Trump’s cartel plan isn’t tough enough

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I rarely agree with President Donald Trump, but I’ll admit he is right about one thing: the immense power of Mexico’s transnational drug cartels and the grave threat they pose to American lives. That’s not to mention the Mexican lives they take with alarming impunity, year after year. We need a new approach to weaken them.

Fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid of which the cartels are major suppliers, killed more than 250,000 Americans between 2018 and 2022. Roughly 275,000 Mexicans have been killed by organized crime violence since 2007, according to Lantia Intelligence, a Mexican research firm.

As a writer on organized crime, I have seen up close how the cartels wreck livelihoods through extortion and send Mexicans fleeing toward the border. As an American from the Midwest, I lost one friend to a fentanyl overdose and came close to losing another.

While I see no truth to Trump’s xenophobic framing of the cartels and gangs as part of an “invasion” of the United States from the south — many people arriving at the border are desperately escaping the crime groups — I agree that weakening and dismantling the cartels should rank at or near the top of U.S. foreign policy priorities.

The problem with Trump’s plan to take them on is that it’s not tough or serious enough.

Trump devoted some of his first hours back in the Oval Office to the threat of the cartels, including signing an executive order to designate some of them as terrorist organizations. Since then he’s also signed executive orders to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, citing, among his reasons, their failure to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. But he quickly reached agreements with the leaders of Mexico and Canada to delay the tariffs for one month — in Mexico’s case, in exchange for 10,000 national guard personnel posted at the border.

But the cartels are not terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS. Cartels like Mexico’s two largest, the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel, do not want to overthrow the state or remold society in their image. They have a less ambitious goal: limitless profits.

That has made them into something even more powerful than terrorists — illicit multinational corporations with almost bottomless resources. Simply sending more troops to the border is unlikely to do much of anything to dent their business model.

For years, the drug trade, fueled by voracious U.S. demand, has generated annual revenues of more than $10 billion in Mexico alone, giving its cartels many times the revenue of ISIS or Al Qaeda. They also make money from migrant smuggling and kidnapping, oil theft, the extortion of avocado exporters, mining, large-scale fishing and countless small businesses.

The Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation are both present in more than 40 countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia. ISIS, by contrast, only ever established territorial control or branches in about a dozen countries.

It is Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s call whether or not to designate those cartels as terrorist groups. It would certainly send a loud message: Washington cares. If he makes those designations, they will give U.S. federal prosecutors authority to pursue the cartels’ “material supporters,” which could include U.S. citizens who smuggle firearms into Mexico; Mexican companies that pay extortion fees; U.S. companies that do business with them; and, most troublingly, migrants and refugees forced to pay cartel operatives a fee to transit through their turf. They could, on those grounds, be turned away from the border.

Trump has also threatened military strikes on Mexican soil — a move that could collapse relations with America’s neighbor and largest trading partner while doing little if anything to significantly weaken the cartels. They have plenty of cash to rebuild any destroyed drug labs and lieutenants in the ranks to replace fallen kingpins.

The biggest risk is not that Trump is committed to a gloves-off plan for the cartels. It’s that, beyond the tough talk, there is no plan, and he might be satisfied with Mexico merely putting on a show of hitting the cartels hard while their businesses and political power continue to grow.

If Trump and those around him are serious about weakening the cartels, they need a serious plan. They need to see the cartels for what they truly are: predatory multinational businesses. He needs a strategy to hit them where it hurts — in the pocketbook.

That might include increasing the Treasury Department’s resources to take down transnational money laundering rings and aiding Mexican efforts to do the same. The Trump administration could also use extradition — the one tool all crime bosses fear — in concert with European and Asian partners to dismantle the cartels’ global networks.

At the same time, Trump should increase cooperation with the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico to go after the cartels’ equivalent of midlevel management — the recruiters, weapons suppliers and logisticians who keep business ticking — and support Mexico’s efforts to dismantle corruption networks among the state police, prosecutors and judges. It is in Sheinbaum’s interest to regain full control of the Mexican state. This must be paired with an equally strong commitment to curbing the flow of illegally trafficked U.S. firearms into Mexico and money laundering in the U.S. financial system.

Trump is a fan of appointing special envoys. Why not name one in charge of combating transnational organized crime in the Americas? How about a North American security treaty, in which the Mexican, American and Canadian militaries and law enforcement officials would work much more closely together to fight organized crime? According to a January poll, 70% of Mexicans like the idea.

Latin America’s criminal conglomerates can buy off government officials in Mexico and elsewhere because they face relatively few obstacles to doing business, and thus have immense spending power. They exploit the commercial shipping industry and ports to move drugs and precursor chemicals around the world. They have laundered hundreds of millions of dollars through banks and sold billions in illegally mined gold to U.S. and European metal companies. They source weapons from “straw purchasers,” who buy guns on behalf of criminal groups. This is the ecosystem that sustains the cartels: a relatively free criminal marketplace.

Countless Latin American judges, prosecutors and police officers have stood up to these groups, but many others have been coerced or bribed into complicity or silence. The Trump White House’s incendiary claim that “Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico” renders a complex situation cartoonishly simple. Yes, parts of the state collude with the cartels, but there are others resisting, and we need them — and Sheinbaum most of all — to work with us.

Trump wants Mexico to do even more to stop refugees and unauthorized migrants from reaching the United States’ southern border (over 900,000 of whom Mexico detained in 2024), while simultaneously fighting the cartels and stopping fentanyl flows. But Trump may have to choose one or the other. He should choose the cartels — the real threat to national security. Realistically, Mexico is incapable of devoting itself fully to serving as a de facto extension of the border wall and combating the cartels with full force at the same time. It has tried that before, and it hasn’t worked.

“The country just doesn’t have the money, the boots on the ground, the training” to fight such a two-front war, Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister, told me. “Sooner or later, one of the two fronts collapses, always.”

Taking on the cartels as businesses would benefit Americans and Mexicans, alike. I know a Mexican politician who has survived two cartel assassination attempts and still fights for justice for cartel victims in his part of Mexico. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear for his safety, he said he doesn’t share many views with Trump, but completely agrees with the idea of U.S. help in fighting the cartels — “Not only that they designate them terrorist organizations, but that they actually do something.”

If Trump does nothing to raise the cartels’ costs of doing business — the only thing that would give governments in the region a shot against the criminal groups — he will never deliver on his promise to make America safe again.

Will Freeman is a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article originally appeared in the New York Times.