A US military insurgency against the Mexican drug cartels would be bloody and difficult
Tom Rogan
What to do about the rising violence from Mexico?
Well, were illegal narcotics produced and sold legally in the United States, the production-to-consumption marginal cost of these drugs would fall significantly. The incentives for criminal control over the drug trade would also decline, reducing violent crime rates attached to drug wars. The problem? Consumption of previously proscribed drugs would also likely increase, along with drug-induced criminality and health and social harms. The ease with which the public accesses and dies early deaths due to fentanyl consumption means the legalization of drugs such as cocaine, MDMA, and heroin is unlikely.
Witnessing the recent kidnap and murder of American citizens, and the continuing murder of tens of thousands of Mexicans each year, a rising chorus is offering dissatisfaction with the U.S. law enforcement response to the drug cartels. Two Republican members of Congress, Dan Crenshaw (TX) and Michael Waltz (FL), have introduced legislation to authorize military force against the major Mexican drug cartels. Their effort recently found support from former Attorney General Bill Barr.
The question is, is that the wisest response, or are there other options?
Considering the rampant corruption of the Mexican government and its security agencies, including President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (though it must be noted that there are small pockets of honorable and hugely courageous men and women in the Mexican security apparatus), the cartels will retain relative free rein without greater U.S. intervention. The current U.S. strategy, wherein the U.S. gives the Mexican government a lot of money to pretend to confront the cartels and arrest the odd leader in advance of a U.S. visit or aid package, is patently ridiculous. Yet throwing the U.S. military into a war with the cartels would be bloody and both morally and politically complex. Far more so, indeed, than the U.S. counternarcotics effort in 1980s and 1990s Colombia.
First, there is a lack of will on the part of the Mexican political and security elite to confront the cartels in the way Colombia once did. That’s a major obstacle from the start. If the best Mexican law enforcement officers are obstructed, reassigned for being too effective, or betrayed by higher ranks, the U.S. will have few of the indigenous allies it needs to reduce the cartels to a manageable concern.
In addition, where the U.S. faced two major cartels in Colombia, the Medellin and Cali cartels, it faces at least six major cartels in Mexico. That means a lot of U.S. military personnel would be needed, a number at least in the low thousands, to wage an insurgency against all of the major cartels effectively. Moreover, the U.S. military units most suited to such an effort are already in very high demand for existing missions. These include counterterrorism operations and intelligence collection against nations such as China, Iran, and North Korea. Sending these units or elements therein to Mexico would mean sacrificing efforts in other areas. When it comes to the Army’s Delta Force and Intelligence Support Activity units, for example, an escalated Mexico deployment might cost other national security priorities significantly.
Then there’s the issue of how the cartels would respond.
Attempting to kill off the U.S. military operation in its infancy, the cartels would almost certainly launch a campaign of violence and terror against Mexicans and Americans. The aim would be to force the Mexican government into active opposition to the U.S. mission or weakening the U.S. political resolve for the mission. The Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels retain global influence, sometimes at very high levels. They also retain a physical presence on U.S. soil. And they can rely upon the service of major U.S.-based gangs such as the Nortenos, Mexican Mafia, MS-13, and Latin Kings.
Put simply, the Mexican cartels would have the means of violently killing a significant number of Americans on American soil. That they presently rely on drugs such as fentanyl to do their killing is not a function of their fear of U.S. retribution. It is a calculation that avoiding unnecessary killing is good for business and a way to maintain a relative status quo in the U.S. drug war, which is to say a way to keep winning at low cost. This same rationale likely explains why the Americans recently kidnapped in northern Mexico were quickly released.
But if the U.S. military does to the cartels what Joint Special Operations Command did to al Qaeda in Iraq between 2006-2009 and launches nightly raids against mid-ranking to senior ranking cartel officers with ruthless efficiency, two things will probably follow. American service personnel will be wounded and killed, and the cartels will strike back on U.S. soil. The cartels’ brutality bears direct comparison with that of ISIS. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel embraces near-psychopathic violence, for example. They won’t limit their war to American police officers, politicians, and journalists. They will kill children and families. Maybe that is an acceptable cost to break the cartels back and save more lives in the future. But the prospective costs should be considered.
A better strategy might be for President Biden to issue a covert action finding against the major Mexican cartels. That would allow the CIA, particularly its paramilitary apparatus, to secretly intimidate, blackmail, kidnap, and kill a range of corrupt Mexican politicians, cartel officers, and their enablers and blame these actions on other cartels, thus fueling (hopefully managed) infighting. There would be risk to the CIA officers involved, their colleagues have faced extreme danger during undisclosed operations in Mexico in recent years. The impact of a CIA-led campaign would also be more limited, at least over the short-medium term, compared to a military deployment. Still, the effect could be significant. This would produce outsize pressure on the cartels with a veil of U.S. deniability and a lesser probability of domestic blowback.