The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning

By Joshua S. Treviño

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

‘Violence should stop in Mexico,” said the tired old man. “Too many lives are lost. It destroys families. It thrusts youths into a life without future. Nobody will win this war.”

 

Then, having spoken, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the most fearsome cartel bosses in all of Mexican history, went silent to await his sentencing. The sentence was handed down on Monday: life in prison without the possibility of parole. As an end for a man who moved drugs and people across America’s southern border for decades, and who was directly and indirectly responsible for uncounted deaths and lives destroyed at the hands of his Sinaloa Cartel, the sentence was arguably somewhat less than he deserved. But the death penalty had been taken off the table some time ago, and Zambada García is reported to have been spared the worst possible federal lockup in ADX Florence, where his erstwhile Sinaloa partner Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán now permanently resides.

 

The question is why he was granted these mercies, small as they are. The Department of Justice knows, but — likely for good reasons — isn’t talking. The conspiratorial hypothesizing that seems to attach to nearly every element of Mexican civics rushes in with explanations, many of them genuinely plausible.

 

One theory is that the circumstances of El Mayo’s rendition to the United States are sufficiently radioactive that the DOJ has a positive interest in keeping them unknown, and therefore in keeping the prisoner from disclosing them. To be sure, the known facts of the case raise significant questions. On July 25, 2024, a small aircraft from Mexico arrived at the grandiosely named Doña Ana County International Jetport, a modest airport in Santa Teresa, N.M., just across the Texas state line. On board were El Mayo and a Chapito — one of El Chapo’s sons, in this case Joaquin “El Güero” Guzmán Lopez. The Mexican authorities had no knowledge of the flight or the passengers, but American authorities clearly did, as both men were arrested by federal agents upon arrival.

 

The tales of the two prisoners, both eminences within the Sinaloa Cartel, swiftly diverged. The Chapito was quickly charged — not by the Americans, but by the Mexicans, whose Fiscalía General de la República (FGR), their DOJ equivalent, indicted El Güero for treason. Tellingly, the Mexican authorities chose to immediately credit at face value Zambada García’s assertion, issued through his lawyer, that he was kidnapped by the Chapito and hustled onto the plane after being lured to a meeting at which Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya was supposed to be present. (Rocha Moya is, of course, now at the center of the DOJ’s April 2026 indictments of Mexican senior officeholders.) The story eventually turned out to be true — or was at least accepted by U.S. authorities as a presentable narrative — when El Güero admitted to the kidnapping in his guilty plea last December.

 

El Güero was charged by the Americans, too — along with his brother Ovidio “El Raton” Guzmán Lopez, who had been arrested and extradited more conventionally the preceding year — for his own role in the Sinaloa Cartel’s leadership. Yet something curious then happened in the Familia Guzmán Lopez, come May 2025: That month, 17 Guzmán Lopez relatives voluntarily crossed from Mexico into the United States, hauling their luggage and a reported $70,000 in cash across the San Ysidro border crossing from Tijuana to San Diego — all under the watchful eyes of American agents and at least one U.S.-side sniper. Again, the Mexican authorities were kept in the dark: The story was broken by the intrepid crime journalist Luis Chaparro and picked up in the U.S. press by the Los Angeles Times. As for El Raton, his sentencing has been deferred to October 2026. El Güero has not yet had a sentencing date set. So much for the Chapitos.

 

The ambit of Mexican governance has responded poorly to this entire sequence of events. The abrupt removal of El Mayo and two of the Chapitos from the Sinaloan chessboard sparked a sanguinary war of succession that continues to wrack the erstwhile territories of that cartel. Those territories extend not just across Sinaloa proper, but in various forms across much of Mexico. Having long tolerated one species of violence in the reign of its Sinaloa-cartel (probable) allies, the ruling Morena regime now blames the Americans for incepting a different phase of killing. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asked, pointedly, why — if the Sinaloa Cartel is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terror Organization — that same United States is apparently making deals with some of its leadership. Sheinbaum’s claim is a rich bit of turnabout: Having been a de facto ally of the Sinaloans for years, the Morena hierarchy now gets to accuse the Americans of the same.

