By YUSEF RAMÍREZ
The Trump administration is waging a new round of the “war on drugs” against Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The bombings of fishing vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and new military pacts between the United States and several right-wing governments in Latin America point to an escalation of U.S. aggression in the region. The “war on drugs”—or, now, the war against “narcoterrorism”—is a war waged by imperialists and the wealthy against the working class and oppressed peoples of Latin America.
At the United Nations General Assembly in September 2026, Donald Trump declared: “Upon taking office, I designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and deployed the United States Armed Forces to eliminate them. The cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere: they are NOT good people. They are enemies waging war against civilization, using murder, rape, torture, and extortion as instruments of terror. Like ISIS, they should be killed, expelled, or detained as enemy combatants, with no possibility of release.”
The U.S. government has designated eight Mexican cartels as “terrorist organizations,” out of a total of 21 across Latin America. This designation not only provides an ideological justification for U.S. intervention in Mexico but also facilitates greater access to government resources to pursue, imprison, and kill those accused of trafficking drugs into the United States. The comparison with ISIS is no coincidence: it seeks to convince public opinion to accept Washington’s war plans in Latin America under the pretext of defending “national security.”
Over the past two years, several developments in U.S.-Mexico relations have helped us to understand how the United States uses the fight against “narcoterrorism” to pressure the Mexican government and force it to comply with its demands.
Mexican government’s response to U.S. blackmail
In February 2025, the Trump regime demanded that Mexico stop the flow of drugs and migrants through its territory into the United States in exchange for lifting the tariffs imposed on Mexican products. In response, President Claudia Sheinbaum sent an additional 10,000 soldiers to the U.S. border, adding to the 5000 deployed by former President López Obrador. On the U.S. side, 9000 soldiers patrol the border. This growing militarization increases the deadly risks for migrants attempting to cross into the United States and normalizes the military occupation of cities in northern Mexico.
As researcher Dawn Paley describes it: “In Mexico, the militarization of prohibition has fueled extreme violence for nearly two decades. The strategy of using soldiers—who, it should be noted, are armed and trained by the U.S.—in policing roles to control drug trafficking has led Mexico down a path of profound suffering, with more than half a million direct victims of homicide and disappearance and hundreds of thousands displaced since December 2006.”
Indeed, through these security agreements between the U.S. and Mexico, under which Mexico’s National Guard arrests, deports, and attacks migrants entering through Mexico’s southern border, the United States is extending its southern border to the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize border, using Mexican agents as an extension of its own border forces.
In 2025, two CIA agents who were reportedly in Mexico investigating drug trafficking died in a car accident in Chihuahua. President Sheinbaum claimed she was unaware of their presence. It is difficult to know whether the federal government knew about it, but the episode reveals the difficult position Sheinbaum finds herself in: If she knew the agents were there, her rhetoric about defending Mexican sovereignty would lose credibility; if she did not know, her position vis-à-vis the United States would be weakened. The federal government has brought former Chihuahua Attorney General César Jáuregui to trial for violating Mexican laws prohibiting the presence of foreign military forces on Mexican soil and for failing to inform the federal government of CIA activities in his state.
In 2024, Joaquín Guzmán López, son of “El Chapo” Guzmán, tricked drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada into boarding a plane that landed in Texas, where FBI agents arrested both men and charged them with drug trafficking. While the U.S. government maintains that its forces did not operate on Mexican soil, the Mexican government once again claims it was unaware of the FBI’s plans.
In the spring of 2025, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) posted on social media that its agents had participated in an anti-drug raid in Sinaloa in collaboration with Mexican security forces. Both the U.S. embassy and the Mexican government disputed that claim, maintaining that the United States had only provided intelligence for an operation led by Mexican forces.
The presence of U.S. forces in Mexico includes surveillance drone flights over Mexican territory, U.S. personnel evaluating and training Mexican troops, and intelligence sharing between the two states. The Mexican government used U.S. intelligence—and probably direct CIA support—to kill Nemesio Oseguera, known as “El Mencho,” then Mexico’s most-wanted man. This triggered a wave of violence against the state and between rival cartel factions in different parts of the country. It is no coincidence that this operation took place shortly after the Trump regime invaded Venezuela to arrest Nicolás Maduro. The message sent to the peoples of Latin America through that invasion was clear: they had better align themselves with U.S. policy in the region. And Claudia Sheinbaum did just that.
Although CIA covert operations are widely documented, including by U.S. media outlets, the Mexican government continues to deny the presence of U.S. forces in Mexico and insists that the United States must not cross that line. This highlights growing tensions between different sectors of the Mexican capitalist state: on the one hand, those acting outside the federal government in collusion with the U.S. armed forces, as occurred in Chihuahua; on the other, the federal government itself, which seeks to avoid the popular backlash that a U.S. military occupation of Mexico would provoke.
In addition to imposing its military control over Mexico, the United States is expanding the reach of its judicial system within the country. Although extraditions from Mexico to the United States are nothing new, the Trump administration has intensified them. In 2025, the ruling party, MORENA, agreed to extradite 92 prominent Mexican drug lords to the U.S. judicial system. The United States is now demanding the extradition of nine prominent figures in Mexican politics and security forces over their alleged links to drug trafficking. The most prominent of these nine is Rubén Rocha Moya, former governor of Sinaloa. He is a member of MORENA, the party to which Sheinbaum belongs, and she initially defended him against criticism. So far, the Mexican government has refused to extradite him, claiming there is insufficient evidence. However, the real reason is political: if President Sheinbaum agrees to extradite a member of her own party, it could trigger an internal crisis within MORENA.
