There Is No Military Solution to Mexico’s Cartel Problem
Crime groups operate less like nations and more like banks.
As recently as 2005, it was not only doable to drive from the U.S. cities of El Paso or San Diego to Mexico City—it was safe.
That’s no longer the case. Since 2006, Mexico has descended into a drug war that has made large parts of the country unsafe to travel in. That reality was on stark display on Sunday after Mexican troops killed the country’s most notorious drug boss. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” commanded the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which responded by killing government forces in attacks across Mexico. Some areas popular with tourists were impacted by roadblocks and car burnings.
Mexican forces killed El Mencho at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s orders—under U.S. pressure and with Washington’s intelligence support, but without U.S. troops. A U.S. military operation on Mexican soil is Sheinbaum’s red line in dealings with Washington, which appears to be eager to turn U.S. firepower against Mexican drug cartels.
In taking action against a major cartel leader, Sheinbaum is walking a tightrope. She has reversed her longtime stance against the U.S.-led war on drugs, which many Mexicans see as having initiated their long-standing insecurity crisis. (Anger about the war on drugs was a major reason that Sheinbaum’s Morena party first came to power in 2018.) At the same time, Sheinbaum is attempting to safeguard Mexican sovereignty and forestall the kind of intervention that U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch.
The Trump administration welcomed Mexico’s attack on CJNG and was quick to claim its share of the credit for El Mencho’s elimination. Yet the operation’s benefit to ordinary Mexicans is far less clear. The cartel’s reaction was swift and vicious. Actual casualty numbers are unclear, though at least 25 members of Mexico’s National Guard are reported to have been killed, with a total death toll of more than 70. Attacks occurred across Mexico’s Pacific coast, from Oaxaca to Baja California, grounding daily life to a halt and triggering widespread stay-at-home notices.
All day Sunday, Mexican forces worked to clear roadblocks and restore order over large swaths of the country. By Monday morning, the government claimed to have regained control. But violence is likely to continue, with CJNG due for a bloody succession battle and turf wars with competing cartels looking to take advantage of their rival’s weakness. Any reduction in the flow of drugs northward will be temporary, if it happens at all.
Yet the reaction of many pundits, politicians, and think tankers in both Mexico and the United States was as swift as it was predictable: to call immediately for further escalation and military action against cartels. Some influential MAGA activists and Republican officials spread false claims that cartels were targeting U.S. citizens in Mexico, prompting direct pushback from the Mexican Embassy in Washington.
Mexico’s opposition aimed to spin the chaos as evidence that Sheinbaum’s government is soft on cartels. Mexican Sen. Alejandro Moreno claimed that Sheinbaum leads a “narcogovernment,” never mind that she was the one to order the operation against CJNG in the first place. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers, including Miami Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez, were quick to imply that direct U.S. military intervention remained on the table. Even Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego joined the chorus, calling the Sheinbaum administration’s previous approach to cartels “soft.”
These responses miss the point. The lack of Mexican firepower was not a problem; the military successfully killed El Mencho. The problem is the operation’s aftermath: both the immediate retaliatory violence by the decapitated-but-still-very-much-alive CJNG and the deeper, unalterable reality that, as long as money can be made selling drugs, eliminating one cartel boss merely means ensuring his replacement. Mexicans have seen this movie enough times to know that the replacement will often be worse—and that he can emerge only after fierce bloodletting in brutal turf battles that all too often catch innocent civilians in the crossfire.
This is exactly how Mexico’s insecurity problem began. Smuggling to the United States has existed in Mexico ever since Prohibition-era bootleggers operated across the U.S.-Mexico border, if not earlier. Endemic corruption came alongside it; many a Mexican cop, soldier, or government official has taken their cut of the profits that can be made selling to Americans what their government won’t let them buy. Yet insecurity and mass violence for ordinary people because of the drug trade through Mexico is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to 2006.
Beginning that year, conservative President Felipe Calderón, with support and funding from the Bush administration, moved to militarily crush Mexico’s cartels. Many prominent cartel leaders were killed or captured while civilian deaths soared. But drug cartels are not nations, armies, or ideologically motivated groups that can be forced to surrender. Cartels are more like banks—economic actors filling a need in an enormous, if illicit, market that are willing to go to extreme measures to defend their equally enormous profits. Taking out an entire cartel from lowliest drug mule to the highest ranking narco can no more eliminate the drug trade than shutting down Bank of America would eliminate the financial sector.
