocky, owing to mistrust, a difference in goals, and the weak capabilities of Mexican intelligence agencies, which produce relatively small amounts of actionable intelligence. But U.S. agencies produce plenty of intelligence that can fill the gap, especially now that the U.S. military has increased intelligence collection on the border and the CIA has expanded a program, which began under the Biden administration, to use unarmed drones to gather intelligence on cartel labs and redoubts. As long as Washington continues to share its information with trusted agencies within the Mexican government, Mexican security forces can use it to interdict cartel activity. The United States could also increase technical aid, expand information and analysis centers that pool intelligence across multiple agencies and assist decision-making, known as fusion cells, and target financial support to Mexican intelligence and police services.

As Washington considers military options short of an invasion, one that has become a common tool in counterterrorism campaigns is raids by special operations forces. Carried out in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria, such raids eliminated senior terrorist leaders, including al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, degraded or dismantled insurgent cells, and provided opportunities to gather intelligence that enabled subsequent operations. Yet there can be steep costs if the raid goes wrong. Sobering examples include a 2017 raid in Yakla, Yemen, which left one Navy SEAL dead and several others wounded, and the 1993 Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, Somalia, which triggered a firefight that resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis. Failed or controversial raids can provoke political scrutiny and erode public support for ongoing military operations. Civilian casualties, such as those in the 2017 Yakla raid, can further undermine local support and serve as powerful propaganda for militant groups.

In theory, special operations forces deployed to Mexico could eliminate cartel members, disrupt hubs of drug and human trafficking activities, and collect actionable intelligence in the process. But carrying out such raids would come with considerable risk. These operations always endanger U.S. personnel and, especially when they happen in densely populated urban areas, risk collateral damage. Given the large numbers of U.S. citizens who live in and visit Mexico (and the many family members of U.S. citizens in Mexico), civilian harm could trigger a strong public response at home in a way that civilian casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen never did. A botched operation would also jeopardize broader security cooperation with the Mexican government. And if the U.S. military executed raids without the Mexican government’s consent, the violation of sovereignty could further imperil collaboration between the two countries.

A safer alternative to sending in special operations forces is to use drones. Over decades of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, drones have been used in one-off strikes against top leadership and in sustained campaigns targeting the middle ranks of an organization. Sustained drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan removed key figures, disrupted communications and organizational processes, forced leaders into hiding, and prevented the establishment of large-scale training camps. Yet even successful drone campaigns rarely destroy a group entirely. They force decentralization, which does make it harder for terrorist groups, especially those with far-flung affiliates, to coordinate globally and carry out acts of spectacular violence that require a high degree of training and skill. That lack of coordination, however, can create a fragmented foe that is more difficult to completely defeat. Moreover, U.S. drone campaigns have resulted in significant numbers of civilian deaths. The U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan from 2004 to 2018, for example, killed between 303 and 969 Pakistani civilians.

A drone campaign against cartels in Mexico might kill leaders, disrupt the transport of drugs, and destroy production facilities. But this sort of drone campaign would face strong headwinds. Cartels are primarily motivated by profit, so their leadership is generally easier to replace than that of ideological terrorist groups because of the material benefits that usually accompany membership in a cartel. Leadership decapitation also tends to be more for small (fewer than 500 members), new (fewer than ten years old), and centralized networks. Cartels, however, can easily become decentralized, and many of the best-known transnational criminal networks are large and relatively established. And if the bloody turf wars catalyzed by the kingpin strategy is any indication, drone campaigns would create additional fighting among cartels for control of the drug trade, likely killing many civilians in the process.

 

Occupational Hazards

Given the risks of and likely backlash to both drone strikes and targeted raids, the United States should consider other strategies to suppress Mexico’s cartel operations. Some of the U.S. military’s most expansive counterterrorism efforts have involved securing territory to exert pressure on and deny haven to terrorist groups. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces attempted to destroy bases where terrorist groups could organize, plan, and train, and to stop “ratlines”—clandestine movement and supply networks—that enabled terrorists to infiltrate government-controlled areas. To secure Baghdad, for example, the United States had to secure neighboring residential, industrial, and agricultural areas and roadways—the so-called Baghdad Belts—that insurgents were using to stage attacks.

