• United States

August 20, 2025, 12:29 PM View Comments ()

The U.S. State Department’s recent designation of five Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) may well be a prelude to U.S. military action against them, something that President Donald Trump first threatened in November 2019. A few months after that, he proposed missiles strikes against drug labs in Mexico, according to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Now, with the FTO designations in place, Trump has secretly directed the Defense Department to develop plans to attack the drug trafficking organizations, according to reporting in the New York Times.

While the terrorist designation may provide statutory authority for U.S. military action in Mexico, it does nothing to lessen the Mexican government’s adamant opposition to any such unilateral intervention. Mexico lost 55 percent of its land mass to the United States in the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, so the idea of U.S. military operations on Mexican soil provokes strong nationalist antipathy. Anything of the sort would gravely damage overall counternarcotics cooperation and bilateral relations in general.

There is a way, however, in which designating the cartels as terrorist organizations could harmonize rather the fracture U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the war on drugs and make a real dent in the level of violence in Mexico. The U.S. gun dealers, straw buyers, and smugglers who have flooded Mexico with made-in-the-USA weapons of war can now be prosecuted for providing material support for terrorism.

This “river of iron” illegally moves between 72,000 and 258,000 weapons south of the border every year, giving Mexican drug lords more firepower than the Mexican police and fueling the cartels’ wars over market share. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) traced 70.5 percent of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes in 2024 (and then submitted to the ATF for tracing) to licensed gun dealers in the United States. And it’s getting worse. Despite U.S. enforcement efforts, from 2019 to 2024, the number of weapons traced to the United States increased by more than 25 percent.

In 2015, a Mexican military operation intended to capture the head of the Jalisco cartel (also known as the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación) was foiled when a military helicopter was shot down by a .50-caliber weapon purchased from a gun dealer in Portland, Oregon.

In 2019, a military patrol of some 30 soldiers captured Ovidio Guzmán, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel after his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was imprisoned in the United States. But before the army could depart with their prisoner, dozens of cartel gunmen armed with automatic weapons, including mounted .50-caliber machine guns, laid siege to the city of Culiacán, blocking the roads with burning vehicles and trapping the military unit. Cornered, outnumbered, and outgunned, the soldiers were forced to release their prisoner in order to escape alive.

The loss of the military helicopter in the Jalisco operation and the escape of Guzmán are extreme cases, but emblematic nevertheless of the futility of trying to win a military victory over cartels with access to weapons of war. Since 2006, drug-related violence has killed more than 480,000 Mexicans, and more than 120,000 people have been disappeared. Thousands of those killed have been police and military personnel.

The Mexican government has long complained about Washington’s failure to do enough to stop the arms traffic. In 2021, it filed a civil suit against major U.S. arms manufacturers and distributors, asking for $10 billion in damages and alleging that they were aware that their guns were being used for crimes in Mexico and had done nothing to prevent it. This June, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the suit as overly broad and argued that it was barred by the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun makers and distributors from liability for the harms that firearms cause.

Thus far, U.S. enforcement actions have failed to significantly reduce the illegal gun trade. Estimates of its magnitude have been near their peak for the past several years. Underfunded and understaffed, the ATF is unable to conduct inspections of dealers’ records often enough to deter illegal sales, and the Trump administration has proposed to reduce its budget by 25 percent and lay off 540 inspectors.

Now that the main Mexican cartels have been designated as FTOs, the law prohibiting material support for terrorists opens new avenues for shutting off the flood of weapons. The prohibition, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, dates back to 1996 and provides a criminal sentence of up to 20 years for “whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so.” Weapons are explicitly included in the definition of material support.

A prosecutor need not prove that defendants intended to further terrorist activity—only that they knew that the recipient of support was a designated terrorist organization. Gun dealers will, no doubt, deny any such knowledge, but ATF tracing data shows that a relatively small number of independent dealers sell large volumes of weapons to individual buyers. It strains credulity to believe that these dealers are unaware that most of these sales are straw purchases destined for the cartels. But that’s a question of fact best left up to a jury.

Criminal charges are not the only enforcement avenue opened by the designation of the cartels as terrorists. In addition to being designated FTOs by the U.S. secretary of state, they have also been designated as specially designated global terrorists (SDGTs) under Executive Order 13224. That designation gives the Treasury Department the authority to block the assets of anyone found to “assist in, sponsor, or provide financial, material, or technological support for, or financial or other services to or in support of” designated groups.

Unlike criminal prosecutions, these financial sanctions do not require proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. The secretary of the Treasury Department makes the determination “in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General” based on their judgment. Treasury would have to sanction only a few independent gun dealers for the rest of them to get the message that they can no longer act with impunity as the armory of the drug cartels.

“The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels, which we are doing,” Trump told a joint session of Congress in March. Designating Mexican traffickers as terrorists signals that the president is serious about making real progress in the war on drugs. In any war, cutting off the enemy’s logistics is a key to victory. Politics is the only obstacle. The gun lobby and its constituents in MAGA’s base are allergic to any restrictions on firearms, so sanctioning dealers for giving material support to terrorism will make gun fanatics apoplectic. But that may be the price the president has to pay to make good on his promise.

Military action alone will never solve the problem of drug use in the United States, but damming up the iron river of weapons would be a big step forward. It would earn real gratitude from the Mexican government and deepen all other elements of counternarcotics cooperation. It would give the Mexican police and military a fighting chance of suppressing the cartels without U.S. intervention. And it would save the lives of countless innocents caught in the crossfire of Mexico’s drug wars.