 

Yet it is this probable Mexican state–cartel alliance that leads to another theory about the small mercies extended to El Mayo. The old cartel lord has been in the business for a very long time; he has worked alongside infamous traffickers including El Chapo, Felix Gallardo, El Señor de los Cielos, Beltran Leyva, and even the Colombians of the Medellin and Cali heydays. He was venerable and senior when, in 2006, what would become Morena’s original political core allegedly first formed its alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel. El Mayo was not removed from that activity: His own younger brother, Jesús Reynaldo “El Rey” Zambada García, has testified twice at trial in the U.S. that Sinaloa provided funding to Morena that year. The Chapitos aren’t the only ones who can be candid, for transactional purposes, with American prosecutors. Could the comparative leniency accorded to El Mayo — who is easily as malevolent in record and character as El Chapo — be a signal that he will share what he knows about Mexico’s corrupted political class? His lawyer is insisting it is not so, but to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that.

 

The prospect clearly has Morena rattled, which is why Sheinbaum has tried to preempt the narrative by ordering the FGR to reopen the case about El Mayo’s removal from Mexico, and further accusing former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar of having lied about the episode. Already stricken with a quiet panic over the American indictments of the Sinaloa governor and one of the state’s federal senators, among others, they (probably correctly) suspect it to be both a result of the Chapito and El Mayo’s cooperation — and a harbinger of things to come. For his part, Salazar (who as ambassador was regarded by much of the Biden White House as far too close to Morena) has stated that the whatever took El Mayo and El Güero to American soil was “not our plane, not our pilot, and not our operation.”

 

Yet the plane is on public display in a small museum at the very same Doña Ana County International Jetport at which the drug lords passed into the custody of the United States, courtesy of the FBI’s El Paso field office. “Nobody will win this war,” said El Mayo — but though crime will always be with us, there is a side that is presently winning. Sinaloa’s cartel is decapitated and has collapsed into civil war. Sinaloa’s political leadership is hiding and under American indictment. The Mexican political class that has profited for so long from cartel partnerships is wondering what’s next — and scrambling to cut deals to save itself.

 

The sentencing of the old jefe de narco is not an end. It is merely part of the beginning. Known and unknown, public and secret, there are more deals to come in the unfolding American war upon Mexico’s narco estado.

Mexico’s Yūshūkan Mindset

By Joshua S. Treviñoe

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

In 1613, the Keichō Embassy under Hasekura Tsunenaga set forth from Japan to the Viceroyalty of New Spain, landing at Acapulco and spending some time in Ciudad de México — not even a full century removed from its past as Tenochtitlan — before proceeding to Europe. The Japanese visit, including a retinue of samurai, was chronicled by the Nahua annalist Chimalpahin, who recorded armed conflicts between the visitors and their Spanish escorts. For a certain class of history buff, swordplay between a Spaniard of the Siglo de Oro and a samurai has the aura of a fantastical happening, but this episode was real. The outcome was a non-mortal wound for the Spaniard while the Japanese mission proceeded onward.

 

Spain’s interest in Japan had been sharpened 20 years prior with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s launch of the Imjin War versus Joseon Korea and Ming China — the Spanish Philippines were understood to be next on his list of aspirations — and the burgeoning ranks of Japanese Christians, reaching into the hundreds of thousands, lent spiritual connection to the strategic. A Spanish priest even traveled with the Japanese armies as a chaplain to some of Hideyoshi’s Christian soldiery, an unofficial Habsburg-imperium presence on the war-wracked Korean peninsula. The embassy nevertheless came to a fruitless end, with Hasekura failing to secure liaison between his daimyo and the powers of Europe, and Japan turning toward cruel repression of its Christians and instituting managed isolation from Europe that would last two centuries. In the end, its legacy was a grand-strategic moment missed for all parties, and a small community of descendants of the retinue in Spain, to this day bearing the surname Japón.

 

This historical episode comes to mind when considering events in Mexico now, illuminated by the lens of a recent sojourn in Tokyo in which this author visited a handful of the sites at which the Japanese memories of the 20th-century wars are kept. The Yūshūkan Museum at the (deservedly controversial) Yasukuni Shrine offers one version of that memory: There, the Japanese wars through late 1945 are cast as rational responses to events, and the Japanese leadership and conduct of those wars are positively interpreted, preposterously so, in some cases. (Hideki Tojo, for example, fought against racial discrimination in Asia; Manchukuo was a noble effort at multiculturalism; and though there is an entire locomotive from the infamous Burma railway in the lobby, there is not a word on the slaves who built it.) It’s quite easy to see how the place inflames sentiment elsewhere in Asia. Americans have the luxury of regarding the thing as a species of absurdity — the adherents of this sort of historical interpretation are also typically the most dedicated proponents of the modern U.S.-Japan alliance — but there is an unpleasant chill upon entering the hallway in which the kamikazes are glorified, and a restored Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka floats above.

