Donald Trump has found a new mission for the CIA—ramping up secret drone flights over Mexico to track and hunt down leaders of Mexico’s drug cartels.
The New York Times reported in mid-February that the CIA’s covert drone program over Mexico, first initiated by the Biden administration, has proved useful in helping the Mexican government to locate fentanyl labs, which emit chemicals that make them easy to find from the air.
During the 2024 election, Trump called for the death penalty for drug dealers. Then on January 20, he signed an executive order calling for a major crackdown on Mexico’s cartels, which have been designated as a foreign terrorist organization—a label that sets the groundwork for potential U.S. military operations directed against them.[1]
On February 28, the Trump administration secured the extradition of 30 prominent Mexican cartel leaders, including Rafael Cara Quintero, a founding member of the Sinaloa drug cartel who was convicted in Mexico of masterminding the 1985 assassination of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.[2]
Trump may have found a willing partner for his hard-line anti-drug policies in Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, a darling of the liberal media who seems to have abandoned her predecessor, Manuel López Obrador’s progressive “hugs not bullets policy” that was designed to address the root causes of crime by initiating a significant military buildup in the Sinaloa province and along the U.S.-Mexican border.[3]
Trump Draws Off Cultural Stereotypes in Supporting the “Deep State”
Trump’s use of the CIA in escalating the War on Drugs in Mexico undercuts the narrative of the MAGA movement that their hero is doing battle with the dark forces of the “deep state.”
The War on Drugs has been for decades one of the epic boondoggles of the military-industrial complex and a most wasteful government program that has provided a pretext for the CIA and other “deep state” agencies to expand repressive surveillance and police-state measures.
In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the War on Drugs has often provided a pretext for greater U.S. military intervention targeting left-wing groups that challenge U.S. corporate interests and that enhance the ability of multinational corporations to exploit natural resources.[4]
The futility of Trump’s expansion of CIA drone surveillance is underscored by the fact that a decline in fentanyl production in Culiacán, where illicit labs are located, would not necessarily affect the flow of fentanyl north since fentanyl is easy to make and criminal gangs can easily move the labs somewhere else.
These gangs are now investing in advanced equipment to detect American drones so they can stay one step ahead of them.[5]
Public support for Trump’s policies emanates from the way the public has been conditioned to see drugs as an unmitigated evil imposed on them by villainous foreign drug cartels.
Media outlets, Hollywood films and Netflix series have long presented lurid stories of the drug cartel’s bestiality and corruption of American life.
Most of the stories fail to explore the structural forces and neo-liberal economic policies that have fueled the growth of the drug trade in Mexico and high rates of demand for drugs in the U.S.
With rare exception, they additionally do not explore the merger of state policing agencies with drug trafficking gangs and government corruption extending to the U.S. that has ensured the War on Drugs’ failure.
Fentanyl Moral Panic
Support for Trump’s escalation of the War on Drugs is being fueled in part by alarmist media reports resulting in inflated public fears about fentanyl that fit a pattern in recent U.S. history.[6]
A September 2020 article in the International Journal of Drug Policy discussed a proliferation of false stories being spread over social media that claimed Americans were dying of overdoses after coming into mere casual contact with fentanyl.[7]
In 2016, mainstream media outlets reported that 63,632 Americans died from “fentanyl overdoses,” which was actually the number who died from all drugs—including aspirin, acetaminophen, antidepressants, and cocaine.[8]
From 2002 to 2016 prescription pain medicines resulted in about half the deaths of people from accidental falls, with most of those deaths having resulted from polypharmacy where other drugs or alcohol were involved.[9]
Trump added to the disinformation by claiming that Joe Biden’s “Open Border” policy was behind the supposed fentanyl epidemic, when most illicitly produced fentanyl is smuggled into the U.S. through legal ports of entry—by U.S. citizens, and not Mexican migrants.[10]
Fighting Another Mythic Enemy
Oswaldo Zavala’s book, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narco-Trafficking and Culture in the US and Mexico, punctures a number of key myths underlying Trump’s War on Drugs and that of his predecessors.
Central to these myths is that of the menacing and supremely evil Mexican drug cartels.
A professor of Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York (CUNY), Zavala argues that drug cartels do not really exist—at least not in the way that they are presented by the Trump administration and media.
According to Zavala, control over the Mexican drug trade is heavily decentralized. Turf wars often emerge between gangs led by young men in their 20s and 30s who grew up poor and are uneducated.
Famous drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán are far less powerful than they are made out to be.
Their capture is heavily publicized in the media as theater designed to legitimate oppressive police-state measures that fail to address the root causes underlying the growth of organized crime and drug use in society.
