How could Mexico’s drug cartels respond to US military actions?

Over the past two weeks, the United States greatly intensified pressure on the Mexican government to permit U.S. military actions against drug cartels inside Mexico, with President Donald Trump speaking about the necessity of U.S. strikes against land targets. The Mexican government continues to reject such U.S. demands; in a companion blog, I explore the diplomatic costs of potential U.S. military action, its impact on the bilateral relationship, and how the Mexican government might retaliate. I also propose a way out of the crisis: expanding the presence, mandate, and roles of U.S. law enforcement agents in Mexico, instead of bringing in U.S. military units, and intensifying joint efforts against corrupt political and government sponsors of the cartels. In this blog, I detail how the cartels could respond to U.S. military actions.

What is the U.S. military plan? 

The Trump administration has not provided any details about what type of military action it seeks in Mexico. However, it is unlikely that the United States would mount a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaign to militarily defeat the drug cartels, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops present in the country for years. It is uncertain that such a campaign would succeed. It is also evident that the Mexican government, military, and public would view it as an unacceptable violation of their country’s sovereignty and respond accordingly.

Such a military deployment would also profoundly contradict the Trump administration’s national security strategy of avoiding involvement in other countries’ internal wars and nation-building. Despite making extensive rhetorical threats, the Trump administration’s pattern of military engagements has consisted of limited raids, such as the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while leaving the rest of his regime intact, or one-off air strikes, such as against presumed jihadist terrorist targets in Nigeria.

It is far more likely that U.S. military actions—with or without the Mexican government’s acquiescence—would emphasize the destruction of fentanyl labs and/or capture-or-kill raids against the top narco bosses involved in fentanyl production. In a diplomatic bombshell, the United States could also seize and exfiltrate to the United States some Mexican politicians and government officials suspected of ties to the cartels.

The pitfalls of high-value targeting and lab busts

Targeting criminal bosses and drug labs is nothing new: the Mexican government has been doing this for the past two decades, often based on U.S. intelligence, through high-value targeting (HVT) and interdiction operations. Having U.S. forces execute the raids would decrease the chance of hot intelligence leaking out, but it would also result in a decreased frequency of such raids overall due to opposition from the Mexican government.

Furthermore, far from stemming the flow of drugs, HVT has poor results: amplifying violence, undermining U.S.-Mexico bilateral cooperation, and compounding structural and resource problems in Mexico.

Policies like HVT and the destruction of drug labs ignore the ease with which cartel leadership and rank-and-file cadres are replenished, labs are rebuilt, and synthetic drug precursors are smuggled. They also ignore that Mexican criminal groups’ activities are significantly diversified, making it difficult to defund the groups through drug seizures and HVT alone. HVT actions also trigger extensive, and even uncontrollable, intra-cartel violence and warfare over succession and territory, making such policies politically unsustainable in Mexico.

Without a sustained state presence on the ground, these problems persist. Most clandestine labs are very rudimentary and mobile, allowing cartels to rebuild them within days and hide production, leaders, and operatives inside populated areas, where enforcement risks high civilian casualties. In its first year, the Sheinbaum administration’s ground actions reportedly dismantled about 1,600 drug labs—far more than under the previous administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government curtailed efforts and manipulated data to placate the United States.

Military strikes’ utility in generating sufficient incapacitation or deterrence effects vis-à-vis the cartels is thus highly questionable. Moreover, they risk helping the brutal and vicious Mexican criminal groups portray themselves as not only more relevant governing entities than the Mexican government, but also as nationalists defending Mexicans from America. 

How could the cartels retaliate?

Mexican criminal groups can increase their violent retaliation against the Mexican government and conceivably even target U.S. citizens and the U.S. homeland if faced with repeated U.S. military strikes. The scope of retaliation could vary in scale and intensity.

