Drug Cartels Terrorist Designation in International Law

Introduction

The drug cartels terrorist designation has turned a familiar organized crime problem into a difficult question of public international law. Drug cartels have long been prosecuted through criminal law, extradition treaties, drug-control conventions, asset-freezing regimes, and police cooperation. The newer move is different. By classifying certain cartels as terrorist organizations, states may activate stronger sanctions, immigration consequences, material-support offences, financial restrictions, and intelligence tools. Yet the label does not automatically alter the international rules on sovereignty, armed conflict, human rights, or the use of force (Klabbers, 2024; Congressional Research Service, 2025).

The issue became more concrete after the United States adopted Executive Order 14157 in January 2025 and later designated several cartels and transnational criminal groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The listed groups included the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste, Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Carteles Unidos, MS-13, and Tren de Aragua. In 2026, the policy expanded to include Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital. These measures show a clear shift: cartel violence is being framed not only as a criminal enterprise, but also as a national security threat with cross-border and political effects (Executive Office of the President, 2025; U.S. Department of State, 2026).

That shift creates real enforcement consequences, but it also creates legal risk. A state may decide how to classify threats under its own law. Public international law, however, asks different questions. Does the territorial state consent to foreign action? Is there a treaty obligation to cooperate? Has the Security Council imposed binding measures? Has the violence reached the threshold of armed conflict? Are suspects protected by fair trial rights, non-refoulement, and the prohibition of arbitrary detention? The answer cannot be supplied by a national terrorist list alone.

The central difficulty is that cartel violence often sits between categories. Cartels may kill public officials, intimidate communities, infiltrate police forces, control prisons, dominate border routes, corrupt ports, and impose local rules through fear. Some groups use drones, explosives, military-grade weapons, and public displays of violence. These facts explain why policymakers reach for counter-terrorism language. Still, international law does not treat every violent non-state actor as a terrorist organization. Nor does it treat every campaign of public fear as terrorism. Purpose matters. Structure matters. Evidence matters. The applicable legal regime matters.

The Palermo Convention remains the main treaty framework for transnational organized crime. It defines an organized criminal group by structure, continuity, cooperation, serious crime, and the pursuit of financial or material benefit (United Nations, 2000). That model still fits many cartels, but it does not fully capture their current role. Recent institutional analysis shows that some organized criminal groups now operate as geopolitical actors: they distort governance, influence security policy, penetrate state institutions, and affect regional stability (Williams et al., 2026). The law has not adapted cleanly to that reality.

The terrorism framework is also fragmented. International law contains sectoral treaties, Security Council duties, and financial controls, but no single universal definition of terrorism applies across all contexts. Security Council Resolution 1566 links terrorism to serious violence against civilians, hostage-taking, intent to intimidate a population or compel a government or international organization, and conduct already prohibited by counter-terrorism instruments (United Nations Security Council, 2004). Cartel conduct may sometimes resemble that pattern. But resemblance is not enough. A cartel may use terror as a business method without having the political or ideological purpose usually associated with terrorism.

This article argues that the drug cartels terrorist designation is strongest as a tool for financial disruption, prosecution of support networks, immigration control, and pressure on facilitators. It is weakest when used to imply war powers, cross-border military action, detention outside ordinary safeguards, or broad liability for people living under cartel coercion. The same measure that helps prosecutors reach financiers, brokers, transporters, and corrupt intermediaries may also harm migrants, local businesses, family members, and residents of controlled areas if applied without careful limits.

The proper legal analysis must keep the regimes separate. Organized crime law governs criminalization, extradition, mutual legal assistance, and confiscation. Counter-terrorism law targets financing, support, travel, and sanctions. Human rights law controls policing, detention, trial, asylum, and removal. The law on the use of force protects sovereignty and territorial integrity. International humanitarian law applies only when factual thresholds of armed conflict are met. These fields overlap, but they do not collapse into one another.

A serious assessment of the drug cartels terrorist designation must avoid two errors. The first is to deny the severity of cartel power. The second is to assume that a severe threat permits legal shortcuts. Cartel violence can destabilize states, terrorize civilians, and undermine public authority. Even so, public international law still requires evidence, jurisdiction, consent, necessity, proportionality, due process, and review. The terrorist label may be useful, but it is not a master key.

1. The legal issue behind the label

1.1 Domestic label and international legality

A drug cartels terrorist designation begins as an act of domestic law. A state decides that a foreign organization satisfies the criteria set by its own legislation, then attaches legal consequences within its legal system. Those consequences may include asset freezes, travel restrictions, immigration bars, criminal liability for support, financial reporting duties, and broader investigative powers. The 2025 United States designations show this clearly: several cartels and transnational gangs were placed under both Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist frameworks, even though many had already been targeted under drug-trafficking, transnational criminal organization, or Kingpin Act sanctions (Congressional Research Service, 2025).

That domestic classification does not bind the rest of the international community by itself. Other states are not legally required to adopt the same designation unless there is a treaty duty, a binding Security Council measure, or their own national law independently reaches the same result. This point is basic but often missed. A national terrorist list may have a strong practical reach, especially when linked to the U.S. dollar, correspondent banking, immigration systems, or extradition policy. Yet practical pressure is not the same as an international legal obligation.

Public international law treats national designations as legally relevant facts, not as automatic sources of international law. They may influence cooperation, diplomatic pressure, sanctions screening, and risk assessment. They may also shape how prosecutors, banks, and courts understand a group’s activities. Still, they do not decide the separate questions of state responsibility, armed conflict, self-defence, international criminal jurisdiction, or human rights protection. Those questions must be answered through the applicable international rules, not through the label alone.

The distinction matters because the term “terrorist” carries exceptional legal and political weight. It can narrow banking access, complicate humanitarian activity, affect asylum claims, and expose individuals to severe criminal penalties for forms of assistance that might otherwise fall under ordinary commercial, familial, or coerced interaction. In cartel-controlled areas, that risk is not theoretical. Local residents, transport workers, shopkeepers, migrants, and small businesses may interact with cartel power because refusal is dangerous. A legally serious approach must separate voluntary support, coerced compliance, ordinary civilian contact, and criminal collaboration.

The strongest legal reading is narrow: the drug cartels terrorist designation can validly expand the designating state’s internal enforcement tools, but it cannot export a new legal status to the whole international system. A cartel listed in Washington is not automatically listed in Brasília, Mexico City, Bogotá, Brussels, or at the United Nations. Nor does the designation itself transform the territorial state’s consent rules or the Charter limits on force.

1.2 Category collapse between crime and terror

The central danger is category collapse. Drug cartels may look like criminal enterprises, armed groups, insurgent forces, terrorist networks, private armies, and territorial governors at the same time. That hybrid character is precisely why the subject is difficult. It is also why legal classification must be disciplined. Organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, and armed conflict are not interchangeable categories.

Organized crime law focuses on structured criminal activity for financial or material benefit. Its tools are criminalization, extradition, mutual legal assistance, surveillance, asset confiscation, and police cooperation. Terrorism law adds a different concern: violence or intimidation aimed at compelling a population, government, or international organization. Insurgency suggests organized political opposition to state authority. Armed conflict requires factual thresholds of intensity and organization. These regimes may overlap in practice, but each one activates different powers and different limits.

Cartels sit uneasily across these boundaries. The Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, PCC, and Comando Vermelho may use public violence to intimidate populations, resist state operations, control territory, and protect illicit markets. UNICRI’s 2024 study on Latin America treats the crime-terror nexus as a real and evolving phenomenon, while also noting that states differ in how they designate groups and that some actors use terrorist-like tactics without being listed by the United Nations as terrorist organizations (UNICRI, 2024). That distinction is essential. Method is not always status. A massacre, bombing, roadblock, drone attack, or assassination may be terrorizing, but the legal consequences depend on purpose, context, organization, and the governing legal framework.

If the categories are merged too quickly, legal controls weaken. A government may treat ordinary criminal suspects as battlefield enemies. A foreign state may claim military options where extradition and cooperation remain the proper route. Banks may over-block lawful activity. Immigration authorities may treat victims of cartel coercion as terrorist supporters. Courts may struggle to distinguish cartel membership, family association, forced payment, and deliberate facilitation.

The better approach is not to deny cartel brutality. It is to classify each legal issue separately. A cartel can be an organized criminal group under the Palermo Convention, a sanctions target under national law, a possible terrorist organization under a domestic statute, and, in rare factual settings, a party to a non-international armed conflict. None of these classifications automatically proves the others. Legal accuracy requires resisting the urge to let one label do all the work.

1.3 Method and scope

This article examines the drug cartels terrorist designation through public international law. U.S. law is important because the recent designations provide the immediate trigger for the debate. Yet the article is not mainly about U.S. constitutional doctrine or administrative procedure. Its focus is external legality: what the designation changes beyond domestic enforcement, what it cannot change, and how it interacts with the law of transnational organized crime, counter-terrorism, jurisdiction, sovereignty, human rights, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law.

The method is doctrinal and functional. It starts with the legal category used by states, then asks which international rules attach to the conduct being regulated. If the issue is trafficking, money laundering, corruption, or weapons flows, the relevant framework is primarily criminal cooperation. If the issue is financing a listed group, sanctions and counter-terrorism financing rules become central. If the issue is a cross-border raid, the analysis moves to consent, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, and any claimed basis for self-defence. If the issue is detention, trial, removal, or asylum, human rights and refugee law cannot be bypassed.

This approach avoids a common error in policy writing: treating the label as the conclusion. The label is only the start of the analysis. The harder legal question is what follows from it in each operational setting.

2. Organized crime in international law

2.1 UNTOC and the Palermo model

The Palermo Convention remains the central treaty framework for transnational organized crime. Article 2 defines an “organized criminal group” as a structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time, acting together to commit serious crimes or offences under the Convention, in order to obtain a financial or other material benefit (United Nations, 2000). UNICRI uses this same definition as the baseline for its analysis of the nexus between transnational organized crime and terrorism in Latin America (UNICRI, 2024).

The definition is practical rather than symbolic. It does not require the group to have a political ideology, a formal hierarchy, permanent membership, or territorial control. It is enough that the group has some structure, continuity, coordination, serious criminal purpose, and profit motive. This design fits the reality of many drug cartels. They may fragment, delegate, outsource, subcontract, and cooperate with loosely connected cells. They do not need to resemble a formal army or a political movement to fall within the Palermo model.

For the drug cartels terrorist designation, this point is crucial. Most cartels can be legally understood as organized criminal groups before any terrorism analysis begins. Their core business usually involves drug production, trafficking routes, money laundering, corruption, extortion, illegal mining, arms acquisition, and territorial protection of markets. Some also use violence with public and coercive effects. But the existence of terror-like conduct does not erase the financial structure that places them squarely within transnational organized crime law.

The Palermo model is also state-centred. It obliges states to criminalize participation in organized criminal groups, money laundering, corruption, obstruction of justice, and related conduct. It improves cooperation across borders. It does not create an international court for cartels, does not make criminal organizations international legal persons, and does not allow one state to enforce its criminal law by force inside another state without consent.

That limitation is not a defect. It reflects the legal bargain of the Convention. States agreed to cooperate against transnational criminality while preserving sovereignty and domestic control over prosecution. The model is built for police, prosecutors, customs authorities, financial investigators, and courts. It is not a war powers instrument.

2.2 Drug control treaties

International drug control law adds a more specific treaty layer. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs established controls over narcotic substances and lawful medical and scientific uses. The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances extended international control to psychotropic drugs. The 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances responded to the rise of transnational trafficking networks by strengthening criminalization, extradition, mutual legal assistance, asset confiscation, controlled delivery, and action against precursor chemicals (United Nations, 1961; United Nations, 1971; United Nations, 1988).

The 1988 Convention is especially important for cartel analysis. It requires parties to establish offences related to production, manufacture, transport, distribution, sale, import, export, financing, conversion or transfer of proceeds, concealment of criminal property, possession for trafficking purposes, and participation in related conspiracies or associations. It also treats extradition and mutual legal assistance as central tools. The Convention’s logic is direct: trafficking networks are transnational, so the legal response must make evidence, suspects, proceeds, and cooperation move across borders more effectively.

Controlled delivery deserves special attention. It allows authorities, under agreed conditions, to let illicit consignments continue under surveillance so investigators can identify organizers, financiers, and recipients. This method is suited to cartel structures because the visible courier is often less important than the logistics chain, corrupt official, broker, warehouse operator, chemical supplier, or financial intermediary. A narrow arrest-focused model catches replaceable actors. A network-focused investigation attacks command, finance, and infrastructure.

Money laundering is another bridge between drug control and organized crime. Cartels survive because illicit profit can be stored, converted, invested, and reintegrated into lawful markets. Real estate, fuel, agriculture, mining, construction, transport, entertainment, crypto-assets, cash businesses, and trade-based schemes can all serve that function. The legal response must target those systems. Terrorist designation may add sanctions pressure, but the underlying financial work remains built on anti-money laundering, confiscation, corporate transparency, and cross-border evidence.