Study after study has shown that aggressive policing measures and military operations like those now being advanced by the Trump administration (like Biden and Obama and Bush before him) cause traffickers to turn on one another while intensifying competition for control over rackets.[11]
U.S.-backed military operations in Mexico have resulted in egregious human rights abuses by army and police units, whose brutality often eclipses that of the drug gangs.
Drug-war operations contribute to the displacement of farmers, whose land is taken over by multi-national corporations that are intent on setting up mining ventures or drilling for oil.[12]
The specter of the all-powerful cartel is invoked in order to condition support for the War on Drugs, whose real purpose is as a subterfuge for wider U.S. military intervention in Mexico and the extension of U.S. economic and political control over the country.
To help prove his thesis, Zavala quotes from a 1994 interview between a Time magazine journalist and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, a Colombian drug trafficker who allegedly headed the Cali drug cartel with his brother Miguel. Orejuela said that the Cali cartel simply did not exist: It was “an invention of the DEA…There are many groups, not just one cartel. The police and the DEA know. But they prefer to invent a monolithic enemy.”[13]
British journalist Ioan Grillo was given the same response in Colombia when interviewing the “narco-attorney” Gustavo Salazar, the legal representative of the alleged Medellín cartel, who told him: “Cartels do not exist. What you have is a collection of drug traffickers. Sometimes, they would work together and sometimes they don’t. American prosecutors just call them cartels to make it easier to make their case. It is all part of the game.”[14]
Ties That Bind: Government and Organized Crime
Zavala became an expert on the drug trade through his work in the 1990s as a journalist for a popular newspaper in northern Mexico. At the time, he developed the understanding that “the cartels are a symbolic device whose main function is to hide the real networks of official power that determined the flow of drug trafficking.”[15]
These networks include the CIA, whose direct involvement in drug trafficking in Central and South America was exposed by journalist Gary Webb among others.
Zavala points out that many of the drug traffickers who gained notoriety worked for law enforcement and the military and have been seen in public with well-known politicians.
Throughout much of Mexico, trafficking gangs pay protection fees to local politicians.
Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS)—which has long collaborated with the CIA—has controlled many protection rackets, clashing at times over narcotics with the federal police (PJF).
In the mid-1980s, the DEA reported that drug traffickers commonly traveled the streets and highways with automatic weapons carrying credentials from the DFS or other Mexican law enforcement agencies.[16]
Terrence E. Poppa’s book Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, published in 1990, detailed the control that the Mexican political system exercised over organized crime.
A drug trafficker whom he followed in the town of Ojinaga named Pablo Acosta had to pay a monthly fee to local politicians to operate in a specific part of the city. In exchange for paying this private tax, he and his associates were given badges from the Federal Police.[17]
If this is still going on, how will the CIA surveillance operations and Trump’s escalation of the drug war actually cut the supply of drugs into the U.S., especially if demand caused by widening social inequalities and societal breakdown in the U.S. continues to escalate?
Failed Plan Mérida
Progressives should invoke the failure of the Mérida initiative to try to mobilize against the Trump administration’s escalation of the War on Drugs in Mexico.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. government spent $3.3 billion on Plan Mérida from 2008 when it was first inaugurated through 2022.[18]
Plan Mérida was modeled after Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion drug-war program championed by Joe Biden that provided heavy grade equipment to the Colombian military throughout the early 2000s and contributed to the displacement of more than seven million people, largely due to aerial fumigation programs that caused major health and environmental problems.[19]
A key underlying goal of Plan Colombia was to help the Colombian military to defeat the leftist FARC guerrillas, who were branded as narco-guerrillas when the largest drug gangs were allied to the government like in Mexico and on the political right.[20]
Under Plan Mérida, the U.S. government supplied Mexico’s military and law enforcement agencies with sophisticated surveillance and other social control technologies, along with helicopters, maritime patrol planes, and military gear.
Only a tiny percentage of Plan Mérida funds were devoted to advancing police and judicial reform.[21] Little to no money was further allotted for drug treatment and harm reduction—which are far more effective in decreasing the drug trade than punitive and military approaches—and a pittance was budgeted for anti-poverty programs capable of providing better opportunities for Mexican youth who might be prone to join drug gangs.[22]
An additional flaw in Plan Mérida was that it included no counterpart measures to reduce the U.S. market, improve customs control on the northern side of the border, reduce retailing and distribution, eliminate illegal arms traffic and prosecute money-laundering—all problems located firmly within the U.S.[23]
Zavala details how Plan Mérida and militarization of the War on Drugs contributed to a massive spike in violence and homicides during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).