The most likely form of retaliation is one readily available to Mexican criminal groups: to intensify pressure against Mexican politicians, government officials, police, and military installations through assassinations and bombing campaigns. Mexican cartels routinely kidnap, torture, and kill Mexican government officials and security agents and their families (as well as journalists and civil society activists). They have even deployed attack convoys in assassination operations in the heart of Mexico City, as occurred against Omar García Harfuch, who was then Mexico City’s chief of police, in 2020. To demonstrate their displeasure with government security actions, the cartels have attacked and burned down scores of police stations in various parts of the country and attacked military deployments, even shooting down a military helicopter.

The cartels are increasingly using weaponized drones to extend their reach and intensify their attacks, and have allegedly sent operatives to fight on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia battlefield to acquire new experience with drone warfare. Regardless of whether these rumors are, in fact, true, Mexican cartels have been using drones to attack police stations, assassinate government officials, and depopulate vast tracks of Mexico’s countryside for almost a decade. At times, they have spurred tens of thousands of people to flee areas in the state of Michoacán, for example.

In Mexico, the cartels have not yet resorted to burning down national-level government institutions à la Pablo Escobar’s and Colombia’s Extraditable narcos, who, in 1985, instigated the burning down of Colombia’s Supreme Court in Bogota and the massacre of the country’s justices. Such actions, in fact, remain a remote possibility, high up on the escalation ladder of the cartels’ confrontation with the state.

Far more likely, the cartels would blockade roads, highways, and even major crossings into the United States to paralyze the movement of people and economic activity. They have already resorted to such actions and could expand and maintain them for longer periods, jeopardizing U.S. supply chains and inflicting high costs on U.S. and Mexican companies. Such economic warfare could escalate into attacks and sabotage against important infrastructure and the factories and other facilities of U.S. businesses in Mexico. Beyond temporarily paralyzing operations, such attacks would increase the already high costs international companies in Mexico face for security, including hiring private security companies to protect employees.

Sieges of entire cities, as the Sinaloa Cartel mounted in 2019 in Culiacán to extract Ovidio Gúzman López from Mexican military captivity, could become more frequent and spread across Mexico. Resembling urban warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan, that attack featured extensive bombings against the Mexican military and police forces, explosions in Sinaloa’s capital, and the burning down of businesses.

Although Mexican cartels are highly violent in Mexico, killing tens of thousands annually, they have avoided direct violence against U.S. citizens in Mexico and in the United States. Fearing U.S. law enforcement, the cartels currently go to substantial lengths to minimize violence against U.S. citizens. However, significant U.S. military actions against the cartels could change their calculus. The cartels could begin targeting not only U.S. military forces in Mexico—if U.S. strikes went beyond unmanned platforms—but also the millions of U.S. citizens living in or visiting Mexico. Attacking ordinary U.S. citizens in Mexico would represent a severe escalation for the cartels and would be motivated by a sense that survival and bargaining, including in the form of plea bargains, were no longer options.

Cartel violence in the United States, the most escalatory move, is even less likely and a very remote possibility.

A particularly dangerous scenario is that the cartels retaliate by intentionally increasing the potency of drugs they smuggle into the United States, aiming to pressure Washington into reducing or ceasing military operations in Mexico. Fentanyl could, for example, be swapped with carfentanil or nitazenes and introduced—perhaps temporarily—into the U.S. drug supply, rapidly causing thousands of overdose deaths.

A better path forward

To pursue its goals while avoiding the worst outcomes, the United States should use targeted, precise law enforcement pressure in collaboration with the Mexican government to push the cartels to reduce the potency of the drugs they smuggle into the United States. There is some evidence—though inconclusive—that the extensive, explicit, and specific pressure the Biden administration exerted on the Chapitos led Mexican criminal groups to start supplying less potent, and thus less lethal, fentanyl, saving American lives.

Effectively altering cartel behavior, dismantling their operational capacities, and durably reducing their power and criminal activities requires far more sustained and strategic law enforcement actions than limited U.S. strikes can deliver.