Trump's plan to wage war with cartels will backfire, experts say

Yahoo

15-03-2025

In February, the State Department branded Mexico's Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels, as well as several other Latin American gangs, as "terrorist organizations" akin to ISIS or al-Qaeda. This comes after years of Republican lawmakers banging the drums of war against the narcos south of the border, even describing illicit fentanyl, an opioid used daily in hospitals for surgery, as a "chemical weapon."
The declaration was shortly followed by the opening shots of a trade war with Mexico, Canada and China with the Trump administration imposing tariffs on goods imported from those countries unless they take drastic action to stop narcotrafficking.
Back at the White House, President Trump told a meeting of governors he was ready to send drug dealers to the gallows.
'If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem. They execute drug dealers,' the commander-in-chief claimed. 'And when you think about it, it's very humane, because every drug dealer, on average they say, kills at least 500 people — not to mention the damage they do so many others.'
This is, of course, bullshit. But the dubious factual accuracy of this aside, all signs point to Trump – like his predecessors Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton – reinvigorating the war on drugs at home and abroad. But why should he succeed where they've failed?
Let's begin with the terrorist designation. There are fears that by lumping the narcos together with America's more overt enemies like ISIS could set the stage for military action, a possibility Trump brought up in his 2024 election campaign. Indeed, Trump has both privately and publicly contemplated deploying special forces to liquidate cartel chiefs, seemingly lifting his foreign policy from the plot of the 1994 action flick 'Clear and Present Danger.'
'A lot of people are under the belief that this designation allows the United States to go into Mexico or do drone strikes or bombardments. Not hardly,' Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, told Salon. 'There's been actions like that taken against Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, but it's not done because of that designation. It's done through the executive power of the president.'
Such actions, if taken unilaterally without Mexico's consent, would also be illegal under international law. If Mexico doesn't agree to boots on the ground, it's a breach of sovereignty — and you can kiss goodbye any counternarcotics and immigration cooperation after that.
That said, it's possible Trump could order operations into Mexico anyway. But this has been tried before.
The killing frenzy that has engulfed Mexico erupted in the mid-2000s, partly from turf wars between criminal organizations and partly from the actions of President Felipe Calderón, who in December 2006 declared war on the cartels, starting with his home state of Michoacán. Troops and tanks poured into the state and Calderón himself flew down, dressed in full army regalia. Under the Mérida Initiative, Mexico received three billion dollars worth of American aid to fight the drug gangs, including training and Black Hawk helicopters.Like the generals at the start of World War I, Calderón probably thought this would be over quickly. Two decades of slaughter later, he was proven wrong. Eliminating crime bosses created power vacuums that their capos scrambled to fill, as is happening now in the northwestern state of Sinaloa which is in a state of civil war after last year's capture of narco-godfather Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada.
While Mexican crime lords do wield their own militias which occasionally engage the armed forces in open combat – sometimes even wearing their own uniforms and insignia – for the most part they're more like insurgents than regular armies, deeply embedded in local communities, where it's not always obvious who's who. Abuses are rife: in 2019, 21-year-old Jennifer Romero was kidnapped, along with seven others, by the Mexican security forces in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, dressed as a sicario (cartel enforcer), and shot dead. She was two months pregnant. Any armed intervention is practically guaranteed to result in heavy civilian casualties.
Over two decades of this narco-war, drug deaths in America continued climbing, only suddenly falling last year. This is because all that gunplay failed to dismantle the basic structure of narcotrafficking. The term 'cartel' plays well in an American courtroom but doesn't accurately reflect reality. Mexican drug cartels are more than merely gangs of bandidos: they're networks of traffickers, politicians, police chiefs and other strongmen, with factions between them. Parading gangbangers before the cameras is only good for PR.
Moreover, intensifying violence will only worsen the border crisis. The number of Mexican refugees fleeing gang warfare has already surged dramatically in recent years, and now the 'terrorism' designation may add legitimacy to their asylum claims.
