Why America’s Next War is Heading to Mexico

Summary

Highlights

• Cartels have caused around 400,000 deaths in Mexico due to drug-related violence since 2006. 💀
• Fentanyl smuggling from Mexico is a significant factor in the US's opioid crisis. 💊
• Trump-era actions involved considerable military and CIA surveillance over Mexican territories. 🛰️
• US-Mexico relations are strained; unilateral military actions risk vitiating cooperation. 🇺🇸🇲🇽
• Cartels control about one-third of Mexican territory, comparable to a 'failed state.' 🇲🇽
• Cartels' armament includes drones and sophisticated weaponry, resembling military forces. 🚁

Key Takeaways

• The US is seriously contemplating military intervention in Mexico to tackle cartels, especially due to the fentanyl crisis. 🚁
• Trump's administration led significant drone and surveillance operations across the Mexican border. 🎥
• Cartels have vast control over Mexican territory and wield military-grade arsenals. 🔫
• Legal challenges and potential diplomatic fallout loom over unilateral US military actions. ⚖️
• Addressing narcotics demand and arms trafficking are vital in resolving the larger conflict. 🔍

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to the Mexican Cartel Conflict The chapter provides an introduction to the conflict among Mexican cartels, highlighting the intense violence and power struggle within Mexico. It describes how various cartel factions have been battling for control over narcotics trade routes and markets in the U.S. since 2006, leading to approximately 400,000 deaths and disappearances due to violent crimes.
• 00:30 - 05:00: Impact of Fentanyl and US-Mexico Relations This chapter discusses the severe impact of fentanyl smuggling on the United States, focusing on its escalating overdose deaths and its role in the opioid epidemic. The chapter highlights that since 2018, over 250,000 people in the US have died due to fentanyl overdoses. It emphasizes the alarming rise in fentanyl-related deaths, which were 27 times higher in 2022 compared to 2012. The narrative points out that most illicit fentanyl is manufactured outside the US, implicating cross-border drug smuggling in its spread.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Escalation with Trump's Return This chapter explores the escalating tensions involving the U.S., Mexico, and cartels, particularly considering a more direct intervention by the U.S. military in Mexico. With Donald Trump returning to office, what was once thought to be a fictional notion—a new U.S. military engagement against cartels—has gained traction. The situation unfolds against a backdrop where Mexican authorities have been combating cartels since 2006, although the possible intrusion of U.S. forces marks a significant and contentious escalation.
• 10:00 - 15:00: US Surveillance and Military Movements This chapter explores the topic of US surveillance and military movements, particularly focusing on an incident involving former President Trump and Mexican cartels. It mentions a claim from a memoir by Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense during Trump's tenure, where Trump allegedly inquired about the possibility of using US military force to target cartel-run drug labs in Mexico and subsequently denying responsibility. Trump has denied these allegations, yet the issue reflects broader Republican rhetoric on tackling the cartel problem.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Legal Actions and Political Dynamics The chapter titled 'Legal Actions and Political Dynamics' discusses the intensified efforts against cartels, particularly focusing on their fentanyl operations. A significant incident occurred in March 2023 when four American tourists were kidnapped by Mexico's Gulf cartel in a case of mistaken identity, resulting in the murder of two of them. This tragedy led to an uproar in the United States, prompting political discussions and actions, notably by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who announced plans to propose legislation related to the incident.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Drug War History and Strategies The chapter delves into the complex dynamics of the drug war, focusing particularly on the U.S. strategy to combat Mexican cartels. Initially, there was resistance from Mexico's President Amllo against using U.S. military force, citing sovereignty concerns. However, with the transition of power to Claudia Shine Bomb, the U.S. has been strategizing a more direct approach, marking a significant shift in tactics against the cartels.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Impact of Cartels and US-Mexico Challenges The chapter discusses the initiation of a covert CIA surveillance drone program over Mexican airspace and territory by Shine Bomb. This secret program, unauthorized to use lethal force, focused on locating cartel-run fentanyl labs. The existence and details of this program remained hidden until surfaced by a New York Times article in February 2025.
• 30:00 - 40:00: Potential US Actions and International Law The chapter discusses potential actions by the US and their alignment with international law. It highlights the intelligence activities involving CIA reconnaissance drone flights over Mexico, which are intended for future operations and coordination with Mexican authorities. Additionally, it notes the increase in these flights ordered by Trump on his return to office. The US military is also engaging in increased surveillance along the southern border and Mexico's Pacific coast, although they lack formal permission to use Mexican airspace. Despite this, the Trump administration continues military operations to gather essential intelligence.
• 40:00 - 45:00: Historical Context of US-Mexico Tensions The chapter titled 'Historical Context of US-Mexico Tensions' provides insight into recent intelligence and military operations conducted by the US along the southern border, focusing particularly on the surveillance flights aimed at monitoring activities related to Mexican cartels. Specifically, it mentions that since Trump returned to office, there has been more than two dozen surveillance flights using various aircraft, including a notable operation involving a US Air Force RC135V rivet joint reconnaissance aircraft. This aircraft maneuvered through international waters and airspace to surveil the Gulf of California, near Sinaloa, a stronghold of one of Mexico's most influential cartels.
