The U.S. government has officially designated several Latin American organized crime groups as terrorist organizations, but the move will do little to help attack these complex criminal networks.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced February 20 that the Venezuelan mega-gang Tren de Aragua, the MS13 street gang, and the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG), Gulf Cartel, Northeast Cartel, Familia Michoacana, and United Cartels in Mexico would be declared “foreign terrorist organizations.”
The official designation stemmed from an executive order U.S. President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office announcing his intention to make this decision.
“The Cartels have engaged in a campaign of violence and terror throughout the Western Hemisphere that has not only destabilized countries with significant importance for our national interests but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs,” Trump said at that time.
The new designations are likely to put further strain on US-Mexico relations, which are already tense due to Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Mexican goods and his statements claiming Mexico’s government is controlled by criminal interests.
Experts consulted by InSight Crime cautioned that this measure is far from a cure-all for the threats posed by transnational criminal networks and may actually complicate joint efforts to fight them.
“If the question is how to effectively weaken, combat, and dismantle criminal networks in Mexico, then the starting point needs to be addressing them for what they are,” said Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
“Mexican criminal groups are very powerful and cause horrific levels of violence and suffering, but they are not pursuing the type of political ends that a terrorist organization pursues,” she added.
US authorities already have a number of legal tools at their disposal to prosecute criminal leaders, impose financial sanctions, and seize assets. While the U.S. can now impose stiffer penalties on the people they target and obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to carry out their own electronic surveillance, Brewer told InSight Crime that the foreign terrorist designation does not significantly increase the tools needed to combat these groups and risks unintended consequences.
“The concern is that this could open the door to both criminal prosecutions and immigration consequences for a wide range of everyday people, organizations, and businesses on both sides of the border that might find themselves inadvertently caught up in the framework of providing material support to terrorist groups,” she added.
What’s more, the move is based on the premise that these are monolithic groups when they are highly complex, horizontally-integrated organizations with no clear lines separating who is part of the network and who is not.
Their use of violence is based on protecting economic interests, not obtaining political objectives or imposing an ideology.
“The designation fundamentally misunderstands how these criminal operations work,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an expert on organized crime.
“These networks have people in the United States that form part of very large supply chains that make such criminal operations possible,” she told InSight Crime. “The designation makes it seem like the threat is coming exclusively from the outside, but that is not compatible with reality and how these criminal activities happen.”
Below, InSight Crime looks at the eight groups targeted by the new U.S. government designation.
MS13
Born in the United States and later exported to the streets of Central America, the MS13 is arguably Latin America’s most notorious street gang. But an unprecedented crackdown waged by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador has severely diminished the gang’s strength and reach in that country.
In recent years, U.S. prosecutors have indicted a number of the group’s top leaders on terrorism-related charges. This includes Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook,” who was captured in Mexico after government officials in El Salvador secretly released him from prison.
As InSight Crime reported in a multi-year investigation, the MS13 is a complex social organization engaged in a range of criminal activities across Central America, Mexico, and the United States. And while the gang has often used spectacular displays of violence, it is rarely used strictly for political purposes or to further a specific ideology.
SEE ALSO: MS-13 or MS13 Gang: A Comprehensive Profile of the Mara Salvatrucha Gang
Tren de Aragua
Few criminal groups have received more coverage recently than Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan mega-gang born in the country’s prison system that has since expanded across South America on the back of a mass exodus of migrants fleeing an acute social and economic crisis at home.
Despite international headlines suggesting the gang is invading the United States, Tren de Aragua has not established a significant U.S. presence and does not appear poised to do so in the future.
The group has expanded from Venezuela and into Colombia, Peru, and Chile, engaging in a wide range of criminal activities such as extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, and migrant smuggling, among others.
The group’s designation as a terrorist organization comes just months after the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization that poses an “escalating threat.”
Sinaloa Cartel
Rather than a single unified group, the Sinaloa Cartel is more like a federation of different criminal factions operating primarily in the state of Sinaloa but also across various other parts of the country and the US-Mexico border.
They are mainly dedicated to trafficking drugs like cocaine, the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, and methamphetamine, but also profit from taxing migrant smugglers and others in legal industries like fishing and agriculture.
The different criminal factions operating in Sinaloa may come together to share resources and secure protection. However, these links are not necessarily cohesive, and some factions often engage in violent conflicts with each other.
The most recent example is the fracture between the Chapitos faction – led by the sons of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo” – and another known as the Mayiza that is associated with Ismael Zambada García, alias “El Mayo.”
