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Just hours after the US overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader accused of “narco-terrorism,” US President Donald Trump suggested he could expand his military campaign to Mexican drug-trafficking groups.
“We have to do something” about America’s southern neighbor, Trump told the TV show “Fox and Friends” at the weekend, noting the Mexican government had repeatedly rejected his offer to “take out the cartels.”
On Thursday, Trump reiterated his stance, saying he would soon target cartels on land. “We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water, and we are gonna start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox News.
Mexico might seem a logical target for what Trump has framed as a war on drugs. It’s the main producer of US-bound fentanyl, and the principal corridor for cocaine from Colombia. That makes it a far more significant player in the global drug trade than Venezuela.
But Trump’s description of the Mexican trafficking world – one dominated by a few cartels that can be swiftly defeated – is at odds with how the crime organizations actually operate, experts say.
For years, books, movies and Netflix series have portrayed Mexican cartels as top-down organizations led by colorful drug lords like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, whose Houdini-like escapes from prison turned him into a celebrity. In the 1980s and 1990s, a half-dozen such cartels dominated Mexico’s trafficking industry, several based near the US border.
Today, the criminal landscape has been transformed. Most of the old cartels have splintered. Around 400 groups of different sizes now operate around the country, said Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Intelligence, a Mexican consulting group that tracks them.
“They’re practically everywhere,” he said.
The biggest ones have become more sophisticated and more complicated. The most powerful, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, is composed of around 90 organizations, Guerrero said, up from 45 just a few years ago.
“This fragmentation has meant that you’ll need a more complex, more sophisticated strategy to weaken and dismember them,” he said.
Even snatching several of the top drug lords wouldn’t necessarily cripple a trade worth billions of dollars a year. Mexican authorities tried that approach in an aggressive, decade-long hunt for narcotics “kingpins” starting around 2007. The Mexican military and police, backed by US intelligence and equipment, arrested or killed dozens of leading cartel figures. But others emerged to take their place. Tons of drugs continued to flow over the US border.
The cartels have evolved into intricate economic networks with a large consumer base, more like multinational corporations than traditional terrorist groups, said Benjamin T. Smith, author of “The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade.”
“If you took out the CEO of Coca-Cola tomorrow, you wouldn’t stop Coca-Cola sales,” he said. “As long as you have a major demand for the drugs, you’re not going to get rid of the supply.”
Indeed, many analysts argue the “kingpin” strategy backfired, fracturing cartels into smaller groups that battled each other and the government and leading them to change the way they operate.
Increasingly, they have sought to control territory and impose “taxes” on nearly everyone in their turf. That includes both legitimate businesses like avocado growers, and smugglers moving drugs and migrants toward the United States. Those who don’t pay risk being killed.
What makes the country’s security particularly challenging is that “no one is firmly in control, neither the cartels nor the government,” said Falko Ernst, a researcher of Mexican organized crime. In some areas, like Mexico City, the government has the upper hand. In others, armed groups rule.
“You have a mosaic of different forms of power,” he said. “This makes it so complex that you cannot simply execute one simple solution for the entire country. Power, conflict violence, drugs and crime don’t follow one model. They follow 1,000 models.”
The cartels have become ever more resilient as they have penetrated the country’s political structure. That was evident in the 2024 national elections, when crime groups openly sought to install their own mayors in different regions. Three dozen candidates were killed during the campaign, and hundreds more dropped out because of intimidation.
Crime groups are embedded in many local police forces and have assumed a growing role in the economy. In some areas they effectively operate their own intelligence services, paying or threatening local street vendors, construction workers, taxi drivers and others to report on the movements of security forces.
Removing the leaders of cartels won’t eliminate that kind of structure, Smith said.
Criminal organizations have shored up their support by providing jobs. A 2023 study by Mexican and European researchers published in Science magazine estimated cartels employed between 160,000 and 185,000 people nationwide.
Asked to comment on whether the Trump administration was oversimplifying the Mexican cartel problem, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly referred CNN to the recently issued National Security Strategy and the Monroe Doctrine, a policy issued in the 1800s warning outsiders – particularly Europeans – to keep their hands off the Western Hemisphere.
“The administration is reasserting and enforcing the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, control migration, and stop drug trafficking,” Kelly wrote. “The president has many options at his disposal to continue to protect our homeland from illicit narcotics that kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.”
In contrast to Maduro, Mexico’s president has maintained a relatively friendly relationship with the Trump administration. But Sheinbaum has drawn the line on welcoming US troops into Mexico.
“Our position should be firm and clear with regard to our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday, emphasizing that she wanted to work with Trump but not take orders from him.
Sheinbaum has reasons for her position. American military action could spark a backlash, not just from a public with deep memories of US invasions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but from Sheinbaum’s leftist Morena party and Mexico’s staunchly nationalist army. It could also unleash extensive, potentially destabilizing violence.
The Pacific state of Sinaloa offers a cautionary tale. Last summer, Mexican traffickers apparently coordinating with US authorities grabbed a Sinaloa cartel leader, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and hustled him onto a plane bound for New Mexico. The move detonated a war within the cartel that has left thousands dead or disappeared.
Sheinbaum argues there’s no need for US boots on the ground, since she’s already taking action. Since Trump was inaugurated nearly a year ago, threatening severe sanctions to force Mexico to curb fentanyl trafficking, Sheinbaum has sent thousands of troops to the US border to intercept narcotics and migrants. She has transferred dozens of top drug-trafficking suspects to the United States.
Any unilateral US military intervention could severely damage relations with a country that has become Washington’s No. 1 trade partner.
Trump on Monday repeated his assertion that “we have to do something” about drugs “pouring through Mexico.” Sheinbaum “is a little afraid” to accept his offer of troops, he said. “The cartels are running Mexico.”
Sheinbaum, known for her cool, steely demeanor, sought to play down his comments. “There has been very good communication” with the Trump administration, she told a Tuesday news conference. Asked if she thought it unlikely that Trump would pursue US military action in Mexico, she said simply: “Yes.”
Nonetheless, Trump has injected a new note of uncertainty into the relationship.
With the Venezuela raid, the United States “acted as a power that will establish the order in its immediate neighborhood,” wrote Brenda Estefan, a professor of geopolitics at Mexico City’s IPADE business school, in a column in the Reforma newspaper. The US move “establishes a new structure of power that no country in Latin America can ignore.”