• 45:00 - 50:00: Trump's Military Precedents and Future Tactics The chapter titled 'Trump's Military Precedents and Future Tactics' discusses the increased surveillance activities against the Sinaloa cartel during Trump's administration. These surveillance operations aim to gather intelligence and identify potential targets for future attacks. Additionally, the chapter highlights Trump's strategic appointment of Ronald Johnson as the US ambassador to Mexico, a decision reflecting an intent to lay the groundwork for future military actions. Johnson's background as a former Green Beret and CIA veteran emphasizes a focus on leveraging military expertise and intelligence in diplomatic roles.
• 50:00 - 55:00: Drugs, Weapons, and Cartel Dynamics The Trump administration's policies towards Mexico and its cartels included sending the Green Berets for joint training with Mexico's naval Marines and designating six major Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
• 55:00 - 60:00: Complexities of US Interventions This chapter explores the complexities surrounding US interventions, focusing on the Mexican cartels. It discusses the historical context in which Mexican cartels, such as the Generation Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, Lendoeva Familia, the Gulf Cartel, and the United Cartels, have never been designated as terrorist organizations by the US government. Unlike terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS, which have political or ideological motives, Mexican cartels are primarily business-driven, aiming to make money. However, the chapter notes that the Trump administration designated them as terrorist organizations, challenging traditional perspectives.
• 60:00 - 65:00: Manhunt for El Chapo In the chapter titled 'Manhunt for El Chapo,' the focus is on the implications of designating organizations as terrorist groups by the US government. This designation does not directly lead to the use of US military power in Mexico but allows financial authorities to target the cartels' finances more aggressively. Consequently, assets of these organizations under American financial institutions are frozen, and their known members are banned from entering the United States.
• 65:00 - 70:00: Modern Conflicts and Nebula Promotion The chapter discusses the implications of designating a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). This designation allows for the deportation of individuals affiliated with the group and prohibits US citizens and others from providing material support to it. Practical consequences include potential targeting of businesses, such as a Mexican restaurant paying protection money to a cartel, through financial freezes or seizures. However, this designation can also lead to unintended financial and economic consequences.

Why America’s Next War is Heading to Mexico Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 For years, the most violent armed conflict taking place in the Western Hemisphere has been raging like an inferno across Mexico, consisting of various different cartel factions, all vying against one another for power, influence, and the control of lucrative narcotics trade routes and markets in the United States. This war within Mexico between the cartels and against the Mexican government has claimed the lives of around 400,000 people through violent crime rellated homicides and disappearances since it began in 2006.
• 00:30 - 01:00 While the fentinol and methamphetamine that they've been smuggling across the border have been ravaging America's streets and fueling the US opioid epidemic, where more than 250,000 other people have died from fentinyl overdoses alone just since 2018. The numbers of fentinyl overdose deaths in the US have been rising almost every single year since 2012 to the point where they were 27 times higher in 2022 than a decade previously in 2012. And despite the vast majority of elicit fentinyl originating
• 01:00 - 01:30 from labs outside of the country and entering the US by being smuggled by cartels across the border, and despite the fact that the Mexican government has already been officially at war with the cartels ever since 2006, the prospect of the US military stepping in and taking direct action against the cartels in Mexico themselves always seemed like a fringe idea or something out of a movie for years. But over the past few months, with Donald Trump back in office again, that once fringe idea of sending the US military off to its next war with the
• 01:30 - 02:00 Mexican cartels across the border has been becoming increasingly more mainstream and plausible. According to a memoir that was written by Mark Esper, Trump's Secretary of Defense during his first term, Trump allegedly asked him privately in 2020 if it would have been possible for the US military to fire missiles at cartelrun drug labs in Mexico and then deny all US responsibility for the attacks afterwards. Trump himself has denied that this interaction ever took place at all, but the rhetoric from him and other Republicans since then on going after
• 02:00 - 02:30 the cartels and crushing their fentinol operations has only grown in fervor. In March of 2023, a group of four American tourists who were mistaken for Haitian smugglers by Mexico's Gulf cartel in the border town of Madam Moros were kidnapped and two of them were murdered. Even after the cartel apprehended the men who were allegedly responsible and turned them over to authorities and apologized profusely. The incident sparked an uproar in the United States and led to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham saying that he would introduce legislation to lay the groundwork for
• 02:30 - 03:00 the Biden administration to deploy US military force against the Mexican cartels. Something that Mexico's then president Andreas Manuel Lopez Orador better known by his initials as Amllo rejected on the basis that it would have been a violation of Mexico sovereignty. But since Amllo left office in Mexico in late 2024 and his political successor, Claudia Shine Bomb assumed office, the US has been steadily moving the pieces into place to confront the cartels more directly. Anyway, shortly after taking office in October of 2024, President
• 03:00 - 03:30 Shine Bomb secretly began allowing the CIA for the first time to start running covert surveillance drone flights over Mexican airspace and territory. The extent of this secret CIA surveillance drone program over Mexico wasn't revealed for several more months until an article was released about the program by the New York Times in February of 2025. While not given any authorization to use lethal force, at least for now, the CIA drones have been busy hunting for cartelrun fentinel labs across Mexican territory instead, whose