The Sinaloa Cartel and its different factions have weathered targeted government pressure for years. Despite the fact that many of the group’s top leaders have been arrested and extradited to the United States, they remain one of Mexico’s most formidable networks.
SEE ALSO: Mexico Crime Profile: Criminal Groups, Security Forces, Prisons, and the Judicial System
CJNG
The CJNG has in recent years been characterized by its use of extreme violence and military tactics to expand its criminal operations to nearly every Mexican state.
The group coerces or forms alliances with smaller groups and subcontracts them to help it establish a foothold in new areas, especially along the border in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
Alongside the Sinaloa Cartel, U.S. prosecutors say that the CJNG is a major supplier of synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl into the United States. However, various factions of the group are also involved in extortion, mass kidnappings, and illegal mining. It is also known for its sophisticated financial and money laundering schemes.
Most recently, its primary battlefront has been on the border between Michoacán and Jalisco, where it is increasingly relying on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to battle local armed groups like the Knights Templar, Viagras, remnants of the Familia Michoacana, United Cartels, and self-defense groups that have all pushed back against its expansion.
Gulf Cartel
The Gulf Cartel is one of Mexico’s longest-standing criminal groups, but it has since splintered into a number of different rival factions operating primarily in the northern state of Tamaulipas. Among the most powerful splinter groups are the Scorpions, Cyclones, Rojos, Metros, and Panthers.
The Scorpions faction gained notoriety in March 2023 when it kidnapped four U.S. citizens in the border city of Matamoros. Two of those individuals later died and a Mexican woman was shot and killed during the abduction.
Following the attack, a number of U.S. lawmakers made calls not just to label the Gulf Cartel and others as foreign terrorist organizations, but to also authorize the use of U.S. military force against them. Factions of the group have also been involved in other mass killings near the US-Mexico border.
Northeast Cartel
After the top leaders of the once-feared Zetas were arrested and killed, the Northeast Cartel was the most dominant splinter faction to emerge from the group. For many years, the group was controlled by members of the Treviño Morales family that founded the Zetas and still dominates the city of Nuevo Laredo.
After Mexican marines arrested Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias “El Huevo,” in March 2022, an hours-long firefight ensued on the streets of Nuevo Laredo and shots were fired at the U.S. consulate.
But unlike other groups who have weakened as a result of these high-profile arrests, the Northeast Cartel has managed to maintain near total control of Nuevo Laredo’s underworld and has even expanded into neighboring states like Nuevo León.
While it is not a major drug trafficking network, its primary source of income comes from taxing various groups that use the Nuevo Laredo-Laredo border crossing, including drug traffickers and migrant smugglers.
Moreover, the Northeast Cartel inherited from the Zetas the systematic extortion of both illegal markets and certain legal businesses within its territory, a practice known as cobro de piso.
A number of rival groups have tried to undermine their criminal hegemony in Nuevo Laredo, including Gulf Cartel factions like the Metros, as well as other remnants of the Zetas, primarily the Old School Zetas, but have so far been unsuccessful in doing so.
New Familia Michoacana
The Familia Michoacana is a shadow of its former self. Since its heyday in the 2000s, the group has splintered into several different factions that maintain a presence in Michoacán, Guerrero, and the State of Mexico.
At times, offshoots of the group have banded together with the Knights Templar, Viagras, and other independent groups under the banner of the so-called United Cartels in an effort to push back against incursions from the CJNG.
The Familia Michoacana remains an active player in southern and central Mexico’s criminal landscape, and U.S. authorities have accused its members of continuing to traffic fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine into the United States.
United Cartels
The United Cartels is a coalition of independent and semi-independent criminal networks, as well as civilian self-defense groups, operating primarily in the states of Michoacán and Jalisco that joined forces in order to resist the CJNG’s nation-wide expansion.
In some cases, especially in the contested Tierra Caliente region, InSight Crime witnessed these groups openly collaborating with local police forces to ensure security.
Despite these complexities, the U.S. government took specific aim at the so-called Tepalcatepec Cartel, one of the groups that forms part of this alliance and that is reportedly led by Juan José Farías Álvarez, alias “El Abuelo.” Álvarez rose to prominence with the self-defense movement but has since been accused by Mexican authorities of trafficking synthetic drugs.
The United Cartels is characterized by a very loose association between its different members and a constantly shifting set of alliances. The Mexican government also listed them as a priority target due in part to their role in running extortion rackets targeting the agricultural sector in Michoacán, primarily of lime and avocado farmers.
