Exclusive: Cartels React To Terrorist Designation

Narcos and gang members talk to CrashOut about Trump threats of U.S. strikes

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Katarina Szulc, Juan Alberto Cedillo and Ioan Grillo

Close to the steel pillars of the U.S. border fence, in a ramshackle slum of the city of Tijuana, an operative who oversees an area for a cartel sits in a house explaining to journalist Katarina Szulc how he controls local drug distribution. Asked what he thinks of U.S. President Donald Trump designating cartels as terrorist groups and how this would make him their enemy, he answers quickly. “We are not going be the ones to start a war,” he says. “You can’t beat the [U.S] government. I guarantee there won’t be a war, where they want to invade here.”

A few blocks away, however, a drug seller with sacks of weed and a compact pistol with the name of U.S. company Creed Precision stamped on it, takes a more defensive line. “[If] they would like to come and attack us, imagine what I am going to do. I will defend myself,” he says. “I am not going to cross my arms and let them come fuck me…We are Mexicans.”

These answers are among a broad range of responses the CrashOut team found talking to active and former cartel operatives from Tijuana to Tamaulipas to Texas about the United States designating them as terrorists. The higher-ranking members said they didn’t want conflict and described measures they have taken to reduce pressure. Cartels have ordered affiliates to hold back on smuggling migrants over the U.S. border and banned fentanyl in some sectors, sources described.

But some street-level players showed more bravado or even saw the terrorist label as a badge of toughness. Gangsters in Mexico also pointed defensively to their many associates inside the United States who move drugs.

On Thursday, Public Notice 12672 was published in the Federal Register of the U.S. government designating eight new groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. It followed Trump issuing an executive order to name cartels as terrorists on his first day in office on Jan. 20.

The list includes the Sinaloa Cartel (currently in civil war), the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (of El Mencho), the Gulf Cartel and Northeast Cartel on the Texas border, and La Familia and Carteles Unidos in the heart of Mexico. It also includes the Tren de Aragua, which originated in a Venezuelan prison but has spread to the United States, and the MS-13, which was formed by Salvadorans in Los Angeles but became endemic in Central America.

The terrorist designation will give U.S. law enforcement enhanced powers to go after affiliates of cartels, including those selling them guns or laundering their money. It does not in itself authorize the U.S. military to strike at cartels inside Mexican territory. But there is increasing speculation that Trump could order the U.S. military to hit targets south of the border citing his presidential authority.

Fear of such strikes has sent a shock wave through cartels, who are also under new pressure from the Mexican government to reduce their activities. Trump has knelt on Mexico City by threatening tariffs in reaction to the smuggling of fentanyl and migrants, which could savage the $800 billion in cross-border trade.

A Defensive Pact

In Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas, a source close to the drug-trafficking family of Cárdenas Guillén, a core power in the Gulf Cartel, described how in reaction to the terrorist label, the cartel had…

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