 

The nearby National Showa Memorial Museum, focusing upon the wartime experience of the Japanese home front, tells it straight and is rewarding for the American visitor. It’s impossible to miss the parallel here with much Southern historiography on the American Civil War — these comparisons arise throughout the experience of Japanese memorialization of the war — but that doesn’t mean either case is wrong on its merits. Although not for the reasons the Yūshūkan curators would have it, Japanese wartime suffering in Japan was indeed tremendous, and in the final year became horrific, and a fullness of historical memory includes it. The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage — a very out-of-the-way (from a tourist perspective) and comparatively small museum — brings it home in full. This small establishment commemorates the Great Tokyo Raid of March 9 and 10, 1945, in which the B-29s of the U.S. Twentieth Air Force razed much of the city with incendiaries, plausibly killing about 100,000 men, women, and children. The hellish tableau of Tokyo wreathed in firestorm and charred corpses is a portrait of the bloody 20th century alongside scenes of Verdun and Stalingrad. To its immense credit, the center places the episode in its historical context — the visitor is informed that Imperial Japan was terror-bombing Chinese cities long before the coming of the Americans.

 

The thing itself was monstrous, but of course the American airmen flying the missions were not monsters. (I will plead partiality here: my grandfather was a B-29 gunner, although the war ended before he flew a single combat mission.) Neither were the Japanese families incinerated by the raid. It is altogether a good opportunity to reflect upon history and how we understand it. A modern progressive approach simply cannot do it, just as the patriotic militarism of the Yūshūkan is insufficient. Both enforce a stark binary that slashes downward through every element of human existence. A cause may be right or wrong, but to borrow from Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil passes through every human heart.

 

This brings us to Mexico, where that long-suffering country arrives at twin straits in short order. By the end of this month, it will reckon with the treaty-designated deadline for review of USMCA reauthorization. Simultaneously, it will soon have been 60 days since the American indictments of a host of Mexican senior politicians. Both concerns are existential. The Mexican economy, which staggers along at near-zero growth under the perennial mismanagement of its political class, requires both access to the American market and an influx of remittances to avoid contraction, and even collapse. The Mexican civic sphere requires a scouring of its prodigious narco-political class if it is to be the liberal democracy envisaged, but never actually achieved, by its founders (and re-founders in the eras of Benito Juárez and the revolution of the early 20th century). Hardly a decade after Mexican independence, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the Mexicans . . . took the Federal Constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy. But although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which give it life . . . [and therefore] to the present day Mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism.” Thus then as now. One might think that the present Mexican regime of the leftist Morena party, which conceives of itself as the direct inheritors of Juarez and the Revolution both, would be eager to complete that work at last, bringing to Mexico a governance and a civics worthy of its own historic aspirations.

 

Yet it will not. USMCA may or may not be reauthorized, although the odds are in its favor; but the narco-politicians subject to U.S. indictment will probably not be surrendered absent pressure yet to be brought to bear. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum — not herself among the narco cohort — has publicly affirmed her opposition to their extradition and further accused the United States of using the indictments to undermine Mexican sovereignty. What could have been a case of binational cooperation against cartel criminality among the political ranks has been transformed by the Mexican side into a test case for or against Mexican independence itself.

 

All history is contingent, and very few things have singular causes. Yet we may acknowledge primary causes, and one of them here is the nature of Mexican historical memory. To borrow from the Japanese case, there is no parallel to the Showa Museum or the Center of the Tokyo Raids in the Mexican civic narrative. There is, however, a Yūshūkan.

 

Precision is necessary here. There is no Mexican record of world-historical crimes of the nation against other nations requiring acrobatic apologetics. This is not to say that terrible criminality within history does not exist in the Mexican narrative, only that it is mostly perpetrated against other Mexicans. (The horrifying Aztec record, the mass bloodletting of the revolution, and the nightmarish massacres of the present cartel wars all testify to it.) It is to say that within Mexican historical understanding as it coalesced in the 20th century, Mexico is wronged rather than wrong, Mexico is perennially menaced from without, and Mexico is a polity distinguished by its moral mission.