• 03:30 - 04:00 intelligence is then passed on to Mexican authorities and likely kept by the US for potential future operations. Since returning back to office again, Trump has ordered an increase in the numbers of these CIA reconnaissance drone flights that are taking place over Mexico. While he's also ordered the US military to step up its own separate surveillance flights along the southern border and along Mexico's Pacific coast. Unlike the CIA, the US military does not yet have formal permission to utilize Mexican airspace. But that hasn't stopped the Trump administration from using the military to acquire
• 04:00 - 04:30 intelligence on the cartels. Anyway, since Trump returned to office, the US military has conducted more than two dozen known surveillance flights along the southern border using a variety of spy planes and drones. Well, in early February, a US Air Force RC135V rivet joint reconnaissance aircraft carefully threaded the needle of international waters and airspace to fly deep within the Gulf of California, directly by the Mexican state of Sinaloa, home to one of Mexico's largest and most influential cartels, the
• 04:30 - 05:00 Sinaloa cartel. These increased surveillance flights under the Trump administration appear to be gathering intelligence and acquiring targets for potential future attacks. While the Trump administration has also been further laying groundwork for attacks in other ways as well. Trump's pick for the US ambassador to Mexico during this administration is a man named Ronald Johnson, a former Green Beret and a veteran CIA officer with more than 20 years of prior experience leading sensitive paramilitary operations. a pick that suggests the Trump
• 05:00 - 05:30 administration's coming posture towards Mexico and the cartels. Between February and March of 2025, the Trump administration sent a detachment of the Green Berets to the Luis Carpizo Naval Facility in the Mexican state of Campe to conduct joint training exercises with Mexico's elite naval Marine Corps. While on the 20th of February, the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of formally designating the six largest Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations or FTOs. the Senaloa cartel, the Halisco New
• 05:30 - 06:00 Generation Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, Lendoeva Familia, the Gulf Cartel, and the United Cartels. Now, historically and practically speaking, the Mexican cartels were never designated by the US government as terrorist organizations in the past because there's a pretty clear difference between cartels who are basically businesses whose ultimate goal is making money and groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS whose ultimate goals are political change and who are ideologically or religiously motivated instead. Nonetheless, the designation of the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations by the Trump
• 06:00 - 06:30 administration does not immediately open up the door to US air power raining down on them in Mexico. It actually offers up no additional military tools against them all on its own. What it does do, though, is it enables US financial authorities to go after the cartels finances much more aggressively than they used to be able to do. All organizations designated as terrorist groups by the US government get all of their assets frozen that are under the control of American financial institutions while their known members are banned from entering the country and
• 06:30 - 07:00 it immediately enables their deportation. However, the most significant thing that happens when a group is designated as an FTO is that it becomes illegal for US citizens and even others to knowingly provide what's called material support for the group. If there's a restaurant somewhere in Mexico that pays protection money to one of the cartels, for example, this would enable the restaurant to get targeted by financial freezes or seizures due to the financial transfers with the cartel. The designation can also come with great unintended financial and economic consequences. As well, though, because
• 07:00 - 07:30 of how deeply embedded many of the cartels are within Mexican society, there are countless Mexican businesses that are connected to one in some way or another. For example, for years, even before Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, American financial companies like PayPal simply refused to conduct any business in the West Bank at all. Out of fear that since Hamas was a designated foreign terrorist organization and since Hamas was so embedded in the West Bank, that their services might have ended up getting used by someone linked to Hamas and then
• 07:30 - 08:00 they would get come after by US financial authorities. A similar dilemma could now arise in Mexico with the six major cartels in the country now designated as foreign terrorist organizations, making US-based banks, payment processors, and other financial companies operating in Mexico potentially susceptible to federal prosecution. Formally designating the six cartels as terrorist organizations also lays the groundwork in America for justifying an intervention against the declared terrorists. Later, very shortly
• 08:00 - 08:30 after their designation was made, Elon Musk, one of Trump's top advisers, took to X and said that meant they're eligible for drone strikes. Back in November of 2024, Trump's border zar, Tom Hman, said that the president was committed to calling the cartels terrorist organizations and using the full might of the US special operations to take them out. While this new Trump administration secretary of defense Pete Hegsth has also repeatedly refused to rule out the option of drone strikes and other US military actions against the
• 08:30 - 09:00 Mexican cartels when pressed about it, even without the express consent of the Mexican government. During a visit to the southwestern border in February, HGth publicly refused to rule out launching crossber raids in Mexico to pursue the cartels and said that all options remained on the table. But there also appears to be some degree of division within Trump's inner circle on how aggressively to go after the cartels. Based on insider reports, one of the camps in the Trump administration is being led by Sebastian Gora, Trump's
• 09:00 - 09:30 appointed senior director for counterterrorism on the White House National Security Council. Gora's camp is apparently pushing towards using the US military to aggressively pursue the cartels within Mexico and to destroy their fenol operations as quickly as possible with or without the prior consent of the Mexican government. This camp argues that the urgency of the fenol crisis in America demands rapid and decisive action against the cartels. While the other more cautious camp is apparently being led by Trump's homeland security adviser, Steven Miller, who is allegedly concerned that going too hard