The label may have other unwanted consequences for American interests; chief among these is there is no evidence it will slow or stop drug trafficking.
'I think it's all for show, because the terrorist designation is not going to have any impact,' Vigil explained. 'The terrorist designation allows for three things. One, it allows the United States to seize bank accounts that are in financial institutions here in this country that belong to these designated groups. Two, it allows the government to sanction U.S. citizens that provide material support to these designated organizations. Three, it tries to prevent them from coming into the United States.'
Vigil warned that sanctioning U.S. citizens would have a 'ripple effect.'
'There's a lot of businesses that operate in Mexico, and if they have ties or they're buying products from a company that belongs to or is tied to one of these designated groups, they can be sanctioned,' he continued. 'So, Donald Trump has opened the door for that to occur with businesses operating in Mexico.'
Given how thoroughly the Mexican economy is compromised by organized crime, from paying protection to outright fronts, staying clean can be a challenge.
'Secondly, that would allow also for sanctions to be applied to the gun manufacturers and distributors here in the United States, because at least 80% of the weapons that are going into Mexico come from the United States,' noted Vigil.
Since 2021, Mexico has been suing the American firearms industry for enabling the cartel carnage.
Then there are the tariffs: 25% on Mexican and Canadian goods, and 10% on Chinese goods. The pressure has produced some immediate, if short-term results: Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, seemingly eager to stay on the good side of White House's new occupant (unlike her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador), expedited the extradition of 29 cartel figures including Rafael Caro Quintero, who's been wanted by the DEA since 1985 for ordering the slow, painful death of agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena — an event which shook Mexican-American relations.
Meanwhile, the amount of fentanyl intercepted at the border shrank by 41% between January and February, although it had been shrinking for several months already. But it's a little early to break out the champagne glasses. Sanho Tree, a fellow at the D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies said it was speculative, "but it's quite possibly drug war theater.'
'What we know that is getting through is much more than what they're confiscating, right?' Tree told Salon. 'It's like the astrophysicists who search for dark matter in the universe — we know it's out there, and we know it's massive."
Tree said that if he were the Sinaloa Cartel, this is exactly the strategy he would pursue.
'I would continue to send some drugs through ports of entry, some even with migrants in backpacks across the desert, even though I know they'll get caught,' Tree explained. 'The Republicans are happy; they get to point to seizures and migrants. Customs and Border Protection is happy because they get all their new toys and they can show how many kilos they've intercepted. But if I'm a drug trafficker, that's the tax I'm going to pay whilst I use my primary means of smuggling.'
This, Tree points out, could be anything from tunnels running under the border, to boats, drones, submarines and even catapults. It could also be that drugs start moving from an entirely new direction. While Canada is not currently a significant source of narcotics (despite Trump's tariffs, only 0.2% of fentanyl intercepted last year came from the Great White North), last year a fentanyl 'super lab' was discovered near Vancouver, along with a large stash of weapons and explosives. It's possible one day we will see fentanyl labs in the States – if they're not already here.
Meanwhile, pressuring your neighbors with unrealistic demands is unlikely to endear them to you.
'Claudia Scheinbaum, when she took over as president of Mexico, immediately came out and said she wanted to work with the United States,' Vigil said. 'And she continues to say that, despite the ridiculous attacks by Donald Trump, because Trump wants to put all the blame on illegal drug trafficking and consumption on Mexico and tries to absolve himself of any liability on his part. You know, no country is going to fully cooperate when they're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and that's basically what Trump is doing.'
Back home, the president has repeatedly stated he wants the death penalty for convicted drug peddlers.
'There are quite a few [countries]— many in Asia — where they have the death penalty,' he told the governors' meeting. 'There's no drug problem whatsoever.'
Only the first part of that statement is correct. It's true that Iran, China and Vietnam regularly execute traffickers, and yet they all still have well-documented drug issues, just like any country. Singapore will march you to the gallows over just half-a-kilo of weed, but authorities themselves admit drug consumption is steeply rising, especially among people under 30.