A large number of the killings during this period were carried out by Mexican soldiers and police officers equipped with U.S. surveillance gear and weapons produced by corporations that donate heavily to both the Democratic and Republican parties.[24]
Mexico’s drug gangs were also heavily armed through the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious, which flooded Mexico with weapons as part of a failed scheme to entrap drug gang leaders.[25]
Mexicans today consider Calderón to be a war criminal who should be charged with major human rights crimes or even genocide.
The CIA’s contribution to Plan Mérida was its operating a fusion center in Monterrey to help monitor drone surveillance footage from missions flown deep into Mexico’s interior. [26]
CIA-linked firms also trained police anti-narcotics units, one of which was captured on video training an elite Mexican police unit in what appeared to be torture techniques.[27]
If Trump Were Serious About Fighting Drugs…
Instead of ramping up the CIA’s nefarious operations in Mexico, the Trump administration—if it were serious about curbing drug-related violence—could tighten restrictions on gun sales and make it more difficult for Mexican gang members to buy guns in the U.S.
Trump could also stop flooding Mexico with military-grade weapons that are sold on the black market by corrupt military officers, many of whom defect to the drug gangs, or otherwise use the weapons to nefarious effect.
A further move that the Trump administration could take would be to crack down on money-laundering banks that enable drug profits to flow freely.
Still another would be to address the social inequality and anomie underlying rising drug-use patterns in the U.S.
The latter has resulted from the depredations of the predatory capitalist class to which Trump is very much tied so, of course, he will do nothing to try to curtail it.
The New York Times reported that a group of Trump aides headed by Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism within the National Security Council, is pressing for more aggressive U.S. military action against the cartels. Alan Feuer and Maria Abi-Habib, “Trump Aides Split: Fight Drug Cartels With Mexico, or Despite It,” The New York Times, February 28, 2025, A4. ↑
Alan Feuer, “Mexico Places Cartel Leaders in U.S. Custody,” The New York Times, February 28, 2025, A1. ↑
Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas, “Used to Causing Dread, Drug Cartel Now Feels It,” The New York Times, March 3, 2023, A1, A8. Sheinbaum had vowed to continue AMLO’s more liberal drug policy but seems to have backtracked. Fawning portraits of Sheinbaum in U.S. liberal media can be found here, here and here. ↑
See Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014). ↑
Kitroeff and Villegas, “Used to Causing Dread, Drug Cartel Now Feels It,” A8. On the limits of the high-tech War on Drugs, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Failure of the High-Tech War on Drugs,” Diplomatic History, 45, 5 (November 2021), 903-914. ↑
For historical parallels, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, Eds., Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). ↑
The article warned about how fentanyl hysteria manufactured by the media was engendering “counterproductive policies, including hyper-punitive responses.” See also Casey Ross, “Are people really falling ill from touching fentanyl? In most cases, scientists say no,” Stat News, August 9, 2017; https://www.acmt.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Fentanyl_PPE_Emergency_Responders_.pdf. Comparisons can be made with COVID-19 and how alarmist media reports fueled an international moral panic that resulted in public acquiescence to regressive social policies serving the interests of powerful corporations and oligarchic elites. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Drug Scares of the 1970s and 1980s Set the Groundwork For the Great COVID Scare of 2020,” Substack, July 26, 2024. ↑
Iris Erlingsdóttir, “The Opioid Misinformation Epidemic,” American Council on Science and Health, January 29, 2019. Erlingsdóttir noted that “opioid prescription medications…don’t quite live up to their lethal-killer reputation.” ↑
Erlingsdóttir, “The Opioid Misinformation Epidemic.” ↑
Manisha Krishnan, “The GOP Is Manufacturing a Moral Panic Over Fentanyl Smuggling,” Vice, October 21, 2022. In 2021, about 85% of people convicted of fentanyl trafficking were U.S. citizens compared to about 8% who were “illegal non citizens,” according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. ↑
See, for example, Benjamin T. Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). The loosening of gun restrictions—exemplified by the expiration in 2004 (during the Bush II administration) of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act preventing the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons to civilians—has given cartel members easier access to firearms, resulting in a spiraling murder rate. ↑
Oswaldo Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narco-Trafficking and Culture in the US and Mexico (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022); Paley, Drug War Capitalism. ↑
Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, 3, 4. ↑
Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, 4. ↑
Idem. ↑
Terrence E. Poppa, Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin (Demand Publications, 1998). ↑
Some of the funds for Plan Mérida have now been frozen because of the freeze on USAID, which coordinated some of the programs under Plan Mérida. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Forgotten Story of How Joe Biden Helped Ramp Up the War on Drugs in Colombia,” CovertAction Magazine, January 11, 2021. Plan Colombia contributed to entrenched violence and corruption in Colombia while failing to reduce drug flows to the U.S. To implement the plan, the U.S. allied with a corrupt, right-wing government headed by Alvaro Uribe Vélez who had ties with the Medellín drug gang. ↑
Kuzmarov, “The Forgotten Story of How Joe Biden Helped Ramp Up the War on Drugs in Colombia.” FARC stands for Fuerzas Armada Revolucionario de Colombia. ↑
