News broke Wednesday that the State Department has  , named  , eight Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, two of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country.
Because it implicates the Latino state at its highest degrees, the name of Sinaloa is particularly significant. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his decision MORENA alliance are strongly connected to the Sinaloa Cartel, as is his protégé and leader, President Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s not all that much to say that MORENA and the Sheinbaum leadership are the state sponsors of the Sinaloa Cartel if it is a criminal business.
This is supported by a large body of evidence. The Sinaloa Cartel has long been greatly invested in Mexican federal elections, and began , bankrolling López Obrador’s social career , as early as 2006, when AMLO, as he is called in Mexico, ran for president and just lost to Felipe Calderón, who launched the Mexican drug war by deploying the armed forces against the organizations.
Sinaloa initially backed AMLO in trade for assurances that he would help run the organizations, which turned out to be a wise decision. AMLO made his absolute best efforts to protect the gang from both the US and the Mexican military and security creation during his administration, which spanned from 2018 to 2024. And he didn’t actually try to hide it. After the Sinaloa military forces besieged the city of Culiacan, where the kingpin’s boy had been detained by Latino soldiers executing a U.S. arrest warrant, AMLO also ordered the launch of one of El Chapo’s children.
Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Hispanic defence minister who was detained by federal officials in Los Angeles on drug trafficking and money laundering claims, was requested by AMLO in 2020. When Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, omitted Cienfuegos, as requested, Mexican authorities immediately acquiesced and exonerated the former flag officer of all wrongdoing.
Soon a cartoonishly corrupt series of events appeared. AMLO accused the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating drug trafficking charges against Cienfuegos, and on AMLO’s orders, Mexican prosecutors , released hundreds of pages of files , on the retired general they had obtained from their U. S. counterparts. Soon after this, according to , a report on the Cienfuegos affair by ProPublica,” Joint operations against drug traffickers came to a standstill. U.S. agents reported being followed by what appeared to be Mexican army surveillance teams. Mexico revoked DEA agents ‘ immunity and slowed down their operations. In terms of U.S. Mexico’s cooperation with the cartels, this is essentially where things are right now.
All of which brings us to the Sinaloa Cartel’s designation as a terrorist organization. In one of the first statements issued by the Trump White House concerning U. S. tariffs on Mexican goods, the Trump administration  , declared,” the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico”.
This would appear to be an overt acknowledgement of everything that has already been discussed. And if Trump is serious about removing these cartels, it could lead to the ouster of the Sheinbaum administration and the ruling MORENA coalition, which are closely linked to the Sinaloa Cartel.  ,  ,  ,
But removing the Mexican state from the cartels won’t just be a matter of sending armed drones to execute precise strikes on targets south of the Rio Grande because of the symbiotic relationship between the Mexican state and the cartels. Not to say that Trump is not opposed to engaging in direct American military action. He even proposed the idea of attacking cartels in his first term, and more recently, Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation to allow for the use of military force ( AUMF) to stop cartels from entering the United States. However, Mexico’s issue is more complex than that.
Organizations like Sinaloa and CJNG are not, at least not at the moment, just drug trafficking organizations. The largest cartels in Mexico have over the past 20 years evolved into quasi-government actors, not just through the bribing of state officials at every level but also, in some cases, taking on the role of government actors. CJNG gunmen regularly distributed food and other supplies in urban areas under their control during the Covid pandemic lockdowns, out in the open and in clearly marked CJNG vehicles. In these towns, people came to rely on the cartel at this time. Other cartels enforced curfews, travel restrictions, and various other pandemic protocols in their respective areas. The distinction between a cartel and a state grew ambiguous.
With the 2018 election of AMLO, who campaigned on a slogan of “hugs, not bullets” with respect to the cartels, a new era of cooperation between Mexican officialdom and the cartels began. AMLO expanded its responsibilities to the Mexican military from the beginning of his term, creating the Mexican National Guard as a kind of interior security service, tasked the military with major infrastructure projects, and relied on the armed forces for things like the distribution of the Covid vaccine.  ,
But as the Cienfuegos affair demonstrates, elements of the Mexican military are controlled by the major cartels, including Sinaloa, which kept President Calderón’s own security chief, Genaro GarcÃa Luna, who is now facing a life sentence in a U. S. federal prison, in its pay for many years.
Naming these eight cartels as terrorist organizations is the right move, but dismantling them will require a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic tactics. Above all, it will require acknowledging how deeply ingrained the cartels are in the Mexican government and recognizing that we have no role in the Mexican state when it comes to the fight against the cartels. It is without a doubt important for the American people to have a stable and peaceful southern neighbor. But for now, we must admit the truth: in Mexico, we don’t have a partner or an ally, we have an adversary, and we need to start acting like it.