The drug treaties also reveal a legal boundary. They are severe criminal law instruments, not military instruments. Their remedies are prosecution, cooperation, extradition, confiscation, and prevention. They do not authorize unilateral armed operations on foreign territory. That remains true even when cartel violence is extreme.

2.3 Cooperation, not war powers

The architecture of transnational crime law is cooperative. It assumes that states remain the primary enforcement authorities within their territories. One state may request extradition. It may ask for bank records. It may share intelligence. It may coordinate controlled delivery. It may help trace assets. It may assist with prosecution. What it may not do, absent a separate legal basis, is treat another state’s territory as an enforcement zone.

This point is central to any legally accurate discussion of the drug cartels terrorist designation. The shift to terrorism language may change domestic penalties and sanctions exposure. It may increase political pressure for joint operations. It may justify stronger financial screening. It does not create an independent right to conduct raids, drone strikes, or military operations in another state.

The Congressional Research Service noted that the 2025 designations raised possible questions about foreign policy, trade, military dynamics, and legislative proposals to authorize or prohibit the use of force against certain entities (Congressional Research Service, 2025). That observation is important because it shows the policy risk: once a criminal group is classified through national security language, the debate may move quickly toward force. Public international law slows that movement. It requires consent, Security Council authorization, or a valid claim of self-defence under the UN Charter.

Even where a territorial state is weak, corrupt, or partially unable to control cartel-dominated areas, sovereignty does not disappear. International law has no general “cartel exception” to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Cross-border cooperation may be urgent and extensive, but the legal basis must be identified. Joint policing with consent is one thing. Unilateral force is another.

This cooperative model also has a practical advantage. Cartels are not defeated only by kinetic operations. Their resilience comes from corruption, money, supply chains, social control, prison networks, weapons flows, and laundering routes. These systems are better disrupted through prosecutors, financial intelligence units, customs authorities, beneficial ownership registers, anti-corruption bodies, and coordinated investigations. Military force may kill individuals. It rarely dismantles the ecosystem that replaces them.

2.4 Cartels as geopolitical actors

The older image of organized crime is too narrow for contemporary cartel power. The traditional model imagines a hierarchical mafia-style structure operating outside the state and seeking profit while avoiding political exposure. That model still explains some conduct, but it fails to capture the broader influence of major cartels and prison-based criminal networks in Latin America.

The 2026 European Parliament study argues that organized criminal groups have evolved into transnational geopolitical actors. It finds that current international law does not adequately define or reflect this transformation, and that existing frameworks often confine organized crime to the transnational criminal domain rather than treating its wider political and security effects with sufficient precision (Williams et al., 2026). The study identifies a practical blind spot: powerful criminal groups may shape governance, markets, borders, public security, and foreign policy while remaining outside the main accountability structures of international law.

That argument is persuasive if handled carefully. It does not mean cartels become states. It does not mean they acquire an ordinary international legal personality. It means their factual power can produce international consequences. A cartel that controls ports, influences customs officials, regulates access to neighbourhoods, corrupts police units, moves weapons across borders, and affects electoral or prison governance is no longer only a trafficking organization in the narrow sense. It becomes an actor capable of altering public authority.

For the drug cartels terrorist designation, this is the strongest reason why ordinary organized crime frameworks may feel insufficient. The problem is not only that cartels sell drugs. The problem is that some groups govern spaces, discipline communities, control illicit economies, negotiate with officials, and shape security choices. The legal challenge is to respond to that reality without pretending that the terrorist label solves all classification problems.

2.4.1 State-opposed cartels

State-opposed cartels confront or replace state authority in specific areas. They may attack police, ambush soldiers, burn public transport, blockade roads, threaten judges, assassinate officials, and impose local rules. CJNG is often cited in this context because of its militarized violence, use of armed commandos, drones, land mines, improvised explosive devices, armoured vehicles, and capacity to challenge public forces (UNICRI, 2024).

This type of group creates the strongest temptation to use war language. The temptation should be resisted unless the legal thresholds are actually met. Intense violence against the state may support a domestic terrorist designation. It may also be relevant to armed-conflict classification if organization and intensity reach the required level. But it does not automatically convert all anti-cartel operations into combat operations. Law enforcement remains the default frame unless the factual threshold for non-international armed conflict is crossed.

2.4.2 State-embedded networks

State-embedded networks operate through corruption, political protection, business infiltration, and administrative dependence. Their power comes less from open confrontation and more from access. They influence procurement, customs clearance, police intelligence, port logistics, prison administration, licensing, local politics, and public contracts. In these cases, the cartel does not merely fight the state. It uses parts of the state.

This model is harder to address through a terrorist designation. Sanctions may help if they expose facilitators and front companies. Criminal prosecution may reach corrupt officials, lawyers, accountants, transport operators, and money launderers. But the deeper problem is institutional capture. If prosecutors, police, customs officials, or judges are compromised, the law exists on paper but fails in practice.

The European Parliament study notes that legal tools against organized crime often depend on political will and assume a separation between criminal organizations and the state, even though some powerful groups survive through cooperation with state actors or exploitation of state functions (Williams et al., 2026). This is one of the main weaknesses of a purely list-based approach. Designation targets the named group. State capture requires institutional repair, anti-corruption enforcement, witness protection, judicial security, and financial transparency.

2.4.3 State-sponsored criminal actors

State-sponsored criminal actors are protected, enabled, or used by state officials. The relationship may be direct or indirect. A state may tolerate a group in exchange for political loyalty, revenue, territorial control, sanctions evasion, repression of rivals, or deniable external activity. In other cases, individual officials, military units, intelligence actors, or local authorities may provide protection without a unified state policy.

This category raises the most serious international law questions. If a state merely fails to suppress a cartel, the issue is due diligence, capacity, corruption, or cooperation. If state organs direct, control, or knowingly assist criminal violence across borders, the analysis may shift toward state responsibility. The attribution rules are demanding, but they cannot be ignored. A cartel protected by state officials is not legally the same as a cartel operating despite the state.

The drug cartels terrorist designation may expose these relationships by forcing financial institutions, prosecutors, and intelligence agencies to map support networks. Yet designation alone cannot answer attribution. International law requires evidence of state conduct, control, assistance, acknowledgement, or adoption of conduct as its own. That evidence threshold protects against political accusation, but it also makes accountability difficult when criminal-state relationships are informal, deniable, and mediated through corruption.

The result is a legal gap. Some cartels are too powerful to be treated as ordinary criminal associations, but they do not fit neatly into the categories of state, armed group, terrorist organization, or international legal person. The law can still respond, but only by using the right tool for the right problem: organized crime treaties for trafficking and laundering, counter-terrorism measures for support and financing, anti-corruption law for state capture, human rights law for policing and detention, and the law on force only when its strict conditions are independently satisfied.

3. Terrorism in international law

3.1 No single treaty definition of terrorism

International law regulates terrorism through a fragmented structure. There are treaties on aircraft hijacking, attacks on civil aviation, hostage-taking, terrorist bombings, terrorist financing, nuclear terrorism, and maritime violence. These instruments criminalize specific conduct, but they do not create a universal definition of terrorism applicable to every legal context (Saul, 2019; Aust, 2010).

This fragmentation explains why national designation systems differ. One state may list a group because it threatens national security, another may require proof of political or ideological purpose, and another may rely on a judicial or administrative process linked to financing, travel, or public order. The absence of a single treaty definition does not mean terrorism is legally empty. It means the content of the term depends on the instrument, institution, and domestic law being applied.

For cartel analysis, the gap is important. A cartel may use extreme violence, public intimidation, assassination, or bombings. Those acts may resemble terrorist conduct. Yet resemblance alone is not enough to create an international classification. The legal question is narrower: does the conduct satisfy the elements required by the relevant treaty, Security Council measure, sanctions regime, domestic statute, or criminal offence?

This is why a drug cartels terrorist designation may be powerful inside the designating state but less decisive internationally. Domestic law can attach consequences to a list. Public international law requires a separate legal basis before other states, courts, or international bodies can treat the same group in the same way.

3.2 Security Council functional criteria

The United Nations Security Council has not solved the definitional problem completely, but it has supplied functional criteria. Resolution 1566 describes terrorism through three connected elements: serious violence against civilians or hostage-taking; intent to provoke terror among the public or compel a government or international organization; and conduct already covered by international counter-terrorism conventions or protocols (United Nations Security Council, 2004).

This formula is useful because it avoids treating every violent non-state actor as a terrorist. It looks at conduct, target, purpose, and treaty connection. A cartel killing a rival for market control, murdering a judge to block prosecution, or bombing a police convoy may create public fear. The harder question is whether the act was meant to compel public authority or intimidate a population in the sense contemplated by counter-terrorism law, rather than simply protect illicit profit.

UNICRI’s study on Latin America adopts a similar UN-based approach when discussing the nexus between organized crime and terrorism. Its value is analytical caution. It recognizes operational overlap while avoiding automatic equivalence between criminal groups and terrorist organizations (UNICRI, 2024). That caution matters because Latin American criminal networks often use terror as a method of governance, not always as an ideological programme.

Resolution 1566 also shows why purpose cannot be ignored. Terrorism is not merely violence that frightens people. Many forms of organized crime do that. The legal category becomes stronger when violence is directed at civilians or public authority for coercive ends, especially where the group seeks to influence state conduct, control communities, or paralyse institutions.

3.3 Financing and targeted sanctions

Counter-terrorism financing law is one of the areas where international obligations are clearest. Security Council Resolution 1373 requires states to prevent and suppress terrorist financing, criminalize the provision or collection of funds for terrorist acts, freeze assets, deny safe haven, and improve cooperation (United Nations Security Council, 2001). The 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism also requires states to criminalize the financing of terrorist acts and cooperate in investigation and prosecution (United Nations, 1999).

FATF Recommendation 6 translates these obligations into operational standards. States must implement targeted financial sanctions without delay against persons and entities designated under relevant counter-terrorism regimes, with mechanisms for freezing assets and preventing funds or economic resources from being made available to listed actors (FATF, 2023).

The distinction between UN-mandated sanctions and unilateral national lists is essential. A Security Council listing under Chapter VII creates binding obligations for all UN member states. A unilateral designation, by contrast, binds only the designating state as a matter of its own law. It may still have a global impact because banks, insurers, shipping companies, payment processors, and multinational firms often avoid exposure to powerful sanctions systems. Practical reach should not be confused with universal legal authority.

Cartel financing complicates the picture. Drug profits move through cash businesses, trade-based laundering, shell companies, real estate, ports, fuel markets, crypto-assets, remittances, and professional intermediaries. If a cartel is listed under a terrorism framework, financial compliance becomes more severe. Yet the evidence must still identify support, control, ownership, benefit, or knowing facilitation. Otherwise, broad sanctions screening may punish ordinary economic life in territories where criminal groups impose coercive control.

3.4 Terrorist tactics and legal status

Cartels often use methods that resemble terrorist tactics. Public executions, car bombs, threats against judges, attacks on police stations, drone-dropped explosives, road blockades, and massacres can terrorize entire communities. Some acts are staged for visibility. Others are designed to punish cooperation with authorities or demonstrate that the state cannot protect its population.

The legal status of the actor does not follow automatically. International law separates method, purpose, designation, and classification. A method may be terror-like. The purpose may still be profit protection. A domestic designation may be valid under national law. The same group may still remain an organized criminal group for treaty cooperation purposes and may not qualify as a party to an armed conflict unless the factual thresholds of international humanitarian law are met.

This separation prevents legal shortcuts. Without it, any violent criminal network could be treated as a battlefield enemy. That would blur criminal prosecution, policing, military targeting, detention, and asylum exclusion. The result would be doctrinally unstable and dangerous in practice.

The stronger legal analysis asks four questions. What did the group do? Against whom was the act directed? What was the intended coercive effect? Which legal regime is being invoked? The answer may differ across sanctions, criminal liability, extradition, refugee law, and armed conflict classification.

3.5 Fragmented national designations

National systems approach terrorism lists differently. The United States uses Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist frameworks, with major consequences for material support, immigration, sanctions, and financial restrictions (Congressional Research Service, 2025). Canada relies on its Criminal Code listing system, which supports offences linked to participation, facilitation, financing, and property control (Government of Canada, 2024). The European Union uses a Common Position and Council regulations to freeze assets and restrict support for listed persons, groups, and entities (Council of the European Union, 2001).

Latin American approaches vary more widely. Some states have specific terrorism offences and financing controls, but have historically been cautious about applying the terrorist label to drug cartels, partly because of sovereignty concerns, domestic political sensitivities, and memories of internal conflict. Others use registries, financial intelligence systems, or criminal law provisions that target terrorist financing without creating broad public lists comparable to the U.S. model.

Fragmentation creates leverage. A powerful designation by one state can affect banks, shipping routes, remittances, extradition strategy, immigration screening, and corporate risk assessments far beyond its territory. It also creates uncertainty. A group may be treated as a terrorist organization by one state, a transnational criminal organization by another, and a domestic public security threat by a third.

