Mexican drug cartels are reportedly in fear and going into hiding as Mexican law enforcement officials have ramped up arrests and drug busts in response to the Trump administration threatening to hit the country with tariffs.
Several cartel members told the New York Times they had either “gone into hiding” or were in the process of “trying to figure out how to protect” their families “in case the American military” launched strikes in Mexico.
One “high-ranking member” in the Sinaloa Cartel told the outlet that “you can’t be calm” or sleep “because you don’t know when they’ll catch you,” and other cartel members explained that they were faced with “selling off property and firing unessential personnel.”
The New York Times reported that in response to President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada until the mass inflows of illegal aliens and fentanyl across the borders into the United States were stopped, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has sent her government “on the offensive” and has “dispatched 10,00 national guard troops to the border”:
President Trump began floating the possibility of tariffs soon after his election in November, and soon after taking office announced 25 percent levies on Mexican goods if the country didn’t act on border security and drug trafficking. The president gave Mexico a month to deliver results, threatening to enact the tariffs on March 4 if he wasn’t satisfied.
Facing economic chaos, the Mexican government went on the offensive. President Claudia Sheinbaum dispatched 10,000 national guard troops to the border and hundreds more soldiers to Sinaloa state, a major hub of fentanyl trafficking where a cartel war has caused turmoil for months.
Breitbart News’s John Carney reported in November 2024 that Trump had threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on all goods coming into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada until they reigned in the illegal aliens and drugs such as fentanyl flowing across the border.
The Mexican Attorney General’s Office recently confirmed that 29 criminals, including as “a top drug boss behind the 1985 murder of DEA Agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena,” who were wanted by the Department of Justice, would be extradited to the U.S.
La @FGRMexico y la #SSPC informan que, esta mañana fueron trasladados a los #EstadosUnidosDeAmérica 29 personas que se encontraban privadas de su libertad en diferentes centros penitenciarios del país, las cuales eran requeridas por sus vínculos con organizaciones criminales por… pic.twitter.com/X5eJTWjmre
— Secretaría de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana (@SSPCMexico) February 27, 2025
“Trump established a deadline, and we are seeing the results of everything we could have seen in years being done in a month,” Jaime López, a security analyst in Mexico City told the outlet. “The government is sending a message that when it really wants to, it can exert that kind of pressure.”
In a recent post on Truth Social, Trump stated that “drugs are still pouring” into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico, adding that “until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effected on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled.”
While the threat of tariffs from Trump was credited as being behind the increase in the crackdown on drug cartels in Mexico, the outlet reported that Sheinbaum “had showed her willingness to take on the cartels” after taking office in October 2024.