• 09:30 - 10:00 on the cartels without the Mexican government's approval, could jeopardize the cooperation between the US and Mexican governments on migration and border issues, which could greatly exacerbate the numbers of migrants who are reaching the US border. Mexico's relatively new president herself, Claudia Shinbal, has repeatedly asserted that Mexico will never accept unilateral US military actions or drone strikes on Mexican territory. She has insisted that any US military actions taken on Mexican territory without her government's
• 10:00 - 10:30 consent would be a gross violation of Mexico's sovereignty and that Mexico seeks cooperation or coordination with the US, not invasion or subordination. She has allowed the CIA to begin conducting those reconnaissance flights over Mexican airspace. She has deployed 10,000 Mexican troops to the northern border to patrol for fentanyl smuggling. She has sent more soldiers and police into the Sinaloa estate where her government has reported nearly 900 arrests just since last October. And she's already begun extraditing more than two dozen cartel operatives to the
• 10:30 - 11:00 US to stand trial. Nonetheless, in early April, NBC News reported that several unnamed highlevel Trump administration officials were still considering launching drone strikes in Mexico against cartel targets soon, even without the Mexican government's approval. And to understand what's happening right now between the US and Mexico and the cartels, it helps to understand a bit of the context behind the drug wars history and how bad the problem has gotten over time. Drug traffickers and criminal groups in Mexico began growing more organized and
• 11:00 - 11:30 advanced in the 1980s after the historical cocaine smuggling route from Columbia to Miami by sea grew more difficult to pull off, which led to the cocaine smuggling route shifting overland to the US southern border through Mexico instead. Criminal drug cartels in Mexico began coalesing in regionally defined areas, and they began fighting against one another and the government for the control of these narcotics trade routes and markets in the US. Under President Filipe Calderon, the Mexican government officially declared war on the drug cartels in 2006
• 11:30 - 12:00 and engaged with the US government on a joint campaign to decapitate cartel leadership, something that they called the kingpin strategy. For the next 6 years until 2012, American intelligence agencies passed on information about the cartels to the Mexican government. US law enforcement agents cooperated with Mexican law enforcement and US special forces trained up elite Mexican commandos to go after the cartels themselves. But this initial strategy had its shortcomings. Some of the Mexican special forces that were trained by the American special forces later
• 12:00 - 12:30 defected and took their training and expertise with them to form one of the most fearsome Mexican drug cartels, Los Zetas, which later became the Northeast Cartel, which is one of the cartels that is now designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US. Targeting cartel leadership also often created power vacuums and triggered fierce succession crises and civil wars within the cartels which exacerbated the levels of violence further. After Calderon's party was voted out of office in 2012 and Enrique Pena took over as Mexico's president
• 12:30 - 13:00 next he shifted the strategy away from using the Mexican military to confront the cartels back towards law enforcement agencies and the joint military operations with the US against the cartels were ended. Nonetheless, despite a brief decrease in homicides in Mexico following President Nato's reforms, corruption and crime related violence continued to be serious issues in the country. Near the end of his term in 2016, drugrelated homicides in Mexico increased by a staggering 22% with more
• 13:00 - 13:30 than 20,000 people killed that year alone. In 2017, a mass grave that contained the remains of more than 250 victims of drugrelated violence was discovered in the country's Veraracru state. And then the violence continued escalating to an all-time high peak of 33,341 reported homicides in 2018, which has remained fairly consistent at levels nearly that high every year since. The murder rate in Mexico continues to
• 13:30 - 14:00 remain among the highest in the world and is more than three times as high as it is in the US next door. While between 2017 and 2020, one journalist was killed in Mexico roughly every week on average. Then after Amalo assumed the Mexican presidency next in 2018, he began pursuing a radically different approach towards the cartels than any of his predecessors. He adopted a new policy that he called hugs, not bullets, in which he sought to address the cartel violence problem by legalizing
• 14:00 - 14:30 marijuana, implementing poverty alleviation programs and rolling out new sentencing guidelines for convicted drug traffickers. He also created a new Mexican National Guard, a sort of hybrid civilian police and military force to fight against the cartels on the ground. Overall, Amllo took a very hands-off approach towards the cartels in Mexico, which effectively enabled them to flourish like they had never before. Amllo claimed falsely on multiple occasions that no fentinol was even produced in Mexico at all. Amllo
• 14:30 - 15:00 formally withdrew Mexico from a security cooperation agreement with the US in 2021. While the numbers of disappeared people in Mexico skyrocketed under his lax administration, more people disappeared in Mexico under Amllo's presidency than during both of his predecessors combined. During the final year of his administration in 2024, an average of 37 people in Mexico disappeared every single day, while more than 120,000 people in Mexico are now listed as officially missing. So, while
• 15:00 - 15:30 the official homicide rate declined slightly under Amllo's leadership, the disappearance rate also skyrocketed at the same time. And since missing people are not counted by the Mexican government statistics as homicides, the true homicide rate when counting the dramatic increases in missing people since 2018 is likely far higher than the official Mexican data suggests it is. and the problems of violence and smoke link both got much worse under Amllo's watch. While the cartels grew
• 15:30 - 16:00 increasingly more powerful as it currently stands now in 2025, it's been estimated by the US military that the various competing cartels in Mexico now de facto control around 1th3 of the entire country's territory, putting the Mexican government on a level of de facto control within their country that's about on a par with a recognized failed state like the Syrian government. Between all of the cartels combined today are an estimated 160,000 to 185,000 armed fighters and mercenaries.
