Terrorist Label for Cartels: Diplomatic Consequences for Latin America

Introduction

The terrorist label for cartels has changed the diplomatic meaning of organized crime in Latin America. The issue is no longer confined to drug trafficking, homicide, money laundering, prison control, or corruption. Washington now treats selected criminal organizations as threats to national security, foreign policy, border management, financial stability, and hemispheric order. That change matters because diplomatic classifications create consequences. They affect sanctions policy, intelligence cooperation, banking behavior, migration screening, trade bargaining, and the political room available to Latin American governments when they negotiate with the United States.

The immediate turning point was Executive Order 14157, issued in January 2025. Its language moved cartels beyond the category of ordinary criminal organizations by describing them as actors capable of infiltrating foreign governments, working with hostile external forces, operating through adaptive command structures, and exercising quasi-governmental control in parts of Mexico (Federal Register, 2025). This was not a minor administrative shift. It gave U.S. policy a broader strategic grammar: cartel violence became a matter of regional security, not only domestic law enforcement.

Mexico is the central test of that strategy. The February 2025 U.S. designations included six Mexico-based groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, along with MS-13 and Tren de Aragua (Congressional Research Service, 2025). No country is more exposed to the diplomatic consequences. Mexico must cooperate with the United States on fentanyl, extradition, border enforcement, financial intelligence, and migration. At the same time, any suggestion of unilateral U.S. action inside Mexican territory triggers a sovereignty dispute. The result is a fragile pattern: operational cooperation mixed with political distrust.

Brazil shows why the question is now regional. The designation of Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho placed Latin America’s largest state inside the same debate. These groups are not simple street gangs. PCC has prison roots, transnational connections, financial capacity, and a presence across drug routes that reach beyond Brazil. Comando Vermelho combines urban territorial control, armed coercion, and links to narcotics markets. UNICRI’s study of the crime-terror nexus in Latin America shows that such groups can affect ports, prisons, borders, arms flows, illicit finance, and public authority (UNICRI, 2024). Yet Brazil is unlikely to accept a U.S. security vocabulary that appears to define Brazilian public order on Washington’s terms.

The deeper diplomatic problem is not only the accuracy of the word “terrorist.” Some cartel conduct clearly resembles terrorist tactics: attacks on officials, intimidation of civilians, public massacres, car bombs, prison uprisings, and coordinated assaults on state institutions. But cartels usually pursue profit, territorial control, market access, and impunity. They are not identical to ideological movements such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. A serious analysis must hold both points at once: cartel violence can have political effects without making every cartel an ideological terrorist organization.

This article argues that the terrorist label for cartels is best understood as a tool of coercive diplomacy. It gives the United States stronger leverage through sanctions, visa restrictions, financial enforcement, intelligence demands, and pressure on private firms. It also carries diplomatic costs. Latin American governments may cooperate quietly while rejecting the language publicly. Banks may cut ties with lawful businesses in high-risk areas. Companies operating under criminal extortion may face impossible compliance choices. Migrants fleeing cartel-controlled zones may encounter a system that treats their claims through a harder security lens. Regional institutions may struggle to respond when Washington designates first and consults later.

The central question, then, is not simply whether cartels deserve the label. The better question is what the designation does to Latin American diplomacy. If used narrowly, with strong evidence and real consultation, it may help disrupt the most dangerous criminal networks. If used broadly, or tied to military threats and trade pressure, it can damage trust, politicize cooperation, and weaken U.S. legitimacy in the region. The terrorist label for cartels may be a useful instrument, but only if it remains disciplined, coordinated with affected states, and separated from unilateral intervention.

1. A New U.S. Doctrine for the Hemisphere

1.1 The 2025 designation shift

The United States crossed an important policy line in 2025 when it moved selected cartels and transnational criminal organizations into the counter-terrorism framework. Executive Order 14157 did not merely create an administrative path for new listings. It presented cartels as threats to U.S. national security, foreign policy, economic stability, territorial safety, and the wider security of the Western Hemisphere (Executive Office of the President, 2025).

That language matters because it changes the diplomatic status of the problem. For decades, the United States had treated Latin American criminal networks through counternarcotics policy, extradition, police cooperation, anti-money-laundering rules, sanctions, and border enforcement. The 2025 shift did not replace those tools. It placed them under a harder strategic frame. Organized crime was no longer described only as a cross-border criminal market. It was described as a threat to regional order.

The first major designations followed in February 2025. They covered six Mexico-based groups: the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, Cártel del Noreste, the Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia Michoacana, and Carteles Unidos. They also included MS-13 and Tren de Aragua (Congressional Research Service, 2025). The selection was revealing. It grouped Mexican drug cartels, a Salvadoran-origin gang network, and a Venezuelan criminal organization under the same U.S. security vocabulary. That made the policy hemispheric rather than only Mexican.

The move should be read as doctrine, not as a routine listing decision. It links fentanyl, migration, border security, financial sanctions, trade pressure, intelligence cooperation, extradition, and diplomatic alignment. A cartel becomes more than a target for prosecutors. It becomes a foreign-policy problem. Latin American governments are then forced to decide how far they will accept Washington’s framing.

This is where the new article must remain consistent with the previous legal analysis. A U.S. designation can intensify domestic enforcement and sanctions. It can increase pressure on banks, companies, facilitators, and criminal support networks. It does not, by itself, alter the international rules on sovereignty, armed conflict, human rights, or the use of force (Santos, 2026). The diplomatic consequences are large, but the legal effect is not unlimited.

1.2 Why terrorism language matters

Terrorism language raises the political stakes. A government may disagree over the best way to fight organized crime. It is much harder to reject cooperation once Washington has described the same group as a terrorist threat. That is the first diplomatic effect of the terrorist label for cartels: it narrows the room for hesitation.

The vocabulary also changes the institutional response. Organized crime suggests prosecutors, financial investigators, customs officers, anti-corruption units, prison reform, and extradition. Terrorism suggests intelligence fusion, sanctions, travel restrictions, emergency powers, border hardening, and possible military planning. The same group may be targeted through both approaches, but the political tone is different.

This does not mean that the label is baseless. Some cartel conduct plainly resembles terrorist methods. Public executions, car bombs, attacks on police, threats against judges, massacres, prison uprisings, and attacks on infrastructure are designed to create fear beyond the immediate victim. These actions can silence witnesses, force police retreats, influence elections, block investigations, and intimidate entire communities.

Yet method and legal identity must not be confused. A cartel can use terror as a business technique without becoming equivalent to al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, or an ideologically driven insurgency. Most cartels seek profit, territorial control, market access, protection, and impunity. Their violence may have political effects, but their strategic centre is usually economic.

That distinction is essential for diplomatic credibility. If Washington treats every violent criminal network as a terrorist organization, the category becomes too elastic. Latin American governments may then suspect that the language is being used less to classify threats accurately and more to expand U.S. discretion. That suspicion is especially strong in countries with long memories of U.S. intervention, pressure, or security conditionality.

The strongest argument is narrower. Some cartels have acquired enough coercive power to affect state authority, cross-border security, trade flows, public confidence, and foreign relations. They do not need to be identical to ideological terrorist groups to require a stronger response. But the response must be built around what they actually are: profit-driven criminal organizations that sometimes use terrorist-like tactics and sometimes exercise unlawful territorial governance.

1.3 The bargain offered to Latin America

The U.S. offer to Latin America is clear. Washington can provide intelligence, sanctions support, financial tracking, extradition coordination, border technology, maritime interdiction, investigative training, and pressure against facilitators. For states facing powerful criminal groups, those tools matter.

No major Latin American government can confront transnational organized crime alone. Drug routes cross borders. Weapons move through regional and global supply chains. Money is laundered through banks, shell companies, real estate, trade invoices, remittances, crypto-assets, ports, fuel markets, and professional intermediaries. Criminal networks use one country’s weak institutions to reach another country’s markets. Cooperation is not optional; it is structurally necessary.

The bargain is unequal, though. The United States controls the region’s most powerful sanctions architecture, a central financial system, major intelligence capabilities, and the market most relevant to Mexico’s export economy. It can offer support, but it can also impose costs. A bank, port operator, logistics firm, exporter, payment company, or public official may face scrutiny if Washington links them to a listed group.

Mexico faces the sharpest version of this imbalance. Fentanyl, migration, border enforcement, tariff threats, and the USMCA review are now connected to cartel policy. Mexico needs U.S. cooperation, but it also needs to show its public that it is not accepting foreign control over national security. This produces a familiar pattern: cooperation in practice, resistance in political language.

Brazil faces a different version. The designation of Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho does not operate through a shared land border. It works through finance, ports, sanctions screening, banking access, extradition, and reputational risk. Brasília may accept cooperation against money laundering and trafficking. It is far less likely to accept any suggestion that Brazilian public security should be defined within a U.S. counter-terrorism doctrine.

The same tension appears in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Central America. Governments want help against criminal organizations. They do not want Washington to decide alone which domestic security threats become part of a hemispheric terrorism agenda. The bargain can work only if it is based on evidence, consultation, and respect for political limits.

1.4 The risk of coercive overreach

The central diplomatic danger is confusing leverage with legitimacy. The United States can force attention through sanctions, visa restrictions, banking pressure, intelligence demands, tariffs, and public designations. That does not mean Latin American governments will accept the policy as legitimate.

A measure that looks firm in Washington can look intrusive in Mexico City, Brasília, Bogotá, Quito, San Salvador, or Caracas. U.S. officials may see the policy as a necessary answer to fentanyl deaths, cartel brutality, border insecurity, and illicit finance. Latin American leaders may see the same policy as a claim of U.S. authority over their domestic security agenda.

Mexico shows the problem clearly. Its government can cooperate on extradition, financial intelligence, arrests, precursor chemicals, weapons tracing, and border security. It cannot easily accept a framework that appears to open the door to unilateral U.S. operations on Mexican territory. That would turn security cooperation into a sovereignty crisis.

