Trump Administration Intensifies Pressure on Mexican Cartels, Designates Them Terrorist Organizations

An anticartel military operation took place in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 2026. That same month, Washington strong-armed Mexico into taking out the drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho. President Donald Trump’s approach to the drug war has included spectacular boat bombings by American forces in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September.

Those operations have killed nearly 200 people. Benjamin Lessing, writing in Foreign Affairs, stated the boat bombings violated international law.

U.S. Prosecutors indicted Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, on charges of aiding drug trafficking. -led regional security initiative to counter drug cartels and transnational crime. Trump has designated Mexican and Venezuelan cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

He is threatening to designate Brazil’s powerful prison-based gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. U.S. officials have floated direct military action that would shred diplomatic boundaries long thought inviolable, @ForeignAffairs reported.

The current efforts echo Mexico’s experience in 2006, when President Felipe Calderón launched a full-scale offensive against cartels, deploying Mexican armed forces in the streets. Cartel-related homicides in Mexico increased tenfold after Calderón’s 2006 crackdown.

Members of Felipe Calderón’s security staff, working with Mark Kleiman, pushed a plan to hit the most violent cartels hardest, but Calderón rejected it.

U.S. fentanyl crisis was responsible for an estimated 70,000 deaths between November 2024 and November 2025. The United States and Latin America interdict only a small share of overall drug flows, on the order of 20 percent.