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In 2023, Senators Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) reintroduced the Drug Cartel Terrorist Designation Act, proposed the previous year, aimed at empowering the State Department to formally designate Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO). The FTO designation in the proposed Senate legislation would apply to four transnational criminal organizations – Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Golfo, and Cártel del Noreste. As Republicans have majority control of Congress in 2025, the issue of designating Mexican cartels as terrorists will likely surface again, and President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that he plans to consider the issue.

The current USG FTO list consists primarily of groups akin to Al Queda and Islamic State. This allows the Treasury Department to target financial aspects of the organizations and the State Department to curtail associated members’ travel. However, a terrorist designation also opens the aperture for the Department of Defense to combat terrorism, and this idea has Mexico City apprehensive.

In January 2025, we published a detailed analysis of Mexico’s central government's resiliency and domestic resistance it faces. This framework proves critical in understanding how unilateral U.S. action taken against Mexican cartels could affect the domestic legitimacy of the new left-wing populist party Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) and how Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, would react to such pressure.

Publication Date

2-5-2025

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/RALI4136

GNSI Decision Brief: Should Congress Designate Mexican Cartels as Terrorists?

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