How Mexican cartels are using drones, now and in the future

Last week’s test of an anti-drone laser weapon by the U.S. military near El Paso, which for hours halted civilian air traffic, set off a fierce debate about how extensively and for what purposes Mexican criminal groups use aerial drones. In fact, the use is extensive and growing. In March 2024, the head of U.S. Northern Command, General Gregory M. Guillot, testified in the U.S. Congress that some 1,000 drones cross from Mexico into the United States every month for reconnaissance against law enforcement or drug smuggling. In Mexico itself, criminal groups use drones for a much wider range of purposes, including warfare and population control. Like other criminal groups around the world, they will further embrace the evolving aerial and, eventually, marine drone technology to conduct crime over larger distances and with fewer personnel.

Assassinations, intimidation, and population control

Mexican criminal groups have been using aerial drones for over a decade. Predictably, the first type of use centered on reconnaissance and intelligence gathering against law enforcement actors, rival criminal groups, and entire local populations.  

Since at least 2020, Mexican cartels have also operated weaponized drones against their enemies, security forces, and communities. In October 2025, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) flew an off-the-shell drone loaded with a primitive explosive device, known in Mexico as a potato bomb, into a heavily-protected compound of the state prosecutor’s office in Tijuana. Although no one was killed, the cartel demonstrated that it could penetrate high-defense areas and render vulnerable facilities previously believed to be highly protected.

Precision targeting is still a real challenge for criminal groups, but also unnecessary. The decreasing costs of off-the-shelf drones allow explosive-laden drones to simply crash into the target, be it the car of a government official or drug lab of a rival criminal group, and explode on impact. Not having to return to the pilot also reduces the intelligence footprint of the kamikaze drone, and thus the ability to track the network behind it.

Assassinating enemies and combating rivals by using drones has not yet become widespread in Mexico, but it is around the corner. Like other non-state actors, Mexican cartels have been learning more sophisticated use of advanced drones from watching Ukraine’s battlefield.

Already, CJNG has regularly used drones to carpet bomb rural areas in Michoacán to render an area unusable for civilians. Just as ideology-driven insurgent groups as well as counterinsurgency forces regularly deploy scorched earth policies to break population support for a rival actor and drive the local population out of an area, the CJNG used the drone carpet bombing to overcome the home-base advantage of their enemies, Carteles Unidos, and its social embeddedness within local communities. Instead of struggling to win the local population’s obedience and allegiance, CJNG drove out tens of thousands of people.

Surveillance, reconnaissance, and drone attacks all translate into power: into augmented and simplified control over local populations and their movements and actions. In a matter of time, one can imagine the narcos flying drones to track civil society activists, business community members, or local government officials, such as mayors, to ascertain whether they are liaising with local police forces, federal officials, or rival criminal groups. Even the mere belief that the narcos have such a capacity would complicate the Sheinbaum administration’s efforts to break municipal-level collusion between politicians, businesses, and criminals.

In areas of intense narco activity, such as in rural Baja California or Jalisco, local people already fear that criminal groups have acquired spyware such as Pegasus and penetrated cell communications systems. Many are increasingly reluctant to speak about sensitive issues through even standard encrypted platforms, my research in 2025 showed.

Drones and trafficking

Criminal groups also use drones to deliver contraband, including drugs or cell phones into prisons. Eventually, drug delivery all the way to a user’s windowsill will be commonplace. Moreover, with the continual expansion of the payload of even cheap drones available through online platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba, aerial drones increasingly also traffic drugs across larger distances. Such a smuggling method is particularly viable for synthetic drugs with high potency-to-weight ratio, such as fentanyl and nitazines. With such drugs, even small amounts can supply large segments of drug retail markets.

Still, the vast majority of such drugs are smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border hidden in legal cargo in trailer trucks or in special secret compartments of personal vehicles and between continents by container ships. Certainly, trafficking large amounts of cocaine by aerial drones would currently be highly inefficient and expensive. Narco semi-submersibles, today still manned, are far more convenient for that purpose. Staying just one meter below the sea’s surface, they are very hard to detect by radar.