For international law, that unevenness has consequences. Cooperation becomes easier where states share classifications. It becomes harder when one state fears that another is using terrorist language to justify intervention, military pressure, or overbroad sanctions. The legal label may mobilize enforcement, but it may also weaken trust if affected states see it as a political tool rather than an evidence-based classification.

4. The crime-terror nexus

4.1 Operational convergence

The crime-terror nexus describes practical cooperation, imitation, or overlap between organized criminal groups and terrorist actors. It does not mean the two are the same. The connection may involve drug trafficking, weapons procurement, money laundering, forged documents, migrant smuggling, prison recruitment, illicit taxation, cyber-fraud, territorial safe havens, and shared transport routes (Makarenko, 2004; UNICRI, 2024).

Latin America offers strong examples of convergence without uniform legal classification. Criminal networks may provide logistics to ideological groups. Terrorist actors may tax narcotics routes. Prison gangs may exchange weapons, forged papers, or laundering services. Cartels may copy insurgent tactics because those tactics work, not because they have adopted an ideological programme.

UNICRI treats the nexus as a recognized regional problem. Its analysis highlights drug trafficking, money laundering, migrant smuggling, prison dynamics, and the interaction between terrorist organizations and criminal structures in Latin America (UNICRI, 2024). The point is not that every cartel becomes a terrorist. The point is that operational overlap increases the need for intelligence-sharing, financial tracking, border cooperation, and careful legal classification.

Tactical learning is especially important. Once a cartel learns to use drones, improvised explosive devices, encrypted communications, propaganda videos, territorial checkpoints, or prison command structures, its violence may resemble the conduct of an armed political group. The resemblance is operationally relevant. Legally, it still requires separate analysis.

4.2 Purpose: profit, coercion, or both

Purpose is the doctrinal centre of the debate. Organized crime normally seeks financial or material benefit. Terrorism normally uses serious violence or intimidation to compel a government, international organization, or population for political, ideological, religious, or similar coercive ends. Cartel violence often combines profit and coercion, which makes classification difficult.

A cartel may murder a mayor to stop police cooperation. It may burn buses to force prison concessions. It may attack journalists to silence reporting. It may massacre civilians to control territory. These acts are not merely private crimes. They influence public authority and civilian behaviour. The legal question is whether that coercion is instrumental to profit, or whether the group has crossed into a form of political violence that justifies terrorism classification under the relevant law.

The answer will not be the same in every case. Some cartels remain primarily economic enterprises, even when brutal. Others may develop governance functions and coercive agendas that move closer to terrorism or insurgency. A group that taxes communities, controls movement, commands prisons, negotiates with officials, and attacks state institutions may no longer be adequately explained by the old trafficking model.

Still, caution is necessary. If every act of intimidation connected to profit becomes terrorism, organized crime law loses its independent meaning. Many criminal markets depend on fear. Extortion, trafficking, and corruption often work because victims believe violence will follow non-compliance. Terrorism law should not absorb the whole field of serious organized crime.

4.3 Latin American case studies

4.3.1 CJNG and militarized violence

Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación is one of the clearest examples of cartel violence that resembles armed group conduct. It has been associated with attacks on officials, territorial confrontation, use of drones, improvised explosive devices, armed convoys, heavy weapons, intimidation of communities, and cross-border trafficking structures (UNICRI, 2024; Congressional Research Service, 2025).

CJNG illustrates why ordinary criminal labels can feel inadequate. Its operations are not limited to clandestine trafficking. In some contexts, the group openly contests state presence, imposes territorial control, and uses spectacular violence to discipline both rivals and public authorities. Such conduct may support designation under domestic counter-terrorism law where statutory criteria are met.

Even so, militarized behaviour does not settle the international law question. IHL classification would still require organized armed groups and violence reaching the required intensity. Self-defence analysis would require an armed attack, necessity, proportionality, and a lawful basis for acting across borders. Criminal prosecution would require evidence against individuals. The group’s brutality is legally relevant, but it is not a substitute for thresholds.

4.3.2 Sinaloa and global trafficking

The Sinaloa Cartel better illustrates the enterprise model. Its strength lies in production, logistics, corruption, maritime and land routes, precursor access, money laundering, brokers, compartmentalized cells, and cross-border distribution. Violence is part of the system, but the organization’s strategic value comes from its capacity to manage global illicit markets.

This model fits the Palermo Convention and drug-control treaties more directly. The legal response must focus on extradition, mutual legal assistance, controlled delivery, precursor chemicals, financial intelligence, confiscation, and prosecution of facilitators. A terrorism label may add pressure, especially on support networks and financial channels, but the core architecture remains transnational criminal law.

Sinaloa also shows why listing alone cannot dismantle a cartel economy. A trafficking network survives through farmers, chemists, transport operators, corrupt officials, accountants, brokers, front companies, distributors, and money movers. Some are core members. Some are contractors. Some are coerced. Some are deliberately blind commercial actors. A serious legal response must distinguish those positions rather than treat all contact as equivalent support.

4.3.3 PCC, CV, and prison governance

Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho reveal another pattern: prison-based governance expanding into territorial and regional power. These groups developed strong command structures inside detention systems, then projected influence into neighbourhoods, drug routes, arms markets, border regions, and transnational networks. Their authority often depends on discipline, debt, protection, punishment, and internal rules.

This form of governance is hard to classify. It is not ordinary street crime. It is not always terrorism. It is not necessarily an insurgency. It may involve territorial authority, social control, violence against state agents, intimidation of civilians, and regional trafficking connections. The prison element adds another layer because state detention facilities may become command centres rather than instruments of incapacitation.

PCC and CV also expose the limits of foreign designations. External sanctions may disrupt finances and travel, but the main vulnerabilities lie in prison administration, corruption, communications control, witness protection, policing quality, arms flows, and laundering channels. International cooperation helps, but domestic institutional capacity remains decisive.

4.4 Nexus evidence and legal thresholds

Evidence of a crime-terror nexus justifies stronger cooperation. It may support joint investigations, financial disruption, intelligence-sharing, sanctions screening, extradition requests, anti-money laundering controls, and action against facilitators. It may also justify closer attention to prisons, border corridors, ports, chemical supply chains, weapons trafficking, and professional enablers.

It does not automatically satisfy the thresholds for terrorism, armed conflict, or self-defence. A cartel may cooperate with a terrorist actor without becoming one. A group may use terrorist tactics without meeting a treaty or domestic definition. A network may possess military-grade weapons without becoming a party to a non-international armed conflict. A violent cross-border threat may be grave without amounting to an armed attack under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

The correct legal method is threshold-based. For terrorism, the analysis must examine prohibited conduct, target, intent, and the applicable listing or criminal framework. For armed conflict, it must assess organization and intensity. For self-defence, it must identify an armed attack and test necessity and proportionality. For human rights, it must examine legality, due process, non-discrimination, and effective remedies.

Nexus evidence is valuable, but it should not become a shortcut. It tells states where to investigate, where to freeze assets, where to cooperate, and where criminal groups may be learning or borrowing techniques. It does not replace the legal tests that keep public international law from becoming a vocabulary of convenience.

5. U.S. designation architecture

5.1 FTO designation under U.S. law

The United States Foreign Terrorist Organization system is created by section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Secretary of State may designate an organization when three conditions are met: the organization is foreign; it engages in terrorism or terrorist activity, or retains the capability and intent to do so; and the activity threatens United States nationals or the national security of the United States (Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952, s. 219).

The criteria are only the entry point. The more important issue is consequence. Once a group is listed, U.S. law attaches criminal, immigration, and financial effects. It becomes unlawful for persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to knowingly provide material support or resources to the group. Members and representatives may face immigration consequences. U.S. financial institutions must block funds in which the listed organization or its agents have an interest (Congressional Research Service, 2025).

That structure explains why the drug cartels terrorist designation matters even outside a battlefield context. It does not merely describe a group. It changes the legal risk attached to money, services, logistics, professional assistance, travel, and association. For cartels, this matters because their strength depends on support ecosystems: chemical suppliers, transport firms, corrupt officials, brokers, accountants, lawyers, shell companies, ports, warehouses, and local intermediaries.

Still, the FTO system remains domestic law. It may influence foreign companies and non-U.S. persons through jurisdictional connections, banking exposure, or commercial caution, but it does not itself create an international terrorist listing. That distinction must remain visible. The U.S. list may reshape conduct worldwide as a practical matter. It does not automatically bind other states as a matter of public international law.

5.2 SDGT designation and financial sanctions

Specially Designated Global Terrorist status operates through Executive Order 13224, as amended, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The central mechanism is asset blocking. Property and interests in property subject to U.S. jurisdiction may be frozen, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with listed persons or entities (Executive Order 13224, 2001; International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 1977).

The SDGT framework is particularly significant for cartels because financial networks are often more vulnerable than armed cells. A cartel can replace street-level members faster than it can rebuild trusted laundering channels, trade routes, front companies, corrupt banking relationships, or high-value facilitators. Sanctions can also place pressure on lawful businesses that knowingly or recklessly deal with controlled suppliers, logistics providers, or intermediaries.

The wider risk lies in secondary sanctions exposure. CRS notes that foreign financial institutions may face sanctions risk when they knowingly conduct or facilitate significant transactions for persons whose property is blocked (Congressional Research Service, 2025). For banks, insurers, payment processors, commodity traders, and shipping firms, that risk can reshape conduct even when no domestic prosecution is filed.

The result is legal leverage through financial infrastructure. U.S. dollar clearing, correspondent banking, sanctions screening, and multinational compliance systems can make a unilateral listing globally influential. The doctrinal limit is equally important: financial pressure is not the same as universal legal authority. Other states may cooperate, resist, or adopt parallel measures depending on their own law and diplomatic position.

5.3 The 2025 cartel designations

The 2025 designations marked a turning point in U.S. treatment of Latin American criminal organizations. The listed entities included the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste, Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Carteles Unidos, MS-13, and Tren de Aragua. The designations followed Executive Order 14157, which framed certain cartels and transnational gangs as threats to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and territorial safety (Executive Office of the President, 2025).

CRS makes an important observation: seven of the eight groups had already been targeted under other sanctions frameworks, including drug-trafficking sanctions, transnational criminal organization measures, the Kingpin Act, or Executive Order 14059. The new step was not the first legal action against most of these groups. It added a terrorism layer to the existing enforcement architecture (Congressional Research Service, 2025).

That matters for legal analysis. The 2025 move did not create concern about cartels for the first time. U.S. law had long treated major criminal networks as serious threats through narcotics, organized crime, and sanctions tools. The novelty was the classification shift. The same groups were now placed inside a counter-terrorism framework, with consequences for material support, immigration, secondary sanctions, and political signalling.

This also weakens simplistic claims that the terrorism label was the only available enforcement option. Many tools already existed: narcotics prosecutions, asset forfeiture, anti-money laundering controls, extradition, sanctions, mutual legal assistance, and organized crime designations. The terrorism layer may intensify pressure, but its added value must be measured against diplomatic cost, overbreadth, and the risk of treating criminal governance as armed conflict by implication.

5.4 The PCC and CV extension

The 2026 U.S. announcement concerning Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho moved the policy beyond Mexico and into Brazil’s criminal landscape. The State Department designated both groups as SDGTs and announced its intention to designate them as FTOs, with the FTO effect set for June 2026 (U.S. Department of State, 2026).

This is a major expansion because PCC and CV are not Mexican cartels organized around the U.S.-Mexico border. Their roots lie in Brazilian prison systems, urban territorial control, drug trafficking, arms flows, and regional criminal networks. UNICRI describes PCC as Brazil’s largest criminal organization and identifies its transnational reach, revenue sources, and past use of attacks against public institutions. It also describes CV as a Rio de Janeiro-based group with prison origins, territorial power in favelas, links to narcotics markets, and violent resistance to state intervention (UNICRI, 2024).

The extension creates a broader doctrinal problem. If Mexican cartels, Venezuelan gangs, Brazilian prison-based factions, and other criminal networks can all be placed under the same terrorism architecture, the boundary between organized crime and terrorism becomes more difficult to police. Some groups may genuinely use coercive violence against public authority. Others may be primarily profit-seeking entities with brutal territorial methods. The legal analysis cannot treat them as identical.

Brazil’s reaction also matters. Sovereignty concerns become sharper when the listed groups are deeply embedded in another state’s domestic security environment. A foreign designation may assist financial disruption and international cooperation, but it can also be perceived as external interference, especially if it is linked to domestic politics, sanctions pressure, or possible military rhetoric.

5.5 Material support liability

FTO status has its strongest criminal effect through the material support law. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2339B, it is unlawful to knowingly provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Material support is broad. It may include funds, services, training, expert advice or assistance, personnel, transportation, lodging, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, and other forms of support, subject to statutory definitions and exceptions (18 U.S.C. § 2339B).

