Odds are that lead will fly as Mexico positions 10,000 troops between cartels and their drug money – and watch for triggering US-supported raids on drug labs and narcotics depots
By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas – “Abrazos, no balazos” – often translated into English as “Hugs, not Bullets,” is the chosen political slogan that Mexico’s last president embraced to describe official government policy toward the country’s ultra-violent drug-trafficking cartels. The beauty of this policy title choice is that it requires no explanation.
But the flipped “Bullets, not Hugs” is probably next up for Mexico, whether it likes it or not. Expect fireworks because President Donald Trump has just forced Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to capitulate to a threat of ruinous 25 percent trade tariffs on Mexican exports unless she uses military force to suppress the flow of fentanyl (and illegal immigrant smuggling) over the US southern land border. She’s deploying 10,000 troops to cartel country, right smack in the drug-trafficking lanes of Mexico’s far northern precincts along the US border.
This deployment of Mexican troops is different than past ones, in which the main mission was to slow illegal immigration only, including during Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden term. For this one, the Trump mission demand is, as State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce put it recently, that Mexico “dismantle transnational criminal organizations…and stem the flow of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from China” to the cartels.
That priority American agenda has just put Mexican forces onto the most sensitive cartel nerve ending: the blood-soaked zone between heavily armed cartel forces and their money just across the US border.
As if this was not provocative enough on its own, a senior Trump official with direct knowledge told me bilaterial plans call for at least some of the more trusted of Mexico’s forces to physically attack cartel-run narcotics depots that would include pre-smuggling fentanyl hubs inside Mexico.
Certain US intelligence groups are working with the Mexican government “to give them an exact laydown. They say they’re going to target the narcotics. We’re literally still at the table.”
All of this should prove triggering, literally, to any of Mexico’s nine main cartels once the whole enterprise ramps up in earnest.
I have a good feel for what this set of circumstances portends. As a reporter for Hearst News in San Antonio, Texas from 2006-2009, I regularly covered the exceptionally bloody civil drug war against the cartels that then President Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa (2006-2012) declared and which, after hundreds of thousands of Mexican casualties, spawned the popularly preferred “Hugs, not Bullets” policies of his successors. The US partnered with Mexico throughout the war, providing targeting intelligence and billions of dollars to modernize its security forces. All of that was for a quest to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.
But after six years of ferocious combat and widespread torture and assassination, Mexico retreated in almost total defeat. The drug flow may have dipped from time to time but never stopped.
In the years since, I’ve often pondered whether Calderon and his successors should have trebled down when defeat seemed inevitable, as did former President George W. Bush during the Iraq war. When the chips were down amid calls for a humiliating US withdrawal during the Iraq war, Bush famously turned the tables by deploying 30,000 more troops.
But with Mexico, the truth must be told that militarily disrupting fentanyl production and trafficking will not happen easily even if another government-cartel war sparks off like the 2006-2012 one and escalates sharply.
The stars and planets all seem to be aligning for more violence, including from an unexpected quarter: President Sheinbaum herself may be aching for this fight.
Rodrigo Nieto Gomez, a Mexico-born and educated national security research professor for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California said Sheinbaum has installed anti-cartel Morena Party hardliners over much of Mexico’s state security apparatuses. This wing of her party, Nieto-Gomez explained, has been spoiling to shed the “hugs-not-bullets” policy for a good hard fight with the cartels.
Now Trump is providing a “top cover” excuse for them to finally exert the military pressure they’ve been wanting.
“Trump’s actions have temporarily tilted the playing field in favor of Morena,” Nieto-Gomez said. “With the right philosophy and the right level of American support, we may see a different type of violence in Mexico.”
Perhaps a worthy achievable goal for Mexican military fireworks is that it forces a sort of devil’s truce where the cartels, whose leaderships are ever the most consummate and pragmatic of capitalists, ultimately agree to voluntarily quit fentanyl altogether as a good business decision. IF they can have the other drugs pretty much roll in as usual. After all, when the operatives are shooting and dying, they’re spending rather than earning.
What seems certain is that Trump’s insistence on following through on his campaign promises to suppress fentanyl ups the chances of Mexican military conflict with the cartels for some other reasons. They’re no doubt feeling uncharacteristically pinched these days on other fronts Trump has opened on them.
Trump has asked his Secretary of State to designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, which would open authorities for the Americans and its allies to seize assets and prosecute banks and people who work with the cartels on serious “material support” crimes. To isolate and weaken them where it counts, in the pocketbook, and disrupt their global operations.
And, of course, Trump has all but killed the biggest cash cow those cartels have seen in years by shuttering the southern border almost hermetically in a matter of days. Their smugglers are moving probably fewer than 500 illegal immigrants a day now, most of them caught and deported right away, compared to 14,000 a day last December. Losing those numbers is a financial catastrophe and should drive the cartels to invest everything they have in drug trafficking again.
Because they are free from babysitting and processing illegal migrants all day long, Border Patrol is back on the drug traffickers full force and they have help, the U.S. military is down there glassing the landscape and using surveillance assets to spot the traffickers.
Some of the cartels were already so frustrated their leaders okayed the use of drones to attack US agents in the way of drug loads. Cases of firearms attacks on Border Patrol are rising.
Now Mexico’s going to put 10,000 troops in between them and their money?
If she is not already, Sheinbaum should about now be preparing for the worst because Trump absolutely expects some kind of real action – with demonstrable results – or else he’ll push that tariff button.
She’s under pressure right now to produce something, anything, whether for show or not. And those cartels are ever ready to go to war.
If it happens, combat could very quickly escalate because those cartels are impulsive, brazen, money-hungry, and extremely well-armed from the billions they all earned on former President Joe Biden’s mass migration program.
Sheinbaum undoubtedly discerns the dangers here and will have to tread carefully between appeasing Trump and sparking off another all-out civil war, which many in the United States believe is long overdue. And maybe it is. She and all those cartel leaders would probably feel lucky to cap things down to merely a “splendid little war” like the 1898 Spanish-American war.
But Trump knows the art of the deal often pivots on what’s good business for everyone involved.
Mexico’s 2006-2012 war shows the cartels will more than likely survive whatever fireworks are coming, if any. Trump may make them realize sooner rather than later that they just have to give up the fentanyl.