Brazil’s case is similar but less border-centred. Cooperation against PCC and Comando Vermelho may be useful, especially against laundering and transnational routes. Yet if the designation is seen as pressure on Brazilian banks, companies, ports, or domestic political choices, Brasília has strong reasons to resist publicly. Private technical cooperation can continue while political trust declines.

Coercive overreach can also weaken regional institutions. If Washington designates first and consults later, the Organization of American States and other forums become secondary. Latin American states may conclude that regional dialogue is cosmetic while U.S. executive action decides the real policy. That damages the collective ownership of the security strategy.

There is also a strategic cost. China and Russia do not need to solve cartel violence to benefit from U.S. mistakes. They only need to present themselves as partners that do not impose counter-terrorism conditions on domestic security. That message can appeal to governments frustrated by U.S. pressure, even if it offers little practical answer to organized crime.

The terrorist label for cartels can strengthen enforcement only if it remains disciplined. It must be evidence-based, limited to the most dangerous groups, coordinated with affected states, and separated from unilateral military threats. Without those limits, Washington may gain short-term pressure and lose the regional trust needed for long-term cooperation.

2. Cartels and State Authority

2.1 Criminal governance

Major cartels are not ordinary gangs. Their relevance to international relations comes from their ability to govern unlawfully. In areas where public authority is weak, corrupted, or contested, criminal groups may regulate daily life through fear, money, punishment, and selective protection.

This is not statehood. Cartels do not possess legal sovereignty, diplomatic personality, or legitimate public authority. They do not become governments because they control a neighbourhood, a prison wing, a trafficking corridor, a rural road, or a port route. But they may perform fragments of a rule. They decide who may sell, transport, farm, mine, build, work, cross a boundary, or speak to police. They collect extortion, impose curfews, punish disobedience, and regulate access to illicit or semi-licit markets.

That form of power has diplomatic consequences. If a cartel controls a border corridor, it affects migration and trafficking policy. If it influences a port, it affects trade, customs cooperation, and maritime security. If it dominates prisons, it affects recruitment, intelligence, and command structures. If it intimidates judges, mayors, journalists, and police, it affects democratic governance and foreign assistance.

Mexico demonstrates how criminal governance becomes a bilateral issue. Groups such as the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG do not merely move drugs. They influence territory, local officials, public fear, and the credibility of the Mexican state in areas connected to the U.S. border and the U.S. drug market. Brazil shows another model. PCC emerged from prisons and developed a disciplined structure with transnational reach, while Comando Vermelho combines prison origins, urban territorial control, and narcotics markets (UNICRI, 2024).

Ecuador adds a further example. Prison violence, port insecurity, and cocaine routes have turned domestic criminal fragmentation into a matter of international shipping, regional policing, and foreign diplomatic concern. These cases differ, but the underlying issue is the same: criminal governance becomes a foreign-policy problem when it weakens a state’s ability to control territory, protect lawful commerce, and cooperate credibly with partners.

The concept must not be exaggerated. A cartel checkpoint is not a ministry. Extortion is not taxation in the legal sense. Prison command is not public administration. Still, illegality does not erase political effect. Criminal governance is dangerous precisely because it hollows out the state without formally replacing it.

2.2 Violence with political effects

Cartel violence is usually organized around profit. Groups kill, torture, threaten, and intimidate to control routes, punish rivals, secure markets, deter witnesses, enforce debts, obtain protection, and discourage state action. This economic logic separates most cartels from ideological terrorist movements.

But motive and effect are not the same. A profit-driven killing can still change politics. When a mayor is assassinated, local government changes. When police abandon an area, the public authority retreats. When judges are threatened, justice becomes selective. When journalists are murdered, public knowledge shrinks. When transport companies pay extortion, armed actors partly regulate the economy.

This is why the policy debate has become serious. Cartel violence is not always private violence in a narrow sense. It often communicates with the state and the public. Bodies left in public places, attacks on police stations, burned buses, prison massacres, roadblocks, and videos of armed convoys all send a message: the group can punish cooperation, block authority, and control space.

The legal article uploaded earlier made a necessary distinction: cartel violence may terrorize civilians and destabilize states, but severity does not allow legal shortcuts (Santos, 2026). The same distinction matters here diplomatically. A government may have strong reasons to treat cartel violence as a national-security threat. It still needs a strategy that addresses the economic system behind the violence.

Terror is often a method of business protection. The message is practical: do not testify, do not enter this route, do not support a rival, do not refuse payment, do not challenge local control. The effect can be political, but the centre of gravity remains market control and impunity.

A strong response must address both layers. It must recognize that cartels can subordinate public authority. It must also target money laundering, corruption, weapons flows, precursor chemicals, prison governance, illicit taxation, local protection markets, and the state-crime relationships that allow the violence to continue.

2.3 Cartels, gangs, and armed groups

Latin America’s violent non-state actors are not one uniform category. Precision matters because different actors require different tools. Mexican cartels, Brazil’s PCC and Comando Vermelho, MS-13, Tren de Aragua, Colombian armed-criminal groups, and Ecuadorian prison-based networks differ in origin, structure, territorial reach, political exposure, and international connections.

Mexican cartels such as Sinaloa and CJNG are deeply embedded in transnational drug markets. Their power rests on trafficking routes, production networks, armed units, corruption, money laundering, U.S. demand, weapons flows, precursor chemicals, and territorial corridors. They are not street gangs in any serious analytical sense. They are market-making criminal organizations with the capacity to challenge state authority in particular areas.

PCC has a different profile. It emerged from Brazil’s prison system and developed a disciplined network with internal rules, loyalty structures, financial capacity, and cross-border connections. UNICRI identifies PCC as a major Brazilian criminal organization with transnational reach and revenue linked to cocaine trafficking, cybercrime, money laundering, and arms trafficking (UNICRI, 2024). Its power is organizational as much as territorial.

Comando Vermelho also has prison origins, but its public image and operational strength are tied more directly to armed territorial presence in Rio de Janeiro, local drug markets, and confrontation with rivals and state forces. It should not be treated as interchangeable with PCC. A serious analysis must preserve the difference between a prison-based network with regional expansion and an urban faction rooted in territorial control.

MS-13 belongs to another category. Its history is tied to migration, deportation, gang formation, urban violence, and Central American state responses. El Salvador’s recent security model has reduced visible gang power but raised concerns about emergency rule, mass detention, and weak due process. A counter-terrorism frame may strengthen state coercion, but it may also normalize exceptional government.

Tren de Aragua is different again. Its rise is linked to Venezuelan prison governance, migration flows, extortion, trafficking, and regional expansion. It has diplomatic importance because it intersects with U.S.–Venezuela relations, migration politics, and claims about state collapse.

Colombia requires still more caution. Armed actors there are shaped by decades of insurgency, counterinsurgency, paramilitarism, drug trafficking, peace negotiations, territorial disputes, and rural governance failure. FARC dissidents, ELN structures, and groups such as Clan del Golfo cannot be understood through the same lens as Mexican cartels or Brazilian prison factions.

This variation is not academic decoration. It determines policy. Sanctions may work against financial facilitators. Extradition may reach traffickers. Peace mechanisms may be relevant in Colombia. Prison reform is central in Brazil and Ecuador. Border enforcement is central in Mexico and Central America. If the diagnosis is flat, the policy will be crude.

2.4 The danger of false equivalence

False equivalence is the main analytical danger. Cartels are not al-Qaeda. PCC is not the Islamic State. CJNG is not the FARC. MS-13 is not Hezbollah. Some of these groups may use similar tactics, occupy overlapping illicit markets, or cooperate through criminal channels. That does not make them strategically identical.

The distinction matters because categories carry habits. If a group is treated mainly as a terrorist enemy, governments tend to prioritize disruption, detention, surveillance, sanctions, border exclusion, and force. If it is treated mainly as organized crime, governments focus on investigations, prosecution, asset recovery, anti-corruption, witness protection, prison control, customs integrity, and financial transparency. Both approaches may be needed, but they are not interchangeable.

Cartel brutality should not be minimized. Public massacres, torture, forced recruitment, threats against officials, attacks on civilians, and control over communities can produce fear similar to terrorist violence. For the people living under that control, the distinction between criminal terror and political terror may feel irrelevant.

For strategy, the distinction remains vital. Ideological terrorist groups often seek symbolic confrontation, mobilization, religious or political transformation, and recognition through violence. Cartels usually seek operating space. They may attack the state when the state threatens their markets. They may corrupt the state when corruption is cheaper. They may negotiate informally when violence becomes costly. Their relationship with public authority is predatory, transactional, and adaptive.

Misclassification produces bad policy. A military-heavy approach may fragment criminal groups without weakening markets. Broad sanctions may push money deeper underground. Harsh border controls may hit migrants more than cartel leadership. Public pressure on partner governments may generate nationalist resistance while technical cooperation continues under strain.

The more precise position is stronger: some cartels have become geopolitical criminal actors because they affect territory, governance, markets, borders, and foreign relations. They do not need to be identical to ideological terrorist organizations to require a stronger response. But the response must be built around their real structure, not around a politically convenient analogy.

That is the line the article should maintain. The terrorist label for cartels can expose the seriousness of cartel power, but it can also flatten distinctions that diplomacy and enforcement need to preserve. Latin American diplomacy will be shaped by how carefully that line is drawn.

3. Mexico as the Central Diplomatic Test

3.1 Sovereignty and cooperation

Mexico is the decisive case because no other Latin American state sits so close to the full pressure of U.S. cartel policy. The two countries share a nearly 2,000-mile border, deep trade integration, migration flows, security cooperation, and the fentanyl crisis. CRS describes the relationship as one in which Mexico must address U.S. concerns over drugs, migration, tariffs, and security cooperation while preserving its sovereignty (Congressional Research Service, 2026).