CRS identifies material support as one of the principal consequences of the 2025 cartel designations. This is legally significant because cartel economies depend on many actors who are not gunmen. Transport brokers, chemical suppliers, logistics coordinators, money launderers, corrupt officials, procurement agents, and professional enablers may become exposed to terrorism-linked charges where knowledge and jurisdictional requirements are satisfied (Congressional Research Service, 2025).

The danger is overextension. In cartel-controlled territories, interaction with the group may be coerced, routine, or unavoidable. A shopkeeper paying extortion, a taxi driver crossing a controlled area, a farmer forced to sell goods, or a migrant compelled to pay passage is not the same as a financier, weapons broker, or corrupt official. A serious prosecution theory must preserve that difference.

The legal threshold should focus on knowing assistance, meaningful contribution, and voluntary facilitation. Without that discipline, material support law risks punishing people trapped under criminal authority rather than those who sustain it.

5.6 Immigration and asylum consequences

The immigration effects are severe. U.S. law already contains grounds of inadmissibility and removal for drug trafficking and serious criminal activity. Terrorism-related grounds add another layer: association with a terrorist organization, engagement in terrorist activity, representation of such an organization, or support for its activities may trigger exclusion, removal, and bars to relief (Congressional Research Service, 2025).

Asylum is especially sensitive. A person fleeing cartel violence may also have lived in a neighbourhood where the cartel controlled movement, transport, food distribution, employment, or informal taxation. The legal system must distinguish persecutors, collaborators, coerced participants, and victims. A broad association theory can turn survival under territorial coercion into alleged support.

This is not a marginal issue. In areas controlled by groups such as CJNG, Sinaloa factions, PCC, or CV, civilians may be forced to pay fees, obey curfews, transport goods, provide information, or remain silent. Treating those coerced acts as terrorist support would undermine refugee protection and non-refoulement principles. It would also create perverse incentives: the more complete a cartel’s territorial control, the more exposed its victims become to immigration penalties.

The better approach requires individualized evidence. Immigration authorities should examine voluntariness, knowledge, duress, the person’s role, and the seriousness of any contribution. Terrorism bars are legitimate when applied to genuine members, financiers, recruiters, weapons suppliers, or operational supporters. They become legally dangerous when applied to populations living under fear.

5.7 Compliance effects beyond U.S. borders

The largest practical impact may fall on private actors. Banks, shipping companies, agricultural exporters, mining firms, fuel distributors, fintechs, remittance providers, insurers, logistics platforms, and NGOs may all face heightened risk when operating in cartel-influenced areas. The problem is not only direct dealings with listed groups. It is indirect exposure through suppliers, transport corridors, payments, beneficial owners, security providers, or local intermediaries.

For financial institutions, the concern is sanctions screening, suspicious transaction reporting, correspondent banking exposure, and the possibility that a customer or counterparty is controlled by, acting for, or materially assisting a listed group. For companies, the risk moves into due diligence: who owns the supplier, who controls the route, who collects security payments, who operates the port warehouse, and who finances the local distributor.

Humanitarian and civil society actors face a different difficulty. In territories controlled by violent organizations, access may require contact with local power structures. Counter-terrorism compliance can make donors, banks, and insurers unwilling to support legitimate work. The result may be de-risking: lawful activity stops not because it is illegal, but because the perceived exposure is too high.

This is where legal precision becomes operationally valuable. Compliance systems must target knowing facilitation and controlled entities, not entire regions or vulnerable populations. Overbroad private de-risking may weaken lawful commerce, humanitarian access, and community resilience while leaving sophisticated criminal networks able to adapt.

6. Jurisdiction and enforcement abroad

6.1 Bases of criminal jurisdiction

Cartel cases often involve several bases of jurisdiction at once. Territorial jurisdiction is the strongest where conduct occurs inside the prosecuting state: distribution, laundering, homicide, firearms offences, conspiracy meetings, banking transactions, or digital communications routed through domestic infrastructure. It is the least controversial basis because the state is enforcing law within its own territory (Aust, 2010; Klabbers, 2024).

Nationality jurisdiction allows a state to prosecute its own nationals for conduct abroad. This may matter for citizens who finance, broker, launder, transport, or coordinate cartel activity outside the country. Passive personality jurisdiction becomes relevant when nationals are victims of serious offences abroad, such as kidnapping, murder, hostage-taking, or attacks directed at civilians. It is more sensitive, but widely used for terrorism and other grave transnational crimes.

Protective jurisdiction may be invoked when foreign conduct threatens core state security interests. The United States often relies on this idea when foreign narcotics networks, money laundering, or terrorism-related activity threatens national security or public safety. In cartel cases, the argument is strongest where the conduct is directed at the prosecuting state’s borders, institutions, officials, financial system, or population.

Effects-based jurisdiction is practical but contested. Drug shipments, fentanyl supply chains, dollar-clearing transactions, encrypted communications, and laundering schemes may produce effects inside the United States even when much of the conduct occurs elsewhere. Courts and states may accept this more readily when the conduct is intentional and the domestic effects are substantial. They will scrutinize it more closely when the connection is remote.

The strongest cartel prosecutions usually combine several bases: drugs entering the territory, money moving through domestic banks, victims with the state’s nationality, conspirators using domestic infrastructure, or conduct aimed at national security. The weaker cases depend on broad assertions of influence without a clear jurisdictional link.

6.2 Extradition and mutual legal assistance

Extradition remains one of the main tools for cross-border cartel enforcement. It depends on treaty rules, domestic implementing law, evidence standards, and the principle of specialty. The requested state will usually ask whether the offence is covered, whether dual criminality is satisfied, whether the person is properly identified, and whether prosecution would violate fundamental rights or treaty exceptions (Aust, 2010).

Dual criminality is usually not difficult for drug trafficking, murder, money laundering, firearms offences, corruption, or organized crime. Terrorism-linked charges may be more complicated if the requested state does not classify the relevant group in the same way or has a narrower definition of terrorism. A conduct-based approach helps: the requested state may extradite for murder, trafficking, laundering, or explosives offences even if it does not accept the requesting state’s terrorist classification.

The political offence exception is less protective than it once was, especially for terrorism, hostage-taking, bombings, and serious violence against civilians. Yet cartel cases can still generate disputes when the requesting state frames ordinary organized crime as national security or terrorism. The requested state may fear political instrumentalization, disproportionate penalties, or later expansion of charges.

Specialty is also important. A person extradited for one set of offences should not be tried for unrelated offences without the requested state’s consent. If a suspect is surrendered for narcotics conspiracy and later charged with terrorism-related offences, treaty rules and diplomatic assurances may become central.

Mutual legal assistance is less visible but often more decisive. Bank records, phone data, corporate documents, witness statements, customs information, and digital evidence are the material foundations of cartel prosecution. Without timely evidence-sharing, extradition becomes symbolic. Strong cases are built through coordinated prosecutors, not press statements.

6.3 Financial jurisdiction and de-risking

Financial jurisdiction gives the United States unusual reach. Many international payments touch U.S. banks, correspondent accounts, dollar-clearing systems, or U.S.-based intermediaries. Once that connection exists, sanctions and money-laundering laws may create enforcement exposure. Even non-U.S. firms may adjust behaviour because they cannot afford exclusion from dollar markets or correspondent banking channels.

This mechanism is powerful against cartel finance. Laundering networks rely on access to banks, payment systems, trade finance, invoices, remittances, crypto conversion points, and professional services. A sanctions designation can force institutions to identify beneficial ownership, monitor counterparties, freeze assets, reject transactions, and report suspicious activity.

The cost is de-risking. Banks may close accounts for whole sectors or regions rather than assess individual risk. Exporters, charities, fintechs, remittance companies, and small businesses may lose access to services because they operate in areas associated with the listed groups. This can harm lawful activity and push communities toward informal channels, where criminal groups are stronger.

FATF has repeatedly warned that risk-based compliance should not become indiscriminate exclusion. A risk-based approach requires identification, mitigation, enhanced due diligence where needed, and documentation. It does not require treating every person in a cartel-influenced economy as a prohibited counterparty (FATF, 2023).

For policymakers, the lesson is clear. Financial disruption works best when it targets nodes: beneficial owners, front companies, transport corridors, corrupt officials, professional enablers, and high-value facilitators. It works poorly when it isolates legitimate communities and leaves sophisticated laundering structures untouched.

6.4 Due process in listing systems

Listing systems impose serious consequences before any criminal conviction. Assets may be frozen, reputations destroyed, contracts terminated, travel blocked, banking access removed, and families affected. Due process is not a procedural luxury. It is the safeguard that keeps sanctions and terrorism lists from becoming instruments of unreviewable executive power.

At a minimum, listing systems should provide a clear legal basis, an evidentiary standard, notice where compatible with security needs, reasons sufficient to permit challenge, access to a delisting process, independent review, and proportionality assessment. Secrecy may be necessary in some cases, but it cannot eliminate meaningful review.

The Kadi litigation before the Court of Justice of the European Union remains the leading warning. Even Security Council-linked sanctions had to be implemented in a manner compatible with fundamental rights within the EU legal order, including rights of defence and judicial protection (Kadi v Council and Commission, 2008; Commission v Kadi, 2013). The lesson extends beyond that system: targeted sanctions require accountability mechanisms.

Cartel-related listings carry specific risks. Criminal organizations use aliases, fragmented cells, subcontractors, family businesses, coerced intermediaries, and front companies. Mistaken identity and overbroad association are real dangers. A person may share a surname, live in a controlled area, operate in a compromised sector, or unknowingly transact with a tainted supplier. Without adequate review, such errors can become permanent civil death.

Proportionality should also shape enforcement. A major cartel financier and a coerced local business should not face the same legal treatment. A controlled company and an unaware downstream buyer require different responses. A sanctions system that cannot make these distinctions may appear tough, but it becomes less credible and less effective.

The strongest design is targeted, evidence-led, and reviewable. It should allow fast action against genuine threats while preserving mechanisms to correct mistakes. That is not softness. It is the legal discipline needed when counter-terrorism tools are applied to complex criminal economies.

7. Sovereignty and the use of force

7.1 Article 2(4) and territorial integrity

The most serious international law risk appears when a cartel listing is used to suggest military options across borders. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. That rule is not displaced because the target is a non-state group, nor because the group is violent, transnational, or listed under another state’s domestic law (United Nations, 1945; Gray, 2018).

For cartel cases, the rule has direct consequences. A state may not send drones, special forces, missiles, or military units into another state’s territory merely because it has classified a cartel as a terrorist organization. The territorial state remains protected by the Charter. If the operation crosses into the territory of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, or any other state, the first legal question is not the identity of the group. It is the legal basis for using force on foreign soil.

This distinction is often obscured by security language. Cartels may control areas, corrupt officials, and threaten border security. They may also kill foreign nationals. None of that, by itself, removes the prohibition on force. International law does not contain a general “organized crime exception” to Article 2(4). The rule protects territorial integrity even where a state is struggling to control armed criminal networks inside its borders.

7.2 Consent by the territorial state

Consent is the clearest route for lawful external action. A territorial state may invite another state to assist with intelligence, training, equipment, asset tracing, extradition, controlled delivery, joint investigations, or coordinated arrests. Consent may also support some operational deployments if the assistance stays within the terms given by the host state (Deeks, 2013).

The legal value of consent depends on authority and scope. It must come from the government, entitled to speak for the state, and the assisting state must not exceed the permission granted. Training police units is not the same as conducting unilateral raids. Intelligence-sharing is not the same as launching strikes. A joint operation agreed with prosecutors or security agencies must still comply with domestic law, human rights obligations, and any limits imposed by the consenting state.

Consent also has political fragility. A government may cooperate privately while resisting public language that suggests foreign intervention. This is common in cartel contexts, where local sovereignty, domestic legitimacy, and public anger over foreign pressure matter. A legally valid operation can still damage cooperation if the assisting state treats consent as a blank cheque.

The better model is operational discipline: written authorizations where possible, clear command structures, evidence-sharing rules, limits on force, detention safeguards, and accountability mechanisms. Cooperation works best when it strengthens the territorial state rather than making it appear bypassed.

7.3 Security Council authorization

The Security Council may authorize force when it determines that a situation threatens international peace and security. That power comes through Chapter VII of the UN Charter. It has been used in different contexts involving armed conflict, terrorism, maritime security, and threats to civilian populations (United Nations, 1945; White, 2017).

No general cartel designation creates such authorization. A state’s domestic list is not a Security Council resolution. A U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, a Canadian listing, or a regional sanctions measure may carry major domestic consequences, but it does not authorize armed operations in another state. Only the Council can impose binding collective-security measures on all UN members.

The Council could, in principle, treat cartel violence as a threat to international peace and security if the situation involved cross-border destabilization, mass violence, state collapse, or deep links with armed conflict. That would require a specific decision. Without one, the ordinary Charter rules remain intact.

This matters because public debate often moves too quickly. Once a group is called a terrorist, force is discussed as if the question has already been answered. It has not. Security Council authorization must be express or clearly implied by the resolution’s language. Political condemnation is not enough.

