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.

Trump signed an executive order in April to fast-track research on the use of ibogaine and other psychedelics for medical purposes. Benjamin Lessing argued that Trump’s talent for coercion could support a policy of conditional repression that concentrates force on the worst cartel behavior rather than pursuing unconditional crackdowns.

"However contentious his tactics, Trump may be uniquely (and surprisingly) qualified to change the way the United States—and the world—fights the drug war," Lessing wrote in the May 12, 2026, Foreign Affairs article.

Lessing is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Founding Co-Director of the Program on Political Violence at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Lessing contended that unconditional repression has backfired by empowering the most violent groups, as seen with the rise of El Mencho’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel after 2006.

He proposed drawing bright redlines and using escalatory measures only against groups that cross them, thereby reducing fentanyl flows, violence, extortion and environmental damage while leaving well-behaved organizations intact enough to maintain order.