Georgetown Americas Institute

President Trump has put the fight against drug cartels at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. In his second term, he’s taken extraordinary steps – bombing suspected drug-carrying vessels, designating cartels as terrorist organizations, ordering a daring raid to grab Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, wanted on narcotics charges. For the first time in decades, the U.S. government is threatening to use military force in Mexico – its largest trade partner – to try to cripple trafficking groups. 

Yet amid this stunning drumbeat of news, there’s been little attention to a basic question: How do Mexico’s cartels work? That was the theme of a panel discussion at the Georgetown Americas Institute this week, featuring Falko Ernst, an academic and former senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group, and Steve Dudley, the co-director of Insight Crime, an organization that investigates criminal activity in Latin America. They have each spent years doing on-the-ground research into the nature of drug trafficking. 

Reality versus Television

The conversation illuminated some key takeaways. First, Mexico’s cartels don’t look like they do in a Netflix series. Ernst, who has worked on conflict and organized crime in Latin America since 2010, recalled that when he began his Ph.D. research in Mexico, he saw the government and crime groups as antagonists. What he found was that they were often connected. Spending time with the Mexican military, he realized how deep corruption ran. Idealistic young soldiers soon realized they could be penalized – sent to the most dangerous areas, denied promotion – if they didn’t accept the wrongdoing.

“You cannot think of organized crime and the state as apart. You need to look at the entanglements between both sides.” - Falko Ernst

The structure of the cartels has also changed dramatically, he said. Years ago, there were a handful of large, cohesive trafficking groups. Now, there are more than 200 crime organizations of varying size around the country. They’ve diversified into illegal businesses ranging from oil theft to extortion to wildcat mining. That’s why Trump’s repeated offer to send U.S. troops to “take out” the cartels is unlikely to yield results, Ernst said. 

For the military, “you need a clearly delineated target, which you don’t have in Mexico,” he said. Dudley’s organization has done extensive research on fentanyl manufacturing in Mexico, and discovered a lot of it is in the hands of small producers – not big cartels. The producers do rely on cartels to provide protection and buy and transport the drug. But the relationship is complex.   

“The perception is, they (fentanyl makers) wake up in the morning, they call their cartel boss, they say, how much do you want today? What we found, in fact, was actually they were basically independent entrepreneurs.” - Steven Dudley

Failed Strategies

Taking out a kingpin like “El Mencho” may not diminish a big cartel. In February, Mexican soldiers using U.S. intelligence stormed a chalet in western Mexico and fatally wounded Nemesio Oseguera – “El Mencho.” He was the head of Mexico’s biggest cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by the Spanish acronym CJNG. Mexican and U.S. authorities celebrated the operation as a resounding success. But it’s not clear whether it will ultimately weaken the cartel.

Ernst said that CJNG had set up a “franchise system” around Mexico, in which smaller crime groups paid a percentage of their profits to the cartel, in exchange for protection and the use of its name to intimidate enemies. But those groups have a lot of autonomy, he said. “It’s not this vertical structure anymore,” he said. The drug lords at the top have “little will, let alone capacity, to control the whole system.”

Dudley said that organized-crime groups have become increasingly focused on controlling territory in Mexico, rather than simply shipping drugs north. Once they dominate an area, the groups engage in a range of activities – extortion, oil theft, selling crystal meth to local users. 

The barrier to entry for these illegal economies has become very low, he said. “In essence, anyone can get in, and once they’re established, they’re hard to eradicate,” he said. “All of these smaller factions that have been added on over the last decade could very well form their own groups and be self-sufficient.” 

The U.S. supported a Mexican “war” on drugs 20 years ago. It didn’t work. The Trump administration’s emphasis on using military force against cartels echoes some of the ideas in the “war” on drugs launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2006. For over a decade, the U.S. government backed that strategy via the $3 billion Merida Initiative. Tens of thousands of Mexican troops and police were deployed around the country, and dozens of drug lords were killed or captured. Yet the strategy didn’t significantly weaken the grip of organized crime or disrupt the flow of drugs. 

What Went Wrong? 

Ernst said authorities assumed that by taking out cartel leaders, the organizations would collapse. “What we saw instead was a disintegration and internal feuds,” which resulted in spiraling violence, he said. Other criminals stepped in to replace those who were slain or jailed. Equally important, the Mexican government wasn’t willing or able to confront corrupt mayors and governors who provided protection for the traffickers, he said. Dudley noted that the U.S. outlays on the Merida Initiative were actually small, compared to the size of the Mexican defense budget. “It wasn’t a game-changing amount of money,” he said. 

John Feeley, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who played a key role in implementing the Merida Initiative, was in the audience and pushed back on the idea that U.S. policy was focused on a “war” on drugs. He emphasized that the military-support piece of the strategy was complemented by efforts to reform the justice system, build up other civilian institutions and bolster civil-society groups. Still, he acknowledged: “It failed.”

The fundamental reason, he said, was that the U.S. government “pushed too hard” and too fast for the Mexican authorities to tackle corruption. The Americans “ran into entrenched Mexican political attitudes that were unwilling to take on the corruption,” he said. 

A Glimmer of Hope

The news may not be all bad on the anti-drug fight. Despite all the problems, Ernst said, he saw “a glimmer of hope.” President Claudia Sheinbaum has taken a tougher approach to organized crime than her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office in 2024. She’s under intense pressure from Trump, of course. But Sheinbaum also appears to appreciate the severity of the security problem. 

“You have people at the levers in public security in Mexico that are thinking more proactively than past administrations did” about organized crime, said Ernst. The president’s team knows they won’t wipe out the crime groups, which bring in vast amounts of money – in part due to demand for drugs in the United States. “But what you can do is think about, what are your goals about shaping that beast you’re going to live with,” Ernst said. 

For example, he said, the government can make clear that “certain behaviors will not be tolerated any more” – such as brutality against civilians, open clashes with the military and activities such as extortion that hurt local economies. While Mexican politicians have bristled at Trump’s aggressive policies, Ernst noted, some people in the country’s intelligence services say they aren’t entirely opposed to the U.S. pressure. “The more complicated conversation is, whether Mexican policy goals” – such as protecting populations from criminal violence – “and American goals, [like] having ‘Mission Accomplished’ posters put up, have synergies,” he said.