7.4 Self-defence against non-state actors

Self-defence is the most contested argument in cross-border operations against non-state actors. Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs. The difficulty is deciding when violence by a cartel, operating outside the victim state’s territory, reaches that level (United Nations, 1945).

7.4.1 Armed attack

Not every violent act is an armed attack. Ordinary criminal violence, even grave violence, is usually addressed through law enforcement, extradition, prosecution, sanctions, and cooperation. Terrorist attacks may sometimes reach the armed attack threshold, especially when they are large-scale, organized, and comparable in gravity to military action. Small-scale border incidents, isolated killings, trafficking deaths, or generalized criminal harm usually fall below that level (Gray, 2018).

The International Court of Justice has treated the concept of armed attack as a threshold category. In Nicaragua, the Court distinguished the most grave forms of force from less serious uses of force and assistance to rebels (ICJ, 1986). In Oil Platforms, it scrutinized necessity and proportionality closely, even where the invoking state alleged attacks on its vessels and interests (ICJ, 2003). The point for cartel cases is clear: the factual gravity of the attack matters.

A cartel killing foreign nationals abroad may trigger criminal jurisdiction, diplomatic protection, extradition requests, sanctions, and pressure on the territorial state. It does not automatically permit force. The harder case would involve repeated, organized attacks directed across a border, causing substantial loss of life or destruction, and showing a level of gravity comparable to an armed attack. Even then, further conditions must be satisfied.

7.4.2 Attribution and state involvement

Attribution remains central where a non-state group operates from another state’s territory. In Nicaragua, the ICJ required a high level of control for the conduct of armed groups to be attributed to a state (ICJ, 1986). In Armed Activities, the Court rejected broad self-defence claims where the attacks were not sufficiently linked to the territorial state and where the factual and legal basis for force was not established (ICJ, 2005).

This case law matters for cartels because many criminal organizations survive through corruption, tolerance, weak governance, or fragmented local protection. Those facts may show due diligence failures or institutional capture. They do not automatically prove that the state itself directed or controlled the group.

The modern debate is more divided when the territorial state is unwilling or unable to suppress the non-state actor. Some states argue that self-defence may be available against a non-state group operating abroad when the territorial state cannot or will not address the threat. Others reject that doctrine as too permissive and dangerous for sovereignty (Corten, 2021; Gray, 2018). Cartel cases would be especially sensitive because the “unwilling or unable” argument could turn chronic criminal insecurity into a claimed basis for foreign force.

A careful article should not present this as settled law. It is contested. The safer conclusion is narrower: attribution strengthens a self-defence claim when state involvement is proven, but the absence of attribution does not automatically leave the victim state free to use force. The Charter framework, ICJ case law, and state practice still demand a rigorous justification.

7.4.3 Necessity and proportionality

Even where self-defence is arguable, necessity and proportionality control the response. Necessity asks whether force is required to repel or prevent further armed attacks when no reasonable, lawful alternative is available. Proportionality limits the scale, target, duration, and intensity of the response to what is needed for that defensive purpose (Dinstein, 2017; Gray, 2018).

These principles are strict in cartel settings. If extradition, joint operations, arrests, financial disruption, intelligence cooperation, or host-state action can address the threat, unilateral force becomes harder to justify. A state cannot choose military action merely because it is faster, politically attractive, or symbolically forceful.

Proportionality would also reject broad territorial campaigns. Destroying cartel infrastructure, striking suspected members, occupying border areas, or targeting economic assets would require a clear link to the armed attack being addressed. Retaliation, punishment, or generalized deterrence would not satisfy the test.

The evidentiary burden is high. The acting state must identify the attack, the continuing threat, the target’s role, the territorial connection, and the reason force is necessary. Without that, self-defence becomes a vocabulary for enforcement rather than a rule of law exception.

7.5 Why designation is not a force trigger

A terrorist designation does not authorize drone strikes, raids, occupation, or cross-border military operations. It may support sanctions. It may create criminal liability for material support. It may affect immigration status. It may sharpen financial compliance. It does not create an armed attack, replace territorial consent, or operate as a Security Council authorization.

This point is the core safeguard. Domestic classification can change domestic consequences, but the external use of force remains governed by the UN Charter. If force is proposed, the analysis must start again: consent, Security Council authorization, or self-defence after an armed attack. The designation may be part of the factual background. It is not the legal basis.

For the drug cartels terrorist designation debate, this is the line that cannot be blurred. Cartel violence can be severe enough to require international cooperation, financial disruption, and specialized prosecution. It does not follow that counter-cartel policy may be militarized across borders without satisfying the ordinary rules on force.

8. Armed conflict classification

8.1 IHL depends on facts, not labels

International humanitarian law applies because of facts on the ground, not because a government uses the language of war. A state may declare a “war on drugs,” call a cartel a terrorist, deploy armed forces internally, or describe criminal violence as a security emergency. None of those choices automatically creates an armed conflict (ICRC, 2024).

The classification question is objective. Are there sufficiently organized parties? Has violence reached the required intensity? Are confrontations protracted? Is the group capable of carrying out coordinated operations? Can it implement basic rules through a command structure? These questions matter more than political rhetoric.

This is essential in cartel settings. Some violence remains criminal violence, even when extremely brutal. Some situations may approach or cross the threshold of non-international armed conflict. The answer depends on evidence, not on the seriousness of public fear alone.

8.2 Organization and intensity

A non-international armed conflict requires armed violence between state forces and organized armed groups, or between such groups, reaching a certain level of intensity. The widely used test, reflected in ICTY jurisprudence and ICRC analysis, examines two main elements: the organization of the group and the intensity of the violence (ICTY, 1995; ICRC, 2024).

An organization may be shown by command structures, disciplinary systems, ability to recruit and train, territorial presence, logistics, access to weapons, coordinated operations, internal rules, communications, and capacity to negotiate or implement agreements. A loose criminal network may fail this test. A heavily armed group with hierarchical control, regional commands, and sustained operational capacity may satisfy it.

Intensity looks at the frequency and seriousness of clashes, duration of violence, number of fighters and casualties, types of weapons used, displacement, territorial control, military deployment, destruction, and the extent to which ordinary policing becomes insufficient. Sporadic violence, even shocking violence, is not enough. The violence must exceed internal disturbances and tensions.

Cartels complicate the test because their structures vary. CJNG-style militarized operations may look closer to organized armed group activity in some areas. Sinaloa-style networks may be more decentralized and commercial, despite extreme violence. PCC and CV may display strong internal discipline and territorial authority, but the classification still depends on the intensity and nature of confrontations in a specific setting.

8.3 Common Article 3

If a non-international armed conflict exists, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions supplies minimum protections. It requires humane treatment for persons not taking active part in hostilities, including detained fighters, wounded persons, civilians, and those who have laid down arms. It prohibits violence to life and person, murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, hostage-taking, humiliating and degrading treatment, and sentencing or execution without a regularly constituted court offering judicial guarantees (Geneva Conventions, 1949).

Common Article 3 binds each party to the conflict. That includes the state and the organized armed group. It does not grant combatant immunity to cartel members. It does not legalize their violence. It sets minimum humanitarian limits once the conflict threshold has been crossed.

The practical consequences are serious. Detained cartel fighters could not be tortured, disappeared, summarily executed, or held outside basic judicial guarantees. Civilians suspected of association would remain protected unless and for such time as they directly participate in hostilities. Medical care could not be denied as punishment. Hostage-taking and terror against civilians would remain prohibited.

This is one reason states may resist recognizing armed conflict with cartels. Applying IHL imposes constraints and may appear to elevate the group’s status. That concern is politically understandable but legally misplaced. IHL classification does not legitimize the group. It regulates violence to reduce cruelty.

8.4 Additional Protocol II

Additional Protocol II sets a higher threshold than Common Article 3. It applies to conflicts between a state’s armed forces and dissident armed forces or other organized armed groups that are under responsible command and exercise such control over part of the territory as to enable them to carry out sustained and concerted military operations and implement the Protocol (Additional Protocol II, 1977).

This threshold is demanding. Many cartel situations will not meet it. Territorial influence, criminal governance, extortion, or control of neighbourhoods may not be enough unless the group can conduct sustained military operations and apply the Protocol’s rules through responsible command. A cartel may dominate a favela, prison system, trafficking corridor, or rural zone without satisfying Additional Protocol II.

Where the threshold is met, the legal consequences are broader. The Protocol protects civilians, regulates detention, restricts attacks, safeguards medical personnel, and prohibits acts of terrorism against the civilian population. It also reflects the idea that internal armed conflict is not a legal vacuum.

For cartel analysis, Additional Protocol II should be used carefully. It is not triggered by the mere fact that a group controls territory through fear. The control must be connected to sustained military operations and have enough command capacity to implement humanitarian obligations. That excludes many criminal environments but leaves open the possibility that some situations may qualify.

8.5 Targeting limits in cartel violence

Even if a cartel-related situation becomes a non-international armed conflict, not every cartel member becomes targetable at all times. IHL does not permit status-based killing of everyone linked to the group in a social, financial, familial, or coerced way. Targeting rules require closer distinctions.

Members of an organized armed group who perform a continuous combat function may be targetable while they remain in that role, subject to the rules on distinction, proportionality, precautions, and military necessity (ICRC, 2009). Civilians are protected unless and for such time as they directly participate in hostilities. A person transporting drugs, paying extortion, laundering money, feeding fighters under duress, or living in a controlled neighbourhood is not automatically a lawful target.

The distinction is vital for cartels because their power rests on mixed networks. There may be armed units, lookouts, accountants, relatives, coerced drivers, local shopkeepers, political protectors, children used as messengers, and residents forced to obey. Treating all of them as fighters would collapse IHL into collective punishment.

Criminal associates should normally be arrested and prosecuted, not targeted with lethal force. Family members remain civilians unless they directly participate in hostilities. Coerced collaborators require careful assessment of conduct and voluntariness. Children recruited or used by criminal groups require protection and accountability measures suited to their status.

Targeting errors in cartel environments are especially likely because intelligence is often contaminated by rival informants, corruption, local fear, and fragmented group structures. That makes precautionary duties more important, not less. The more complex the social environment, the greater the need for reliable identification.

The final point is simple but decisive: IHL may apply in rare cartel-related circumstances, but it does not turn counter-cartel policy into unrestricted war. It imposes rules. It protects civilians. It limits targeting. It preserves detention guarantees. It requires evidence-based distinction between those who fight, those who support crime, those who are coerced, and those who are merely trapped under violent control.

9. Human rights constraints

9.1 Right to life and policing standards

Outside armed conflict, cartel violence remains primarily a law enforcement problem. That point is not cosmetic. It determines the rules governing arrest, surveillance, detention, interrogation, firearms, and lethal force. A state may deploy heavily armed police or even military units for internal security, but the applicable framework remains human rights law unless the factual threshold of armed conflict is crossed (ICCPR, 1966; Human Rights Committee, 2019).

The right to life is the controlling rule. Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life. It does not ban all use of force by state agents, but it demands legality, necessity, proportionality, precaution, and accountability. Under the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, lethal force may be used only when strictly unavoidable to protect life (United Nations, 1990).

That standard matters in anti-cartel operations. A suspected trafficker, lookout, money courier, or local collaborator is not automatically a lawful target. If the person can be arrested safely, killing is not a lawful substitute for capture. If a raid creates foreseeable risk to civilians, authorities must plan, supervise, and review the operation with care. If force is used, the state must investigate deaths independently and effectively.

A terrorist label does not lower the threshold. It may increase the perceived danger of the suspect, but the legal test remains tied to the concrete threat at the moment force is used. A person’s alleged connection to CJNG, Sinaloa, PCC, CV, or another listed group does not itself prove an imminent threat to life. Evidence, conduct, and operational context remain decisive.

9.2 Detention, fair trial, and review

Counter-cartel policy often fails when it treats detention as intelligence management rather than legal custody. Human rights law is clear: no one may be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention, and anyone detained must have access to legal safeguards. Article 9 of the ICCPR requires lawful grounds, prompt information about reasons for arrest, judicial control, and the ability to challenge detention (ICCPR, 1966; Human Rights Committee, 2014).

Terrorism-linked measures raise additional risks. States may rely on secret intelligence, sealed evidence, administrative detention, special courts, extended pre-trial detention, anonymous witnesses, or restrictive prison regimes. Some measures may be lawful if tightly controlled. Others undermine the right to a fair trial. Article 14 of the ICCPR requires equality before courts, a competent and independent tribunal, adequate time and facilities for defence, access to counsel, and the ability to examine evidence and witnesses (ICCPR, 1966).

Listing systems create a separate due process problem. A person or company may be sanctioned before any conviction. Bank accounts can be frozen, contracts terminated, travel blocked, and reputations destroyed. Those consequences require meaningful review. The listed person must have a real chance to contest the factual basis, seek delisting, and obtain judicial protection where rights are affected (Kadi v Council and Commission, 2008; Commission v Kadi, 2013).

