If Drug Cartels Are Terrorist Orgs, Mexico Is Their State Sponsor

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.

The naming of Sinaloa in particular is important because it implicates the Mexican state at the highest levels. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his ruling MORENA coalition are closely connected to the Sinaloa Cartel, as is his protégé and successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s not too much to say that if the Sinaloa Cartel is a terrorist organization, then MORENA and the Sheinbaum administration are its state sponsors.

There is a mountain of evidence for this. The Sinaloa Cartel has long been deeply invested in Mexican national politics, and began bankrolling López Obrador’s political career as early as 2006, when AMLO, as he is called in Mexico, ran for president and narrowly lost to Felipe Calderón, who launched the Mexican drug war by deploying the armed forces against the cartels.

Sinaloa first backed AMLO in exchange for promises that he would facilitate the cartels’ operations — an investment that paid off handsomely in the end. During his stint in office, from 2018 to 2024, AMLO did his utmost to protect the cartel not only from the United States but also from elements of the Mexican military and security establishment. And he didn’t really try to hide it. Not only did AMLO publicly pay his respects to the mother of former Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera on one of his many trips to the Sinaloa headquarters town of Badiraguato, he also ordered the release of one of El Chapo’s sons after Sinaloa armed forces besieged the town of Culiacan, where the kingpin’s son had been detained by Mexican troops executing a U.S. arrest warrant.

In 2020, AMLO demanded the release of Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense secretary who was arrested by federal agents in Los Angeles on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Trump’s Attorney General William Barr foolishly agreed to release Cienfuegos as requested, whereupon Mexican authorities promptly cleared the former flag officer of all wrongdoing.

A cartoonishly corrupt series of events soon followed. 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 removed immunity for DEA agents and restricted their operations. This is more or less where things stand today in terms of U.S.-Mexico cooperation against the cartels.

All of which brings us back to the designation of the Sinaloa Cartel 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 seem to be a tacit acknowledgement of all that’s outlined above. And if Trump is serious about taking out these cartels, it might well mean the collapse of the Sheinbaum administration and the ruling MORENA coalition, which is closely tied to the Sinaloa Cartel.   

But precisely because of the symbiotic relationship between the Mexican state and the cartels, taking out the latter will not be simply a matter of sending armed drones to carry out precision strikes on targets south of the Rio Grande. Not that Trump is unwilling to pursue direct U.S. military action. Indeed, he floated the idea of striking the cartels in his first term, and more recently Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation for the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against cartels trafficking fentanyl into the United States. But the problem in Mexico is more complicated than that.

Groups like Sinaloa and CJNG are not merely drug trafficking organizations — at least not anymore. Over the past two decades, the largest cartels in Mexico have become 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. During the Covid pandemic lockdowns, CJNG gunmen regularly distributed food and other supplies in urban areas under their control — out in the open, in clearly marked CJNG vehicles. The people in these towns came to rely on the cartel during this time. Other cartels enforced curfews, travel restrictions, and various other pandemic protocols in their respective areas. The line between cartel and state became blurred.

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. From the outset of his term, AMLO gave the Mexican military greater responsibilities than ever before, creating the Mexican National Guard as a kind of interior security service, tasking the military with major infrastructure projects, and relying 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 García 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 enmeshed the cartels are with the Mexican government and recognizing that we have no partner in the Mexican state when it comes to the fight against the cartels. There’s no question that it’s in the American national interest to have a peaceful and stable 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.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.