To impede smuggling routes and disrupt cartel operations, the United States could establish a buffer zone along the U.S.-Mexican border, perhaps extending into northern Mexico, by increasing border patrol and military deployments, as well as defensive measures such as physical barriers and sensors. Maritime buffers, established by increasing U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy patrols and maritime surveillance, could also prevent cartels from island hopping between countries in the Caribbean with poor littoral security to move drugs and precursor chemicals without detection. A more ambitious alternative would see U.S. forces work with Mexican forces to seize and occupy key cartel strongholds deep in Mexican territory, including in Sinaloa, Michoacán, Jalisco, and Tamaulipas. These efforts could be modeled after counterinsurgency campaigns such as those in Fallujah during the war in Iraq or in Kandahar during the war in Afghanistan, proceeding through the steps of clearing territory, holding it through persistent patrols, and then strengthening local governance and policing capacity.

Occupying cartel hotbeds deeper in Mexico could enable the U.S. military to dismantle infrastructure, capture or kill the groups’ leaders, and restore the Mexican government’s control over its own territory. But sending U.S. forces into the Mexican interior would demand a significant commitment of personnel, provoke cartel retaliation, risk prolonged conflict in occupied areas, and jeopardize the Sheinbaum administration’s cooperation. As terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan did, cartel fighters could use civilian populations as shields. And even if military operations were coordinated with the Mexican government, they could lead to a fierce backlash in Mexico against the United States. Sticking to buffer zones would not come without risk: this strategy would endanger U.S. personnel and require long-term joint operations with the Mexican army. But the risk would be lower than in a larger occupation of cartel territory, and this approach could still enable important gains, such as denying traffickers access to key corridors, disrupting cross-border activity, exposing cartel movements to greater surveillance and interdiction, and creating secure staging areas for U.S. intelligence collection and rapid response operations in Mexico.

Finally, U.S. counterterrorism strategies have often included efforts to improve the capacity of partner governments and their military forces, which may be poorly trained, corrupt, brutal, and politicized, in an attempt to prepare them to fight terrorists on their own. Partner governments typically welcome these efforts; unlike unilateral U.S. military action, they do not threaten the country’s sovereignty. When successful, U.S. training can make foreign militaries, police, and intelligence services more effective and willing to act by themselves, ensuring that long-term counterterrorism campaigns are less costly and risky for the United States.

Building the capacity of a partner, however, is difficult. Not only does U.S. training often fail to guarantee respect for human rights or improve norms of civilian control; it often fails to equip a foreign military for victory. Despite years of training and tens of billions of dollars in spending, U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fell apart when facing smaller numbers of lightly armed opponents. Mexico’s track record does not necessarily promise a better outcome. Mexican security forces have already been receiving U.S. training and aid for years, yet their capacity is still lacking, and cartel-linked corruption is common at all levels of government. Recently uncovered networks of fuel theft in the armed forces do not inspire confidence. Nonetheless, Sheinbaum is under intense political pressure, from both Washington and from many Mexicans, rightly preoccupied with violence, to deliver security gains. Washington should not abandon its approach of working with and training vetted units within the Mexican army and navy.

 

Blowback in the Neighborhood

If the United States charges into Mexico with no regard for the political or military consequences, the result could be a disaster. Washington would no doubt do some damage to major drug cartels, but the overall flow of drugs might not change substantially, and violence in Mexico might increase as the chaos leads to competition among surviving groups. Some cartels could even conduct revenge attacks across the border. The diplomatic consequences could be even more consequential. Mexico could end its migration and security cooperation, reducing overall pressure on cartels and curtailing enforcement actions with long track records of success, even as showy U.S. efforts proceed. The resulting anger in Mexico could easily spill over into other areas of the U.S.-Mexican partnership, including trade, undermining one of Washington’s most important economic and diplomatic relationships.

To avoid this outcome, Washington should prioritize strengthening its intelligence relationship with Mexico City, improving land and maritime border security, and building Mexico’s capacity to fight the cartels with targeted security assistance and training. Doing so could reduce the cartels’ freedom of action, increase their costs of doing business, and over time, reduce the flow of drugs to the United States. The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to rewrite the rules of U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. The Sheinbaum government views Trump’s threats of using force unilaterally as credible, especially after the strike on the Venezuelan vessel, and Mexico has proved willing to compromise, as long as the United States does not cross the country’s red line against raids on Mexican soil.

Trump has long criticized the United States’ forever wars in the Middle East. He is well aware of how U.S. interventions in the name of counterterrorism can go wrong. Mining the long and often sordid history of these efforts can provide the Trump administration with lessons for the fight against transnational crime. But to embrace the entire U.S. counterterrorism playbook without considering what may and may not work against the cartels would be to court catastrophe.

 

 

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