That tension defines the diplomatic problem. Mexico needs cooperation with the United States. It benefits from intelligence sharing, extradition channels, financial investigations, border coordination, weapons tracing, and action against precursor chemicals. Yet cooperation becomes politically costly when it appears to place Mexican territory under U.S. security priorities.

The terrorist label for cartels intensifies that pressure. Once Washington describes Mexican cartels as terrorist-level threats, the bilateral conversation changes. The United States can ask for more than police cooperation. It can demand urgency, measurable action, tighter border control, deeper intelligence access, and stronger action against named groups. For Washington, the label shows seriousness. For Mexico, it may look like a step toward external control over domestic security.

The contradiction is not new, but the label makes it sharper. Mexico can cooperate operationally while resisting politically. It can transfer suspects, share intelligence, and intensify security actions, but it must also reject any suggestion that U.S. agencies can act independently inside Mexican territory. That is not diplomatic theatre. It is a constitutional, historical, and political constraint.

A coherent policy must respect this line. If the United States treats Mexico as a partner, cooperation can deepen. If it treats Mexico as a space where U.S. threats may be neutralized unilaterally, the relationship moves toward crisis. The legal boundary established in the companion analysis remains essential: designation strengthens enforcement tools, but it does not override sovereignty or create automatic authority for cross-border force.

3.2 Fentanyl, tariffs, and pressure

Fentanyl changed the diplomatic atmosphere. Earlier U.S.–Mexico security debates often centered on cocaine routes, marijuana, cartel violence, firearms, extradition, corruption, and border enforcement. Fentanyl has added a direct public-health crisis in the United States. That altered the political cost of inaction for U.S. officials and made cartel policy more central to domestic politics.

The drug is not only a narcotics issue. It now connects border policy, migration, customs enforcement, chemical supply chains, public health, criminal finance, and trade bargaining. U.S. officials can put pressure on Mexico as a response to overdose deaths, not merely as a foreign-policy preference. That gives Washington a stronger domestic argument for hard measures.

CRS notes that the Trump administration used the imposition or threat of tariffs to push Mexico on migration control, drug trafficking, and Rio Grande water deliveries (Congressional Research Service, 2026). This is the core change: cartel policy is no longer confined to security agencies. It has entered economic diplomacy.

Tariffs turn cooperation into bargaining under pressure. Mexico may act against cartels because it has its own security interest in doing so. But when tariff threats are added, the same action can appear coerced. That perception matters. A policy that looks like effective leverage in Washington can look like economic punishment in Mexico City.

The fentanyl issue also creates a measurement problem. U.S. political debate often demands quick indicators: seizures, arrests, extraditions, border numbers, and chemical interceptions. These figures are visible, but they do not always prove strategic success. A cartel can lose shipments and still adapt. A leader can be arrested and still be replaced. A border seizure can increase while total flows remain resilient.

The more serious test is structural. Are trafficking networks losing access to precursor chemicals? Are laundering channels being disrupted? Are corrupt officials being prosecuted? Are ports, customs systems, and transport corridors becoming harder to penetrate? Are homicide, extortion, and territorial control declining? Without those indicators, tariff-linked pressure risks producing public gestures rather than durable security gains.

3.3 Intelligence without intervention

Mexico can accept intelligence cooperation. It can accept evidence-sharing, joint investigations, extradition coordination, financial intelligence, controlled delivery, sanctions information, cyber leads, and technical support. These tools strengthen Mexican capacity without formally displacing Mexican authority.

The dividing line is intervention. Mexico cannot easily accept unilateral U.S. strikes, raids, special operations, or open military activity inside its territory. Even the discussion of such action damages trust. It suggests that the United States may treat Mexican sovereignty as conditional on Mexican performance.

This distinction must remain clear throughout the article. Intelligence cooperation and unilateral force are not points on the same continuum. They are different categories of action. One can strengthen the bilateral partnership. The other can rupture it.

The practical need for intelligence is obvious. Cartels use encrypted communications, cross-border finance, front companies, precursor networks, drones, weapons brokers, corrupt officials, and layered logistics. No state can track those systems alone. U.S. intelligence can help identify money flows, chemical suppliers, weapons routes, and international facilitators.

Yet intelligence cooperation depends on trust. If Mexican authorities believe shared information may support unilateral U.S. action, they will have reasons to restrict access, slow cooperation, or channel sensitive exchanges through narrower mechanisms. Public threats can poison private cooperation.

The better model is a controlled partnership. Intelligence should support Mexican-led or jointly agreed operations, evidence-based prosecutions, financial disruption, and extradition requests. It should not become a substitute for host-state consent. That line protects both legality and long-term operational access.

3.4 USMCA and strategic bargaining

The 2026 USMCA review makes the cartel issue more sensitive. Mexico depends heavily on predictable access to the U.S. market. The United States depends on Mexican manufacturing, supply chains, energy links, agriculture, and border commerce. Interdependence creates mutual benefit, but it also creates pressure points.

Security and trade are now difficult to separate. If Washington links cartel enforcement, fentanyl control, migration management, and tariff threats to trade negotiations, Mexico’s economic exposure becomes a diplomatic tool. That does not mean trade rules formally become counter-cartel rules. It means the political environment around trade is shaped by security demands.

This is coercive interdependence. Close economic ties do not remove power asymmetry. They can increase it. The stronger party may use access to its market, tariff threats, customs delays, investment uncertainty, and regulatory pressure to obtain security concessions.

For Mexico, this creates a strategic dilemma. Confronting cartels is necessary for domestic security. Cooperating with the United States is also necessary. But if every security concession appears tied to market access, Mexican leaders risk looking as though they are enforcing U.S. priorities rather than national policy.

The United States faces its own risk. Excessive pressure may secure short-term enforcement steps while damaging the cooperative basis of USMCA. Businesses require predictability. If security disputes repeatedly threaten trade stability, investors begin to price political risk into supply chains. That can harm both countries.

A disciplined approach would keep the channels connected but not fused. Security cooperation can inform trade confidence, especially when criminal networks threaten ports, transport corridors, and customs integrity. But trade threats should not become the default tool for forcing security behavior. Overuse turns partnership into managed coercion.

3.5 Mexican nationalism and public legitimacy

Mexican nationalism is not an obstacle invented by politicians. It is a real constraint on bilateral security policy. The country’s history with the United States makes sovereignty a highly sensitive subject. Any policy that suggests Mexico cannot govern its own territory strengthens resistance, even among actors who may privately support stronger action against cartels.

A cooperative Mexican government must still manage domestic legitimacy. It cannot appear to accept U.S. command over national security. It cannot allow foreign agencies to look more powerful than Mexican institutions. It cannot ignore public suspicion that Washington’s cartel policy may become a pretext for intervention.

The terrorist label for cartels affects their legitimacy. If framed as a joint effort against transnational criminal power, it may be manageable. If framed as a U.S. judgment that Mexico has lost control, it becomes politically explosive.

This matters for operational results. Public legitimacy affects whether citizens report crimes, whether local officials cooperate, whether prosecutors can pursue sensitive cases, and whether political leaders can sustain long-term security commitments. A policy rejected as a foreign imposition will not be stable, even if it produces immediate arrests.

The United States needs Mexican institutions to work. It needs prosecutors, customs officers, judges, financial investigators, police, port authorities, and prison systems capable of acting inside Mexico. That cannot be achieved by humiliating the partner state. Durable cooperation requires Mexican ownership.

Sovereignty, then, is not ceremonial language. It is the condition under which bilateral security cooperation remains politically possible. Washington may have leverage, but Mexico has the territory, institutions, witnesses, courts, and local knowledge needed to make enforcement real.

4. Brazil and the Regional Expansion

4.1 PCC and CV as a turning point

Brazil changed the geography of the debate. Once Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho were brought into the U.S. terrorism framework, the issue was no longer centered on Mexico. The terrorist label for cartels became a broader Latin American question involving South America’s largest state, its banking system, ports, prisons, urban security, and regional trafficking routes.

The U.S. designations of PCC and CV created consequences beyond symbolism. They triggered asset-blocking concerns, restrictions on U.S. persons, material-support exposure, sanctions risk, and significant compliance pressure for firms and financial institutions with U.S. connections (Erb, Wible and Lim, 2026). That practical reach is what makes the designation diplomatically important.

Brazil is not Mexico. There is no shared land border with the United States, no USMCA framework, and no equivalent fentanyl-border politics. U.S. pressure works through different channels: finance, sanctions, correspondent banking, ports, trade compliance, extradition, intelligence, and reputational risk.

That makes the Brazilian case a test of financial power rather than territorial proximity. Washington can affect Brazilian actors even without direct border leverage. A company using dollar transactions, U.S. banks, U.S.-linked cloud systems, U.S. personnel, U.S. investors, or U.S.-regulated counterparties may face exposure if its operations touch designated networks.

The regional implication is serious. If Washington can apply the terrorism frame to Brazilian prison-origin organizations, other Latin American criminal groups may later face similar treatment. That could increase pressure on criminal finance, but it could also widen sovereignty disputes across the region.

Brazil’s position will likely be pragmatic but guarded. It has reasons to cooperate against money laundering, drug routes, arms trafficking, and prison-based command structures. It also has reasons to reject any suggestion that Brazilian public security should be placed under an American counter-terrorism narrative.

4.2 Brazilian autonomy and U.S. pressure

Brazilian foreign policy has long valued autonomy. Brasília may cooperate with the United States when interests align, but it resists frameworks that appear to subordinate Brazilian choices to U.S. strategic language. That tradition matters in the PCC and CV context.

