Title: The Dangerous Narrative of the “War on Cartels”

Building a New Wall

In 2016, the US-Mexico border became a matter of foremost national interest. Former president Donald Trump ran his 2016 campaign around the purported need to build a “big beautiful wall” to prevent the illegal entry of people and drugs from Mexico into the United States. He built a key pillar of the “America First” movement around a political narrative focused on demonizing undocumented immigration, strengthening border security, and suppressing drug trafficking. The campaign galvanized xenophobic prejudices among voters. According to recent polls, unauthorized immigration is causing great consternation among Republicans.

Republicans have attributed the immigration and drug “crises” to weak border enforcement, Mexico’s inability to deal with its “bad hombres,” and the existence of an alleged Mexican narco-state. However, this narrative is misleading. As a result, the US government’s proposed solutions to the fentanyl crisis have been incomplete and unsuccessful.

Failures of the Current Approach

Throughout its drug war, the United States has extended its anti-crime agenda abroad through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other US law enforcement agencies. US authorities have engaged in anti-narcotics or security cooperation programs with other countries, such as Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative, and the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). While this approach has strengthened US law enforcement’s intelligence gathering in the Americas, the drug problem has not been solved. Over the past three years, the number of deaths from drug overdoses in the United States has exceeded 300,000. In fact, in 2022, drug overdose deaths in the United States reached an all-time high at 110,000. The United States is experiencing a fentanyl crisis or, more generally, an epidemic of opioids and synthetic drugs. Thus, efforts to control the US drug problem by declaring a “war on drugs” and militarizing immigration have failed.

The US government has focused on the supply side of the drug trade, cracking down on Mexican drug cartels and drug lords. This approach has led the DEA and other US agencies to implement the so-called kingpin strategy, in which law enforcement targets the heads of drug trafficking organizations. US-Mexico cooperation through the Merida Initiative commits Mexico to go after these drug lords. However, the initiative has resulted in hundreds of thousands of drug-related murders and disappearances. The US imposition of an anti-narcotics strategy on Latin American countries has caused divisions and brutal fights within Mexican criminal groups. When a cartel leader is killed or arrested and leaves their place empty, other members of the organization typically fight against each other to occupy it.

US Misconceptions About the Drug Trade and a “War On Cartels”

After decades of a failed US drug war, the US government seeks to expand the same futile anti-narcotics strategies. Today, Republicans focus on tackling drug trafficking with a “war on cartels,” which describes the use of US military force in Mexico’s territory to fight drug trafficking organizations. This mission has largely replaced Trump’s 2016 discourse about building the wall. Instead of devising a comprehensive strategy that focuses both on the supply and demand sides of the illicit drug trade, the United States currently focuses on fighting the Mexican cartels based on a misunderstanding of the drug trade, US drug consumption and addiction, and Mexico’s criminal landscape.

Most US politicians, media, security analysts, and law enforcement agencies attribute the fentanyl crisis to Mexican cartels without recognizing the deeper root causes. The DEA has highlighted that most of the fentanyl distributed by the top two cartels–the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG)–“is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico.” However, this explanation ignores the responsibility of “big pharma” for initiating the opioid epidemic in the United States and the role of US drug manufacturing.

Pharma companies have facilitated the drug crisis by actively promoting opioids and a variety of painkillers as well as lobbying against legislation that would reduce opioid use. Purdue Pharma, the creator of OxyContin, owned by the Sackler family, is an emblematic case in the creation of the opioid epidemic. To market OxyContin, Purdue Pharma attempted to change doctors’ prescription habits and paid them to argue that concerns about opioid addiction were misguided. Thus, the drug crisis cannot be understood without considering the role of American pharmaceutical companies.

Blaming the US drug crisis entirely on Mexican cartels also neglects the configuration of the criminal world in Mexico and the complexity of international drug markets. Global drug markets involve several transnational businesses and drug trafficking organizations. For example, while the CJNG is a Mexican drug cartel, it imports chemicals from India and China and manufactures illegal narcotics in the United States. Thus, to crack down on the CJNG, US officials must consider its global suppliers. The United States must also recognize that not all synthetic drugs consumed in the United States are manufactured beyond its borders, as much of the drug supply comes from within the country. Evidently, combatting the drug crisis requires more than a crackdown on Mexican actors, as a global supply chain fuels US addiction.