• 16:00 - 16:30 Almost half the size of the standing Mexican armed forces themselves. Large swaths of the country in Mexico that are under cartel influence are more controlled by the cartels than by the actual government. Which is why the US State Department currently still maintains a level four do not travel advisory to the Mexican states of Kol Lima, Guerrero, Mihoakan, Sinaloa, Tamalipas, and Zagateas where cartel activities and influence are particularly well pronounced. In addition, corruption and cartel
• 16:30 - 17:00 influence across the Mexican government also runs extremely deeply. A report by the American DEA found evidence that the cartels had funneled millions of dollars into the 2006 presidential campaign of Amllo. For example, in 2020, US law enforcement arrested the former Mexican defense secretary while he was visiting Los Angeles on a sprawling indictment that accused him of accepting bribes from one of the cartels and of using his position to assist with drug smuggling. Well, in 2024, the former Mexican
• 17:00 - 17:30 Secretary of Public Security was also sentenced to 38 years in prison for his role in accepting bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. Facts that now presents significant challenges to the prospect of the US military cooperating with the Mexican government against the cartels. If the cartel's influence extends high enough up through the government to the Mexican president's own cabinet positions, to what extent can the Mexican government be trusted to not leak information about impending US military plans to the cartels? It's for this reason why the more hawkish members
• 17:30 - 18:00 of the Trump administration advocate for more heavy-handed unilateral military action against the cartels, even without the support of the Mexican government, which they view as being too corrupt and compromised by the cartels themselves. Now, while there are multiple cartels operating within Mexico today, the biggest and most fearsome two right now are the Sinaloa and the Halisco New Generation Cartels, and they are the two that will most likely become the targets of any potential direct US military attacks involving drone strikes or special forces raids. These two large
• 18:00 - 18:30 cartels are responsible for the overwhelming majority of narcotics that enter into the United States today, including nearly all of the illicit fentanyl and methamphetamine in America. What sets the Sinaloa cartel apart from the others in particular is also the cartel's very close ties to China and the fentinol trade route. The Sinaloa cartel dominates Mexico's Pacific port of Mazatlan within their home Sinaloa estate through which they're able to import large quantities of precursor chemicals necessary for fentinol
• 18:30 - 19:00 production from China. Sinaloa cartel chemical brokers will purchase Chinese-made chemical ingredients for fentinol and then smuggle them into Mexico where they arrive at the cartel's drug labs and are transformed into high-grade synthetic fentinol in either pill or powder form which is then smuggled across the border into the United States carried in smaller packages by individual drug mules or in large quantities co-mingled with legitimate trade goods carried by trailers where they have been ravaging American communities for years. Drug-related overdose deaths in the US
• 19:00 - 19:30 have been steadily rising since the 2010s as the supply of fentinol and methamphetamine into the country from Mexico has increased too the point where in 2022 alone the CDC reported that more than 107,000 Americans died from drugrelated overdoses. 70% resulting from fentinyl and other synthetic opioids and the other 30% resulting from methamphetamine and other synthetic stimulants. the majorities of both of which come into the country through the Sinaloa and the Haliscoco New Generation
• 19:30 - 20:00 cartels. It is the deadliest and most serious drug epidemic that the United States has ever faced in its history. And the sheer brazeness of the Sinaloa cartel's willingness to partner with chemical companies from the biggest US state adversary to flood the US with synthetic drugs underscores how serious of a problem this has become. But the flow of deadly drugs like fentinyl and methamphetamine in one direction from Mexico north to the US is only one half of the problem. The other half of this
• 20:00 - 20:30 problem that's often left out of these conversations in the American context is the simultaneously enormous flow of weapons and arms in the other direction southward from the US across the border into Mexico. Throughout the entirety of Mexico right now, there is only just a single legal gun store to purchase firearms at. And yet, despite that, there are millions of firearms that can be easily found in Mexico that were manufactured in the United States. It's been estimated that somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 US-made firearms are
• 20:30 - 21:00 smuggled south across the border in New Mexico every single year. A problem so significant that Mexican authorities often refer to it as the Iron River. The Mexican government has claimed that between 70 to 90% of the guns used for crimes in Mexico have been illegally trafficked into the country from the US. While the US government itself has reported that more than 40% of the illegal firearms seized by authorities in Mexico over a 5-year period came exclusively from the state of Texas. So,
• 21:00 - 21:30 while the cartels have flooded the American side of the border with synthetic drugs that have fueled America's opioid and drug epidemics, it could also be argued that American gun manufacturers and sellers have also flooded the Mexican side of the border with firearms that has fueled the violence and war surrounding the cartels in Mexico's long drug war. And as a result of this long iron river, the cartels have been steadily able to transform themselves into some of the most powerful and wellequipped non-state actors in the world. They are now known
