The Folly of Trump’s Cartel-Bombing Fantasy

Shootouts echoing through the streets. Masked gunmen dragging people from homes. Mutilated bodies dumped on the sidewalks. For almost a year, the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa has been under siege, as warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations, have waged a brutal internal conflict.

Mexican authorities have cracked down on the syndicate, rounding up more than 1,500 alleged cartel operatives in the state since October, according to Mexico’s security chief. But they have failed to stop the blood bath there or anywhere else in Mexico, where cartels have long been a dominant force.

For years, President Trump has been threatening to get the U.S. military involved in this fight. The administration has already designated the Sinaloa Cartel a foreign terrorist organization, along with other Mexican cartels. The C.I.A. has been conducting covert drone flights over Mexico to identify fentanyl labs and other cartel targets.

Today, the possibility of direct, unilateral military strikes against cartels on Mexican soil looks closer than ever.

Mr. Trump has reportedly signed a directive authorizing the use of military force against the cartels. The Pentagon has reportedly been looking at such plans and has deployed thousands of additional troops to waters around Latin America and the Caribbean.

Officials in Mexico City, who had claimed they were nearing a major security agreement with Washington, were apparently blindsided by the news. “We will never, ever allow the U.S. Army or any other institution of the United States to set foot in Mexican territory ever,” President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said on Aug. 11.

After more than two decades covering cartel wars in Mexico, it’s clear to me that unilateral U.S. military action won’t dismantle these groups. Cartels are increasingly transnational criminal networks that run a portfolio of rackets across huge swathes of territory. U.S. drone strikes or other targeted attacks would barely make a dent in them and would inflame relations with the Mexican government, precluding the cooperation that is necessary to take these organizations down. Mr. Trump wants a show of force — but a U.S. attack would only make a bad situation worse.

For some hawks in Washington, strikes south of the border would be a righteous use of U.S. military might. “Mexican drug cartels are just as dangerous and murderous as terrorist groups,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on X in response to the report.

This logic puts the fight against Mexico’s drug cartels on the same footing as the war on terror, during which the United States conducted thousands of drone strikes against terrorist targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere — and during which SEAL Team Six assassinated Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011. These operations did ultimately help dismantle Al Qaeda and other terror networks, even if the broader wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ultimately failures.

Mexican cartels, however, operate very differently from international extremist groups. Cartels are driven not by a particular religious or political doctrine, but by the vast profits of the black market — most important, the U.S. drug trade, which was worth over $150 billion in 2017 alone, on top of billions more from human smuggling, stolen oil and extortion across much of the Mexican economy. This large-scale enterprise is able to finance extensive networks of operatives and to pay off the authorities and officials who might otherwise stand in their way, effectively making these groups a shadow power throughout much of the country.

These resources have also turned organized crime syndicates into one of Mexico’s biggest employers, according to a 2023 study in Science. They can continue to operate in the face of enormous pressure from government forces and rival groups. And taking out top bosses, as Mr. Trump would probably seek to do, would only prompt cartels to split into smaller, more violent factions.

The power struggle within the Sinaloa cartel, for instance, broke out in response to the arrest of the veteran drug lord Ismael Zambada García. In July 2024, a son of the infamous Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo, reportedly lured Mr. Zambada, the leader of a competing faction within the Sinaloa cartel, onto a plane, where he was then flown to an airfield in New Mexico and handed over to U.S. authorities. Instead of dismantling the group, as officials might have hoped, the betrayal ignited a struggle for control of the organization’s booming empire, in the latest iteration of a bloody pattern I have observed for decades.

The Trump administration’s threats risk undermining a remarkable moment of cooperation between the two governments. Since assuming power in October, Ms. Sheinbaum has worked closely with U.S. officials to quash cartel activity, with security forces more surgically focused on drug labs, fentanyl traffickers and human smugglers.

This partnership has shown results, including an over 50 percent drop in fentanyl seizures at the border since Sheinbaum came to office, according to U.S. data. Mexico has been working with U.S. law enforcement to arrest and eliminate top members; just last week, Mexico sent 26 people accused of being high-ranking cartel members to the United States. A unilateral U.S. strike, especially one that risks civilian casualties, would worsen existing anti-American sentiment and make it politically challenging for Ms. Sheinbaum to continue working with Washington on vital issues like cartels and migration.

Stripping cartels of their power will require years of hard work on both sides of the Rio Grande. Mexico needs to do more to address mounting violence and remove corrupt politicians and officials who facilitate and profit from cartel activity. If Washington is serious about dismantling cartels, it should start on its side of the border: reducing the massive American demand for drugs, cracking down on stateside money laundering and stopping the flow of illegal firearms into Mexico.

In 1916, the United States sent thousands of soldiers into Mexico to hunt down the bandit-turned-revolutionary Pancho Villa after he conducted a violent raid in New Mexico. Even though the troops never caught Villa, Newton D. Baker, then the secretary of war, nonetheless declared the venture a success. The real purpose of the mission, he said, was “an extension of power of the United States into a country disturbed beyond control.”

The same imperative seems to drive supporters of U.S. military action in Mexico today. They want a show of U.S. military might in a country that they claim is chaotic and lawless, not to address the deep problems that have enabled cartels to flourish. An American attack on a fentanyl lab might make Mr. Trump look strong before his base. But the vast networks of organized crime, and the U.S. drug market that keeps them going, can’t be so easily blown away.

Ioan Grillo is a contributing Opinion writer who has covered gang violence and organized crime in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America for two decades.

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