The core question is who defines the threat. Brazil can define PCC and Comando Vermelho as major criminal organizations that threaten public security, financial integrity, prison governance, and regional trafficking routes. The United States can define them as terrorist actors under its own law. Those descriptions may overlap in practice, but they are not diplomatically identical.

Brazil may accept cooperation in specific areas: asset tracing, financial intelligence, extradition, port security, firearms trafficking, cybercrime, drug routes, and prison communications. It is far less likely to accept a broad U.S. framing that turns Brazilian criminal policy into a branch of American counterterrorism.

The distinction matters because domestic legitimacy is at stake. If Brazilian authorities appear to follow Washington’s classification without a clear Brazilian rationale, opposition actors can frame cooperation as submission. That is especially sensitive in a country where public security is already politically charged and where federal-state relations complicate enforcement.

There is also a legal-diplomatic concern. U.S. designations can affect Brazilian companies and banks even when Brazil has not adopted the same classification. That practical extraterritorial effect can generate friction. Brasília may cooperate against the groups while objecting to unilateral financial pressure on Brazilian actors.

A more stable approach would use shared threat assessments. Brazil and the United States can agree on the conduct that matters: laundering, arms flows, cocaine routes, port infiltration, cybercrime, prison command, corrupt facilitation, and violence against public authority. That avoids a sterile dispute over terminology while preserving cooperation against the actual networks.

The worst approach would be rhetorical escalation. If Washington treats Brazil as a passive enforcement space, resistance will increase. If Brasília treats all U.S. pressure as illegitimate, criminal networks benefit. The viable path is structured cooperation with Brazilian ownership.

4.3 PCC’s transnational profile

PCC is not merely a local prison gang. UNICRI describes it as Brazil’s largest criminal organization, with presence across Latin America and links reaching Africa, Europe, and North America. Its revenue sources include cocaine trafficking, cybercrime, money laundering, arms trafficking, and other illicit markets (UNICRI, 2024).

That profile gives PCC strategic relevance. A group rooted in prisons but capable of operating across borders is not contained by ordinary local policing. It can coordinate trafficking routes, discipline members, manage debts, use violence selectively, and build relationships with foreign criminal networks.

The prison origin is central to understanding its power. A prison-based organization can recruit, punish, communicate, tax, and command from inside institutions that are supposed to neutralize criminal leadership. When prisons become headquarters, detention no longer incapacitates. It may even consolidate criminal authority.

PCC also shows how criminal organizations become diplomatic problems without becoming states or ideological movements. Its power affects financial systems, border regions, ports, weapons flows, cybercrime, and regional cooperation. It does not need a political manifesto to influence international security.

The terrorism frame may help expose the seriousness of PCC’s reach, especially where financial facilitators and international partners are involved. Yet it must not obscure the institutional roots of the problem. Sanctions cannot replace prison reform, anti-corruption, prosecutorial capacity, financial intelligence, and police coordination.

A policy focused only on designation will miss the deeper machinery. PCC survives through discipline, finance, corruption, cross-border routes, internal rules, and prison governance. A serious diplomatic response must target those systems, not only the label attached to the group.

4.4 Comando Vermelho and urban control

Comando Vermelho represents a different kind of challenge. UNICRI links the group to prison origins, territorial control in Rio de Janeiro, narcotrafficking, armed coercion, and historical connections to weapons-for-drugs arrangements involving Colombian armed actors (UNICRI, 2024).

Its significance lies in the connection between urban territorial control and wider criminal markets. A group entrenched in urban communities can regulate retail drug economies, impose local authority, confront police operations, intimidate residents, and influence access to territory. That power may appear local, but its effects can travel through narcotics routes, arms flows, port access, money laundering, and public security policy.

CV shows how urban criminal authority becomes a diplomatic issue. If violence affects port logistics, police operations, tourism, investment, regional drug flows, or international finance, foreign governments begin to treat the group as more than a domestic policing problem. That is where diplomacy enters.

The challenge is classification. CV’s territorial control may resemble insurgent presence in some areas, but its core logic remains tied to criminal markets and local coercion. Treating it as identical to an ideological terrorist group would be analytically weak. Ignoring its ability to weaken public authority would be equally weak.

Brazilian policy must deal with the local roots of CV power: policing legitimacy, favela governance, corruption, prison control, weapons access, laundering channels, and social vulnerability. International cooperation can help with finance, arms, intelligence, and trafficking routes. It cannot replace domestic governance.

For the United States, CV raises a question of proportionality in diplomatic pressure. The group may justify sanctions and financial scrutiny. It does not justify treating Brazilian urban security as an external theatre of counterterrorism. The distinction will shape whether Brazil sees U.S. policy as useful cooperation or intrusive reframing.

4.5 Financial overcompliance

The most immediate impact of the Brazil designations may fall on banks and companies. Once PCC and CV are associated with terrorism-related restrictions, private actors face pressure to avoid risk. This can affect banks, insurers, exporters, fintechs, logistics firms, port operators, commodity traders, real estate actors, and professional service providers.

Overcompliance is the danger. A bank may decide that a client, sector, city, port, or region is too risky to assess carefully. A company may avoid suppliers in areas associated with criminal influence. An insurer may refuse coverage. A payment provider may close accounts. These decisions may be commercially rational, but their diplomatic effects can be damaging.

Legal businesses can be harmed even when they have no voluntary connection to PCC or CV. In criminally influenced areas, companies may face extortion, forced transport fees, protection demands, or informal local controls. If compliance systems fail to distinguish coercion from support, the private sector may punish victims of criminal governance rather than facilitators.

This is not only a compliance issue. It is a diplomatic issue because overcompliance can make U.S. policy look like economic coercion. Brazilian officials may accept the need to disrupt criminal finance while objecting to the private-sector retreat that damages lawful commerce, employment, and financial access.

Overcompliance can also strengthen criminal groups. If lawful banks withdraw, informal credit grows. If legitimate businesses lose access to services, criminal intermediaries gain influence. If communities are financially isolated, cartel-linked actors can fill the gap. A blunt financial response can deepen the conditions that organized crime exploits.

The better approach is targeted due diligence. Banks and companies should identify beneficial ownership, controlled entities, suspicious transactions, high-risk intermediaries, and coercive payment patterns. Regulators should provide clear guidance on extortion, humanitarian activity, lawful commerce, and delisting. The objective should be to isolate PCC and CV, not entire Brazilian communities or sectors.

For Latin America, Brazil is the warning case. The terrorist label for cartels may strengthen financial disruption, but if applied without precision, it can create backlash, harm lawful actors, and weaken the legitimacy of cooperation. The diplomatic test is not whether pressure can be applied. The question is whether pressure can be applied without damaging the partnerships needed to defeat the networks.

5. The Wider Latin American Map

5.1 Colombia and post-conflict security

Colombia should not be analysed as a second Mexico. Its security landscape was shaped by guerrilla conflict, paramilitary violence, cocaine production, rural inequality, weak state presence, peace negotiations, and the fragmentation of armed groups after the 2016 FARC agreement. Drug trafficking is central, but it is not the whole story.

This distinction is important because terrorism language can damage post-conflict policy when it compresses different actors into one category. FARC dissidents, ELN fronts, Clan del Golfo, local trafficking brokers, and territorial armed groups do not have the same structure or political meaning. Some still use insurgent language. Others operate as criminal enterprises. Many combine territorial authority, illegal taxation, protection markets, and drug logistics.

A broad counter-terrorism frame may help when a group uses systematic violence against civilians or state institutions. It becomes harmful when it weakens incentives for demobilisation, rural substitution, local negotiation, reintegration, and transitional justice. Colombia’s security problem cannot be solved only through listings, sanctions, or force. It also requires governance in places where the state has historically arrived late or not at all.

The terrorist label for cartels should not erase the legacy of armed conflict. A financier moving cocaine profits and an armed structure controlling rural communities require different responses. Extradition, financial sanctions, peacebuilding, land policy, crop substitution, and military operations are not interchangeable tools.

Colombia’s lesson for Latin America is precision. Violent actors must be classified by conduct, structure, territorial role, and political context. A blunt label may look decisive, but it can make diplomacy less flexible and peace policy harder to sustain.

5.2 Ecuador and port insecurity

Ecuador shows how quickly domestic criminal violence can acquire international consequences. The country’s crisis is tied to cocaine routes, prison violence, port infiltration, assassinations, corruption, and the limits of state capacity. Its ports are especially important because container shipping links local criminal networks to global cocaine markets.

The issue is not only public order. It is supply-chain security. A criminal group that penetrates a port can affect customs cooperation, shipping insurance, export credibility, maritime policing, and foreign investment. That is why Ecuador’s violence concerns the United States, Europe, Colombia, Peru, shipping firms, insurers, and logistics companies.

The escalation also shows how criminal organizations can shape diplomacy without becoming states. Control over prison networks, port access, transport routes, customs officials, and local gangs may be enough to influence cross-border trade and regional policing. Formal sovereignty remains with the state, but practical authority is contested in strategic spaces.

Terrorism language may clarify the scale of the threat when groups use public assassinations, prison massacres, attacks on officials, and coordinated intimidation. Yet it can also narrow the policy response too much. Ecuador needs port security, prison reform, customs integrity, financial investigation, judicial protection, police vetting, and regional intelligence. A designation may increase urgency, but institutions determine results.

The Ecuadorian case is a warning against spectacle. If policy focuses only on dramatic enforcement, the criminal infrastructure adapts. Ports, prisons, money, and corrupted officials must be treated as strategic targets.

5.3 Venezuela and Tren de Aragua

Tren de Aragua brings migration and regime politics into the debate. Its rise is linked to prison governance, extortion, trafficking, migrant exploitation, and regional expansion. Its profile differs from Mexican cartels and Brazilian prison-origin organizations, even though all operate across borders.

