Violence in Mexico: When Cartels and Terrorists Converge

I arrived in Bogota one bright morning in the spring of 1988, the leader of an executive protection team providing security to a prominent American billionaire — this was back in the day when a billion dollars was still real money. We’d just arrived from Peru, where our protectee’s insistence on visiting Machu Picchu had compelled a dangerous train ride through an area dominated by the “Shining Path” terrorists. Having, thankfully, navigated this without incident, my team looked on Bogota as an opportunity to relax, if only just a little.

So imagine our dismay when we found the lobby of our luxury hotel filled with young, fit men whose handguns were only marginally concealed under their suit jackets. That evening, interacting with some Bureau of Diplomatic Security officers who’d come to escort our man to an embassy function, I asked my counterpart what the show of force was about. He laughed and explained that our hotel was also hosting a gathering of “Latin American Friends of the Palestine Liberation Organization,” many of whom, it seemed, enjoyed the protection of Cuban security professionals.

Fortunately, no one was of a mind to cause trouble, and we enjoyed our hoped-for relaxed stay in Bogota before moving on. But in the years since, I’ve reflected from time to time on this incident, which offered a stark reminder that Middle Eastern terrorist groups, even then, had a way of expanding their tentacles into the Western Hemisphere, aided and abetted by the Castro regime among other bad actors.

Reading the “burning Mexico” headlines these last several days, taking a retired professional’s interest in the explosion of narcoterrorist wrath, I’m reminded once again that terrorism comes in many flavors, not just the explicitly political. I’m also reminded that narcoterrorism has developed capabilities akin to the most heavily armed political terrorist groups. Above all, I’m reminded that the supposed “hard line” between political terrorism and, shall we say, the more “commercial” variety isn’t really a hard line at all.

Instead, various political terrorist groups dabble — some do more than just “dabble” — in the drug trade among other commercial ventures. In turn, largely commercial criminal enterprises, notably the drug cartels, have created structures and capabilities that closely resemble the explicitly political terrorist organizations. The interactions are complex, often poorly understood by outsiders, but the convergence of interests makes these purported “strange bedfellows” often willing to cozy up in bed together.

ISIS, in its various permutations, or Hezbollah, has certainly used drug trafficking to finance operations. While the Taliban loudly denounced and appeared to suppress Afghanistan’s opium trade, the reality was much more complex. In turn, drug cartels have a long history of using terrorist tactics to protect their activities and advance their interests, often wholly compromising the governments of their respective countries. This was — and may be again — the case in Colombia, and, as recent events make clear, is certainly the case in Mexico. (RELATED: Two Regimes, One Reality)

Nor does it end there. For years, it’s been painfully clear that governments such as Cuba and Venezuela have supported an intertwined network of narcotics trafficking and political terrorism. While China insists that it supports worldwide anti-trafficking measures, the Chinese sourcing, for example, of fentanyl precursors processed in Mexico, is well known. In my recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, I explore this as one dimension of a larger Chinese undertaking to destroy our position on the world stage, using our drug problem as a solvent to dissolve our communities. (RELATED: Slow Walking in Venezuela)

Finally, we shouldn’t feel confident that the “cartelization” of entire Mexican states and cities doesn’t exist elsewhere. In France, for example, whole neighborhoods in the great Mediterranean port of Marseilles appear to have been largely taken over by drug gangs. In Sweden, once a model of social stability, drug gangs and other quasi-terroristic criminal enterprises have taken over significant swaths of several large cities and now appear to have spread their tentacles to other Scandinavian nations. (RELATED: Drug Gangs, Child Gunmen and Antisemitic Abuse — Welcome to Marseille)

Above all, we should be crystal clear about the threat to our own communities. Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gained notoriety in the closing days of the Biden Administration for its attempts to take control of whole neighborhoods in cities across the country. MS-13 has long exerted a powerful influence in major cities like Los Angeles, but not only there. The tidal wave of illegal immigration didn’t solely consist of poor people seeking honest work. Instead, it was surfed by the drug cartels and human traffickers, often working in tandem.

We kid ourselves if we ignore the fact that such hostile actors as China and Iran haven’t also taken advantage of this. We don’t know just how many of their agents infiltrated during the years of the immigration flood, for the simple reason that, when Biden abdicated control over the border, we lost all means of tracking such threats. But even a small sample of apprehensions attests to the likelihood of a much larger problem.

Moreover, there’s no reason to assume that these state-level threats wouldn’t make common cause with the narcoterrorist cartels. For years, a common assumption was that, for all their viciousness, the cartels were more interested in making money than in exerting political influence. In this telling, they would draw the line at anything that might affect their bottom line.

But whenever their business model has come under government attack, as for example in Colombia some years ago, the cartels were quick to make common cause with anti-government forces. Now that the Trump administration has taken on the task of corralling the power of the cartels, all bets are off. (RELATED: Trump’s Strong-Arm Tactics Convince Mexico to Take Action Against Cartels)

We read repeatedly, above all in pronouncements by the Iranian regime, that if we strike against them in the coming days, they will strike back, lethally, at American targets. Most analysts seem to think that this will be confined to U.S. military assets in the Middle East, but this seems a much too comforting assumption. There’s every reason to suspect that Iranian-backed terrorist attacks will take place on American soil, and these might readily find logistical support from the cartels, who increasingly detest Trump and would likely rejoice at seeing him humbled.

In 1988, in the lobby of our five-star hotel in Bogota, my team and I found it utterly incongruous to encounter the leaders of the “Latin American Friends of the PLO,” along with their legions of armed bodyguards. Looking back, however, on the parallel evolution of the political terrorist and narcoterrorist threats, it seems that, in fact, we were seeing the wave of the future, and that the fiery outbreaks of violence across Mexico could very well come our way, orchestrated by Iranian or Cuban interests. We have, after all, some experience with violent outbreaks in recent years, fueled by foreign actors.

The 19th-century Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz famously described his country as “Poor Mexico — so far from God, so close to the United States.” As we watch the cartel violence taking place in Mexico, perhaps we should remind ourselves that it works both ways. We are very close to Mexico, and much that is now roiling Mexico has also taken root in our own cities. When it comes to the emerging multi-dimensional terrorist threat, we should by all means pray that we are close enough to God, and remind ourselves that, in dealing with such a threat, God helps those who help themselves.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Lepanto’s Legacy: The Fight for Western Survival

American Lives: Frozen Moments, Lasting Sorrow

Time to Stand With the People of Iran

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed Venezuelan terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.