And while the Philippines had not officially imposed capital punishment, recent hearings revealed that the anti-drug campaign under President Rodrigo Duterte, in which death squads may have mercilessly slain as many as 30,000 Filipinos, only reduced consumption by 4.5%. (Duterte was recently arrested by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity over his violent drug policy.) In general, studies comparing crime rates between jurisdictions that do or do not have the death penalty fail to find a correlation.
'Whether you're a consumer or a trafficker or money launderer, every person gets into [drugs] because they think they'll get away with it — and by and large, they do,' Tree said. 'And so using death as a deterrent, it's very difficult to get that to stick. [But] the drug warriors, they don't want to promote harm reduction. They want to promote harm maximization — that the wages of sin ought to be death, because that's how you send a message to all the other people not to do drugs. And of course, that has not worked ever.'
Then there's another aspect: capital punishment in the U.S. has been disproportionately inflicted on minorities, particularly Black and Indigenous people. From 1998 to 2024, 60% of federal death penalty cases have convicted non-white defendants.
Both Vigil and Tree, despite their differing perspectives, agreed there was a racist element to the bloodlust.
'Donald Trump does not mention any white supremacist groups that are distributing drugs like the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Circle, the Aryan Kings,' Vigil said. 'The Aryan Brotherhood has between 15,000 and 20,000 members in this country that distribute drugs. But he focuses on Hispanic groups because it goes along with his racist narrative that migrants are all criminals.'
'He's not talking about going after, you know, white suburban kids whose daddy is a CEO,' Tree said.
Interestingly, Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, has been accused of selling cocaine while at college.
Finally, another part of Trump's strategy is a PSA campaign telling youngsters that 'when you take certain drugs, the drug fentanyl … it destroys your skin, it destroys your teeth, it destroys your brain, it destroys everything.'
'When some young kid is sitting down watching this commercial a couple of times, I really don't think they're going to be taking drugs,' Trump said. 'This is a big statement, but I think we can drop [drug use by] 50 percent by doing this.'
The '80s called, they want their propaganda back. For readers too young to remember, that decade was full of ominous voices on the television telling folks 'this is your brain on drugs' behind an image of some fried eggs. There was also the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program consisting of police officers visiting schools and warning children to stay sober.
'Those programs were scare tactics, right?' said Sanho, who was a student activist when the government first invited 'Officer Friendly or Not-So-Friendly' to come into the classroom. 'And it backfired because they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They would lie and say, 'kids, if you smoke a joint, you'll be doing heroin in six months.' And a lot of kids, my older siblings didn't go through that. And they think, well, what other lies are the grownups telling me?'
Follow-up studies in the '90s and 2000s proved DARE had little effect on youth drug use; at least for one study cohort, drug use even increased.
But just as the drug war for Richard Nixon was an excuse to suppress leftist, countercultural and civil rights movements, so Donald Trump's drug war may have ulterior motives. Some have speculated that sending the troops is just a ploy to grab the rich coal, oil and gas deposits in Mexico's northeast.
'I think these tariffs have nothing to do with reducing fentanyl,' Tree said. 'He needs an emergency declaration. The power to tariff used to belong to the legislative branch, but they've given it away over the decades to the executive branch. But the way the executive branch can do it unilaterally is to declare an emergency. So you have a fentanyl emergency, you have an invasion by migrants. They use this language very carefully, very specifically. And I think they're laying the groundwork for something even worse, which is the Insurrection Act, which would eventually become the basis for martial law.'
The White House and Department of Homeland Security are already referring to undocumented immigration as an 'invasion,' in-line with years of white nationalist rhetoric which has infected the Republican Party.
Then there's Trump's own personality to consider.
'He's obsessed with discovering any unilateral powers he has, whether it's the power of commutation and pardon, or taking the FBI directly into the White House and operating it as his personal police service, or tariffs,' Tree concluded. 'And so he's unlocking each unilateral power that he can discover and using them to the max. Number two, he gets to humiliate and beat allies and adversaries, which plays well to his base.'