A brand new plan to dismantle cartel-run drug-smuggling corridors alongside the U.S. southern border used to be introduced by means of the U.S. management in mid-August 2025 to nice fanfare.
“Project Portero” will see the Drug Enforcement Management collaborate with Mexican legislation enforcement, prosecutors, protection officers and contributors of the intelligence neighborhood to ascertain a coordinated technique placing on the middle of drug gangs’ command-and-control. DEA Administrator Terrance Cole described the initiative as “a bold first step in a new era of cross-border enforcement,” including: “We will pursue it relentlessly until these violent organizations are dismantled.”
The issue? Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, denied that this type of initiative exists.
“The DEA issues the statement, we don’t know based on what,” stated Sheinbaum on Aug. 19. “We haven’t reached any agreement — none of the security institutions have — with the DEA.”
The US’ and Mexico’s apparently divergent positions towards the drug industry lift doubts concerning the international locations’ skill to paintings in combination meaningfully to curb the fentanyl industry.
And any issues Mexican government will have harbored about operating with President Donald Trump will indubitably no longer were assuaged by means of U.S. unilateral army moves on Venezuelan boats the White Space alleges have been trafficking fentanyl. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, condemned the motion as a “military attack on civilians not at war.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum glances up at a video of U.S. President Donald Trump all over the day by day morning briefing on Would possibly 22, 2025.
Juan Abundis/ObturadorMX/Getty Photographs
In Mexico, Sheinbaum already walks a effective line between negotiating with Trump on problems like migration and price lists and protective Mexican sovereignty. In the USA, Republicans have an increasing number of raised the chance of sending the U.S. army into Mexico – an concept that has apparently transform the “litmus test” for conservatives in judging who’s fascinated by fighting fentanyl.
But other pursuits and approaches to policing medicine, particularly the use of army drive, have lengthy been at play within the international locations’ precarious collaboration towards narcotics. I discover those divergences within the soon-to-be-published “Policing on Drugs” – a prehistory of U.S. and Mexican antidrug efforts from 1969 to 2000.
Oxford College Press
My analysis means that over the path of 3 a long time, Mexico’s embody of The united states’s punitive — from time to time militarized — antidrug insurance policies bolstered the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime and have been so useless in an technology of open industry blocs that they hastened the growth of the drug industry.
Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’
Starting within the Sixties, the USA started prioritizing provide management over call for aid in its struggle towards unlawful medicine, focusing in on international locations equivalent to Mexico the place marijuana and opium poppies have been cultivated.
Below President Richard Nixon, there used to be a large growth of the U.S. counternarcotics forms as a part of his “war on drugs.”
Washington started forcing junior companions, equivalent to Mexico, into adopting their counternarcotics insurance policies.
All over Operation Intercept in September 1969, Nixon close down the border to forestall Mexican medicine from getting into the USA. Mexican companions, who sought to reopen the border as temporarily as imaginable, agreed to undertake the USA’ extra competitive antidrug insurance policies.
Leaders in the USA and Mexico started situating drug management inside of a bigger context of militarized policing, which greater the ability and affect of the army and competitive counternarcotic businesses in each international locations.
American citizens tended to center of attention extra on getting rid of the medication, whilst Mexican government cared much less concerning the medicine and extra about social management efforts at the flooring. Specifically, the USA sought after Mexico to make use of herbicides to damage poppy crops in its drug-producing northwest the use of American planes. The initiative would later manifest as Operation Condor starting within the overdue Nineteen Seventies.
80 pounds of marijuana take a seat in a cart at San Ysidro, Calif., the U.S.-Mexican border on Aug. 31, 2006.
Ken Cedeno/Corbis by way of Getty Photographs
In observe, Condor and campaigns love it illustrate the other pursuits that U.S. and Mexican brokers dropped at drug enforcement and the precarity of bilateral antidrug collaboration. Extra curious about the herbicidal facets of Condor, the USA paid significantly much less consideration to the Mexican military’s 10,000-man effort at the flooring, which aggressively policed the nation-state for medicine, manufacturers and dissidents.
Downplaying collaboration
In its collaboration with the USA, Mexico used to be a hit at aligning itself with U.S. safety imperatives — equivalent to all over the Chilly Struggle and the struggle on medicine — tailoring U.S. insurance policies and support to its personal safety demanding situations. However this handiest intensified the coercive capacities of the Mexican state and its enforcement.
Drawing from U.S. assets, the Mexican authorities adapted facets of competitive policing to its personal safety goals, equivalent to squashing anti-government sentiments.
However U.S. intervention used to be extremely unpopular some of the Mexican inhabitants. In consequence, Mexican leaders needed to repeatedly downplay any cooperation with the USA, even because it willingly – and from time to time enthusiastically – followed U.S. policing equipment and techniques to handle inner Mexican safety problems. Sheinbaum seems to be drawing from the similar playbook as of late.
Creeping militarization
The 1985 torture and homicide of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena by means of Mexican drug lords in Guadalajara proved a pivotal second in U.S.-Mexican antidrug cooperation.
It highlighted the an increasing number of essential function undercover U.S. brokers performed inside of Mexico following Condor’s preliminary execution. However extra, Camarena’s homicide pressured Mexico – apparently not able to forestall drug violence – to cede sovereignty to the USA of their drug-policing efforts, as the rustic’s drug trafficking organizations have been changing into extra tough than the Mexican state.
The our bodies of slain DEA agent Enrique Camarena and pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar, lined with sheets, lie in again of a pickup truck close to Guadalajara, Mexico.
Cindy Karp/Getty Photographs
Since then, the picture of DEA brokers working extraterritorially in Mexico has transform hackneyed, nevertheless it continues.
The signing of the North American Unfastened Industry Settlement in 1994 ushered in greater militarization in U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement. Below NAFTA, an uncomfortable paradox advanced through which the USA reduced the obstacles to prison industry with Mexico to extend North American competitiveness because it heightened its safety and policing alongside the U.S.-Mexico border.
The unintentional outcome of this militarized U.S.-backed drug management in Mexico used to be the kind of violence noticed for the reason that early 2000s, when photographs of cartel leaders, safety brokers donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious homicide charges, and army guards at U.S. border crossings deeply influenced the sector’s belief of Mexico.
Imperial overreach
In August 2025, The New York Instances reported that Trump signed a secret order authorizing the usage of the military towards Latin American cartels, a number of of which his management designated international terrorist organizations previous this 12 months.
Trump had homed in on Mexico early in his first time period in his reaction to an opioid disaster that noticed at its peak just about 108,000 American citizens killed a 12 months, a determine that has since dropped to 80,000 in 2024. Trump turns out intent on expanding power on Mexico in his 2nd time period – the use of the specter of price lists, and doubtlessly direct army drive – to drive Mexican businesses to crack down on cartels.
In the midst of August, Sheinbaum grew to become over 26 accused cartel contributors to the USA so to appease Washington.
However Sheinbaum has drawn the road with regards to Mexican sovereignty, rejecting Trump’s tips of U.S. army intervention.
Mexican leaders are, in fact, engaged in discreet, behind-the-scenes discussions with U.S. officers relating to safety cooperation. Alternatively, publicly disclosing such collaborations dangers home backlash. And it kind of feels the DEA’s resolution to announce Mission Portero will have inadvertently undermined its viability prior to it even started.
Given the fraught historical past of DEA operations in Mexico, an overt public declaration of this sort used to be at all times more likely to be perceived by means of many Mexicans as emblematic of U.S. imperial overreach.