The U.S. designation of Tren de Aragua sits inside a hostile relationship between Washington and Caracas. That creates a serious analytical risk. A criminal network may deserve sanctions, prosecution, and intelligence cooperation. It should not automatically become a substitute for policy toward the Venezuelan government.

Migration makes the issue more sensitive. Criminal groups exploit migrants through transport control, debt, sexual exploitation, extortion, document retention, forced recruitment, and threats against relatives. A hard security frame can help target the group’s organizers. It can also stigmatize Venezuelan migrants if public rhetoric treats nationality, movement, or poverty with suspicion.

A sound approach separates three issues: criminal accountability, migrant protection, and relations with the Venezuelan state. Merging them produces a weak policy. It may create a powerful enemy image, but it can obscure the criminal economy and harm people fleeing the same networks under investigation.

The evidentiary standard must remain individual. Financing, recruitment, laundering, armed enforcement, and command responsibility can justify action against specific people. Nationality, neighbourhood, migration route, or coerced contact cannot.

5.4 El Salvador and MS-13

MS-13 raises a different problem. El Salvador’s hardline strategy has weakened visible gang control and reduced everyday fear for many citizens. Extortion, territorial restrictions, and public gang presence declined in ways that have political significance. Ignoring that reality would make the analysis unserious.

The cost is equally important. Emergency rule, mass detention, limited judicial review, weak individualized evidence, and severe prison conditions raise major rule-of-law concerns. Security gains achieved through permanent exception create a difficult question for the region: Does the model restore public authority, or does it normalize a state of emergency as ordinary government?

The terrorism frame can strengthen this model. Once a gang is described as a terrorist-type enemy, safeguards become easier to portray as weakness. Defence rights, judicial control, press scrutiny, and civil society criticism may be framed as obstacles to security rather than conditions of legitimate enforcement.

MS-13 should also be distinguished from Mexican cartels, PCC, Comando Vermelho, and Colombian armed groups. Its history is tied to migration, deportation, prison dynamics, urban violence, and Central American state weakness. A single hemispheric category flattens those differences.

El Salvador is both a model and a warning. It shows that aggressive state action can break gang power. It also shows how quickly emergency logic can become politically attractive. A durable strategy needs courts, prosecutors, prison control, anti-corruption measures, rehabilitation, local protection, and lawful policing. Force can suppress a gang. It cannot alone build legitimate authority.

5.5 Central America and displacement

In Guatemala, Honduras, and parts of Central America, criminal violence is a driver of displacement. Extortion, forced recruitment, sexual violence, gang threats, police collusion, debt, family retaliation, and territorial control push people to move. A migration policy that begins only at the border misses the origin of the movement.

A terrorism frame may affect the region through deportation rules, asylum screening, visa restrictions, aid conditionality, police cooperation, and financial scrutiny. These measures will not only touch gang leaders. They can also affect people who lived under criminal control and had unavoidable contact with violent groups.

That distinction is critical. A person who paid extortion, obeyed a curfew, used a controlled route, or remained silent to protect relatives is not equivalent to a recruiter, financier, weapons supplier, or commander. The companion legal article rightly insists that coerced contact must not be treated as deliberate facilitation (Santos, 2026).

Displacement is not a side issue. It is one of the ways criminal governance becomes regional politics. It affects U.S. domestic debate, Mexican transit policy, humanitarian protection, remittances, and the diplomatic relationship between sending, transit, and receiving states.

The correct response is to target the structures that force people to move: extortion networks, prison commands, corrupt police, weak prosecutors, local protection markets, money laundering, and retaliation against witnesses. Border enforcement alone cannot solve a problem produced by criminal rule at the community level.

6. The Crime-Terror Debate

6.1 The crime-terror nexus

The crime-terror nexus describes cooperation, imitation, or convergence between criminal organizations and terrorist actors. Cooperation may involve money laundering, weapons, safe routes, forged documents, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, prison recruitment, cybercrime, or logistical services. Imitation occurs when criminal groups borrow tactics associated with terrorism. Convergence appears when profit, coercion, and political intimidation begin to overlap.

The concept is useful only with discipline. UNICRI’s Latin America report documents terrorist-like tactics, illicit finance, arms flows, prison-based recruitment, and links between criminal and armed actors. It does not support the claim that all organized crime should be treated as terrorism (UNICRI, 2024).

That caution is essential. Some groups use fear to govern territory, silence communities, and pressure officials. Others remain primarily profit-driven enterprises that use violence to protect markets. Some change character across regions or periods. A single label cannot capture all of that.

The value of the nexus concept is investigative. It tells states where to look: prisons, ports, weapons routes, chemical suppliers, laundering channels, corrupt officials, encrypted communications, migration corridors, and cross-border brokers. It should not replace careful classification by purpose, structure, conduct, and legal consequence.

Used properly, the concept improves diplomacy. It helps states cooperate against shared networks without pretending that every violent criminal organization has the same nature as an ideological terrorist movement.

6.2 Tactical terrorism and criminal aims

Cartels and major criminal organizations may use methods that resemble terrorism. Car bombs, public executions, bus burnings, prison riots, attacks on police, threats against judges, drone attacks, and coordinated assaults on public authorities communicate fear. The immediate victim is often not the only audience.

UNICRI records PCC’s attempted bombing of São Paulo’s Barra Funda courthouse and a coordinated 2006 wave of violence involving 293 attacks over nine days (UNICRI, 2024). That kind of conduct cannot be reduced to routine crime. It is a demonstration of institutional reach and coercive capacity.

Purpose remains decisive. PCC’s violence, like much cartel violence, is tied to prison control, retaliation, bargaining power, market protection, and criminal survival. It may terrorize civilians and intimidate officials, but its centre of gravity is not ideological transformation.

The same point applies to Mexican cartels. Roadblocks, assassinations, armed convoys, explosive devices, and public displays of brutality may justify stronger sanctions and deeper security cooperation. They do not automatically turn every confrontation into armed conflict or every person living under the group’s control into a supporter.

The correct policy response must address both the tactic and the economy behind it. Public terror should be punished. The systems that make it useful must also be dismantled: laundering, corruption, weapons supply, prison command, chemical access, territorial extortion, and political protection.

6.3 When the label clarifies

The label can clarify reality when ordinary organized crime language understates the threat. Some groups do more than traffic drugs or extort businesses. They intimidate civilians systematically, attack public institutions, corrupt officials, control communities, and operate through transnational support networks.

In those cases, a terrorism-related designation can serve useful functions. It signals that the threat has exceeded ordinary criminality. It mobilizes financial scrutiny. It warns banks, ports, exporters, logistics firms, chemical suppliers, remittance providers, crypto platforms, and professional intermediaries that facilitation carries high risk.

It can also improve foreign-policy coordination. States may exchange intelligence faster, trace assets more aggressively, restrict travel, freeze funds, and coordinate action against facilitators. For groups operating across borders, this can close gaps between national systems.

There is also a human reality behind the terminology. Communities living under cartel control may face fear comparable to political terror: disappearances, threats against families, forced recruitment, sexual violence, public punishment, and forced silence. An analysis that treats such conditions as ordinary crime is too thin.

The point is not to deny the economic nature of cartel power. It is acknowledged that some criminal organizations now affect public authority, civilian life, regional stability, and foreign relations. The label can be useful when it reflects that escalation and remains tied to evidence.

6.4 When the label distorts

The label distorts policy when it turns profit-driven criminal groups into ideological enemies. That mistake changes the diplomatic and institutional response. It encourages war language, emergency powers, broad surveillance, harsh migration controls, and pressure on partner states without enough attention to legal limits or political context.

Bad classification produces bad diplomacy. If Washington treats a cartel as a terrorist army, Mexico or Brazil may hear a threat to sovereignty. If banks treat entire regions as contaminated, legal businesses lose access to finance. If immigration officers treat coerced contact as support, victims become suspects. If police treat criminal spaces as battlefields, judicial safeguards erode.

The distortion is especially dangerous in Colombia, El Salvador, and Central America. In Colombia, it can damage post-conflict tools. In El Salvador, it can normalize permanent emergency rule. In Central America, it can harden migration policy against people fleeing criminal control. The label may look strong while weakening the conditions needed for long-term security.

It can also distract from the machinery of criminal power. Cartels survive through money laundering, corruption, ports, prisons, chemical inputs, weapons, extortion, professional facilitators, and consumer demand. A counter-terrorism frame can help target finance and support networks. It fails when it replaces structural enforcement with spectacle.

A final risk is credibility. If the category expands too far, courts and partner governments may treat it as political rather than analytical. Cooperation then becomes harder, even where the underlying security threat is real.

The better position is narrow. Use the label where evidence shows systematic coercive violence, transnational reach, institutional intimidation, and support networks that justify exceptional financial and diplomatic measures. Do not use it to bypass sovereignty, due process, refugee protection, or the factual thresholds for armed conflict and force. Latin America needs stronger action against criminal organizations, not a vocabulary that turns every hard security problem into war.

7. Sanctions, Finance, and Private Power

7.1 Sanctions as diplomacy

Sanctions are not only legal penalties. They are diplomatic signals. They tell governments, banks, companies, insurers, logistics firms, investors, and regional elites that contact with a designated organization now carries strategic risk. A cartel designation can freeze assets, block transactions, restrict travel, expose facilitators, and make commercial actors reassess relationships that previously sat in a grey zone.

The practical reach is broader than the formal legal act. A national designation binds the state that adopts it, but its pressure can travel through banking, dollar clearing, insurance, trade finance, correspondent accounts, and corporate compliance systems. That is why a U.S. designation can affect firms and banks far beyond U.S. territory.

CRS notes that FTO and SDGT designations add prosecutorial, enforcement, sanctions, immigration, and secondary-sanctions tools to existing counternarcotics measures (Congressional Research Service, 2025). The important diplomatic point is that these tools change the behaviour of third parties. Banks become more cautious. Companies review suppliers. Governments face pressure to share intelligence or align enforcement priorities.

