Trump is running out of time to break the Mexico state-cartel alliance

An extraordinary episode took place on Thursday, February 27th: Mexican state aircrafts flew northward to various locations across the United States, carrying within them 29 of the most-wanted Mexican cartel leaders. 

Most notable was the aging Rafa Caro Quintero, who stepped off a plane into the arms of Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Justice personnel. The United States had waited a long time for him. He had murdered Enrique “Kiki” Camarena forty years before. 

Caro Quintero and the other twenty-eight cartel leaders were prisoners of the Mexican state, and the United States had been requesting their extradition for years. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s administration gave the Mexican government a list of desired extraditions, including Caro Quintero. But no one was optimistic: 2021 saw the lowest level of Mexican extraditions to the U.S. in 15 years, and things would not improve so long as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s President from 2018 through 2024, remained in power. 

The source of his hesitation was obvious: he and his ruling Morena coalition, which nearly transformed Mexico into a leftist one-party state, have longstanding ties with narco leaders. This Mexican state-cartel synthesis, referenced directly by the White House as “an intolerable alliance,” effectively precluded meaningful and strategic cooperation between the two nations against the criminal cartels. 

What has changed? In a word: Trump. 

The mere threat of tariffs has radically impacted Mexican officialdom’s thinking. 

Some Mexican political figures argue that the country can simply turn to China if American trade relations are disrupted. But the truth is that the country’s economy will be plunged into disarray long before any Chinese remedy takes effect. Though the Mexican regime does not particularly care about the welfare of its people – having presided over an internal war that has seen the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans by its own cartel allies and sometimes its own armed forces – it does care a lot about its own position.

An economic collapse alarms many government operatives in ways that death and cruelty among its own people does not. 

Another major tool wielded by the President against the Mexican state-cartel alliance has been alluded to, but never made explicit, in public: the threat of American military action within Mexico.

As the Wall Street Journal first reported, a conversation at the end of January between U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and an unnamed senior Mexican-military official saw the latter informed: “that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action.” The Mexicans were reportedly astonished and indignant. 

It has long been obvious that American patience with Mexico’s cartel partnerships would eventually run out. Thinking the U.S. would continue to tolerate this alliance illustrates just how blinkered Morena, the governing party of Mexico, is – but it also reflects how successive American Presidents have held back from taking serious action. Until Trump.

It doesn’t help that the Mexican state routinely fails to give the respect to its neighbor that it loudly demands for itself. Rather, the government turns a blind eye to trafficking organizations that directly attack American sovereignty and citizenry with illegal mass migration, deadly fentanyl, and more. It establishes Morena party cells within the United States and activates them when desired. It interferes, however ineptly, in American elections. 

Its armed forces in uniform routinely protect trafficking cartel shipments and occasionally even take an American soldier prisoner. Its cartel partners kill American citizens in Mexico, and cause trouble for Americans living in the United States. 

A regime genuinely interested in the defense of its own national sovereignty would not surrender thirty to forty percent of its national territory to cartel control. Yet the Mexican state has. 

Donald Trump understands this imbalance and he’s sending a message via his Secretaries to the Mexican regime: we will respect your sovereignty as much as you respect ours. We will respect your country’s institutions as much as you respect your own. 

This is the key to understanding why the Mexican state under President Claudia Sheinbaum is now abruptly giving its prisoners to the U.S, and why it is making a show of going after cartel operations in various parts of the country. 

Mexican officialdom is betraying its criminal-sector partners in the hopes that it will satisfy the United States, lest the Americans go after them. It is shutting down, temporarily, the great cartel-controlled influx of trafficked persons that has numbered in the millions across the past decade.

These efforts are having a real effect on cartel operations in the short term, although as the New York Times’s Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas write, don’t expect the crackdown to last: “Cartel members said the only reason the government hadn’t really fought them until recently was because they’d bought off enough officials.”

They are probably right. Eventually the multi-billion-dollar illegal drug trade and the corrupting effect that has on Mexico’s government will become relevant again. The intent now, on the Mexican side, is simply to buy time until the Americans, believing they have secured a political win, move on to the next crisis. The sacrifice of expendable bosses, lab men, and sicarios is the price of business. There are rumors that a corrupt state governor may even be offered to placate the estadounidenses. 

Mexican officials will then make the case that all this cooperation is valuable, and the Americans ought not to imperil it by imposing tariffs or attacking cartels or indicting former Mexican presidents – or doing anything that threatens the Mexican governing elites themselves. This is a potent line of argument, one which I have heard from U.S. government personnel in Mexico City. I have also heard this from Mexican-government personnel.

The test for American policymaking now is whether our government accepts the Mexican narrative. It ought not. The Mexican state has done several things right since January 20th, 2025, but we must understand that it did so under extraordinary duress. The President had to push tariffs, and the Secretary of Defense had to threaten U.S. military intervention for the first time in a century, to compel the Mexican government to execute the most basic task of any state: to control its territory and deliver justice. Cartel partners would like to see the Mexican government fail in these basic tasks. The drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, now in U.S. custody, has threatened to “collapse” U.S.-Mexican relations by sharing everything he knows, if his return to Mexico isn’t secured. 

President Trump, offering the carrot as well as the stick, has been effusive in his praise – as is diplomatically prudent – for the Mexican President in her efforts to date. But his administration has simultaneously signaled that Mexican politicians could become targets of American justice. 

What the Morena regime in Mexico now wishes to do is come out of all this largely unaffected. The former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has longstanding ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, and would likely not withstand scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Still, Morena will push on with its publicly stated mission, to transform Mexican society into a Venezuelan-style, left-populist autocracy. Cartel and trafficking operations will resume with different narcos in partnership with the same elites. Mexican-government solicitation of offshore balancers in China and Russia will continue to mature into effective operational partnership. 

As bad as the Mexican crisis has been for both ordinary Mexicans and Americans over the past two decades, it pales in comparison to what will happen when Morena’s ambition is fulfilled. We have already seen Chinese and Russian soldiers marching before the Mexican President in Mexico’s independence-day celebrations. We have already seen a Mexican President declare that he would have his armed forces defend the cartels against American action. These are warnings of worse to come, and we must pay attention, because they are not expressions of sentiment alone. President Trump must take note.