The red line that Trump wants to cross in the fight against Mexican cartels

They were just a handful of words in an ocean of phrases, but they were enough, as is often the case with their author, Donald Trump, to set off alarm bells on both sides of the border with Mexico. In addition to causing considerable uproar, the assertion that the U.S. president-elect plans to designate the Mexican cartels as “terrorist organizations” once he takes office on January 20 left behind more questions than answers. When, how, and at what cost does he plan to do so, if he does indeed carry out his threat? What implications would such a designation have? Will the cartels’ inclusion on the State Department list be the preliminary step for controlled attacks on Mexican territory to decapitate these powerful groups dedicated to drug trafficking? And how could Mexico respond to a move that could mean crossing an unprecedented red line in bilateral relations?

On Sunday and Monday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded decisively to this plan, which was put forward at a meeting of the ultra-conservative organization Turning Point in Phoenix (Arizona), where the Republican leader defined his Mexican counterpart as a “lovely woman.” “We collaborate, we coordinate, we work together, but we will never subordinate ourselves,” warned Sheinbaum. “Mexico is a free, sovereign, independent country and we do not accept interference. It is collaboration, it is coordination, but it is not subordination. And we are going to build peace,” she declared.

The list of foreign terrorist organizations is managed by the State Department, which adds and removes names. At the moment, there are 68 groups or individuals included. The oldest names on the list were added in 1997, and they include Hamas, the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) and Peru’s Shining Path. The last two names to be added, in December 2021, were Colombia’s FARC and one of its offshoots, Segunda Marquetalia.

The main consequences of ending up on the list are financial. It gives authorities the power to stop money flows through American banks, facilitates the fight against money laundering and, according to the State Department website, “heightens public awareness and knowledge of terrorist organizations,” while “signaling to other governments our concern about named organizations.”

“Designating cartels as terrorist organizations would be a strategic error with unpredictable consequences for both countries,” said a senior official at the Mexican Embassy on Monday. “Organized crime is not fought with labels, but with cooperation and reinforced institutions.” According to this diplomatic source, the idea put forward by Trump “mixes concepts that respond to different dynamics. Organized crime seeks profit, not ideology, and treating it as terrorism only diverts resources and attention from real solutions.”

In the background, there is the idea — entertained in recent years by a few Republican congressmembers and Trumpist hardliners — of intervening militarily in Mexican territory with selective incursions aimed at harming the cartels that produce fentanyl, a drug that killed around 70,000 Americans in 2023 and that largely enters through the border between the two countries. Such a move, says former Mexican ambassador to the United States Gerónimo Gutiérrez, who served at the beginning of the first Trump administration, “would set the relationship between the two countries back three decades.” “The fact that he said it at a rally in Arizona offers clues that it has political ends. I am sure that he will do something about it in the first days after taking office, but I am not so sure that it will be this specifically,” notes Gutiérrez.

The academic Carlos Pérez-Ricart asserts that this level of tension between both countries is unprecedented in the last 100 years. “We are in uncharted waters, at a time when the largest trade partner has decided to carry out some kind of intervention in Mexico. The question that they [in Trump’s entourage] are asking themselves is not whether they are going to invade Mexico, but how they will do it, how mildly or harshly,” he says. “The announcement [by the president-elect] is going to legalize these intentions, it will provide the legal framework to endorse a series of security measures in our territory not necessarily agreed upon with Mexico,” he adds. Pérez-Ricart, author of the study One Hundred Years of Spies and Drugs: The History of US Anti-Narcotics Agents in Mexico, asserts that this “definitely” opens up the possibility of an “invasion.” “I would not be surprised to wake up one day to an American missile hitting a methamphetamine laboratory in Badiraguato (Sinaloa). It could happen,” he says, but adds: “There is nothing to suggest that a more aggressive, direct, and invasive policy will lead to a decrease in fentanyl trafficking to the United States.”

Friction in bilateral relations

The bilateral security cooperation relationship, well oiled during the nearly two decades of the war on drugs, became complicated during the six-year term of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a charismatic leader whose rhetoric was tinged with Mexican nationalism. The former president criticized the unilateralism with which the United States fought high-level drug trafficking with specific actions. One of the moments that most strained diplomatic relations was the capture in 2020 of General Salvador Cienfuegos, former Secretary of Defense, whom the U.S. government accused of collaborating with the H-2 Cartel, a faction that split from the Beltrán Leyva criminal network. López Obrador protested the fact that U.S. agencies had not informed his government that an investigation was underway on a prominent former official.

López Obrador then criticized the presence of U.S. anti-narcotics agents and, in response, sent a reform to Congress that increased control over their intelligence work. Washington criticized the measure, considering that it meant a step back in cooperation and that it only benefited criminal organizations. The decision to regulate the work of foreign agents has support among Mexicans. Last week, a survey by Enkoll for EL PAÍS concluded that the majority of the population rejects the idea of the United States violating the country’s sovereignty in any way. The survey also reflected that citizens hold the United States jointly responsible for the problem of violence due to the uncontrolled transfer of weapons to Mexico that end up in the hands of the cartels.

The capture last July of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in a secret operation in which the historic boss was kidnapped and transported to Texas aboard a plane added fuel to diplomatic tensions. López Obrador and Sheinbaum have maintained that this unilateral move is at the origin of the all-out war unleashed in Sinaloa between Los Chapitos and Los Mayos. The information surrounding the capture that has come to light points to a betrayal by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and to negotiations with Washington, all behind the back of the Mexican government.

The Sheinbaum administration has made stabilizing the situation in Sinaloa a top priority, with Omar García Harfuch, the Secretary of Security and one of the president’s strongmen, leading the strategy. Sheinbaum has responded to Trump’s threats with political statements and through effective actions. In addition to insisting that Mexico will not enter into a relationship of subordination with the United States, authorities confiscated the largest shipment of fentanyl in history in Sinaloa this month. This concern contrasts with the way in which López Obrador addressed the fentanyl problem. The former president assured that this drug was not produced in Mexico, and suggested that it actually entered from China through U.S. customs.

Pérez-Ricart points out that the confiscated fentanyl stash, 1,500 kilos of opioid pills, is the equivalent of what the CBP, the U.S. agency that controls customs, seizes in an entire year at all access points to that country. “The president is showing that she is going to take it seriously,” he says. The scholar notes that, according to data from the U.S. government itself, 80% of the people arrested for introducing fentanyl across the border are American citizens. “This is a problem that does not originate in Mexico. The source, the demand, and the vectors are not Mexican. It is them,” he says. The sociologist Eunice Rendón adds that both this historic seizure of fentanyl and the recent blow to informal Chinese trade “are messages for Trump.” “What they are trying to show is that Mexico can handle these tasks and that there is a change in the security strategy with respect to López Obrador,” she points out.

This is not the first time that the idea of designating cartels as terrorist organizations has been floated in Washington decision-making centers. When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State (and Barack Obama was in his first presidential term), she declared in 2010 in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in the capital: “The situation [in Mexico] is looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country [...] These drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency.” Clinton said that the Obama administration was considering a kind of Plan Colombia for Mexico and Central America.

Plan Colombia, launched by Bill Clinton, reinforced Colombian security forces with military personnel, equipment, and training from the United States. It involved an investment of $7.3 billion, which put the Colombian guerrillas on the ropes, but also brought with it serious violations of human rights and fell far short of solving the problem of drug trafficking.

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