On Friday, February 14th, Mexico’s president warned U.S. gunmakers they could face fresh legal action and be deemed accomplices if Washington designates Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups.
“If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our U.S. lawsuit,” Claudia Sheinbaum said at a daily press conference.
A new charge could include alleged “complicity” of gunmakers with terror groups, she said.
Sheinbaum said the U.S. Justice Department itself has recognized that “74% of the weapons” used by criminal groups in Mexico come from north of the border.
An estimated 200,000 to half a million U.S. firearms are smuggled into Mexico every year, “60 Minutes” reported in December.
A 2023 CBS Reports investigation found that dozens of cartel gunrunning networks, operating like terrorist cells, pay Americans to buy weapons from gun stores and online dealers all across the country, as far north as Wisconsin and even Alaska, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The firearms are then shipped across the southwest border through a chain of brokers and couriers.
And on February, 19th, 2025, the Trump administration and the U.S. State Department officially designated several Mexican criminal groups as terrorist organizations. This move aimed to increase pressure on these groups, which include the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, among others.
The designation, typically reserved for politically motivated terrorist groups, was applied to these cartels due to their involvement in drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, and violent territorial expansion. The classification allows for more stringent measures against these organizations and those aiding them, reflecting the administration’s commitment to combating organized crime.
Source: Telemundo
