Series: “The Business of Cartels” - Part 5: The War and Its Costs
The Business of Cartels
Part 5: The War and Its Costs
There's a number that anchors this whole series, and it's worth putting it up front instead of building toward it: since Mexico's government declared war on its cartels in December 2006, somewhere north of 100,000+ people have disappeared, and hundreds of thousands more have been killed. Twenty years in, the fentanyl crisis is worse than the crack and heroin epidemics that came before it, the cartels are more fragmented and more violent than they were at the start, and the U.S. and Mexican governments are now openly arguing about whether American drones should be flying combat missions over Mexican soil. However this war was supposed to end, it hasn't ended that way.
The Body Count
Felipe Calderón sent the Mexican army into the streets in December 2006, in response to a wave of violence in his home state of Michoacán. The idea was to overwhelm the cartels with military force, arrest or kill their leadership, and break their grip on Mexican territory. What actually happened, at least by the numbers, was closer to the opposite. Calderón's own six-year term produced 47,515 drug-war deaths by the government's count, and independent researchers believed the real number was higher. Homicides kept climbing after he left office rather than falling. By 2019, Mexico was recording more than 31,000 murders in a single year, a level his successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had promised to bring down with a softer strategy he called "hugs, not bullets." It didn't work either. Disappearances told a similarly bleak story. Mexican authorities put the number of people missing since the start of the drug war at roughly 40,000 as of 2018. Two years later, a more thorough count using state prosecutors' data pushed that number to 61,637, with more than 5,000 new disappearances in a single year. Most of the people who vanish are men between 15 and 35. Most of the bodies that do get found turn up in mass, unmarked graves, and the vast majority are never identified at all. Put those numbers next to some of the worst state-sponsored violence in modern Latin American history and Mexico's drug war doesn't come out looking better. Roughly 40,000 people disappeared during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. About 30,000 disappeared during Argentina's "dirty war" under military rule from 1976 to 1983. Mexico has now surpassed both of those totals, in a period officially defined as law enforcement, not civil war or dictatorship.
Who Actually Pays the Price
The disappeared and the dead are the clearest cost, but they aren't the only one. Millions of people in Mexico's most violent states have been internally displaced, driven out of towns where cartels have effectively taken over local government, or caught between rival organizations fighting for the same plaza. Whole communities have organized armed self-defense groups, autodefensas, because they concluded, not without reason, that neither the cartels nor the state security forces sent to fight them could be trusted to protect ordinary residents. Journalists covering organized crime in Mexico get killed at a rate that puts the country among the most dangerous in the world for the press, which means a meaningful share of what's actually happening in cartel-controlled territory simply never gets reported, because reporting it can be a death sentence.
None of this falls evenly. Poor, rural areas with weak state presence, exactly the places covered in Part 4, absorb almost all of the violence and almost none of the resources spent fighting it. The war gets fought in Michoacán, Sinaloa, and Tamaulipas. The policy debate about it happens in Mexico City and Washington.
Does Any of This Actually Work
The core question hanging over all twenty years of this is whether prohibition-based enforcement, arresting traffickers, seizing shipments, militarizing the border, actually reduces drug trafficking and violence, or whether it just reorganizes both into more dangerous shapes. Parts 1 and 3 of this series already laid out a lot of the evidence pointing toward the second answer. Prohibition created the profit margins that built the cartels in the first place. The kingpin strategy of removing leadership has repeatedly produced fragmentation and more violence rather than less, from the Guadalajara Cartel's breakup in 1989 through the Sinaloa Cartel's collapse into infighting after El Mayo Zambada's 2024 arrest.
Supporters of the enforcement-first approach argue that letting up entirely would hand cartels an even freer hand, and that abandoning interdiction sends the wrong signal, both to traffickers and to the public. Critics, a group that now includes a fair number of former officials who ran the drug war themselves, argue that fifty years of expanding enforcement, in the U.S. and across Latin America, has never meaningfully reduced the supply of drugs reaching American users, only changed which organizations profit from moving them and how much blood gets spilled doing it. Neither side has an easy answer for the other. Reducing enforcement risks strengthening the cartels in the near term. Continuing it hasn't stopped them so far and has produced twenty years of exactly the kind of state fragility and civilian death toll enforcement was supposed to prevent.
Fentanyl Changed the Math
Everything about this war got more dangerous once fentanyl entered the supply chain. Unlike cocaine or heroin, fentanyl doesn't need a coca field or a poppy crop. It's synthesized from precursor chemicals, most of them sourced from Chinese suppliers, in labs that can be set up almost anywhere, run by a handful of people, and moved or rebuilt in days if one gets raided. That makes it enormously more profitable per shipment and enormously harder to interdict than a plant-based drug with a visible agricultural footprint. It's also, dose for dose, far deadlier, which is why the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have been blamed by U.S. officials for a wave of more than 90,000 overdose deaths a year in the United States. Both organizations have leaned into fentanyl production precisely because it's the highest-margin, lowest-visibility product they've ever had access to, which is really the same economic logic that built the cocaine trade in the 1970s, just faster and more lethal.