This is financial diplomacy. Washington can shape conduct through access to markets and payment systems, not only through embassies, military cooperation, or public statements. The leverage is strongest where private actors cannot afford exclusion from U.S.-linked finance.

The same power creates friction. Latin American governments may accept action against cartel finance while objecting to unilateral pressure that affects domestic firms, ports, regions, or financial institutions. A sanctions policy that is too broad can look less like joint security cooperation and more like economic discipline imposed by the stronger state.

7.2 Material support and business exposure

The most difficult private-sector problem appears in territories where criminal groups control transport routes, ports, retail markets, construction, local security, or informal permits. A company may need to move goods through areas where cartels demand payments. A trucker may be charged for passage. A shop may pay extortion. A construction firm may face threats if it refuses a local “security” fee.

After designation, these interactions become more dangerous. Payments linked to transport, protection, logistics, storage, local permits, fuel, warehousing, or security can be treated as support if authorities believe the company knowingly assisted the designated group. The risk is not limited to direct transfers. It may arise through contractors, suppliers, intermediaries, brokers, or controlled businesses.

This is one of the clearest places where legal accuracy matters. A deliberate facilitator is not the same as a coerced business. A logistics company knowingly moving weapons, chemicals, or cash for a cartel is materially different from a small firm paying extortion to avoid violence. A sanctions or material-support regime that cannot preserve that distinction will punish victims of criminal governance rather than the system that sustains it.

The companion legal analysis makes the necessary boundary clear: terrorist designation is strongest when used against financiers, brokers, transporters, corrupt intermediaries, and professional facilitators; it becomes dangerous when applied broadly to people or firms acting under coercion (Santos, 2026).

Companies operating in high-risk areas need due diligence, but they also need realistic rules. A policy that assumes firms can simply refuse all cartel contact ignores how criminal authority works on the ground. A credible enforcement model should ask who controlled the payment, who benefited, what alternatives existed, whether threats were present, and whether the actor knowingly strengthened the group.

7.3 Secondary sanctions and foreign banks

Secondary sanctions give U.S. policy its strongest extraterritorial effect. They can pressure foreign banks and companies that are not located in the United States but still depend on U.S. financial access. A bank may restrict accounts, block payments, freeze funds, or close relationships if it fears exposure to a designated group or its facilitators.

This gives Washington influence without direct territorial control. A Brazilian, Mexican, Colombian, or Ecuadorian bank may alter its conduct because losing correspondent banking access is commercially intolerable. A shipping firm may reject cargo from a high-risk counterparty. An insurer may refuse coverage. An exporter may abandon a supplier whose ownership cannot be verified.

That leverage can be useful against laundering networks. Cartels depend on banks, remitters, trade finance, shell companies, crypto conversion points, real estate, agricultural exports, fuel markets, and professional services. Targeted financial pressure can disrupt these channels more effectively than arrests of replaceable street-level operators.

The diplomatic difficulty is that foreign banks may act defensively rather than precisely. They may close accounts not because a client is proven to be controlled by a cartel, but because the region, sector, surname, port, or transaction pattern looks difficult to explain to regulators. That shifts risk away from banks and onto communities, small businesses, and lawful traders.

A risk-based approach is more defensible. FATF standards support targeted controls, beneficial ownership checks, suspicious transaction reporting, and enhanced due diligence; they do not require indiscriminate exclusion of every actor in a high-risk region (FATF, 2023). The goal should be to identify ownership, control, knowledge, and facilitation, not to turn entire local economies into prohibited zones.

7.4 The extortion dilemma

Extortion is the hardest case. A company may pay a cartel because refusal brings arson, kidnapping, murder, cargo theft, or attacks on workers. The payment may benefit the criminal group, but the payer may be acting under threat rather than support.

A rigid counterterrorism frame can miss that difference. It may treat payment as assistance without asking whether the company had a realistic alternative, whether authorities could protect it, whether the demand was reported, or whether the payment was part of an ongoing voluntary relationship. That is a serious legal and diplomatic problem.

The distinction between coercion and collaboration is not cosmetic. It decides who deserves punishment. A company that secretly builds a logistics channel for a cartel should face enforcement. A business owner paying under immediate threat needs a different response: protection, reporting channels, safe disclosure mechanisms, and guidance on how to exit the coercive relationship.

Extortion also reveals the limits of private compliance. Firms cannot solve territorial criminal rule alone. If the state cannot protect roads, ports, warehouses, workers, and local offices, companies are forced into survival decisions. Punishing them after the fact may create a clean legal narrative, but it does not restore public authority.

A better policy would combine enforcement against facilitators with protected reporting for coerced actors. Regulators should distinguish voluntary services, reckless blindness, unavoidable payments, and active cooperation. Without that distinction, the label may deter legitimate business while cartel control remains intact.

7.5 De-risking and development damage

De-risking occurs when banks, investors, insurers, payment firms, or companies withdraw from clients or regions because the perceived compliance risk is too high. It is rational at the level of the individual firm, but harmful at the level of public policy.

If banks leave high-risk areas, lawful businesses lose access to credit. If insurers withdraw, transport and exports become harder. If payment providers close accounts, remittances and salaries may move into informal channels. If investors avoid entire regions, employment declines. Criminal groups benefit when lawful economic life weakens.

The development damage can be severe. Communities under cartel pressure need more access to lawful finance, not less. They need formal employment, banking, insurance, trade channels, and public investment. When compliance fear removes those tools, criminal intermediaries gain influence.

This is why sanctions must be paired with guidance. Banks and firms need clear standards on beneficial ownership, coercion, extortion reporting, humanitarian activity, low-value civilian transactions, and risk mitigation. Regulators should punish knowing facilitation, not encourage blanket withdrawal.

Financial disruption is useful when it isolates cartel command, laundering structures, front companies, corrupt officials, weapons brokers, and professional enablers. It becomes counterproductive when it isolates lawful communities. For Latin America, that difference is strategic. Security policy that damages legal economies may strengthen the informal systems that organized crime already controls.

8. Migration and Diaspora Politics

8.1 Border policy and threat narratives

The cartel issue now sits at the centre of U.S. border politics. Cartels are linked in public debate to fentanyl, trafficking, migrant smuggling, asylum pressure, border crossings, violence, and national security. A terrorist designation sharpens those associations and gives political actors a stronger language for demanding stricter controls.

The diplomatic effect is immediate. Mexico and Central American states do not hear only a security claim. They hear a domestic U.S. political message that may translate into border pressure, removals, visa restrictions, asylum limits, aid conditionality, and demands for enforcement cooperation.

This complicates relations with partner states. Washington may frame stricter border measures as necessary protection against designated groups. Mexico and Central American governments may see the same measures as burden-shifting, especially when they are expected to stop migrants, accept returns, host asylum seekers, or intensify policing on behalf of U.S. priorities.

The danger is analytical compression. Cartels, migrants, smugglers, asylum seekers, fentanyl traffickers, and trafficking victims are not in the same category. Criminal networks exploit migration routes, but most migrants are not cartel agents. A threat narrative that fails to separate them can damage cooperation and fuel collective suspicion.

A better border policy would target criminal control of routes, extortion, document fraud, kidnapping, forced recruitment, and trafficking while preserving protection for people fleeing violence. Security and asylum do not have to be opposites. Poor classification makes them appear incompatible.

8.2 Asylum and removal consequences

A terrorism frame can cut in two directions for asylum. People fleeing cartel-controlled areas may argue that they are escaping organized terror, forced recruitment, extortion, or retaliation. At the same time, authorities may apply terrorism-related screening more aggressively to people who live in areas dominated by listed groups.

That contradiction is legally and politically important. A person may have paid a fee, crossed a route, obeyed a local order, or interacted with a criminal group because there was no safe alternative. Treating that contact as support would confuse victimization with collaboration.

Refugee law already has tools for serious cases. People who committed grave crimes, recruited for armed groups, financed violence, or knowingly assisted persecution may be excluded from protection. But exclusion requires individualized assessment. It cannot rest on nationality, neighbourhood, family association, coerced payment, or the mere fact of living under criminal control (Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, 2021).

Removal policy carries the same risk. If a person faces torture, disappearance, targeted killing, or serious harm after return, non-refoulement obligations remain relevant. A designation cannot erase those obligations. The state may screen for security risk, but it must still distinguish perpetrator, associate, coerced actor, witness, and victim.

The strongest approach is evidence-based screening. Authorities should examine role, voluntariness, knowledge, contribution, duress, and risk on return. That protects the public without turning entire displaced populations into suspected supporters.

8.3 Latino communities in U.S. politics

Diaspora communities are part of the diplomatic landscape. Mexican American, Salvadoran, Venezuelan, Colombian, Brazilian, and other Latino communities may support stronger action against violent criminal groups. Many have direct family experience with extortion, kidnapping, threats, or displacement. Their security support should not be underestimated.

At the same time, these communities may oppose racial profiling, collective suspicion, military escalation, abusive immigration screening, and rhetoric that treats nationality as threat. That dual position is rational. A person can want cartels weakened and still reject policies that stigmatize migrants, families, or ethnic communities.

This matters because domestic politics feeds foreign policy. U.S. leaders speak to voters, victims’ families, border communities, law-enforcement groups, diaspora constituencies, and national audiences. Language designed for domestic mobilisation can be heard abroad as diplomatic pressure or hostility.

The CUNY study on Mexican American perceptions found concerns around sovereignty, civil rights, racial profiling, diplomacy, and economic disruption in relation to cartel FTO designation (García, 2026). That finding is important because it shows that security framing can create unease even among communities directly affected by cartel violence.