Cartel cases make errors more likely. Criminal groups use aliases, family businesses, front companies, informal workers, coerced transporters, and layered intermediaries. A system that treats association as proof of support will overreach. The law must distinguish a financier who knowingly launders proceeds, a logistics operator moving weapons, a relative with no operational role, and a resident forced to pay extortion.

9.3 Refugee law and non-refoulement

Cartel violence can generate refugee claims. People may flee because they refused recruitment, resisted extortion, reported criminal conduct, belonged to a targeted family, worked in a vulnerable profession, or lived in territory controlled by a violent group. Refugee law does not require persecution to come only from state agents. Persecution by non-state actors may qualify where the state is unable or unwilling to provide effective protection (Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, 2021; UNHCR, 2002).

The legal analysis is fact-specific. A person fleeing cartel threats must still satisfy the Refugee Convention criteria, including a well-founded fear of persecution for a Convention ground. In some cases, claims may involve political opinion, imputed political opinion, membership of a particular social group, family membership, or other protected grounds recognized in domestic and regional practice. Generalized violence alone may not be enough under the Convention, although complementary protection may apply under human rights law.

Exclusion clauses and terrorism bars complicate the picture. Article 1F of the Refugee Convention excludes persons responsible for serious international crimes, serious non-political crimes outside the country of refuge, or acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations (Refugee Convention, 1951). Domestic terrorism bars may also restrict asylum or other protection. These rules are legitimate when applied to actual perpetrators, recruiters, financiers, commanders, or willing operational supporters.

The danger lies in overinclusive reasoning. A person who lived under cartel rule may have paid extortion, followed movement orders, transported goods under threat, or remained silent to survive. Such conduct should not be treated as voluntary terrorist support without careful assessment of duress, knowledge, role, and gravity. Non-refoulement remains central. No person should be returned to a real risk of torture, arbitrary killing, enforced disappearance, or other serious harm (Convention against Torture, 1984; Human Rights Committee, 2019).

9.4 Overbreadth and discriminatory impact

Broad terrorism definitions create predictable abuse. OHCHR and the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, while countering terrorism, have repeatedly warned that vague or expansive counter-terrorism laws can criminalize dissent, journalism, humanitarian work, protest, minority activism, and civil society activity (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2026; OHCHR, 2026).

That warning applies directly to cartel designations. If the definition of support is too wide, it may capture people who are not part of the criminal structure. Journalists who interview gang members, lawyers defending accused persons, NGOs negotiating safe access, clergy mediating local conflict, migrants forced to pay smugglers, or businesses operating under extortion may all face risk if the law does not separate assistance from coercion, reporting, defence work, or humanitarian necessity.

Discriminatory impact is also likely. Counter-terrorism enforcement often falls hardest on migrants, poor communities, racial or ethnic minorities, prison populations, and residents of stigmatized neighbourhoods. In Latin American cartel settings, this means the people most exposed to cartel coercion may also become the easiest targets for overbroad state suspicion.

The proper safeguard is legal precision. Offences must be clear. Liability must require knowledge and meaningful contribution. Humanitarian, journalistic, legal, and coerced conduct must not be casually absorbed into support offences. Police operations must be reviewable. Listing decisions must be contestable. Counter-terrorism tools should target those who sustain violence and finance, not those trapped beneath it.

10. International criminal accountability

10.1 Natural persons, not criminal groups

International criminal law punishes individuals. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over natural persons, not organizations as such. Article 25 of the Rome Statute makes this explicit: the Court may prosecute persons who commit, order, solicit, induce, aid, abet, assist, or otherwise contribute to crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction (Rome Statute, 1998).

This limits what international criminal law can do with cartels. The ICC cannot indict CJNG, Sinaloa, PCC, CV, or any other group as an entity. It can only prosecute leaders, commanders, financiers, or perpetrators if the alleged conduct falls within genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or aggression, and if jurisdictional conditions are met.

The same distinction applies to accountability rhetoric. Calling a cartel “criminal” or “terrorist” does not itself create ICC jurisdiction. Prosecutors would need evidence linking identifiable individuals to Rome Statute crimes. That evidence must satisfy strict elements, including contextual requirements. Ordinary drug trafficking, extortion, homicide, money laundering, and corruption are serious crimes, but they are not automatically international crimes.

The practical implication is clear. Most cartel accountability will remain domestic. International criminal law may become relevant only in exceptional situations involving mass violence, systematic attacks against civilians, or armed conflict-linked crimes.

10.2 Crimes against humanity

Crimes against humanity are the most plausible Rome Statute category for extreme cartel violence outside armed conflict. Article 7 requires one or more prohibited acts, such as murder, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecution, enforced disappearance, or other inhumane acts, committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, with knowledge of the attack (Rome Statute, 1998).

The key term is “attack.” It does not require a military attack. It means a course of conduct involving multiple acts against civilians, carried out under or in furtherance of a state or organizational policy. A cartel could, in theory, satisfy the organizational policy element if it has sufficient structure, command, resources, and capacity to direct repeated violence against a civilian population (ICC, 2010; Bassiouni, 2011).

Some cartel conduct may approach this threshold. Massacres used to control territory, systematic sexual violence, forced displacement, disappearances, torture houses, targeted killings of civilians, and campaigns against communities cooperating with authorities may be relevant. The analysis cannot rest on brutality alone. It must show scale or pattern, civilian targeting, organizational policy, and the accused person’s knowledge.

Profit motive does not exclude crimes against humanity. A group may commit international crimes for economic reasons. What matters is the contextual threshold and the prohibited conduct. A cartel that attacks civilians systematically to control territory or sustain a criminal economy may be closer to Article 7 than a trafficking network whose violence consists mainly of sporadic rival killings.

The evidentiary burden remains high. Prosecutors would need proof of command links, policy, patterns of violence, victim categories, internal communications, orders, financing, and the accused’s contribution. Without that, the phrase “crimes against humanity” becomes descriptive outrage rather than legal classification.

10.3 War crimes and cartel violence

War crimes require a nexus with armed conflict. This is the line that cannot be skipped. Murder, torture, rape, hostage-taking, recruitment of children, attacks on civilians, or destruction of property may be domestic crimes and human rights violations. They become war crimes only when linked to an international or non-international armed conflict and when the relevant elements are satisfied (Rome Statute, 1998; ICTY, 1995).

Many cartel atrocities will not meet that requirement. A massacre by a cartel against civilians may be murder, terrorism under domestic law, organized crime, or possibly a crime against humanity if the broader contextual elements exist. It is not a war crime unless an armed conflict exists and the act is sufficiently connected to that conflict.

Loose war-crime language creates legal confusion. It may help public advocacy, but it weakens analysis. A cartel ambush of police does not automatically prove a non-international armed conflict. A bomb attack does not automatically create an IHL nexus. Military-grade weapons do not by themselves transform criminal violence into warfare.

Where the conflict threshold is met, war crimes analysis becomes possible. In such cases, attacks against civilians, murder of detainees, torture, hostage-taking, rape, child recruitment, and intentionally directing attacks against protected objects may fall within the Rome Statute Article 8. The legal pathway is narrow but real. It depends on facts, not labels.

10.4 Command responsibility and joint conduct

Leadership liability is central because cartel leaders rarely commit every act personally. International criminal law provides several routes to accountability. A person may be liable for direct commission, ordering, soliciting, inducing, aiding and abetting, or contributing to crimes committed by a group acting with a common purpose (Rome Statute, 1998).

For cartel leaders, the strongest theories would focus on orders, operational control, financing, logistics, and contribution to a criminal campaign. A leader who directs killings, authorizes disappearances, controls detention sites, provides weapons, organizes forced displacement, or coordinates attacks on civilians may face liability if the contextual elements of an international crime are established.

Command responsibility is more demanding. Article 28 of the Rome Statute applies to military commanders and other superiors who had effective command or authority and control, knew or should have known of crimes, and failed to prevent them or submit them for investigation and prosecution (Rome Statute, 1998). Cartel structures may sometimes show effective control, especially where leaders discipline members, issue orders, punish disobedience, and control territory or prisons.

Still, courts should not assume hierarchy. Some groups are federated, franchised, or networked. Others operate through alliances, subcontractors, local cells, and temporary armed units. Effective control must be proven, not inferred from reputation. A famous leader is not automatically responsible for every crime committed by everyone using the group’s name.

Joint conduct theories may be useful where several actors contribute to a campaign: cartel commanders, prison leaders, corrupt officials, weapons suppliers, and financial facilitators. The challenge is proof. Prosecutors must connect each person to the criminal plan or contribution with enough precision to avoid guilt by association.

10.5 Domestic, regional, and hybrid courts

The most realistic accountability route remains domestic prosecution. National courts can charge homicide, trafficking, money laundering, firearms offences, corruption, extortion, terrorism, torture, disappearance, human trafficking, and organized crime. They can also use asset forfeiture, plea cooperation, witness protection, and special investigative techniques. This is where most cases will be won or lost.

Specialized organized crime courts may help where ordinary courts are exposed to intimidation or corruption. Their value depends on independence, security, procedural fairness, trained judges, protected witnesses, digital evidence capacity, and financial investigation expertise. Specialization without due process only creates another legitimacy problem.

Regional cooperation is equally important. Latin American criminal networks do not respect borders. Prosecutors’ networks, joint investigation teams, extradition channels, shared databases, financial intelligence cooperation, and coordinated action against ports, weapons routes, prisons, and laundering hubs are more useful than isolated national cases. Institutions such as Ameripol, Interpol, regional prosecutor networks, and financial intelligence groups can support that work, provided evidence standards and rights protections remain strong.

Hybrid courts may be considered only in exceptional circumstances. They are expensive, politically difficult, and usually justified by mass atrocity, institutional collapse, or inability to prosecute domestically. For cartel violence, hybrid models might be relevant where criminal governance merges with state complicity, mass civilian attacks, and systemic impunity. Even then, anti-corruption chambers, special domestic units with international support, or regional investigative mechanisms may be more practical.

The accountability strategy should be layered. Domestic courts handle the bulk of criminal conduct. Regional cooperation targets cross-border networks. Sanctions and financial tools disrupt facilitators. International criminal law remains available for the rare cases where cartel violence reaches the level of crimes against humanity or war crimes. That hierarchy is legally cleaner and operationally stronger than treating every cartel atrocity as an international crime.

11. Sanctions and financial disruption

11.1 UN sanctions and unilateral sanctions

Sanctions are one of the most practical consequences of treating cartels through a counter-terrorism frame. They can freeze assets, block transactions, isolate facilitators, and make financial institutions unwilling to process funds linked to listed persons or entities. Yet the legal source of the sanctions matters. A Security Council measure and a unilateral national listing do not have the same international status.

Security Council sanctions adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter bind all UN member states. The best-known counter-terrorism examples are the regimes connected to Al-Qaida, ISIL, and associated individuals or entities. When the Council imposes an asset freeze, travel ban, or arms embargo, states must implement those obligations through their domestic systems (United Nations, 1945; United Nations Security Council, 1999; United Nations Security Council, 2015).

Unilateral sanctions are different. Measures adopted by the United States, Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or Latin American states may be powerful, but they bind through the law of the adopting jurisdiction. Their reach may become global because of banking dependence, trade exposure, dollar clearing, insurance markets, and multinational compliance systems. Still, practical reach should not be confused with universal legal authority.

This distinction is central to cartel listings. A U.S. designation may force banks, exporters, shipping firms, and payment processors to reassess risk across Latin America. It may also affect non-U.S. actors that use U.S. financial infrastructure. But unless the Security Council adopts a binding measure, other states remain legally free to classify the same group under ordinary organized crime law, terrorism law, or domestic public security law.

The difficulty is not only formal. Unilateral sanctions may support legitimate enforcement, but they can also produce diplomatic friction. A state affected by cartel violence may accept cooperation on asset tracing and money laundering but reject external pressure that appears to redefine its domestic security problem as an international terrorism issue. Sanctions work best when they are evidence-led, coordinated, and tied to concrete financial conduct rather than broad political signalling.

11.2 AML/CFT obligations

Anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules provide the operational machinery for financial disruption. FATF standards require states to criminalize money laundering and terrorist financing, identify and freeze terrorist assets, improve beneficial ownership transparency, supervise financial institutions, and ensure suspicious transaction reporting (FATF, 2023). These standards are not limited to banks. They also affect money service businesses, lawyers, accountants, trust and company service providers, casinos, dealers in precious metals, real estate actors, and other high-risk sectors.

For cartel finance, suspicious transaction reporting is critical. Drug money rarely enters the formal economy as a single obvious transfer. It is layered through cash deposits, invoice manipulation, trade mispricing, remittances, shell companies, crypto conversion, cash-intensive businesses, and cross-border intermediaries. A useful reporting system identifies patterns: unusual cash flows, inconsistent business activity, opaque ownership, repeated transactions below reporting thresholds, unexplained trade routes, and links to high-risk territories.