 

You see this conceit at the museum of national history at Chapultepec, for example, in which the Mexican defeats at the hands of Texans and then Americans in the 1830s and 1840s are cast as conspiratorial outcomes of a superior power versus one both weak and righteous. You see it in the museum of the interventions at Churubusco, in which the predations of invading powers are amalgamated into a singular phenomenon with many episodes all signifying Mexico as victim and virtuous resistance. You see it in the popular revision of the memory of the Spanish Conquest, which is recast as an aggression and a catastrophe. You see it nearly every day in Mexican officialdom, from the presidential mañaneras downward, in the invocations of soberanía deployed to preclude things like arresting politicians who take cartel bribes. This is all Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: What seems obviously wrong to all other nations is explicable and right if only one grasps the virtue of Mexican intentions, and the perfidy of her foes.

 

All this has the paradoxical effect of diminishing the Mexicans themselves, who are stripped of their vigor, their achievements, their deserved justice, and the complexity of their humanity. The real record of Mexico across history testifies to the opposite: Mexican agency and even victory across time. It was the indigenous peoples of Tlaxcala and elsewhere who provided the quantitative force that overthrew Tenochtitlan, not the Spanish.

 

Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, disagreed emphatically with the characterization of Mexico’s soldiery of 1846–1848 as intrinsically inferior, and the certainty of American war success was much more tenuous than it might seem: Taylor’s army never meaningfully advanced after Buena Vista, for example, and Scott’s army might have been entombed in the Valley of Mexico given a Mexican civics that was not in evidence in the 1840s, but was in the 1860s. The official Mexican memory of the Pershing Expedition focuses upon the putative injustice of it, but one almost never reads that, in 1916–1917, Mexican forces adeptly curbed and repelled American forces at engagements deep within Mexico. Mexicans are educated on the Niños Héroes who threw themselves to their deaths off Chapultepec in 1847 in the face of the victorious Americans; and they are mostly unaware of the heroic Mexicans of Escuadrón 201 who fought alongside the Americans in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. The heroic Mexicans of the military and law enforcement who give their lives today against cartels and criminals, numbering in the thousands across the past two decades, receive no memorialization whatsoever. Mexican civic narrative focuses sharply upon interventions against Mexico, and never seems to mention Mexico’s own record of the same against the soberanía of other peoples, from the Carrancista fomenting of insurrection in south Texas in 1915, to former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ham-handed interventions in American civics in 2018–2024, to the present-day role of Mexican consulates in aiding evasion of American immigration enforcement, and Mexican-state support for the Cuban dictatorship. One may assess these episodes as one wishes, justified or not, moral or not, but what they are not is passive.

 

This is the paradox and the pity of Mexico’s Yūshūkan mindset: it requires Mexico to be weak. The historical Japan of the real Yūshūkan is, despite its inevitable end, conceived as a strong and vital nation. The Mexican Yūshūkan discards that central quality but retains the victimization and righteousness.

 

A Mexican regime grounded in a confidence born of those qualities, and a full historical record rather than one adulterated and shaped for particular ends, might at least have a Yūshūkan mindset more like the Japanese, one in which the apologetics for the nation coexists with an ability to relate to the United States as a peer rather than a paranoiac. But that regime does not exist. The fullness of Mexican history illuminates two centuries of mismatch between the extraordinary capacities of the Mexicans and the ceaseless incapacity of their ruling elites. Mexico’s own Yūshūkan, then, protects the regime rather than the nation.

 

Four hundred years ago, the Keichō Embassy came to Mexico, and if one had to predict then which of the two realms, Japan or Mexico, would in the 21st century be cosmopolitan, and which would be parochial, one would likely have gotten the actual answers exactly reversed. Yet this illuminates a hope for Mexico, which is not condemned to its dysfunction, nor to its cartel-riven regime, by any iron law of history. That history is contingent, and there are always new choices to be made. Mexicans have been laboring for some time now to set up their own counters to the Mexican Yūshūkan: bereaved mothers demanding accountability for state and cartel murders, quiet laborers seeking to build a working civil society, and even the occasional brave politician who will speak plain truths. Perhaps someday they will constitute the majority. There is no alternative but to hope.

 

In the meantime, Mexico arrives at twin dilemmas at month’s end, and how it navigates them will tell us nearly everything about the Mexican future, and its rootedness in the Mexican past. In 1847, a Saltillo muleteer named Eduvige Ydrogo signed on to haul supplies for Zachary Taylor’s invading army, and the last record of him in history is condemnation to hard labor, and likely death, in the Yucatan, for aiding the enemies of Mexico. In 1941, a boy named Allen Brady Fincher from Van Zandt County, Texas, who joined the Marines to see the world, arrived at his own end by way of eight Japanese bombs, entombed in the USS Arizona. My direct Mexican ancestor and my distant Texas cousin were different men in different wars, and their memory lives in different ways.