• 21:30 - 22:00 to possess heavy weaponry like beltfed gatling guns, armored personnel carriers, and even their own custommade tank contraptions that are usually called narco tanks. The cartels are also known to have adept ballmaking skills and a proficiency in using IEDs, as evidenced by a recent incident in 2023 when Tucson, Arizona border patrol agents came under fire from cartel members and then after pursuing them discovered 10 cartelplaced IEDs along the border. As early as 2010, the cartels have also made a pioneering use
• 22:00 - 22:30 of drones in multiple applications to deliver drugs across the border to navigate the flows of migrants from above in real time and as weapons to attack their enemies with. Apparently having taken lessons from the war in Ukraine, the Mexican cartels have recently been using drones to drop explosives on their enemies during assassination or terror campaigns. The cartels are also known to possess an arsenal of landmines. While recent reported weapon seizures from Mexican authorities indicates that their arsenals may be becoming even more
• 22:30 - 23:00 sophisticated. In early 2024, Mexican authorities reported to have seized a heat-seeking FIM92 Stinger surfaceto-air missile from the Sinaloa cartel which is theoretically capable of downing a commercial airliner. Well, shortly afterwards, Mexican authorities also reported to have separately seized two US-made Javelin anti-tank systems from the Halisco New Generation Cartel, meaning that the two most powerful cartels right now are likely advanced enough to have significant anti-air and anti-tank capabilities. Regardless,
• 23:00 - 23:30 while significantly outquipping most law enforcement agencies in Mexico, the cartel's firepower, training, and capabilities are still nowhere near on the same scale as the US military is. Probably the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the US military actually attacking the cartels then are the multiple legal roadblocks standing in the way instead. Since the Mexican government has repeatedly made it explicitly clear that they will never consent to unilateral US military actions on Mexican territory and have sworn to defend their sovereignty.
• 23:30 - 24:00 International law prohibits the United States from taking military action in Mexico except through a very narrow exception. Article 2, paragraph 4 of the UN Charter explicitly prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. However, article 51 of the UN charter later also carves out a narrow exception to this, noting that nothing in the charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed
• 24:00 - 24:30 attack occurs against a UN member. It's conceivable then that in order to justify US military strikes on Mexican cartels through the lens of international law, the Trump administration would probably try to argue that the level of destruction and death that's been caused in America by the cartel's fentinyl and methamphetamine smuggling operations entitles it to use military force against them on Mexican territory while acting in self-defense. Regardless of how destructive the fentanyl and methamphetamine crisis has been in America, however, the smuggling of those
• 24:30 - 25:00 narcotics into the US does not really represent an armed attack on the country in the way that article 51 of the UN charter envisioned. Thus, without the Mexican government's cooperation, any US military strikes on the cartels in Mexico would almost certainly be interpreted as a violation of international law at best and could be interpreted as an act of war on Mexico at worst, especially if the strikes end up killing large numbers of Mexican civilians, which are likely. This is the same council that Trump's former defense
• 25:00 - 25:30 secretary, Mark Esper, is said to have cautioned about when Trump allegedly first brought up the idea of firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico back in 2020. It would put the bilateral relationship between the US and Mexico into an irreversible nose dive and it could lead to massive unintended consequences like Mexico simply deciding to stop cooperating with the US altogether on migration issues along the border. Mexico is, to put it politely, also extremely sensitive to the US military taking unilateral actions
• 25:30 - 26:00 inside of their country. In the early 20th century, the US military repeatedly intervened in Mexico's affairs and conducted operations on Mexico's territory without the government's consent. In 1914, the US military decided to seize and occupy the Mexican port of Veraracruz for 7 months that killed around 160 Mexicans in the process. While for 10 months between 1916 and 1917, the US sent around 10,000 of their soldiers across the border into the Chihuahua state of Mexico in a
• 26:00 - 26:30 manhunt for Ponchovilla, a Mexican revolutionary whose forces had attacked a border town in New Mexico. Throw in the very long history of US and CIAled operations throughout the Latin America region for the past century and you get an idea of why Mexico wouldn't exactly trust the intentions of the US military and the CIA operating in Mexico again next. Nonetheless, the recent actions of the US military and of Trump himself during his first term in office may be indicative of what actions they'll
• 26:30 - 27:00 ultimately take against the Mexican cartels next. The US military and the Obama administration, after all, didn't really care at all about Pakistan sovereignty or asking Pakistan for prior permission before they sent in a SEAL team deep into a Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 due to fears that the Pakistani government was potentially compromised and might have tipped bin Laden off if they knew about it. While Trump himself has historically been very against large-scale US troop deployments like in Iraq or Afghanistan, he