Targeted financial sanctions add sharper duties. Where a person or entity is listed under a counter-terrorism regime, financial institutions must freeze relevant assets and avoid making funds or economic resources available. In cartel cases, it requires more than checking the name of the organization. It requires identifying aliases, beneficial owners, controlled companies, front persons, family-linked business structures, and indirect ownership.

The risk-based approach is essential. FATF does not require indiscriminate exclusion of every customer in a dangerous region. It requires institutions to understand risk, apply enhanced due diligence where needed, report suspicious activity, and prevent listed persons from accessing funds (FATF, 2023). A bank that closes all accounts linked to a poor border community may look cautious, but it may also drive lawful users into informal systems where criminal groups have greater control.

The stronger model targets financial nodes. These include chemical brokers, transport companies, port operators, money remitters, corrupt public officials, trade intermediaries, real estate buyers, fuel distributors, and professional enablers. Financial disruption is most effective when it reaches the infrastructure of laundering rather than only the most visible criminal actors.

11.3 Beneficial ownership and front companies

Cartels need companies. They need them to move goods, disguise payments, buy land, import chemicals, launder cash, acquire vehicles, control warehouses, manage fuel, rent properties, and present criminal wealth as lawful revenue. Shell companies and front businesses are not secondary details; they are part of the operating system of transnational organized crime.

Beneficial ownership secrecy is the main weakness exploited by these structures. A company may be formally owned by relatives, employees, nominees, lawyers, or offshore vehicles while being controlled by a criminal network. Without accurate ownership information, investigators may freeze the wrong assets, miss the real controller, or allow a listed group to shift wealth through apparently lawful businesses (FATF, 2023; UNODC, 2024).

Trade-based money laundering is especially useful for cartels because it turns commercial paperwork into a laundering channel. Over-invoicing, under-invoicing, false descriptions, phantom shipments, duplicate invoices, and manipulated commodity prices can move value across borders without a simple bank transfer that looks suspicious. Ports, customs brokers, freight forwarders, free zones, agricultural exports, mining products, fuel shipments, and logistics companies become attractive because they combine volume, complexity, and legitimate trade cover.

Cash-intensive businesses offer another route. Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, car washes, construction firms, parking operations, retail shops, entertainment venues, and local transport businesses can mix illicit cash with lawful income. Real estate provides storage of value and social legitimacy. Mining, fuel, agriculture, timber, and cattle can convert territorial control into apparently lawful production.

Crypto-assets add speed and distance, but they do not replace traditional laundering. They are more useful at certain points: moving value quickly, receiving payments, using mixers, converting through exchanges, or hiding beneficial control behind wallets. The conversion points remain vulnerable. Regulated exchanges, fiat off-ramps, hosted wallets, and professional facilitators can be investigated if states have the technical capacity and legal cooperation to obtain evidence.

The point is straightforward: a designation against a cartel will be weak if it does not reach the legal economy that sustains it. The decisive work lies in ownership registers, financial intelligence, tax data, customs records, land registries, company filings, suspicious transaction reports, and international evidence-sharing.

11.4 Secondary sanctions and third states

Secondary sanctions create the strongest extraterritorial pressure and the greatest sovereignty concern. They threaten consequences against foreign persons or institutions that engage in significant transactions with sanctioned actors, even when the conduct occurs outside the sanctioning state’s territory. For private actors, the choice can be harsh: continue a transaction that may be lawful locally, or risk exclusion from a major financial market.

This mechanism can be effective against cartel facilitators. A foreign bank that knowingly processes funds for a listed cartel-linked company should not be treated as an innocent intermediary. A shipping firm that repeatedly transports goods for controlled front companies may deserve scrutiny. A broker who structures deals to evade sanctions is a legitimate target for enforcement.

The problem is overbreadth. Secondary pressure can affect third states whose own authorities have not adopted the same classification. It may disrupt lawful trade, humanitarian activity, remittances, insurance, export finance, agricultural supply chains, and ordinary banking. In sensitive cases, third states may view such measures as interference with their regulatory autonomy.

Blocking statutes and anti-boycott rules are one possible response. Some states have adopted instruments designed to resist foreign sanctions they consider unlawful or excessive. These tools can create a legal trap for companies: complying with one state’s sanctions may breach another state’s blocking law. Even where blocking statutes are rarely enforced, they signal political resistance to extraterritorial control (Ruys and Ryngaert, 2020).

The chilling effect may be larger than formal law. Banks often avoid entire sectors rather than investigate complex facts. Insurers may refuse coverage. Payment providers may terminate accounts. NGOs may lose donors or banking access. Small exporters may be cut off because compliance teams cannot verify every counterparty. The result can be economic isolation of lawful actors while sophisticated criminal networks adapt through informal channels.

A disciplined sanctions policy must separate high-risk sectors from prohibited actors. It should identify controlled entities, publish usable guidance, protect humanitarian activity, support licensing where appropriate, and coordinate with affected states. Otherwise, financial disruption may punish the environment around the cartel more than the cartel itself.

11.5 Delisting, proportionality, and remedies

Listing systems need exit routes. Without delisting procedures, sanctions can become indefinite punishment based on stale evidence, mistaken identity, political pressure, or guilt by association. The more severe the consequences, the stronger the need for review.

Proportionality requires a connection between the measure and the risk. Freezing the assets of a cartel commander, laundering broker, weapons supplier, or controlled front company may be justified by strong evidence. Applying the same treatment to a coerced business owner, a remote relative, or a company with historical but discontinued contact may be excessive. Sanctions law must be able to distinguish current threat, past association, ownership, control, knowledge, and coercion.

The European experience after the Kadi litigation shows why review matters. The Court of Justice of the European Union insisted that even sanctions linked to international security must respect rights of defence and effective judicial protection within the EU legal order (Kadi v Council and Commission, 2008; Commission v Kadi, 2013). The broader lesson is not confined to Europe. Asset freezes and listing measures require reasons, evidence, challenge procedures, and meaningful institutional review.

Cartel cases make safeguards even more important. Criminal networks use aliases, family names, front companies, informal businesses, coerced intermediaries, and corrupt officials. Mistakes are foreseeable. A person may be listed because of weak intelligence, rival information, outdated corporate records, or a misunderstood local relationship. Remedies must be capable of correcting that quickly.

The best system combines speed with accountability. Authorities need the power to freeze assets rapidly when funds may disappear. But urgent action should be followed by notice, reasons subject to necessary confidentiality limits, administrative reconsideration, independent review, periodic reassessment, and delisting where evidence no longer supports the measure.

Sanctions are most legitimate when they remain targeted. They should disable financial infrastructure, not create permanent civil exclusion without proof. A sanctions regime that cannot correct errors will lose credibility, invite diplomatic resistance, and harm lawful actors. A regime that is precise, reviewable, and evidence-based can disrupt cartel finance while staying within the rule of law.

Also Read

• Colombia–Ecuador Border Bombing and the Use of Force

• Self-Defense in International Law

• The Evolution of Self-Defence Against Non-State Actors in International Law

• Common Article 3 in Non-International Armed Conflict

• Economic Sanctions under International Law

• Principles Of Jurisdiction In International Law

• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998)

• Nicolas Maduro's arrest: legality under International Law

12. Evaluation and reform

12.1 Legal benefits of the designation

The main value of terrorist designation is not symbolic. Its practical strength lies in enforcement. Once a cartel is listed under a counter-terrorism framework, states can expand asset freezes, criminalize support networks, tighten immigration controls, increase financial scrutiny, and pressure facilitators who previously operated in the grey zone between lawful commerce and criminal logistics.

Financial disruption is the strongest benefit. Cartels depend on laundering channels, shell companies, trade intermediaries, transport operators, corrupt officials, property purchases, fuel markets, agricultural exports, crypto conversion points, and professional services. A sanctions listing makes those support structures more dangerous to maintain. Banks and businesses become more likely to block transactions, report suspicious activity, and terminate relationships with high-risk counterparties (FATF, 2023; UNODC, 2024).

The second benefit is prosecutorial reach. Material support offences can reach conduct that ordinary drug-trafficking charges may miss, especially when the accused provides logistics, safe houses, communications tools, training, expert services, financial channels, or procurement assistance. This matters because major cartels are not sustained only by armed members. They survive through accountants, brokers, corrupt public agents, front companies, lawyers acting outside legitimate defence work, transport facilitators, and business intermediaries.

Immigration consequences also have real force. A listed organization can trigger inadmissibility, removal, visa refusal, and bars to certain forms of relief. These tools can prevent commanders, financiers, recruiters, and operational agents from using foreign territory as a safe space for mobility, investment, or family relocation. Used carefully, they can deny criminal elites the benefits of the legal order they exploit.

There is also a deterrent effect. A supplier, shipper, payment processor, consultant, or broker may continue dealing with an ordinary criminal market if the expected cost is low. The risk calculus changes when the counterparty is linked to terrorism sanctions. The designation can make facilitation toxic for companies that depend on formal banking, insurance, public contracts, import licences, or access to U.S., Canadian, British, or EU markets.

The benefit should not be overstated. A label does not dismantle a cartel. It adds pressure to an enforcement system that still needs evidence, investigators, prosecutors, international cooperation, witness protection, financial intelligence, and institutional integrity. Its best use is targeted disruption, not rhetorical escalation.

12.2 Legal and diplomatic risks

The first risk is sovereignty. A foreign designation can be read by affected states as a claim that their domestic security crisis has become an external counter-terrorism matter. If that language is linked to threats of unilateral force, the diplomatic damage may exceed the enforcement gain. Cooperation against cartels depends on trust, intelligence exchange, extradition, joint operations, and financial investigation. Public rhetoric that suggests intervention can weaken all of them.

The second risk is category inflation. If every violent criminal organization is treated as a terrorist, the distinction between organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, and armed conflict loses precision. That creates doctrinal confusion and operational danger. Police may start acting like combat forces. Immigration authorities may treat victims as supporters. Financial institutions may block entire communities. Courts may be asked to apply exceptional rules to ordinary criminal evidence.

Overbroad liability is especially dangerous in cartel-controlled territory. A resident may pay extortion to avoid death. A driver may transport goods under threat. A shopkeeper may obey local curfews. A migrant may pay a smuggling network because there is no safe alternative. These forms of coerced contact must not be treated as voluntary support. Criminal law should punish facilitators who sustain the group, not civilians trapped under its authority.

Asylum claims become harder. People fleeing cartels may also have had unavoidable contact with them. A badly designed terrorism bar can exclude the same people it should protect. Refugee law already contains exclusion clauses for serious criminals and persons involved in grave acts, but those clauses require careful individual assessment. Broad association rules undermine non-refoulement and can send victims back to torture, disappearance, or death (Refugee Convention, 1951; Convention against Torture, 1984).

Due process is another weak point. Listings often rely on intelligence, not ordinary criminal proof. Assets may be frozen before conviction. Companies may collapse before a court assesses the evidence. Individuals may lose travel rights, banking access, and reputation with limited disclosure. Sanctions need review, reasons, delisting procedures, and proportionality. Without them, the system becomes vulnerable to error and political use (Kadi v Council and Commission, 2008; Commission v Kadi, 2013).

A final risk is practical: de-risking. Banks and firms may withdraw from high-risk regions entirely. That can damage lawful trade, remittances, humanitarian work, and local livelihoods. Criminal groups often adapt faster than lawful actors because they already operate outside formal systems. An overbroad financial response can leave communities poorer and more dependent on the same groups the policy aims to weaken.

12.3 A better enforcement model

A better model should treat the designation as one tool within a wider legal strategy. It should not become the strategy itself. Cartels are resilient because they combine violence, corruption, finance, logistics, social control, and market access. An effective response must attack each layer with the correct legal instrument.

12.3.1 Anti-corruption strategy

The central vulnerability is state capture. Cartels need protection at ports, airports, prisons, police stations, customs offices, courts, licensing agencies, local councils, and procurement systems. They buy silence, delay investigations, access police databases, secure weapons, manipulate contracts, and neutralize witnesses. A policy focused only on the armed wing misses the structure that keeps the organization alive.

Anti-corruption work should prioritize prosecutors, police leadership, prison administration, customs officers, port authorities, public procurement, municipal land control, political financing, and judicial security. These are not secondary matters. They are the institutional routes through which criminal power becomes durable.

A serious reform agenda needs vetted investigative units, protected prosecutors, financial disclosure rules, beneficial ownership checks for public contractors, secure evidence systems, independent internal affairs bodies, and witness protection. Without these safeguards, sanctions may identify a target, but local institutions may still fail to act.

Political financing deserves specific attention. Criminal groups do not always need to govern directly. It may be enough to fund candidates, intimidate rivals, influence mayors, shape police appointments, or control public works. Electoral transparency and campaign finance enforcement are part of the counter-cartel strategy, not separate democratic reforms.

12.3.2 Firearms and precursor controls

Cartel violence becomes scalable through supply chains. Firearms, ammunition, explosives, drones, armoured vehicles, communication systems, fuel, precursor chemicals, and logistics platforms allow criminal groups to move beyond street violence into territorial coercion. A group with rifles is dangerous. A group with steady access to ammunition, drones, explosives, chemical inputs, and corrupt transport routes becomes a strategic threat.