 

Allen Brady Fincher, USMC, is not a live issue in U.S.-Japanese relations. He is a tragedy of history.

 

Eduvige Ydrogo, muleteer, is a current event in the two centuries of America and Mexico. He is, for them, a traitor even now.

Bad Hombres

By James P. Sutton, Peter Gattuso, & Ross Anderson

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

On February 22, Mexican special forces cornered Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—better known as “El Mencho,” Mexico’s most-wanted man and the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—at a ranch in Tapalpa, in the state of Jalisco. Wounded in the ensuing firefight, he died on a helicopter ferrying him to a military hospital. His men retaliated within hours, torching cars, blockading highways, and shutting down parts of nearly a dozen Mexican states. The blockades—which spread to 20 of Mexico’s 32 states—killed at least 25 members of the country’s National Guard.

 

Eduardo Guerrero, a former Mexican security official, said the killing was “the most important blow that has been dealt to drug trafficking in Mexico since drug trafficking existed in Mexico.” And it wasn’t a one-off operation.

 

In the months since, Mexican authorities have seized or killed major leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Northeast Cartel—and on Monday, Mexican security forces arrested José Antonio Cortes Huerta, a top operative of a Northeast Cartel cell, during a raid in Nuevo León. During the operation, they seized narcotics, cash, 10 firearms, 11 cars, six motorcycles, and seven tigers.

 

Publicly, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum—of the left-wing populist Morena party (formally the National Regeneration Movement)—has moved against the cartels amid economic threats from the White House. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs to force Mexico’s hand, writing to Sheinbaum in July that “Mexico still has not stopped the Cartels who are trying to turn all of North America into a Narco-Trafficking Playground,” and telling reporters in October that “Mexico is run by the cartels, and we have to defend ourselves from that.”

 

Sheinbaum has insisted that Mexico “coordinates and collaborates” with Washington, “but does not subordinate itself.”

 

But America may be doing more than urging Sheinbaum on. A U.S. military-led task force provided intelligence support for the El Mencho operation, and U.S. authorities supplied intelligence ahead of April’s capture of CJNG commander Audias Flores Silva, known as “El Jardinero.” On Tuesday, CNN reported that the CIA’s paramilitary Ground Branch unit was leading an extensive campaign inside Mexico that included a car bombing that killed a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel near Mexico City in March. (Mexican officials issued angry denials. A spokeswoman for the CIA referred to CNN’s story as “false and salacious reporting.”)

 

In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the State Department to designate cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations. The following month, the State Department named six Mexican cartels—including the Jalisco group—as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), and in August, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against them.

 

Sheinbaum’s tenure has ushered in a new phase of Mexico’s decades-long war against drug cartels and criminal violence, one marked by more intensive operations and greater cooperation with its northern neighbor. What remains to be seen is whether Sheinbaum is willing to confront the network of corruption that has long sustained the cartels—and that her own party has done little to dismantle.

 

When her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—known as AMLO—entered office in 2018, cartel and other criminal violence was surging. Mexican police reported 33,341 homicides that year, the highest level since national record-keeping began in 1997—a record that would itself be surpassed within a year.

 

AMLO—the founder of Morena—proclaimed a “hugs, not bullets” approach toward drug cartels, prioritizing social programs over military and police actions. Homicides climbed through 2019 and 2020 before falling modestly, but the 2024 toll—33,550 killed in the year he left office—roughly matched 2018’s. Mexico’s homicide rate of 25.6 per 100,000 in 2024 was roughly five times the U.S. rate—higher than that of any American state, including Mississippi and Louisiana, the two most violent. The worst Mexican states (Colima, Morelos, Sinaloa) recorded rates above 80 per 100,000.

 

Since succeeding AMLO in 2024, Sheinbaum has taken a different approach. The former Mexico City mayor has deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, intensified the crackdown on fentanyl labs and cross-border drug smuggling, and signed a constitutional amendment passed in November that gave Omar García Harfuch’s federal security ministry the authority to conduct its own criminal investigations and centralize intelligence across Mexican law-enforcement agencies.

 

The strategy may be showing results. Since 2024, Mexico’s prison population has increased 11 percent, to more than 260,000 people, a signal that not just the kingpins but also the mid-level criminals who frequently provide the cartels with weapons and vehicles are getting swept up in the crackdown.

 

Last year, authorities in the western state of Michoacán arrested 53 foreigners accused of cartel links, including 23 Colombians and 22 Venezuelans—some former soldiers brought in to train cartel fighters. Harfuch said intentional homicides have dropped about 40 percent since 2024, falling from roughly 86 violent deaths a day to 51. But some outside observers are more skeptical.

