Designating Cartels as Terrorists Will Have Huge Consequences, Analysts Say (original) (raw)

Ioan Grillo, a Mexico-based journalist and expert on cartels, said the designation would give the U.S. more power to go after cartels’ money and gun suppliers.

News Analysis

On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that started a process by which international organized crime cartels would be designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” or “specially designated global terrorists.”

The designations would give the U.S. government power to go after the cartels’ finances, target those who supply them with weapons, and even carry out military strikes against cartel-owned facilities.

With groups such as the Sinaloa cartel, MS-13 from El Salvador, and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua posing a serious threat to the United States, analysts say these new terrorist designations could have far-reaching consequences.

The Trump administration has not gone into detail about how it plans to use the new powers, but on Jan. 31, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would not rule out military strikes against the cartels.

On Feb. 3, following Trump’s tariffs threat, Canada announced that it would invest $200 million and appoint a czar to investigate the fentanyl trade and would also designate the cartels as terrorist organizations.

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Ioan Grillo, a Mexico-based journalist and author of several books, including “El Narco, The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels,” told The Epoch Times that the terrorist designations would provide the U.S. government with more power to go after the cartels’ finances.

He said it could also be used to target arms dealers in the United States who provide weapons for the cartels.

“You could go after people trafficking firearms to the cartels; you could arrest them for providing material to a foreign terrorist organization,” Grillo said.

Organized crime syndicates such as Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa cartel will be put in the same basket as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups listed as designated foreign terrorist organizations on the State Department’s website.

François Cavard, a human rights activist who has spent years investigating the drug trade in Central and South America, told The Epoch Times that changing the legal status of cartels such as Tren de Aragua from “being considered just another criminal organization” to being designated as terrorists was “huge.”

Cavard said the gang—whose name translates as the “Train of Aragua” and that began as a group of corrupt workers on a failed railway project, which was funded by a huge loan from China—was heavily involved in human smuggling, drug trafficking, and money laundering.

Greta Nightingale, an attorney and partner at O’Melveny, a firm of Washington-based international lawyers, and chair of its national security group, said that being designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” and a “specially designated global terrorist” were based on different statutes but have essentially the same effect.

She told The Epoch Times that the assets of the designee are frozen and that if they come within the control of U.S. persons (such as a U.S. bank), the designee cannot access them.

Nightingale said Americans are also not allowed to engage in any dealings with such designees or engage with third parties if they will benefit the designated party.

“If a U.S. company does business with a Mexican company that is tied to one of these cartels, they risk an enforcement action,” she said.

“If the company is owned or controlled by a cartel, then such business is clearly illegal. But if the ties are more attenuated, then the legal exposure is less clear.”

Danger of ‘Reputational Harm’

Nightingale said, “The safest approach is to stay away if you have information that suggests that there are ties between a cartel and a Mexican business, as you invite reputational harm and also may undermine the safety of your employees.”

Cavard said the most significant effect of the designation is that cartels and gangs such as Tren de Aragua were no longer considered to just be after illegal financial profit but are considered “to also have power and control purposes ... that represents a serious and extremely dangerous threat to the security of the country.”

He said the designation would also “make it clear to the high-level corrupt accomplices these criminals may have within the United States and in U.S. government offices and agencies ... that they’re going after them also.”

Cavard said it would also send a message to what he called “extremely compromised nations,” such as Mexico, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia.

He said groups such as Tren de Aragua had “accumulated the power and the financial resources that have enabled them to corrupt and/or intimidate high-level politicians, authorities, and justice officials all over the world, including the United States of America, and this is an extremely high national security concern for all countries.”

Grillo said, “As for the legal implications, it redefines the battle and could be used in justification of other things such as military actions, as were used against al-Qaeda in Pakistan.”

Potentially, that could lead to a “bad outcome” if Mexican civilians were killed in such an airstrike, he said.

