On February 20, 2025, the United States designated Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). With this act, Washington changed the rules of the game. The crucial question is not whether Mexico agrees, but whether it understands the magnitude of the conceptual disconnect this decision reveals.
When the United States classifies an organization as terrorist, it activates a mechanism designed to address threats to its national security: asset freezes, extraterritorial sanctions, priority intelligence cooperation, and legal justification for counterterrorism operations—national security in its purest form.
Mexico, in contrast, has kept the cartels within the realm of public safety: arrests, seizures, investigations, extraditions. These are metrics of police activity that operate with a radically different logic. It’s not that one is right and the other wrong; it’s that they speak two different languages about the same phenomenon.
Public safety protects people and prosecutes crimes; Its focus is on the short term. National security preserves the continuity and integrity of the State; its focus is on the medium and long term. When a State confuses these two missions, it ends up doing both poorly.
The National Intelligence Center has become increasingly oriented toward serving Public Security. The incentives, the dashboards, the metrics: everything pushes toward the operational-criminal. The intelligence community for National Security has been relegated to combating organized crime, abandoning the comprehensive vision that the State requires.
Culiacán 2019 revealed failures in anticipation, alert, and coordination. The coordinated blockades of 2023 overwhelmed the traditional response. The cyberattack on Pemex and the Guacamaya Leaks exposed systemic vulnerabilities. The adversary learns faster because the system repeats ineffective cycles.
Meanwhile, the United States observes organizations that manage territories, regulate markets, corrupt institutions, and produce substances that in 2023 were linked to more than 100,000 deaths within its borders. For Washington, this is not common crime; it is a hybrid threat with a transnational dimension and the perfect pretext for implementing its new regional control policies.
The FTO designation has precise operational consequences. It activates financial instruments against anyone who provides material support to these organizations.
It alters bilateral cooperation: the US no longer requests police collaboration, but demands action against terrorist threats. And it opens up previously unthinkable scenarios: the declarations about ground operations and the use of surveillance drones are not mere bravado, but signals of a paradigm shift.
What should Mexico do? First, differentiate missions without breaking coordination: criminal intelligence for public safety, strategic intelligence for national security. Second, activate the National Risk Agenda as a guiding instrument, not as a declarative document. Third, protect critical infrastructure: ports, customs, energy, telecommunications—the area where functional sovereignty is lost, even if territorial sovereignty is preserved. Fourth, build the capacity for strategic dialogue with the United States based on our own assessment, not on reacting to the other’s agenda; and fifth, activate the National Security Council, which has broader scope and functions than the National Security Cabinet.
Washington’s decision will not be reversed with diplomatic statements. It can only be countered with institutional capacity. Mexico has the opportunity to reclaim the lost boundary between public safety and national security. What is lacking is leadership, coordination, and political will. Time is running out. While Mexico debates whether or not the cartels are terrorist organizations, the US has already made its decision and will act accordingly.
Source: excelsior
