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An extraordinary episode in the two centuries of Mexican-American relations unfolded on Feb. 27, as aircraft of the Mexican state flew northward to various locations across the United States. They carried within them 29 of the most-wanted Mexican-cartel leaders hitherto held in their own country, and now remanded to the justice of the Americans.
Most meaningfully for the receiving nation, the aging Rafa Caro Quintero stepped off a plane to the welcome of the DEA and DOJ personnel whose colleague, Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena, he murdered 40 years before. Arraigned the next day in a U.S. federal courtroom, Caro Quintero was shackled with Camarena’s own handcuffs.
The United States has waited a long time for him, and for the many other cartel lords and killers who now come into its hands.
The questions are why it has waited, and why it no longer waits, if only in these specific cases. Caro Quintero and the other 28 cartel leaders had been prisoners of Mexico for years, and the United States had been requesting their extradition for years. In 2022, the Biden regime even gave the Mexican government a list of desired extraditions, including Caro Quintero – but the previous year, 2021, had seen the lowest level of Mexican extraditions to the U.S. in 15 years, and things would not improve so long as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador remained president.
The source of AMLO’s delay was no mystery: he and his ruling Morena coalition, which has nearly transformed Mexico into a leftist one-party state, have long-standing ties with narco leaders, most notably within the Sinaloa Cartel. This Mexican state-cartel synthesis, referenced directly by the White House as ‘an intolerable alliance,’ effectively precluded meaningful and strategic cooperation between the two nations against its criminal cartels.
What has changed? In a word: Donald Trump. The American president, who was among those who rationally believed that a workable deal could be struck with AMLO and his regime at its outset, now possesses an accurate assessment of the Mexican state’s basic nature, and is making policy accordingly.
The well-known threatened tariffs, across-the-board implementation of which are now delayed for a second month to April 2, are one element and the most public-facing of the tools he has directed his administration to wield. The mere threat of them has manifestly exerted tremendous effect upon Mexican officialdom’s thinking.
Despite much discussion in Mexico that the country will simply turn to China if American trade relations are disrupted, the reality is that the country’s economy will be plunged into disarray long before any Chinese remedy takes effect.
Though the Mexican regime does not particularly care about the welfare of its people – having presided over an internal war that has seen the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans by its own cartel allies and sometimes its own armed forces – it does care for its own position and privileges, and so an economic collapse alarms it in ways that death and cruelty among its own people does not.
The other major tool wielded by the president against the Mexican state-cartel alliance has been alluded to, but never made explicit, in public. It is the threat of unilateral American military action within Mexico, and as reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals, it was made explicit in a Jan. 31 conversation between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and unnamed senior Mexican-military leadership, in which the latter were informed ‘that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action.’ The Mexicans were reportedly astonished and indignant.
Their astonishment is their own fault: many observers have told them for years that American patience with their cartel partnerships would eventually run out. That it had no effect is partially indicative of the ideological fever dream in which the Morena regime operates. It is also, to a larger part, rational, because no American president has ever before brought real consequences to bear.
Their indignation, by contrast, has no defense except by reference to the perennial Mexican civic narrative that its sovereignty is forever menaced by the United States.
Yet the Mexican state routinely fails to give the respect to its neighbor that it loudly demands for itself. It partners with trafficking organizations that directly attack American sovereignty and citizenry with illegal mass migration, deadly fentanyl, and more. It establishes Morena party cells within the United States and activates them when desired.
It interferes, however ineptly, in American elections. Its armed forces in uniform are routinely encountered within the United States, often protecting trafficking cartel shipments and occasionally taking an American soldier prisoner. Its cartel partners frequently kill American citizens in Mexico, and menace Americans in the United States. It is a deeply rooted victim mentality that receives a well-earned warning from the U.S. secretary of defense and responds with wounded pride. Yet so it is.
Need it be said, a regime genuinely interested in the defense of its own national sovereignty would not surrender 30% to 40% of its national territory to cartel governance. Yet it has. A Mexican state determined to defend its territorial integrity would not back down again and again versus cartel challenges. Yet it has. It is useless to ask why: everyone in Mexico knows why. Those on the lower rungs of the social ladder risk death, and those on the upper rungs get rich.
Unlike every previous American president of the modern era, Donald Trump understands this, and via his secretaries of defense and state, and others, he is delivering the message to the Mexican regime: we will respect your sovereignty as much as you respect ours. In fact, we will respect it as much as you respect yours.