Hegseth, in response to a question from “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade about whether the military would strike a cartel organization inside Mexico if those organizations targeted Americans at the U.S.–Mexico border, said, “All options will be on the table if we’re dealing with what are designated to be foreign terrorist organizations who are specifically targeting Americans on our border.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) talks about his legislation to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at the U.S. Capitol on March 8, 2023. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Grillo, who has written on his Substack about Gen. John Pershing’s raid into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa in 1916, said military strikes would not solve the problem of cartels because, according to research published in Science in 2023, there were 180,000 people in Mexico employed by the cartels.

“It’s probably an underestimate. But even if you go in there with a drone strike, and you kill five, you kill 10, you kill 20 cartel operatives, you don’t solve the issue. You haven’t killed 1 percent of them, and it really would inflame relationships with Mexico,” he said.

“You could easily end up killing Mexican civilians. It'd be very hard to know if you killed Mexican civilians, or killed Mexican policemen or Mexican soldiers.”

Grillo said such incidents would fuel popular resentment in Mexico against the United States “and make it harder for the Mexican president to actually cooperate with the United States on all these issues.”

Could ‘Make Things Worse’

“I do think the United States is right to be concerned about the rise of cartels, but sometimes you can make things worse by doing things like firing some missiles and killing people and inflaming the situation,” Grillo said.

He said the cartels had been largely to blame for the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States, which had been “devastating” in the past decade in terms of addiction and deaths.

Trump’s executive order states that “the cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”

“It’s difficult to read Trump sometimes,” Grillo said.

“Trump is likely using this stuff as a way of pressuring Mexico. So the best scenario could perhaps be if Mexico manages to reduce the amount of fentanyl being trafficked to the United States. That could happen.”

The ingredients of fentanyl are produced in China and exported to Mexico, where syndicates such as the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) manufacture the deadly product, which is shipped across the border for a customer base of U.S. addicts.

But Trump’s threat of 25 percent tariffs may have already succeeded in getting the Mexican government to take action on fentanyl.

On Feb. 3, both Mexico and Canada agreed to strengthen border security in exchange for a one-month pause on the tariffs.

Mexico agreed to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to the border immediately to deter drug traffickers, who make huge profits from the fentanyl trade.

DEA agents raid an unofficial nightclub and arrest 50 people, some of them suspected of being members of Tren de Aragua, in Denver on Jan. 26, 2025. DEA Rocky Mountain Division

“The cartels are only interested in making money. That’s the main objective,” Grillo said.

“They do resemble armed groups. If you’ve seen videos where there'll be like 50 guys in balaclavas with RPG-7s, with bulletproof vests, helmets, they look like an insurgent group, and they can act like an insurgent group in terms of the way they might fight the military sometimes in Mexico, the way they can fight each other, and terrorize civilians.

“They don’t have a political or religious ideology. They don’t have a political program.”

According to Cavard, Tren de Aragua, too, has no political ideology but has spread its tentacles among the Venezuelan diaspora in North, Central, and South America.

“The criminals said wherever our Venezuelan migrants go, we can go with them, and we can use them to carry whatever we want. We can take advantage of them, things like prostitution, because they said ‘you do it or you die,’” he said.

Cartels ‘Good at Adapting’

Grillo said it is difficult to know how the cartels would deal with being designated as terrorists.

“Generally, [what] I think about the cartels is they’ve been really good at adapting to different situations and finding the opportunity to make more money, take more power,” he said.

“When there’s more crackdowns, when the border’s harder to cross, they put the price up and make more money moving migrants. When marijuana was legalized, it killed the Mexican marijuana trade but they moved to fentanyl and other synthetics.”

Cavard said Trump’s executive order designating Tren de Aragua as terrorists was “necessary.”

“He is not giving them enough time to grow and expand their terror, and the feeling they can do whatever they can whenever they can, and the effect that can have on recruiting new members,” he said.

“[Trump] is not going to be playing anymore, he is not going to be prioritizing the human rights of criminals over those of his own citizens.

“If you don’t obey Tren de Aragua or MS-13, you pay with your life, and [Trump] is saying, ‘Guess what, that’s what’s going to happen [to the gangsters].’”

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.