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Predictably, Calderón’s drug war has been followed by never-ending waves of violence. Succession battles ensued every time a prominent narco was eliminated, while new criminal groups emerged to take their part of the drug trade’s profits. Ironically, some of the most dangerous new cartels, such as Los Zetas, emerged from the very U.S.-trained Mexican military forces that had been tasked to take them out.
Two decades of worsening violence later, few of the cartel leaders from 2006 remain. Yet today’s cartels are stronger than before. Vast swaths of Mexico have gone from safe to unsafe; hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have been displaced, with many seeking asylum in the United States; and as many as 30,000 Mexicans are killed in crime-related violence each year. Killing another cartel leader just brings us back to square one.
It’s time to acknowledge what a raw deal the Mexican people receive in the U.S.-backed drug war. The United States’ enormous demand for illegal and dangerous drugs ensures that it will always be enormously lucrative to provide a supply. Meanwhile, the United States’ own bounty of military-grade weaponry—as well as Mexico’s supply of economically precarious young men—ensure that armed violence will always be a cheaply available option for drug suppliers, whether against the state or against the competition.
Mexican drug cartels are a problem with no military solution. Recognizing this does not mean throwing up one’s hands and ignoring the genuinely dangerous public health menace that is illicit drugs. In fact, harsher penalties against drug users in the United States—especially the affluent and privileged, who casually consume the product of enormous Latin American misery—could help reduce the demand that perpetuates cartel strength across the region. If young Mexicans are asked to die combating the drug cartels that smuggle cocaine, then the least that the United States can do is lock up some of the young Wall Street stockbrokers, Silicon Valley techies, and congressional staffers who routinely snort it.
Beyond punitive measures, much more should be done to address the realities of addiction in the United States, especially regarding opioids. The Trump administration has set a particularly bad example on this front by moving to cut programs that address opioid addiction, backing down only after significant backlash.
Recent U.S. diplomatic cooperation with China to address the flow of the precursor chemicals for fentanyl production has demonstrated that real results are possible in reducing the overall supply of drugs by preventing their manufacture. Similar strategies to limit the raw materials needed for drug production include investing in struggling crop substitution programs in Colombia, where longtime coca farmers need capital investment, access to markets, and technical assistance to make the transition to legitimate crops, such as banana and cacao, feasible.
Yet no single policy would be as effective in reducing the power of Mexican drug cartels as cutting off the flow of U.S. guns south of the border. This has been a long-standing priority for the Mexican government, which sought unsuccessfully to sue U.S. gun manufacturers in U.S. court. Washington’s record in this area is particularly checkered, with corrupt former U.S. service members and other federal officials often found to be selling taxpayer-funded weapons to Mexican cartels.
Passing the ARMAS Act, introduced by Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, would be the most commonsense way to make sure cartels no longer have easy access to U.S. firearms. The legislative proposal would return authority over small arms exports from the Commerce Department to the State Department and require the creation of an interagency strategy to disrupt the flow of U.S. guns to Latin America, reversing a first-term Trump administration decision intended to promote U.S. small arms exports.
Tragically, addressing the root causes of both the supply and demand for guns and drugs does not seem to interest Trump. His administration does not value Mexican lives, as its harsh immigration policy indicates every day. Instead, the United States seems intent on pressuring the Mexican government into taking ever more provocative action against cartels—turning the country into a battleground, victimizing ordinary Mexicans, and then using the ensuing violence to ratchet up the pressure for further military action. All the while, the White House also appears poised to keep the U.S. border closed to the Mexican asylum-seekers the drug war creates.
Mexicans have been watching this movie nonstop since 2006. There is no happy ending; there are just endless bloody sequels. It’s time to write a new script.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
Antonio De Loera-Brust is the United Farm Workers communications director and the former special assistant to the U.S. secretary of state. He previously worked for Rep. Joaquin Castro and on the policy teams of the Julián Castro and Elizabeth Warren presidential campaigns. He is a native of Yolo County, California.