Crime by remote

In a few years, marine drones on the surface of the sea or just below will carry both legal cargo and illegal contraband, just as aerial drones will transport commercial products and illicit goods at both the wholesale and retail level within countries and even across them. Law enforcement will struggle to distinguish drones with legal cargo from drones with contraband. Narco-drones 3D-printed in the basement of the criminals’ safehouses will be as untraceable as ghost weapons are today.  

Identification and attribution will be a challenge even when all commercial and private drones are required to have a registered electronic “license plate,” as criminal groups develop the capacity to steal the electronic signature of licensed commercial drones. Hacking government registries of licensed commercial drones, or simply intimidating and corrupting registry officials, will allow criminal groups to furnish their drones with official electronic tags on a large scale.

Law enforcement will face other detection challenges, even as it will deploy scores of its own drones. Swarms of marine surface or close-to-surface drones equipped with AI-powered adaptive navigation systems will be launchable from a fishing ship just at the edge of an exclusive economic zone of a country to ferry drugs ashore. Smaller marine drones will be less visible at docking and less predictable as to where they surface.

Today, narco semi-submersibles transporting cocaine, for example, from Latin America to Europe, generate a substantial visual and electronic signature when they surface – and only when they surface. They also predictably rise at a limited number of offshore islands, such as the Azores. In the future, smaller marine drones will be able to dock up and down the coast and surface along most of the littoral, enjoying both a smaller detection profile and a larger geographic area for unloading. Law enforcement efforts will grow more resource-intensive and complicated, even when detection sensors become mounted on a wide variety of underwater platforms, such as fiber optic cables.

Law enforcement countermeasures and their risks

Interception of aerial and marine drones will be at least as much of a challenge for law enforcement as detection. As the El Paso test of the anti-drone laser weapon demonstrated, various blanket-wide spectrum tools, such as jammers, may interfere with and endanger civilian air traffic and legal commerce.

Destroying drones carrying illegal drugs risks contaminating an area if the drugs don’t burn up during the intercept. The dispersion of synthetic opioids through such a law enforcement intercept, for example, could result in lethal poisonings. Illicit drugs leaking into the sea could cause intense environmental damage, with underwater ecosystems damaged by toxic substances or deleterious chemicals accumulating in the bodies of marine animals. Sharks and porpoises frequenting drug trafficking routes already suffer such poisoning, after drugs are dumped into the sea.

Being able to capture an aerial drone, such as by a net-equipped “falcon” drone, or a marine drone by a “shark” drone that could tow the contraband device to the cops avoids such risks and allows for the collection of intelligence. But such countermeasures are, and will remain, by far the most technically challenging and expensive.

Automation threatens criminals’ jobs too

Just like smuggling, assassinations and territorial warfare by criminal groups will similarly take place by drones over greater and greater distances and with significantly fewer personnel. Traditionally, controlling turf for extortion or drug retail has required the presence of sicarios (hitmen and fighters) and halcones (lookouts). With the spread of drones and other remote monitoring systems and automated weaponized platforms, criminal groups will be able to conduct assassinations in Sonora at the border with the United States, while pressing the trigger in Chiapas at the border with Guatemala or even another country altogether. Their target may be a government official, a businesswoman who refused to pay extortion fees, or a journalist.

Trafficking, intimidation, and population control will also become much less labor-intensive. Various illicit economies, including the production and trafficking of synthetic drugs and extortion, will likely see extensive layoffs of the people whom they currently employ, at the same time as AI and automation in legal economies will likely render many human workers redundant. For centuries, organized crime and illicit economies provided livelihoods for many who could not find employment in legal economies. But with the increasing use of remote platforms, automation, and AI in criminality, this safety valve will no longer be available at the current scale. When drones become widely used by Mexican criminal groups, what will the tens of thousands of laid-off sicarios, fighters, halcones, and other employees do? Will they become roving bandits, unable to make a living in the legal economy and unwanted even by the illicit one?

Even if illicit economies do become less labor-intensive and criminal bosses thus enjoy less political capital with local populations, staying ahead of criminals technologically will be a challenge for law enforcement.