• 27:00 - 27:30 frequently authorized drone and missile strikes and special forces raids to expand and intensify other conflicts. In 2017 and 2018, he ordered US missile strikes in Syria against the Assad regime in response to their use of chemical weapons, which was also probably a violation of the UN charter. He authorized the special forces raid in Syria in 2019 that killed the leader of ISIS. And perhaps most indicative of how he might act in Mexico, Trump also authorized the controversial drone strike that killed General Kasum Solommani in early 2020. 8 months before
• 27:30 - 28:00 that drone strike, the Trump administration designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC, one of the branches of the Iranian State Military, as a terrorist organization. Solommani was then the commander of the IRGC's Cuds force. basically Iran's version of the CIA. While he was at the airport in Baghdad, Iraq in early 2020, Trump authorized a drone strike that assassinated him without asking for approval first from the Iraqi government. The drone strike killed 10
• 28:00 - 28:30 people, including Solommani, and enraged the Iraqi government, which characterized the incident as a violation of its national sovereignty and considered it a breach of its security arrangement with the United States. Shortly afterward, the Iraqi Parliament passed a non-binding resolution to expel all remaining American troops from the country. The incident also might have set a precedent for the Trump administration's potential future actions in Mexico since Trump had the IRGC designated as a terrorist organization and then ordered a drone strike on their most senior leader just
• 28:30 - 29:00 8 months later without requesting approval of the government where the drone strike took place in beforehand. Similar actions could also take place in the future against the now terrorist designated cartel leadership in Mexico. So based on Trump's own historical preferences for taking covert actions against designated terrorist groups like drone strikes and limited special forces raids, these are probably the same kinds of tactics that he's currently thinking about applying to the Mexican cartels as well. Well, he's probably also using the CIA drone flights that are already
• 29:00 - 29:30 taking place over Mexico and the military surveillance flights that are already taking place along the borders and coastlines of Mexico to build out a targeting deck for future attacks. Nonetheless, there will be multiple problems with straight up military attacks on the cartels beyond all of the legal and geopolitical issues. Fentinol in particular is produced completely differently than plant-based drugs are. Fentanyl can be produced in large quantities and relatively small labs. and the cartel's fenol labs are often located in densely populated, crowded
• 29:30 - 30:00 urban areas and in people's own homes. Targeting these labs with drone strikes has very high potential to cause mass civilian casualties, which would further inflame tensions between the Mexican and US governments. Sending in special forces raids instead to attack the labs on the ground could also result in American soldiers becoming casualties or getting captured by the cartels or even by the Mexican government. also sparking a major potential political crisis. Moreover, fentanol labs are also low tech and much easier to replace than
• 30:00 - 30:30 conventional plant-based drug production is. Blowing up or capturing a bunch of fentanol labs does nothing to stop the cartels from just setting up more of them afterwards, especially so long as the demand for synthetic narcotics within the US remains unchanged and lucrative. The Trump administration's idea would be to employ maximum military pressure on the cartels by assassinating their leaders, blowing up their labs, and disrupting their logistics in order to try and compel them into abandoning the fentinyl and methamphetamine trade to the United States. And to critically
• 30:30 - 31:00 abandon their commercial relationships with state adversaries like China, particularly acute for the Sinoloa cartel's close business with China in the overall fentinol supply chain. In some ways, there's already a few early signs that this strategy could actually kind of be working. Just this February, open source intelligence appeared to indicate that the Metros and the Grubo Scorpion cartels managed to broker a ceasefire between them and the Mexican border state of Tamalipas, and that their ceasefire terms notably included a
• 31:00 - 31:30 call to end their fentinyl trafficking into South Texas, potentially out of a fear of incurring the overwhelming wrath of the US military and their foreign terrorist organization designations. On the one hand, the cartels are not ideological terror organizations, and they effectively operate as businesses. When ideological terror organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS are attacked, they often dig themselves in and continue the fight no matter how badly their organization gets bloodied. If the cartels begin losing access to their revenue streams and their resources
• 31:30 - 32:00 begin coming under threat by the military, they on the other hand are much more likely to adapt and negotiate instead of continuing on fighting without the ideological incentive. But at the same time, there's also a risk that taking direct US military action against the cartels will also encourage the cartels to retaliate in uncertain and unpredictable ways. Historically, the cartels have avoided deliberately attacking American citizens out of a fear of encouraging a US military response, as evidenced by the Gulf
• 32:00 - 32:30 cartel's apology in 2023 after they mistakenly killed those two American citizens. However, if the US military was already actively bombing their drug labs and assassinating their leadership with special forces raids, they would have no more incentive to show any restraint. And they might even be incentivized to begin carrying out attacks targeting Americans for leverage and reprisals to try and force the US government into halting their attacks. There are around 1.6 million US citizens