A credible policy should avoid collective blame. It should target criminal leadership, finance, logistics, and corrupt facilitation, while making clear that Mexican, Salvadoran, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Brazilian communities are not extensions of the groups operating in their countries of origin. Precision is not only legally necessary. It is politically necessary for trust.

8.4 Domestic politics as foreign policy

U.S. cartel policy is shaped by domestic electoral incentives. Fentanyl deaths, border crossings, crime narratives, migration debates, and public anger create pressure for visible action. Designations, sanctions, troop deployments, tariff threats, and strong rhetoric all have domestic political value.

Latin American governments understand this. They know that some U.S. security demands are designed partly for American voters. That awareness makes trust harder. A partner state may ask whether Washington is seeking durable cooperation or a public confrontation that looks tough during an election cycle.

This suspicion can weaken diplomacy. Mexican, Brazilian, Colombian, Salvadoran, or Central American officials may cooperate privately while avoiding public alignment. They may also resist U.S. language more strongly than the operational substance requires, simply to show domestic audiences that they are not accepting external pressure.

The same dynamic affects policy design. Measures built for domestic visibility often favour immediate numbers: arrests, seizures, removals, tariffs, listings, and public operations. Durable security requires slower work: prosecutors, prison control, witness protection, financial intelligence, port integrity, police vetting, and anti-corruption.

The challenge for Washington is to avoid letting domestic politics consume regional strategy. A policy that satisfies voters for one news cycle may damage cooperation for years. Latin American governments need to see that cartel policy is not only campaign theatre, but a sustained partnership with clear limits and respect for sovereignty.

This is the broader diplomatic lesson. The United States can use the terrorist label for cartels to increase pressure, but pressure without trust produces fragile cooperation. If the policy is perceived as electoral messaging, partner states will hedge. If it is disciplined, evidence-based, and coordinated, it has a better chance of weakening criminal networks without damaging the regional relationships needed to confront them.

9. Regional Institutions and U.S. Legitimacy

9.1 The OAS problem

The Organization of American States is the natural regional forum for a hemispheric security dispute, but it has limited capacity to restrain unilateral U.S. designations. It can host dialogue, issue declarations, support technical cooperation, and give smaller states a diplomatic platform. It cannot easily stop Washington from using its own sanctions, immigration rules, financial system, or terrorism lists.

That institutional weakness shapes the debate. If the United States designates first and consults later, the OAS becomes reactive. Latin American governments may speak through regional institutions, but the decisive policy has already been set elsewhere. This reduces the OAS to a venue for political response rather than a body capable of shaping the original decision.

The problem is not that regional dialogue is useless. It is that dialogue after designation that does not create shared ownership. A government in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, or Central America may cooperate on enforcement while still objecting to the process. The objection is not only about crime. It is about hierarchy.

The OAS Charter is built around sovereign equality, non-intervention, peaceful cooperation, and collective security (Organization of American States, 1948). A unilateral designation strategy sits uneasily with that diplomatic culture. It may be lawful as a domestic U.S. measure, but it can still look politically dismissive if affected states are treated as objects of policy rather than partners in classification.

For the terrorist label for cartels to gain regional credibility, consultation cannot be symbolic. Affected states need access to evidence, a chance to contest assumptions, and a role in defining the operational response. Without that, regional institutions remain secondary to U.S. executive power.

9.2 UN drug-control logic

The UN drug-control framework approaches narcotics through crime, health, development, corruption, prevention, treatment, and institution-building. It is not soft on criminal markets, but it is broader than a counter-terrorism frame. UNODC’s work treats drug trafficking as a problem connected to public health, organized crime, illicit finance, governance, and development conditions (UNODC, 2025).

The terrorism frame is narrower and more coercive. It emphasizes disruption, sanctions, support networks, travel restrictions, intelligence, and financial blocking. Those tools can be useful against the most violent and transnational groups. They are less capable of addressing addiction, rural dependence on illicit crops, prison governance, police corruption, weak courts, and the economic conditions that make criminal recruitment easier.

The choice is not between drug-control cooperation and counter-terrorism tools. Both may be needed. The question is which frame leads the policy. If terrorism language dominates, states may prioritize visible pressure over slow institutional work. That can produce arrests and asset freezes while leaving the conditions of cartel power intact.

UN drug-control logic is more durable because it accepts the complexity of the market. It can address demand, supply, laundering, corruption, public health, and institutional weakness together. The counter-terrorism frame is more forceful, but it is also more likely to create sovereignty disputes and overcompliance.

A balanced strategy would use terrorism-related measures only for the most dangerous networks and facilitators, while keeping the broader policy anchored in organized crime, public health, anti-corruption, and development. That approach is less dramatic, but more likely to produce lasting cooperation.

9.3 Regional legitimacy

The United States can compel some cooperation through power. It cannot compel legitimacy. That difference is central to Latin American diplomacy.

Washington has leverage through sanctions, trade, banking, intelligence, visa policy, aid, and market access. Those tools can produce action. Governments may extradite suspects, share intelligence, tighten border controls, or review bank exposure because the cost of refusal is high. Compliance, however, is not the same as political acceptance.

Legitimacy is a strategic asset. When Latin American governments accept a policy as jointly owned, cooperation becomes easier to defend domestically. When they see it as imposed, they may cooperate quietly while rejecting the language publicly. That split weakens trust and makes long-term coordination fragile.

Mexico is the clearest example. It may cooperate deeply with U.S. agencies while publicly rejecting any implication that Washington can define Mexican security threats or operate on Mexican territory. Brazil may follow a similar pattern in financial enforcement against PCC and Comando Vermelho: technical cooperation combined with public insistence on autonomy.

Legitimacy also affects private actors. Banks, companies, NGOs, and local governments are more likely to follow guidance when the policy appears evidence-based and coordinated. They are more likely to overreact or resist when it appears unilateral, politicized, or vague.

The lesson is straightforward. A designation may create pressure, but only legitimacy creates durable cooperation. Without it, the United States may win immediate compliance and lose the trust needed to weaken criminal networks over time.

9.4 Openings for rival powers

U.S. overreach can create diplomatic space for rival powers. China and Russia do not need to solve cartel violence to benefit from regional resentment. They only need to present themselves as less intrusive partners.

The point should not be exaggerated. China is not offering a serious alternative model for dismantling Latin American cartels. Russia is not a credible provider of broad regional stability. Yet diplomacy often works through contrast. If Washington is perceived as coercive, other powers can gain influence by avoiding sovereignty-sensitive language and focusing on trade, infrastructure, technology, arms sales, or political support.

China’s appeal is mostly economic. It can present itself as a lender, buyer, builder, and commercial partner without demanding public alignment with U.S. security definitions. For governments facing pressure over sanctions, migration, tariffs, or counter-terrorism cooperation, that contrast has political value.

Russia’s role is narrower but still relevant. It can exploit anti-U.S. narratives, support governments hostile to Washington, and frame U.S. cartel policy as another form of interventionism. This may not solve insecurity, but it can weaken U.S. diplomatic messaging.

The United States should not abandon pressure against violent criminal networks because rivals may exploit criticism. The better point is strategic discipline. A policy that respects sovereignty, shares evidence, protects lawful commerce, and avoids military overreach gives rival powers less room to present Washington as the problem.

Regional legitimacy is not idealism. It is geopolitical protection. If the United States wants durable cooperation, it must prevent its own tools from becoming arguments against its leadership.

Also Read

• Drug Cartels Terrorist Designation in International Law

• The Donroe Doctrine: Power, Law, and Hemispheric Control

• Latin American International Law: Regionalism to Resistance

• Colombia–Ecuador Border Bombing and the Use of Force

• US-Venezuela Tensions and International Law

• Economic Sanctions under International Law: Legality and Consequences

• Law and Power in International Society

• Geopolitics in the 21st Century

10. Policy Choices and Likely Outcomes

10.1 Narrow designations

The United States should use narrow designations. The target should be groups with clear transnational reach, systematic coercive violence, financial infrastructure, and direct threat pathways. Broad labels may look strong, but they reduce analytical precision.

A narrow strategy protects credibility. It allows Washington to say that designation is reserved for groups whose conduct exceeds ordinary organized crime: repeated attacks on public authority, intimidation of civilians, cross-border command structures, sophisticated laundering networks, and operational links that affect regional security.

It also helps partner governments defend cooperation. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and the Central American states are more likely to accept pressure when the evidence is specific. They are less likely to accept a sweeping category that treats different actors as if they were strategically identical.

Narrow designation does not mean weak policy. It means disciplined policy. Sanctions, material-support exposure, financial scrutiny, and intelligence demands are serious tools. They should be used where the evidentiary basis is strong enough to withstand diplomatic challenge.

The likely outcome of a narrow approach is slower expansion but stronger legitimacy. A broad approach may generate headlines faster. It will also increase legal disputes, overcompliance, and sovereignty resistance.

10.2 Joint evidence standards

Latin American governments should not be expected simply to accept U.S. classifications. Joint evidence standards would reduce suspicion and improve operational value. They would also make designations harder to dismiss as political acts.

A practical model could include shared threat assessments, classified evidence briefings, financial intelligence channels, joint mapping of front companies, and agreed criteria for identifying transnational reach. The process does not need to give every partner a veto over U.S. law. It should give affected states a serious role before the diplomatic cost is imposed.

This is especially important for Mexico and Brazil. Both are capable states with strong sovereignty traditions. Treating them as enforcement platforms rather than strategic partners will weaken cooperation. Shared evidence gives them a basis to act domestically without appearing to follow U.S. instructions.

Joint standards also improve accuracy. Local authorities often understand territorial dynamics, political protection networks, prison structures, and community coercion better than foreign agencies. U.S. intelligence may identify finance and cross-border links. Combining both reduces error.

The likely outcome is better targeting. Fewer symbolic designations, stronger cases against facilitators, less backlash, and more credible sanctions implementation.