The Mexican government is aware of how unpopular U.S. intervention would be among its own population: four out of five Mexicans oppose it. If Mexico allowed a U.S. military occupation of part of its territory, anti-imperialist sentiment could erupt and trigger a political crisis for the Mexican government. Mexican national consciousness is shaped by a strong anti-American sentiment rooted in the seizure of half of Mexico’s territory by the United States during the war between the two countries in the 19th century, as well as in armed resistance to the U.S. occupation of Veracruz in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution. Therefore, MORENA’s strategy is to act as a subordinate of U.S. military interests while presenting itself as governing a “sovereign” nation.
By using its enormous economic and political influence over Mexico, the United States can turn the Mexican army into an extension of its own interests, using it to establish a regime of terror in Mexico that serves U.S. imperialism’s need to dominate its most important trade corridor. Billions of dollars’ worth of legal and illegal goods pass through it every day, and the bourgeoisies of both countries collaborate in systematic acts of corruption. While the media blame Mexicans for huachicol, or oil smuggling between the U.S. and Mexico, this is an industry that requires the active participation of companies, agents, and operators on both sides of the border and represents a drain on Mexico’s energy wealth.
As with previous U.S. attempts to supposedly curb drug production in Latin America, the latest version of the “war on drugs” in Mexico has had no significant impact on drug trafficking or drug consumption in the United States. The decline in fentanyl seizures and overdose deaths in the United States began before Trump implemented his policies, so these developments can hardly be attributed to operations along the border or inside Mexico. Overall, both the flow of drugs and their prices have remained stable. This even concerns US military analysts, who consider military intervention in the “war on drugs” a waste of resources that weakens an arsenal already under pressure from the war in Iran.
The continental reach of security agreements between the U.S. and Latin American governments
In March 2026, the United States and its right-wing allies in Latin America, including Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, and Javier Milei of Argentina, formed the Shield of the Americas, a U.S.-led military alliance to coordinate action against “narcoterrorism” in Latin America. Mexico is not part of this alliance because it does not want to appear openly associated with the region’s far-right regimes. However, this does not change Mexico’s willingness to submit to U.S. military domination.
In Ecuador, U.S. military personnel carried out a raid against suspected members of Mexican cartels in late September, alongside Ecuadorian police, in one of several joint operations with the Ecuadorian armed forces. The United States has carried out similar special operations and bombings in Colombia and Venezuela, and more covertly, in Mexico.
As the United States prepares new troop deployments in Central and South America, U.S. military activity will remain a central feature of its policy toward Latin America. Concerned about China’s growing presence on the continent, the United States is intensifying its military campaign to reassert its dominance over the region, particularly over the strategic energy and mineral resources needed by the military and artificial intelligence industries.
U.S. militarization in Mexico is part of a broader process through which the United States seeks to impose its economic terms on Mexico. In the current USMCA negotiations, one of the main U.S. demands is that automotive production between the two countries include more North American components and limit the use of inputs from “third countries,” meaning China. As we have seen with Mexico’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports and the cancellation of plans to build a plant for the Chinese automotive company BYD, Mexico will accept U.S. conditions because, in reality, it has very little room to maneuver as a country subordinate to the United States. The Americans need to intensify their exploitation of Mexican labor and natural resources to compete with their main rival on the continent and on the world stage, China.
The “war on drugs” has never truly aimed to end drug trafficking or help put an end to drug addiction. Drug trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry that benefits capitalists in much the same way as many other industries: it generates profits and power. U.S. banks and politicians benefit from this business, as do Latin American elites. In fact, it is the North American ruling class that profits the most; when drugs cross the border, their prices skyrocket, generating enormous revenues that are laundered through U.S. banks and become intertwined with the human trafficking and sex tourism industries, among other illicit sectors. As Dawn Paley points out in her book “Drug War Capitalism,” “85% of gross revenues in the cocaine market remained in the United States.” Therefore, the current drug war is nothing more than an effort by U.S. imperialism to manage this industry in accordance with its economic and political interests.
The socialist response
For Mexico and the rest of Latin America, the “war on drugs” has generated violence, displacement, disappearances, and terror among the working class and the oppressed. Revolutionary socialists support the struggles of workers and small business owners, searching mothers, feminist organizations, and Indigenous peoples against drug-trafficking violence. At the same time, we point out that this violence is the result of a U.S. imperialist policy that—together with its allies among the Mexican elite—profits from the drug industry while manufacturing a “war on drugs” to justify the militarization of Mexican society, restricting democratic rights and the political space for mobilization.
Revolutionary socialists put forward concrete demands for the working class to confront this reality. To begin with, we call for the cancellation of military agreements between the U.S. and Mexico, as well as the return of Mexican soldiers to their barracks. As Dawn Paley explained in “Drug War Capitalism,” the militarization supposedly aimed at combating drugs, imposed by the Mexican state since 2006, did nothing but intensify violence and disappearances, without having any significant effect on the flow or use of drugs. Therefore, we defend the right to working-class and Indigenous self-defense against this state and parastatal violence, as already practiced in some places, particularly among Mexico’s Indigenous peoples.
In the context of disappearances and kidnappings across the country, we denounce the active participation of state officials and demand their arrest and imprisonment. Furthermore, it is important to cancel the imperialist debt Mexico pays to international creditors—primarily the United States—which represents one-third of Mexico’s GDP, and to invest this wealth in meeting the needs of the Mexican people.
Photo: In February, Trump talked about sending U.S. troops into Mexico as part of the “war” against drug cartels. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)