CULIACÁN, Mexico. — As President Donald Trump has blown up one boat after another off Venezuela’s coast and declared an “armed conflict” against drug cartels, a question with stark consequences has arisen much closer to the United States.
Could Mexico, where far more drugs are made by some of the world’s most powerful criminal groups, be next?
“I would be honored to go in and do it,” Trump said in May, about using U.S. forces to hunt cartel members. “The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They’re evil.”
Yet three senior Mexican officials said in interviews that, although they are watching the U.S. military action with caution, Mexico is not worried — for now.
That is because, they said, the cooperation between the countries has become simply too robust and yielded too many results on migration and drugs for them to imagine the Trump administration jeopardizing it by conducting unilateral military strikes. Their assessments were reinforced by two Trump administration officials who emphasized collaboration between the countries.
But perhaps more surprisingly, these views were shared by several members of a top cartel who said they were unafraid of American intervention. They were more focused on an ongoing conflict within their ranks, they said.
So far, the U.S. government says it has targeted only boats leaving Venezuela, a country ruled by an autocratic government that Washington has long wanted gone.
Mexico, the largest U.S. trading partner, presents a far different case. Any U.S. intervention would have major diplomatic, economic and political consequences, given Mexico’s red line over impeding on its sovereignty.
The Mexican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate diplomacy, have top jobs in areas spanning foreign affairs and security. They said that they have gotten little sense from their U.S. counterparts that Mexico is in the crosshairs.
Still, that experts are asking the question at all says much about how far the Trump administration has shifted U.S. relations with Latin America.
And many American and Mexican political and security analysts cautioned that Mexico was hardly out of the woods, given Trump’s approach to the cartels as targets of war and the reality that the biggest and most powerful cartels are just south of the border.
One of the Mexican officials stressed that while the government did not see unilateral American strikes inside Mexico as an immediate threat, the U.S. strikes in the Caribbean posed a long-term concern.
In Washington, U.S. officials have sounded similar notes about prioritizing collaboration. Two Trump administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that because of the two nations’ increased cooperation, the United States is focused on working with Mexico rather than making unilateral strikes on criminals.
The Trump administration believes its threats against Mexico have caused it to step up against cartels, one official said, eliminating the need for U.S. forces to get involved, at least for now. Another official said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Mexico last month reaffirmed the sense that the countries were aligned on security.
Rubio met with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico on Sept. 3, the day after Trump first announced that U.S. forces had struck a boat in the Caribbean. In comments to reporters, Rubio had harsh words about smugglers from Venezuela.
“We’re not going to sit back anymore and watch these people sail up and down the Caribbean like a cruise ship,” he said. Stopping boats and seizing cargo does not stop smugglers, he added. “What will stop them is when you blow them up.”
But on Mexico, he mostly offered praise. “It is the closest security cooperation we have ever had,” he said.
After the meeting, the two nations put out a joint statement about security cooperation, noting it was based on “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as well as “mutual trust.”
At the top of the Mexican government, Sheinbaum has repeatedly drawn a line in the sand over U.S. military intervention.
“Under no circumstances will the people of Mexico accept interventions that violate our territory,” she said at a rally in Mexico City on Sunday. “Whether by land, water, sea or air.”
Strikingly, Sheinbaum’s firm public stance against U.S. interventions has reassured one of the very criminal networks she and Trump have vowed to dismantle: the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world’s most notorious criminal organizations and potentially a larger supplier of drugs than all Venezuelan smugglers combined.
In interviews, five cartel operatives dismissed the idea that the U.S. military could strike within Mexico next. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, they said their more pressing concern was the relentless fighting among rival criminal factions. Most were only vaguely aware of the recent American attacks in the Caribbean.
One cartel member, a 39-year-old midlevel operative who oversees security operations in Culiacán, the group’s stronghold, said that he had little fear of U.S. intervention because he believed Sheinbaum would not allow it. “It will never happen,” he said. “He can’t do that,” he added of Trump.
Even if the United States did strike their smugglers at sea, he said, disruption would be minimal. “We don’t only have maritime routes, we have land and air as well,” he said. “There is always a way.”
In addition to fighting each other, Mexico’s criminal groups are also under heightened pressure from the Mexican government.
In Sheinbaum’s first year in office, which ended Sept. 30, Mexican authorities said they arrested nearly 35,000 people for high-impact crimes and destroyed nearly 1,600 drug labs. Under her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, there were an average of 8,900 such arrests annually and 380 destroyed labs, they said. Mexican authorities also say they have seized 3.8 million fentanyl pills, a statistic not tracked consistently under López Obrador.
As a result, the Mexican government said, homicides have dropped by almost a third, to their lowest level in a decade, and fewer drugs are being seized at the border.
The Mexican government has also increased efforts on migration, helping to bring illegal border crossings to their lowest level in years.
One of the senior Mexican officials said that there is daily cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities on cartels, including regular U.S. surveillance flights over Mexican territory. But U.S. authorities do not — and will not — use force in Mexico, in part because the Mexican Constitution bans it, the official said.
There is another, nearly $1 trillion reason why many believe the United States will not strike Mexico: The nations are deeply interdependent, with about $950 billion in goods and services flowing between them each year.
Disrupting such trade could potentially cause economic devastation in border states of both countries, and drive migrants to seek work inside the United States.
At the same time, analysts warned that Mexico may be placing too much faith in diplomacy with a notoriously mercurial U.S. president.
“Sheinbaum acts, delivers and gives, but it’s never enough for the U.S.,” said David Mora, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The problem is the volatility and unpredictability of the Trump administration.”
On the ground, attitudes are more complex. At least three national surveys this year have found that more than 60% of Mexicans opposed the idea of the U.S. conducting military operations in Mexico. One poll also showed that 31% of Mexicans welcomed the idea.
In parts of Sinaloa, where bloodshed has become part of daily life, some conservative and business groups would embrace U.S. strikes, said Adrián López, editor of El Noroeste, the state’s largest newspaper. Businesses there have suffered enormous losses because of the cartel wars, and many Mexicans perceive the United States as more effective in combating organized crime, he said, therefore “the logic of U.S. intervention is appealing.”
“People here say, ‘If that makes the violence stop,’” he said, “‘Where do I sign?’”
“But,” he added, “we should be careful what we wish for.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