10.3 No unilateral force doctrine

The United States should separate the designation policy from unilateral military action. This is the most important diplomatic safeguard.

A terrorism-related designation can support sanctions, immigration restrictions, financial investigations, and prosecution of support networks. It does not create automatic authority for strikes, raids, or military operations on another state’s territory. The companion legal analysis makes that boundary clear: sovereignty, consent, the UN Charter, and the rules on force remain separate from domestic listing decisions (Santos, 2026).

Mexico will treat any ambiguity on this point as a sovereignty threat. Brazil would do the same if U.S. rhetoric suggested that PCC or Comando Vermelho could justify external security action inside Brazilian territory. Colombia, Ecuador, and Central American governments would also resist a doctrine that appears to convert domestic criminal violence into a license for foreign force.

The United States can still pursue hard measures. It can use extradition, intelligence, sanctions, controlled deliveries, maritime interdiction with consent, financial disruption, and joint investigations. None of that requires a unilateral force doctrine.

The likely outcome of a clear separation is stronger cooperation. Partner governments can work with Washington without fearing that cooperation will later be used to justify military escalation. Ambiguity may please domestic audiences, but it damages trust.

10.4 Financial disruption with safeguards

Financial disruption should be the centre of the strategy. Cartels survive through money. They need laundering networks, shell companies, trade-based schemes, real estate, fuel markets, mining, agriculture, crypto channels, ports, corrupt officials, and professional enablers.

The target should be infrastructure, not only named leaders. Leaders can be replaced. Trusted laundering channels, beneficial ownership structures, corrupt facilitators, and trade routes are harder to rebuild. FATF standards already support targeted financial sanctions, beneficial ownership transparency, suspicious transaction reporting, and risk-based supervision (FATF, 2023).

Safeguards are essential. Businesses operating under extortion need guidance. Banks need rules that distinguish high-risk clients from prohibited clients. Humanitarian and legal activities need protection. Coerced payments should not be treated the same way as voluntary facilitation.

This is not leniency. It is operational realism. A small business paying under threat is not the same as a broker laundering cartel proceeds. A transport company forced through a controlled route is not the same as a logistics firm knowingly moving weapons or chemicals.

The likely outcome of financial disruption with safeguards is better precision. Criminal infrastructure becomes riskier to use, while lawful actors have clearer paths to remain in the formal economy. Without safeguards, de-risking may damage legal commerce and strengthen informal systems.

10.5 Institution-building over spectacle

Public designations are visible. Institutions decide whether the policy works.

Durable gains come through prosecutors, courts, police vetting, prisons, customs integrity, port security, witness protection, local governance, financial intelligence, and anti-corruption capacity. These are less dramatic than designations, but they are the machinery of state authority.

A cartel can absorb arrests if prosecutors are weak. It can replace leaders if prisons remain command centres. It can survive sanctions if beneficial ownership records are opaque. It can keep moving drugs if ports and customs offices are compromised. It can intimidate communities if witnesses are unprotected.

Institution-building is slow because it attacks the environment in which organized crime operates. That is exactly why it matters. Cartels do not thrive only because they are violent. They thrive because public institutions fail, cooperate, or withdraw.

Security assistance should be measured against institutional performance, not public drama. Training, equipment, and intelligence are useful only if they strengthen lawful capacity. Militarized visibility without prosecutorial follow-through may fragment groups and increase violence.

The likely outcome of institution-building is gradual but more durable improvement. Spectacle may produce temporary political gains. Institutions reduce criminal space.

10.6 Better measures of success

Arrests and seizures are not enough. They are easy to count and easy to publicize, but they can mislead. A cartel may lose shipments and still increase profits. A leader may be arrested and replaced. A seizure may show enforcement activity without proving market disruption.

Better indicators should focus on territorial and institutional change. Homicide reduction matters, but it should be read alongside extortion levels, forced displacement, attacks on officials, threats against journalists, control of prisons, and business confidence in affected regions.

Financial indicators are also important: asset recovery, successful confiscation, disruption of front companies, fewer suspicious trade routes, improved beneficial ownership data, and convictions of professional enablers. If the money continues to move, the group remains alive.

Justice indicators matter as well. Stronger convictions, protected witnesses, faster mutual legal assistance, safer prosecutors, vetted police units, and functioning courts show whether the state is gaining capacity. Public trust should also be measured. Communities that do not trust the state will not report, testify, or resist criminal governance.

The likely outcome of better measurement is better policy. Governments will be less tempted to chase numbers that look good in press conferences but mean little strategically. The real test is not how many people are arrested. It is whether criminal groups lose the ability to govern, intimidate, launder, recruit, and regenerate.

Conclusion

The terrorist label for cartels gives the United States a stronger diplomatic weapon, but it is not a complete strategy. It can raise the cost of doing business with violent criminal organizations, isolate financiers, pressure banks, restrict mobility, and push partner governments toward deeper intelligence and enforcement cooperation. Used with discipline, it can help target the most dangerous support networks behind groups such as CJNG, the Sinaloa Cartel, PCC, Comando Vermelho, MS-13, and Tren de Aragua.

Its limits are equally important. A designation does not solve the structural conditions that sustain cartel power: corruption, weak courts, prison governance, port infiltration, money laundering, weapons flows, chemical supply chains, territorial extortion, and local fear. Nor does it override sovereignty, create automatic authority for unilateral force, or make profit-driven criminal organizations legally identical to ideological terrorist movements (Santos, 2026).

The diplomatic risk is overreach. If Washington uses the label broadly, Latin American governments may treat it as a sovereignty threat rather than a cooperation tool. Mexico may resist any implication of U.S. authority over Mexican territory. Brazil may object to financial pressure that affects its banks, ports, companies, or domestic security agenda. Colombia may see the language as damaging to post-conflict policy. Central American states may face harder migration and deportation policies without stronger protection for people fleeing criminal control.

The economic risk is also serious. Banks and companies may respond through overcompliance, avoiding entire regions, clients, sectors, or ports instead of identifying specific criminal exposure. That can hurt lawful businesses, reduce access to credit, weaken trade, and push vulnerable communities toward informal systems already exploited by criminal groups. Financial pressure works best when it targets laundering networks, front companies, corrupt facilitators, professional enablers, and controlled assets, not communities trapped under coercion.

The strongest policy is narrow and evidence-based. Designations should be reserved for groups with clear transnational reach, systematic coercive violence, financial infrastructure, and direct threat pathways. They should be coordinated with affected states, supported by shared intelligence, and paired with safeguards for coerced civilians, lawful businesses, migrants, humanitarian actors, and due process.

The final judgment is firm: the terrorist label for cartels can strengthen sanctions, financial disruption, intelligence cooperation, and regional coordination. It fails when it becomes a shortcut for military rhetoric, trade pressure, collective suspicion, or legal imprecision. Latin America needs stronger action against criminal organizations, but that action must protect sovereignty, preserve legitimacy, and build institutions capable of outlasting the label itself.

References

1. Associated Press (2025) Mexico defends sovereignty as US seeks to label cartels as terrorists [online]. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/8f010b9762964417039b65a10131ff64 (Accessed: 29 May 2026).

2. Associated Press (2026) Mexico agrees to make more predictable water deliveries to the US [online]. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/a62af1503f2f9df7199930e05938d94c (Accessed: 29 May 2026).

3. Congressional Research Service (2025) Designating Cartels and Other Criminal Organizations as Foreign Terrorists: Recent Developments [online]. Available at: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IN11205.html (Accessed: 30 May 2026).

4. Erb, N., Wible, B. and Lim, D.H. (2026) United States designates Brazilian criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations [online]. Available at: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/united-states-designates-brazilian-criminal-organizations-foreign-terrorist (Accessed: 30 May 2026).

5. FATF (2025) The FATF Recommendations [online]. Available at: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Fatfrecommendations/Fatf-recommendations.html (Accessed: 30 May 2026).

6. Federal Register (2025) 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: 1 June 2026).

7. Federal Register (2025) Foreign Terrorist Organization Designations of Tren de Aragua, Mara Salvatrucha, Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, Carteles Unidos, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel del Golfo, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana [online]. Available at: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/20/2025-02873/foreign-terrorist-organization-designations-of-tren-de-aragua-mara-salvatrucha-cartel-de-sinaloa (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

8. García-Gómez, J.J. (2026) Cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations? How Mexican Americans Interpret U.S. Counterterrorism and Security Policy Pertaining to Mexico. Doctoral dissertation. New York: City University of New York. Available at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7694&context=gc_etds (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

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

10. Organization of American States (1948) Charter of the Organization of American States [online]. Available at: https://www.oas.org/dil/1948%20charter%20of%20the%20organization%20of%20american%20states.pdf (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

11. Santos, E.A. (2026) Drug Cartels Terrorist Designation in International Law [online]. Available at: https://www.diplomacyandlaw.com/post/drug-cartels-terrorist-designation-in-international-law (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

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

13. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2025) World Drug Report 2025 [online]. Available at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/world-drug-report-2025.html (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

14. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (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: 2 June 2026).

15. U.S. Department of State (2025) Designation of International Cartels [online]. Available at: https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

16. U.S. Department of State (2026) Terrorist Designation of Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital [online]. Available at: https://br.usembassy.gov/terrorist-designation-of-comando-vermelho-and-primeiro-comando-da-capital/ (Accessed: 2 June 2026).

17. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (2025) OFAC Alert: International Cartels Designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists [online]. Available at: https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/934096/download?inline= (Accessed: 3 June 2026).

18. The White House (2025) Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists [online]. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/designating-cartels-and-other-organizations-as-foreign-terrorist-organizations-and-specially-designated-global-terrorists/ (Accessed: 3 June 2026).

19. The White House (2025) Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Imposes Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico and China [online]. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-tariffs-on-imports-from-canada-mexico-and-china/ (Accessed: 3 June 2026).