Where Things Stand Now
The current landscape is defined by two things happening at once: the cartel landscape is more fractured than it's ever been, and Washington's patience with the status quo has run out. On the fragmentation side, Part 3 already covered how the kingpin strategy tends to splinter organizations rather than dismantle them, and that pattern has only accelerated. What used to be five or six major Mexican cartels has become something closer to twenty smaller, competing groups, according to U.S. officials tracking the shift, each one fighting for territory that used to belong to a single, more stable organization. That instability is a big part of why homicide and disappearance numbers haven't meaningfully improved even as arrest and extradition totals have climbed.
On the U.S. side, the policy shift has been sharp. In January 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order designating six Mexican cartels, along with Venezuela's Tren de Aragua and the street gang MS-13, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The designation does real things: it freezes and seizes assets, stiffens criminal penalties, and expands the legal tools available to U.S. intelligence and military agencies. It also opens the door, at least in theory, to military action against cartel targets inside Mexico, something that would have been unthinkable as official U.S. policy a decade earlier. Reporting through 2025 described the administration actively weighing drone strikes and even covert special operations raids against cartel leadership, with unilateral action against Mexico's wishes treated as a real option rather than a hypothetical. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has flatly rejected any unilateral U.S. military intervention on Mexican soil, citing national sovereignty, while simultaneously deploying thousands of Mexican troops to the northern border and stepping up extraditions, an attempt to show cooperation forceful enough to keep Washington from acting alone.
Whether the terrorist designation actually changes anything on the ground is genuinely contested. Drug policy researchers, including analysts at Brookings and the Cato Institute, have warned that treating cartels as a terrorism problem risks destabilizing an already fragile Mexican state without doing much to touch the fentanyl labs and smuggling networks actually causing American overdose deaths, especially since most fentanyl still crosses into the U.S. through legal ports of entry, carried overwhelmingly by U.S. citizens rather than migrants, a detail that complicates a lot of the political rhetoric surrounding this fight. Cartel-watchers on the ground in Mexico have reported, as of mid-2025, something close to disbelief among rank-and-file cartel members that the American buildup will ever translate into real unilateral strikes, a bet that may or may not hold.
Decades into this war, the throughline connecting all five parts of this series is hard to avoid. Prohibition created the margins that built these organizations. Those organizations turned into businesses sophisticated enough to survive their own leadership being killed or arrested, over and over. And the deeper they've embedded into local economies and state institutions, the harder they've become to dislodge with the tool that's been tried the longest: force. Whether the next chapter of this war, terrorist designations, drone strikes, a more openly militarized U.S. role in Mexico, breaks that pattern or simply repeats it at a larger scale is the question neither government has yet had to answer.
Works Cited
"Mexico: 60,000 'Disappeared' in Drug War." Jurist, 7 Jan. 2020, www.jurist.org/news/2020/01/mexico-authorities-more-than-60000-have-disappeared-amid-drug-war/.
"Over 60,000 Mexicans Disappeared since 2006." Free Press Journal, 6 Jan. 2020, www.freepressjournal.in/world/over-60000-mexicans-disappeared-since-2006.
"More Than 60,000 Mexicans Have 'Disappeared' during Drug War." The Daily Beast, 6 Jan. 2020, www.thedailybeast.com/more-than-60000-mexicans-have-disappeared-during-drug-war.
"22,322 People Have Vanished in Mexico's Drug War." Newsweek, mag.newsweek.com/22322-people-have-vanished-mexicos-drug-war-266258. Accessed 21 Sept. 2026.
Mann, Brian. "Trump Plans to Classify Drug Cartels as Terrorist Organizations." NPR, 20 Jan. 2025, www.npr.org/2025/01/20/g-s1-43800/trump-plans-to-classify-drug-cartels-as-terrorist-organizations.
Jenkins, Colby, testimony cited in "Cross-Border Drone Strikes Against Mexican Drug Cartels." Lieber Institute, West Point, 21 Apr. 2025, lieber.westpoint.edu/cross-border-drone-strikes-against-mexican-drug-cartels/.
"Trump Administration Weighs Drone Strikes on Mexican Cartels." Small Wars Journal, 10 Apr. 2025, smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/10/video-trump-administration-weighs-drone-strikes-on-mexican-cartels/.
"Cartels Are Business as Usual Despite Trump's Terror Designations." Rolling Stone, via Yahoo News, www.yahoo.com/news/cartels-business-usual-despite-trump-143000326.html. Accessed 21 Sept. 2026.
"Could 'Terrorist' Tag on Drug Cartels Lead to US Strikes on Foreign Soil?" ABS-CBN News, 20 Feb. 2025, www.abs-cbn.com/news/world/2025/2/20/could-terrorist-tag-on-drug-cartels-lead-to-us-strikes-on-foreign-soil-1353.
