Trump after declaring cartels terrorist organizations: ‘Mexico is not going to like it’

The long-anticipated threat has become reality. On his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. “Mexico is not going to like it,” said the tycoon as he signed the decree in a sports arena in front of his supporters. According to specialists, the measure will give the U.S. government enormous powers that could violate Mexico’s sovereignty, resulting, for example, in drone attacks or military incursions on Mexican soil. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government, which has firmly stated the bilateral relationship will be one of cooperation and never subordination, will be under pressure to obtain results in its anti-drug policy, results that can be measured in Trump’s terms. The diplomatic relationship between the two countries, led in Mexico by a leftist president and in Washington by a politician more inclined to the xenophobic and racist right, is expected to be tense on such a priority issue as bilateral security and threatens to affect trade, an area in which both countries are deeply dependent.

Among the Republican president’s priority goals is the reduction of fentanyl trafficking, a drug that kills tens of thousands of Americans (in 2023, 70,000 people died from the synthetic opioid). Sheinbaum, who champions the discourse of tackling the drug-trafficking problem through social aid and addressing inequality, has also emphasized that among her priorities are undermining criminal structures and the seizure of drugs, coups that could give a respite to negotiations with Trump. In Sinaloa, where two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Chapitos and La Mayiza, loyal to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, have been waging an all-out war for months that has left dozens dead, the Ministry of Security, headed by Omar García Harfuch, has captured several criminal leaders and seized a ton of fentanyl, the largest cache of the drug ever impounded in Mexico.

The list of terrorist organizations is managed by the U.S. State Department. Currently, 68 groups and individuals are included, from Hamas to the Colombian FARC guerrillas and Shining Path in Peru. While the main consequences of being on the list are financial — it makes it easier for the U.S. to block capital flows between countries and combat money laundering — there is also an aspect that excites both Republicans and Democrats: military intervention on Mexican soil with selective incursions aimed at damaging the cartels. A unilateral maneuver of this type would mean destroying decades of bilateral cooperation and intelligence exchange between the two governments to combat the historical problem of drug trafficking.

A “soft invasion”

Academic Carlos Pérez-Ricart says that the order to classify the cartels as terrorists provides tools to the security, intelligence, and justice system of the United States to attack Mexican criminal organizations in a different way, and opens the door to a “soft invasion.” “In concrete terms, for Mexico, it implies that the U.S. intelligence ecosystem will already be on top of the country, which is something we had not seen until now: it will be the target of the United States intelligence agencies,” he warns. Author of the study One Hundred Years of Spies and Drugs, Pérez-Ricart maintains that, on the positive side of history, the new framework would also allow monitoring of private companies related to organized crime, from those that launder resources to arms companies that flood Mexico with illegal weapons and provide the cartels with their enormous firepower. “That can even be beneficial for the country,” he observes.

The researcher warns, however, that in relation to the fight against cartels, Mexico and the United States are pursuing two different and mutually exclusive objectives. “Mexico’s objective must always be focused on reducing the violence generated by drug cartels. The United States’ objective is to prevent drugs from reaching its country. There is a huge gap between both. Even by pursuing one, you weaken the other. And that is probably the tension in which the bilateral relationship is immersed,” he says. “If these new powers granted to the United States government are focused only on preventing drugs from reaching the U.S., they will continue to provoke violent dynamics in Mexico.”

Pérez-Ricart explains that drug trafficking organizations do not function in the same way as terrorist groups, and differ in their makeup, objectives, and methods. Therefore, he points out, they should not be approached in the same way. “The drug phenomenon is based on demand in the United States, not on supply. As long as the demand for drugs persists, it is impossible to think that the problem can be attacked at the source: Mexico,” he observes. The academic adds that, therefore, any project aimed at containing the problem only through the use of force “is destined to fail.” “[But] if this is going to imply a focused, intelligent use of disruption of violent organizations, and above all against the actors who swarm around drug-trafficking cells, I think it is good news,” he adds.

Rise of militarism

Oswaldo Zavala, an academic and writer dedicated to the study of organized crime, qualifies the scope of Trump’s executive order and observes that, in terms of security, “Mexican sovereignty has always been violated by the U.S. anti-drug policy.” The researcher points out that the new tension around fentanyl is another stage in Mexico’s subordination to U.S. geopolitics, “[a] stormy, conflictive relationship of supposed cooperation, in quotation marks, that often resembles blackmail and extortion.”

For the author of Cartels do not exist, the main threat to Mexican sovereignty is the imposition from the United States and Europe of a militaristic approach to dealing with insecurity and migration. “When we talk about drug trafficking, we are talking about a way of expressing global militaristic policies, which in our country takes the form of combating organized crime, but which in other countries is called the fight against terrorism, or in countries like the United States, where the concepts of drug trafficking and terrorism are even mixed, as well as undocumented immigration,” he says.

Zavala states that the advance of militarism in Mexico is observed in “the normalized use of harassment and violence against the country’s own citizens.” The author exemplifies this with the containment of migratory flows by the army, military cyber espionage against civil society, the violation of human rights, the “disproportionate public spending on security,” or the lack of oversight over the Armed Forces. “We will not get rid of this problem if there is not a clear awareness that the main immediate problem for Mexican security has to do with our docile role, which allows the advance of national militarism in connection with global militarism,” he assesses.

Congressman Gildardo Pérez, from the Movimiento Ciudadano party, believes that Trump’s threats may have a greater impact because institutions in Mexico have been weakened, something for which he has blamed Morena, the ruling party. “These external pressures are due to an internal weakening. Trump takes advantage of the weakness we have in terms of the administration and delivery of justice,” he says. “The politicians of the last two decades [of the PAN, PRI and Morena] did not address the causes that were causing this institutional weakening,” he states. Beyond the criticism, Sheinbaum’s response to Trump has been to reject submission, awakening a closing of ranks with the opposition parties. The conservative PAN, the majority opposition party, has rejected any possibility of “foreign interventionism.” Mexico awaits in tense calm the next move of the new American president.

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