Laura Carlsen, “A Primer on Plan Mexico” The Narco News Bulletin, May 26, 2008. Carlsen pointed out that most of the funds devoted to the judiciary and police went towards the creation of centralized databank systems that enhanced state repressive capabilities. The U.S. history of training police in repressive techniques augured poorly. There was generally an underlying colonialist assumption that the U.S. could impose its supposedly superior institutions on Mexico when only Mexicans could reform their own institutions in needed areas. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2019), 296-299; Carlsen, “A Primer on Plan Mexico.” Carlsen correctly predicted in 2008 that Plan Mérida would contribute to a spike in violence and human rights abuses. ↑
Carlsen, “A Primer on Plan Mexico.” Carlsen details how Plan Mérida represented a major violation of Mexican sovereignty. She imagines a reverse Plan Mérida in the U.S. completely funded by the Mexican government, that would “place Mexican drug enforcement agents in border customs offices and key points in the interior, including Laredo, Kansas City, Miami and New York. A new wiretapping system, produced by SPY-MEX and supervised by Mexican intelligence officers, will monitor private communications of U.S. citizens suspected of involvement with organized crime, while Mexican-made planes overfly communities thought to be located along drug trafficking routes. The U.S. army, recently deployed to cities across the nation to fight the drug war, will receive arms and training from Mexico.” Carlsen wrote that, if this were ever implemented, “newspapers and blogs would explode with cries of a Mexican re-conquest and the sacrifice of U.S. sovereignty. Yet there is virtually nothing in this scenario that is not already on the table for Mexico.” ↑
Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, 80, 138. Many of these companies also donated generously to the Clinton Foundation at the time when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and championed Plan Mérida. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 4. Zavala cites an Amnesty International report which documented hundreds of cases in which citizens of Juarez, then Mexico’s murder capital, were kidnapped, tortured and murdered at the hands of soldiers sent by Felipe Calderón as part of Operation Chihuahua to attack alleged drug cartels. See, additionally, Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (New York: Bold Type Books, 2011). ↑
Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 298. ↑
Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 299. A key component of Plan Mérida was to bolster intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico. ↑
Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 299. ↑
CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptions, orders and donations from readers like you.
Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism
Click the whistle and donate
When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.
CovertAction Magazine does not receive corporate or government sponsorship. Yet, we hold a steadfast commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as increase the caliber of this work.
Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and enter the amount and your credit or debit card information.
CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your gift is tax-deductible for federal income purposes. CAI’s tax-exempt ID number is 87-2461683.
We sincerely thank you for your support.
Disclaimer: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s). CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI), including its Board of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff, volunteers and its projects (including CovertAction Magazine) are not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.
Differing viewpoints: CAM publishes articles with differing viewpoints in an effort to nurture vibrant debate and thoughtful critical analysis. Feel free to comment on the articles in the comment section and/or send your letters to the Editors, which we will publish in the Letters column.
Copyrighted Material: This web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a not-for-profit charitable organization incorporated in the State of New York, we are making such material available in an effort to advance the understanding of humanity’s problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. You can read more about ‘fair use’ and US Copyright Law at the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.
Republishing: CovertAction Magazine (CAM) grants permission to cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original CovertAction Magazine article. Also, kindly let us know at info@CovertActionMagazine.com. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: info@CovertActionMagazine.com.
By using this site, you agree to these terms above.
About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Claudia Sheibaum’s peaceful non confrontational style of communicating with people seems to be very effective in dealing with Trump, who is a person who hates dealing with confrontational people. Trump seems to like Claudia and this may have influenced him to postpone or cancel some of his promised tariffs, although the threat of future tariffs remains . I think she will be a very good President for Mexico. She is more of a listener than a talker which is a good quality for a politician to have as most politicians are excessive talkers.
Here is an interesting podcast which sheds more light on the fentanyl problem:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and-chinas-role-in-the-us-opioid-crisis/
The components and precursors that are used to manufacture fentanyl come from China. This raises the question. Why is China exporting chemical components that are harmful to human health. China knows that Fentanyl is harmful, yet continues to export the components needed to manufacture Fentanyl.
https://en.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/esta-china-usando-el-fentanilo-como-arma-contra-estados-unidos