• 32:30 - 33:00 who currently live in Mexico who might find themselves the target of attacks in the crossfire. To say nothing of the millions of American tourists who travel to Mexico every single year. No matter which option the Trump administration ultimately takes towards the cartels south of the border, risks abound. Cooperating with the Mexican government against the cartels risks critical information leaking to the cartels through corrupt Mexican government officials. While sidelining the Mexican government altogether and attacking the cartels unilaterally risks crashing the
• 33:00 - 33:30 relationship between the US and Mexico and compromising their historical cooperation on the border and migration, while it further risks incentivizing the cartels to begin initiating terroristic attacks on American citizens and US interests, potentially exacerbating the conflict and drawing the US military further into the war in another Afghanistan in the mountains south of the border. Any chance of being successful in the long run can also not be simply based on attacking the cartel's operations and leadership and eliminating their members. So long as the unquenchable demand for narcotics in
• 33:30 - 34:00 the US still remains high, so long as the flow of guns back across the border from the US into Mexico remains unchecked like an iron river. And so long as the Mexican government's authority over its own territory remains decentralized, weak, and corrupt, the problem will just continue persisting, and new cartels and leaders will just replace the ones that are destroyed to fill in the power vacuum. A multifaceted approach to the long drug war is needed that also addresses the root causes of the conflict in the first place. But
• 34:00 - 34:30 addressing those root causes will be no simple task. The Mexican drug war for years has been among the most violent, destructive, and longest lasting conflicts of the entire 21st century that has evolved through multiple phases that have seen many different cartels and leaders come and go throughout the years. Crushing one cartel and eliminating their leadership without addressing the root causes will never put an end to the conflict. And no other cartel leader throughout this entire conflict has been as powerful or as well known as Walkin Guzman, better known by his nickname of El Chapo, whose arrest
• 34:30 - 35:00 and extradition to the United States in 2017 did nothing to end the drug wars violence and chaos. El Chapo was the leader of Mexico's Cinaloa cartel for years. And at his height, he was arguably even more powerful than Pablo Escobar had managed to become in Colombia in the 1980s. His sprawling empire was once estimated to be responsible for an entire quarter of all the illegal drugs that were entering into the United States, largely through a network of at least 90 underground tunnels that he had ordered constructed between the US and Mexico. A
• 35:00 - 35:30 multi-billionaire, El Chapo is believed to be personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. And for years, he was the most wanted man in the Western Hemisphere with a total amount of bounties on his head that nearly equal $10 million. Constantly elusive, he managed to escape prison multiple times after being arrested. Most infamously in 2015 when he escaped from Mexico's Ultipano maximum security prison through an elaborate tunnel that he had his men construct beneath the prison without being noticed. After that escape, El
• 35:30 - 36:00 Chapo became arguably the most wanted fugitive in the entire world by both the US and Mexican governments, and a worldwide manhunt for his recapture began, the scale of which has rarely ever been seen before since. I also made an entire video about the yearslong man hunt for El Chapo and how the US and Mexican governments were eventually able to locate and capture it in my modern conflict series which I create new videos in every single month taking deeper dives into more recent controversial and darker subject
• 36:00 - 36:30 material surrounding modern wars operations and conflicts. Over the past four years, I've personally created nearly 50 total episodes of modern conflicts, covering topics as diverse as the US's manhunt for Osama bin Laden and the pathway that led up to that point in the 9/11 attacks. An hourby-hour analysis into the events that took place during Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7th and Israel's subsequent full-scale invasion of Gaza, along with how the US led a coalition that eventually destroyed ISIS across Iraq and Syria. How the US military campaigns
• 36:30 - 37:00 in Iraq and Afghanistan began and evolved with time and dozens of other episodes with brand new ones like the man hunt for El Chapo coming out every single month all exclusively on Nebula. Because of the inherently violent, controversial, and recent nature of discussing the details of the manhunt for arguably the most wanted violent criminal of the entire 21st century, this episode covering the manhunt for El Chapo would never work on YouTube because it would instantly be demonetized and age restricted, which means the YouTube's algorithm, which is
• 37:00 - 37:30 based on showing you ads, would never be incentivized to actually show the video to you or promote it. I deal with very large numbers of my videos on YouTube getting demonetized and age restricted as they are. And that's why I upload all of my episodes on modern conflicts exclusively to Nebula and why signing up to Nebula is the absolute best thing that you can do to support me and my channel. And you'll get access to way more content there than just my exclusive Modern Conflict series as well. Because the best part about Nebula is that it's jointly co-owned by myself and hundreds of other independent
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