Precursor controls are essential for synthetic drugs. The 1988 Drug Convention already recognizes the importance of controlling substances used in illicit manufacture (United Nations, 1988). Modern enforcement must track chemical brokers, mislabelled shipments, online suppliers, free zones, port operators, and companies that repeatedly appear in suspicious import chains.

Firearms control requires cross-border tracing, dealer audits, export controls, marking, record-keeping, and prosecution of straw purchasers and trafficking brokers. States should also treat ammunition as a strategic choke point. Weapons stockpiles matter, but sustained violence depends on replenishment.

Drones and commercial technologies need a more precise response. The goal should not be blanket restriction of lawful technology. It should be targeted monitoring of bulk purchases, modified devices, explosive payload components, encrypted command systems, and suppliers repeatedly linked to violent groups.

12.3.3 Asset recovery and forfeiture

Asset recovery attacks the reason cartels exist: profit. Arresting members while leaving the financial base intact produces replacement, not dismantlement. Confiscation, forfeiture, unexplained wealth tools, tax enforcement, beneficial ownership registers, and mutual legal assistance are central to lasting disruption (UNTOC, 2000; FATF, 2023).

Forfeiture should reach real estate, vehicles, aircraft, vessels, fuel stations, farms, mining assets, front companies, crypto-assets, cash businesses, and luxury property held through nominees. The legal system must also pursue professional enablers who knowingly build the structures that hide ownership and move value.

Unexplained wealth mechanisms can be useful where ordinary criminal proof is difficult but lawful income cannot explain assets. They must be designed carefully, with judicial oversight and protection against arbitrary seizure. Poor design can become abuse; careful design can expose hidden ownership.

International cooperation is decisive. Cartel money rarely stays in one country. It moves through banks, offshore vehicles, trade invoices, family networks, property markets, and intermediaries. Mutual legal assistance must become faster, more technical, and more evidence-oriented. Slow cooperation allows assets to disappear.

12.3.4 Joint investigation teams

Cartel cases are cross-border by design. Drugs may be produced in one country, chemicals imported through another, money laundered through a third, weapons sourced elsewhere, and commanders located in multiple jurisdictions. A single-state investigation sees only part of the structure.

Joint investigation teams and prosecutors’ task forces can solve that fragmentation. They allow coordinated evidence collection, synchronized arrests, shared witness strategies, controlled deliveries, digital evidence preservation, and asset freezes before networks adapt. They also reduce duplication and prevent one jurisdiction’s arrest from warning suspects in another.

Controlled delivery remains one of the most valuable tools. It helps investigators move beyond couriers and reach organizers, financiers, warehouses, and corrupt officials. Digital evidence cooperation is equally important: encrypted devices, cloud data, crypto wallets, geolocation records, messaging platforms, and payment metadata often reveal the network better than witness testimony alone.

The model must be prosecutor-led, not press-led. Public announcements should follow evidence strategy. Premature publicity helps criminal networks reorganize. Quiet coordination produces stronger indictments, better extradition packages, and more effective asset seizures.

12.3.5 Human rights safeguards

Human rights safeguards make enforcement more durable. They are not obstacles to security. They are conditions for legitimacy, reliable evidence, and public cooperation. Communities will not assist authorities they fear as much as the cartel.

Anti-cartel operations must respect legality, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination, judicial oversight, and remedies. Lethal force must remain a last resort. Detention must be reviewable. Evidence must be tested. Torture, disappearance, collective punishment, and arbitrary raids damage prosecutions and strengthen criminal propaganda.

Humanitarian, journalistic, legal, and coerced conduct should be protected from overbroad support theories. Lawyers must be able to defend accused persons. Journalists must be able to report. NGOs must be able to provide aid. Residents must not be treated as supporters merely because they survive under criminal control.

Oversight should be built into the system: independent review of lethal incidents, sanctions appeal procedures, delisting mechanisms, audit trails for intelligence use, and judicial control over intrusive surveillance. Precision is not weakness. It is how states avoid turning exceptional tools into arbitrary power.

12.4 Final position of the article

The final position is narrow but firm. Terrorist designation can be legally defensible as a domestic enforcement and sanctions tool when the evidence satisfies the statutory criteria. It can support prosecutions, disrupt money flows, deter facilitators, restrict mobility, and increase international pressure on support networks.

It is not a substitute for the international law frameworks that already govern organized crime, sovereignty, human rights, the use of force, armed conflict, refugee protection, sanctions review, and individual criminal responsibility. Each framework asks its own questions and imposes its own limits.

The drug cartels terrorist designation is most useful when it targets finance, logistics, and deliberate facilitation. It becomes legally dangerous when it is used to imply war powers, bypass territorial consent, weaken due process, punish coerced civilians, or collapse every severe criminal threat into terrorism.

A sound policy should be evidence-led, cooperation-based, financially precise, institutionally focused, and rights-compliant. That approach is less dramatic than military rhetoric, but it is more likely to survive judicial review, preserve diplomatic cooperation, and attack the systems that make cartels powerful.

Conclusion

Cartel violence can be extreme, transnational, and politically destabilizing. Major criminal groups may control territory, corrupt officials, intimidate courts, dominate prisons, move weapons, launder large profits, and terrorize civilians. Some may use methods that resemble terrorism or armed group conduct. The severity of the threat is not in doubt.

The legal consequence is more restrained. Public international law does not allow states to collapse organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, and armed conflict into one category whenever violence becomes severe. Each classification has separate thresholds and consequences. A domestic listing may activate sanctions, immigration controls, material support offences, and financial compliance duties. It does not create Security Council authorization, prove an armed attack, establish an armed conflict, or remove human rights obligations.

The best response combines criminal justice, financial disruption, anti-corruption measures, cross-border cooperation, and human rights safeguards. Prosecutors must target leaders, financiers, logisticians, corrupt officials, and professional enablers. Financial intelligence units must follow beneficial ownership, trade-based money laundering, crypto conversion, real estate, ports, fuel, mining, agriculture, and shell companies. States must control firearms, ammunition, precursor chemicals, drones, and logistics chains. Courts must preserve fair trial rights and review sanctions decisions.

The strongest doctrinal conclusion is that cartel terrorist designation is powerful domestically but limited internationally. It can sharpen enforcement, but it cannot replace the UN Charter, the Palermo Convention, drug-control treaties, human rights law, refugee law, international humanitarian law, or the Rome Statute. A legally credible strategy must use the label carefully, prove the facts rigorously, protect coerced communities, and keep military, criminal, financial, and humanitarian frameworks separate.

References

1. Additional Protocol II (1977) Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts. Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross.

2. Aust, A. (2010) Handbook of International Law. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Bassiouni, M.C. (2011) Crimes against Humanity: Historical Evolution and Contemporary Application. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Commission v Kadi (2013) European Commission and Others v Yassin Abdullah Kadi, Joined Cases C-584/10 P, C-593/10 P and C-595/10 P, Court of Justice of the European Union.

5. Congressional Research Service (2025) The Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) List [online]. Available at: https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2025-02-25_IF10613_9eae088e566f3805acca5977d2983c181a69c499.html (Accessed: 20 May 2026).

6. Convention against Torture (1984) Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. New York: United Nations.

7. Corten, O. (2021) The Law against War: The Prohibition on the Use of Force in Contemporary International Law. 2nd edn. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

8. Council of the European Union (2001) Council Common Position 2001/931/CFSP on the application of specific measures to combat terrorism. Brussels: Council of the European Union.

9. Deeks, A.S. (2013) ‘Consent to the use of force and international law supremacy’, Harvard International Law Journal, 54(1), pp. 1–60.

10. Dinstein, Y. (2017) War, Aggression and Self-Defence. 6th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11. Executive Office of the President (2001) Executive Order 13224: Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions with Persons Who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism. Washington, DC: Federal Register.

12. Executive Office of the President (2025) Executive Order 14157: Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists [online]. Available at: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-02004/designating-cartels-and-other-organizations-as-foreign-terrorist-organizations-and-specially (Accessed: 21 May 2026).

13. Financial Action Task Force (2023) International Standards on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism and Proliferation: The FATF Recommendations. Paris: FATF.

14. Financial Action Task Force (2025) The FATF Recommendations [online]. Available at: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Fatfrecommendations/Fatf-recommendations.html (Accessed: 21 May 2026).

15. Geneva Conventions (1949) Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross.

16. Goodwin-Gill, G.S. and McAdam, J. (2021) The Refugee in International Law. 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

17. Government of Canada (2024) Currently listed entities [online]. Available at: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lstd-ntts/crrnt-lstd-ntts-en.aspx (Accessed: 24 May 2026).

18. Gray, C. (2018) International Law and the Use of Force. 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19. Human Rights Committee (2014) General Comment No. 35: Article 9, Liberty and Security of Person. Geneva: United Nations.

20. Human Rights Committee (2019) General Comment No. 36: Article 6, Right to Life. Geneva: United Nations.

21. Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) Section 219: Designation of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Washington, DC: United States Congress.

22. International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (1999) International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. New York: United Nations.

23. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. New York: United Nations.

24. International Court of Justice (1986) Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v United States of America), Merits. ICJ Reports 1986, p. 14.

25. International Court of Justice (2003) Oil Platforms (Islamic Republic of Iran v United States of America), Judgment. ICJ Reports 2003, p. 161.

26. International Court of Justice (2005) Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v Uganda), Judgment. ICJ Reports 2005, p. 168.

27. International Criminal Court (2010) Elements of Crimes. The Hague: International Criminal Court.

28. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1995) Prosecutor v Tadić, Decision on the Defence Motion for Interlocutory Appeal on Jurisdiction. Case No. IT-94-1-AR72.

29. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977) 50 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1708. Washington, DC: United States Congress.

30. International Committee of the Red Cross (2009) Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities under International Humanitarian Law. Geneva: ICRC.

31. International Committee of the Red Cross (2024) How is the Term “Armed Conflict” Defined in International Humanitarian Law? Geneva: ICRC.

32. Kadi v Council and Commission (2008) Yassin Abdullah Kadi and Al Barakaat International Foundation v Council of the European Union and Commission of the European Communities, Joined Cases C-402/05 P and C-415/05 P, Court of Justice of the European Union.

33. Klabbers, J. (2024) International Law. 4th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

34. Makarenko, T. (2004) ‘The crime-terror continuum: tracing the interplay between transnational organised crime and terrorism’, Global Crime, 6(1), pp. 129–145.

35. OHCHR (2026) The Definition of Terrorist Acts and International Human Rights Law [online]. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/terrorism/sr/activities/2026-03-12-sr-ct-definition-remarks.pdf (Accessed: 27 May 2026).

36. Refugee Convention (1951) Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva: United Nations.

37. Rome Statute (1998) Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Rome: United Nations.

38. Ruys, T. and Ryngaert, C. (2020) Secondary Sanctions: A Weapon out of Control? The International Legality of, and European Responses to, US Secondary Sanctions. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

39. Saul, B. (2006) Defining Terrorism in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

40. United Nations (1945) Charter of the United Nations. San Francisco: United Nations.

41. United Nations (1961) Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. New York: United Nations.

42. United Nations (1971) Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Vienna: United Nations.

43. United Nations (1988) Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Vienna: United Nations.

44. United Nations (1990) Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. Havana: United Nations.

45. United Nations (2000) United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. New York: United Nations.

46. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2002) Guidelines on International Protection No. 1: Gender-Related Persecution. Geneva: UNHCR.

47. United Nations Human Rights Council (2026) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. Geneva: United Nations.

48. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2024) World Drug Report 2024 [online]. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/world-drug-report-2024.html (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

49. United Nations Security Council (1999) Resolution 1267. New York: United Nations.

50. United Nations Security Council (2001) Resolution 1373. New York: United Nations.

51. United Nations Security Council (2004) Resolution 1566. New York: United Nations.

52. United Nations Security Council (2015) Resolution 2253. New York: United Nations.

53. UNICRI (2024) The Nexus between Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism in Latin America [online]. Available at: https://unicri.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/The%20Nexus%20between%20Transnational%20Organized%20Crime%20and%20Terrorism%20in%20Latin%20America.pdf (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

54. U.S. Code (n.d.) 18 U.S.C. § 2339B: Providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations. Washington, DC: United States Congress.

55. U.S. Department of State (2025) Designation of International Cartels [online]. Available at: https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

56. U.S. Department of State (2026) Terrorist Designation of Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital [online]. Available at: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/05/terrorist-designation-of-comando-vermelho-and-primeiro-comando-da-capital (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

57. Williams, P., Madsen, F.G., Kupatadze, A. and Cockayne, J. (2026) Addressing the Nature and Impact of Organised Crime on the International Scene: Understanding and Legislating for the Role of Organised Crime Groups as Geopolitical Actors [online]. Brussels: European Parliament. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2026/783608/EXAS_STU%282026%29783608_EN.pdf (Accessed: 1 June 2026).