On August 13, the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Acorralados 26 drug traffickers in plans destined for the United States, where they will be prosecuted for a litany of drugs and violent crimes. One was sought In the murder of a deputy of the Sheriff of the Los Angeles County almost two decades ago. This was not the first transfer of prisoners from Mexico to the United States. In February, Sheinbaum delivered more than 29 poster figures to the United States Department of Justice.
All this comes at a time when Mexican security forces are accelerating counter-miront operations throughout the country. According to the Secretary of Public Security of Mexico, Homicides have decreased by more than 25% during the first 10 months of Sheinbaum; More than 1,200 drug laboratories have also been dismantled.
If the Trump administration is impressed with progress, officials have not shown it. In fact, Washington is getting ready to the United States Army to help with the problem of poster violence next to it. President Trump signed a directive ordering the Department of Defense to begin using force against Latin American drug cartels that Washington previously designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Six of those posters are in Mexico. As to underline the point, the pentagon ordered 4,000 marines and sailors To the waters of Latin America and the Caribbean, together with destroyers of the Navy, recognition aircraft and a missile cruise with nuclear motor.
None of this is exactly a surprise. Trump, after all, flirted with fentanyl laboratory bombings in Mexico during his first term. His main advisors, by Vice President JD Vance to the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have addressed the possibility of using the US military force to degrade the power of the posters. And the central intelligence agency, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, Surveillance flights has increased on territory dominated by poster to map the terrain better.
But there is no error: pulling the trigger on the US military force within Mexico would be as effective as putting a curite on an open wound.
We can say this with a high degree of confidence because military force has already been deployed against the posters for years, without a discernible impact that is no more violence, death and a continuation of drug trafficking that the United States wants to stop. The successive Mexican governments from the change of the century bought the notion that, with the correct amount of military pressure, the posters would be folded, negotiated with the State or collapse under their own weight.
In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared a large -scale war against drug trafficking organizations, complete with the deployment of tens of thousands of Mexican troops to the most violent states and the rules of participation of the country. The successor of Calderón, Enrique Peña Nieto, had implemented the same strategy with a special emphasis on attacking the leadership structure of the posters. Even Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who campaigned in a “hugs, not bullets” approach, came to trust the Mexican army during the last years of his presidency.
The result was precisely the opposite of what Mexico expected to achieve. Although some high profile drug traffickers They were capturedThe posters as a whole increased violence against the State and made it more shameless. Politicians, police officers, soldiers and senior government officials have been attacked by posters, and the massacre of civilians is now the norm. Last year, Mexico experienced its most deadly electoral campaign in history, With about 200 politicianscandidates and public servants murdered in the period prior to the June elections.
The so -called “capo strategy”, focused on the neutralization of the leadership of the poster, has also fractured the landscape of the poster of Mexico, which makes it even more difficult for the State to contain the problem. Like my colleague Chris McCallion and I wrote In a new articleRemoving senior poster figures tends to cause intense internal competition within the target group and between replacements that fight between them. The smallest groups affiliated with larger posters can use the absence of authority at the top to follow their own path. As a consequence, more people have died; The areas of Mexico previously isolated from the posters are now in the front line. And states like Sinaloa that have been in the epicenter of drug trafficking I have seen an exponential increase In murders. In 2006, when Calderón declared war on the posters, Mexico registered approximately 10,000 homicides; Today, the figure It has tripled more than triplicate.
If it is unlikely that the military operations of the green lights of the Trump administration, the United States completely imitated the hard hand strategy of the Mexican government. American troops do not patrol in Mexican soil in the short term. The United States is more likely to stay with aerial power; In fact, US military officers I have already discussed the option.
However, air attacks will not be more effective to degrade posters or reduce drug flow in the United States than terrestrial operations. The bombs can destroy laboratories and kill the members of the poster, but it is very unlikely that they will alter the reasons of profits in which these criminal organizations operate. The drug business is, in a large word. The posters raise billions of dollars each year from commerce. The rate of performance, particularly in fentanyl, is huge; According to an accusation of 2023Hundreds of dollars in precursor chemicals can net gains from 200 to 800 times larger. It is very difficult to believe that the Sinaloa poster, the new poster of the generation of Jalisco or any other criminal group would renounce all this, particularly when the competitors wait on the wings to increase their own market share.
There is no magical bullet to stop drug trafficking. Washington has been studying for drugs for decades, and the verdict is quite clear: drugs have won.
This does not mean that the United States should be complacent. For example, drug control administration must leave Washington's budgetary struggles with adequate resources. Border control officers need more technology to detect drug shipments. Washington and Mexico City must strengthen their bilateral intelligence cooperation, which has already increased during the first 10 months of the Sheinbaum period. And although the sanctions are not a panacea, they can deter some Americans from working with the posters.
However, bombing Mexico will do nothing more to endanger the relationship with Mexico that the Trump administration must contain the problem.
Daniel R. dependris is a member of defense priorities.