US political rhetoric on the war on cartels insists that a resolution to the ongoing drug crisis can only come from a successful crackdown on Mexican cartels. Many, particularly members of the Republican Party, have tried to mark them as foreign terrorist organizations. Other US lawmakers have introduced bills to fight the cartels directly. One extreme proposal, drafted by Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) and Mike Waltz (R., Florida), is the formal declaration of a “war on the cartels”–meaning the military would be authorized to drop bombs on cartel targets.

Trump first considered using missiles to take out Mexican drug labs in 2020, and other prominent Republicans have followed suit. Former Attorney General William Barr compares cartels to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), urging President Joe Biden to use military force against these organizations. Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis vows to use deadly force at the US-Mexico border to stop the cartels and encourages US authorities to kill drug smugglers “stone cold dead.” In this same tone, Nikki Haley declared that “when it comes to the cartels . . . You tell the Mexican president, either you do it or we do it . . . We can do that by putting special ops in [Mexico] . . . just like we dealt with ISIS.” Thus, prominent Republicans support military escalation against Mexican cartels.

Consequences of These Misconceptions

Distorted ideas about Mexico’s drug cartels can spread to the broader public from propaganda and misinformation campaigns that are activated during election seasons. The focus on the Mexican border incorporates this misleading and dangerous narrative. Declaring a war on cartels could be considered an “act of war against Mexico” and could have severe repercussions for the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor. Sending US troops to Mexico would violate Mexico’s sovereignty and bombing cartels would likely cause massive destruction and death. Any US war on cartels would be rooted in fallacies and a general misconception of the drug epidemic in the United States.

In short, the risky rhetoric of the war on cartels does not account for the reality of the drug trade and consumption. It neither considers pharmaceutical companies’ malicious partnerships with doctors nor the massive distribution of drugs within the United States. It further fails to recognize the production of synthetic drugs in US territory. The dominant narrative on the war on drugs and cartels ignores the US citizens who participate in drug trafficking. Taking advantage of oligopolistic markets, big pharma and multinational organizations are all also complicit in the US drug crisis.

A Comprehensive Strategy

Hence, an anti-narcotics strategy based on America First discourse–reproduced by Trump and prominent members of the Republican party–will not solve the US drug crisis. The proposed actions could instead fundamentally hurt the country’s relationship with its largest trade partner. A comprehensive strategy to deal with the root causes of the drug epidemic in the United States is urgently needed. The US government should focus both on drug demand and supply.

Instead of bombing Mexico, the United States can work with Mexico to dismantle global drug trafficking networks. Effective collaboration with Mexico in well-designed anti-narcotics operations that involve coordination between the two countries and their law enforcement agencies is also fundamental. Intelligence sharing and inter-agency cooperation in the two countries would be part of an effective and comprehensive solution to this problem. The two countries should also include civil society in designing solutions. In particular, they could adopt citizen security approaches that incorporate violence prevention and crime control strategies.

Any solution should also involve intelligence gathering and selected enforcement targeted at the key players in US illicit drug markets. The US government must address the root causes of drug consumption by US citizens. Doing so would require effective drug abuse prevention and harm reduction strategies. An extended and well-funded public health approach to fight the drug epidemic in the United States is essential. Big pharma should be held accountable as well for its responsibility in the drug epidemic that affects the US society. US prosecutors and the judicial system must prosecute cases against big pharma to achieve this goal. Lastly, the US government must crack down on the production of synthetic drugs and their distribution in the United States through improved investigations, greater development of intelligence capabilities, and better enforcement at the federal level. The DEA’s kingpin strategy and a unilateral focus on drug lords have proven to be a failed approach. A mix of drug prevention and recovery programs, civilian harm reduction, and increased law enforcement against big pharma should form part of this comprehensive strategy.

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Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Her areas of expertise are border studies, US-Mexico relations, international security, drug trafficking, migration studies, and human trafficking. She is author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017; Spanish version: Planeta, 2018). Dr. Correa-Cabrera is Past President of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) and is co-editor of the International Studies Perspectives journal (ISP, Oxford University Press). She is currently a Fulbright US Scholar in Mexico conducting research at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and writing her forthcoming book entitled Coyotes LLC.