This, then, is the key to understanding why the Mexican state under President Claudia Sheinbaum is abruptly disgorging its prisoners into the hands of the Americans, and why it is furthermore making a show of going after cartel operations in various parts of the country. Mexican officialdom – the state and its elites – is betraying its criminal-sector partners in the hopes that it will satisfy the United States, lest the Americans go after them.
It is furthermore shutting down, temporarily, the great cartel-controlled influx of trafficked persons that has numbered in the millions across the past decade. These efforts are having a real effect on cartel operations in the short run, although as the New York Times writes, they don’t expect it to last: ‘Cartel members said the only reason the government hadn’t really fought them until recently was because they’d bought off enough officials,’ and they expect that status quo ante will return.
They are probably right. Mexican grand strategy, never a robust corpus of thought, has always had as a major pillar the imperative to keep the Americans out. In the past half-century a second pillar has been erected, which is the imperative to profit from the Americans. There is a tension between the two, especially when the second conflicts with the first by virtue of cartel and trafficking operations.
Eventually the superstructure of multibillion-dollar illegal trade and the political-powerholder buyoffs that render it useful to nearly the whole apparatus of governance will reassert itself. The intent now, on the Mexican side, is simply to buy time until the Americans, believing they have secured a political win, move on to the next crisis. In that light, the sacrifice of the great mass of expendable bosses, lab men and sicarios is the price of business. There are rumors that a corrupt state governor may even be offered to placate the United States.
Then, Mexican officialdom will make the case that all this cooperation is so valuable, the Americans dare not risk it by, say, imposing tariffs or attacking cartels or indicting former Mexican presidents – in short, by doing anything that imperils the Mexican governing elites themselves. This is a potent line of argument, according to some reports with purchase in the White House itself – although not, in any reporting, with the American president himself. This author has heard it directly from U.S. government personnel in Mexico City, and has also heard it from Mexican-government personnel, expressive of an operational logic reminiscent of criminal extortion.
The test for American policymaking now is whether it makes the mistake of believing the Mexican narrative. It ought not.
The Mexican state has done several things right since Jan. 20, 2025, but we must understand that it did so under extraordinary duress. The president had to threaten tariffs, and the secretary of defense had to threaten U.S. military intervention for the first time in a century, to compel the Mexican government to execute on the most-basic tasks of any state: control its territory and deliver criminals to justice.
That duress is amplified by threats from its erstwhile cartel partners as well: Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, for example, now in U.S. custody, has threatened to ‘collapse’ U.S.-Mexican relations by telling all he knows if the Mexicans fail to secure his return to Mexico.
President Trump, offering the carrot as well as the stick, has been effusive in his praise – as is diplomatically prudent – for the Mexican president in her efforts to date. His administration has simultaneously signaled that Mexican politicians are coming into American view as proper targets of justice.
What the Morena regime in Mexico now wishes to do is navigate these straits with its own powerholders and eminences essentially untouched. Chief among them is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose long-rumored ties to the Sinaloa Cartel would likely not withstand renewed scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice.
If it is allowed to do so, then America will simply face a greater crisis later, when Morena has completed its openly stated transformation of Mexican society into a Venezuelan-model left-populist autocracy, cartel and trafficking operations have resumed with different narcos in partnership with the same elites, and Mexican-government solicitation of offshore balancers in China and Russia has matured into effective operational partnership.
Bad as the Mexican crisis has been for both ordinary Mexicans and Americans across the past two decades, it pales versus what will come to pass when the Morena ambition is fulfilled. We have already seen Chinese and Russian soldiers marching in review before the Mexican president in independence-day celebrations, and we have already seen that same Mexican president declare that he would have his armed forces defend the cartels against American action. These are warnings of worse to come, and we must pay attention, because they are not expressions of sentiment alone: they are programmatic.
Put differently, this is a regime that, by its nature, is not amenable to a long-term partnership with the United States.
The bad news is that every previous American administration would have been satisfied with the Mexican offer on hand now. The good news is that this administration will likely not be.
President Trump has taken an accurate measure of the Mexican regime. What remains is to put his vision into action. Policy takes time to unfold, but we know what success looks like: neither narcos nor their friends in Mexican governance, from alcaldes to generals to presidents, are safe any longer inside Mexico. They are not safe from the long reach of the American neighbor whose citizens they have killed, whose border they have violated, and whose sovereignty they have disregarded for so very long.
Mexico’s regime wants a cooperative agreement. But America wants justice.