 

Nathan P. Jones, an associate professor of security studies at Sam Houston State University, pointed out that more than 130,000 people in Mexico are officially considered missing, a number that may reflect a rise in kidnappings for ransom.

 

“Is the homicide rate really going down, or are the disappearances going up, because people are getting better at hiding the bodies?” Jones asked TMD.

 

Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged the statistics are contested but said the trend is real. Independent think tanks, like México Evalúa, estimate that the homicide reduction is smaller than the government claims, but still a substantial 22.2 percent. That would put the daily toll at about 67 deaths—roughly 19 fewer per day than before Sheinbaum took office.

 

While temporary agreements between law enforcement and cartel gangs have managed to reduce violence in particular regions, “nothing has ever held on the level of an entire country effectively,” Freeman told TMD. “I have to think that some of it is because of the strategy led by Omar García Harfuch.”

 

Harfuch, nicknamed “Batman” for his crime-fighting reputation, has applied technology and elite investigative units against criminal networks.

 

Some Mexico analysts think the Sheinbaum government’s strategy contains a flaw that will make it difficult to maintain any gains against the cartels: its focus on the drug war, motivated by the desire to appease the U.S.

 

“What has changed during this administration is the narrative,” driven by Trump’s desire to focus on the fentanyl trade, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, co-director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center at George Mason University, told TMD. “There is [a] lack of understanding in both countries, and especially in Washington, that we’re not dealing with these powerful organizations that produce fentanyl mainly,” Correa-Cabrera said. “We’re dealing with a very complex network.”

 

But the drug trade is hardly the only source of the cartels’ power, or the reason for Mexico’s endemic violence. Independent investigations and government reports have shown that Mexican criminal syndicates’ revenue streams are increasingly diversified—ranging from migrant smuggling to kidnapping and extortion to fuel theft from Pemex pipelines, and including thriving protection rackets in the tortilla and avocado industries. Among its various businesses, the Jalisco cartel traffics cocaine and methamphetamine as far as Australia, smuggles Chinese migrants into the United States, and runs illegal gold mining across South America.

 

Regional officials’ tolerance of cartel activity—and sometimes outright cooperation—is a key pillar of cartel strength, and a major problem for politicians who want to take on organized crime.

 

“In comparative terms, there is no other country in the history of mankind with the size of the criminal power that Mexico has,” Sergio Aguayo, a professor at El Colegio de México who studies national security and organized crime in Mexico, told TMD.

 

In 2023, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s public security secretary from 2006 to 2012—was convicted in a U.S. federal court of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, becoming the highest-ranking Mexican official ever tried in the United States. He joins a long list of senior figures—Cabinet ministers, generals, governors—accused of working for or with the cartels.

 

Late last month, U.S. Justice Department prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinaloa state and one of Sheinbaum’s most powerful allies, accusing him of acting with nine others to protect the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug smuggling in exchange for bribes and the intimidation of Rocha’s political rivals.

 

Sheinbaum has resisted U.S. requests for Rocha’s extradition. She declared that she would allow Rocha to be sent to the U.S. only if it provided “solid and irrefutable” evidence of crimes under Mexican law or if the Mexican Office of the Attorney General’s own investigation uncovered crimes. (Rocha has temporarily stepped down while the investigation proceeds and denies wrongdoing.)

 

But a single high-profile prosecution—even of a governor from her own party—is unlikely to deter other officials from cutting deals with the cartels. Among state leadership alone, five former governors have been imprisoned by the Mexican government for making deals with criminal groups, and two more have been extradited to the U.S. in the past 10 years. “Even those exemplary prosecutions haven’t been enough,” Freeman said.

 

Sheinbaum may prove unwilling or unable to dismantle Mexico’s entrenched corruption, capping how far crime can fall. Mexico’s homicide clearance rate is around 10 percent, and corruption prosecutions of mid- and senior-level officials are rare. Those incentives—for the cartels and for the officials they pay—are what continue to drive the country’s rates of murder, kidnapping, and extortion.

 

Aguayo noted that many of the places in Mexico that have been able to bring violence under control are cities where leaders focus on coordinating multiple levels of government and society to fight criminal groups. When Sheinbaum was mayor of Mexico City, she and Harfuch developed a strategy to improve intelligence and target specific criminal networks, which helped bring homicides there down by roughly half from 2019 to 2023. “When you combine all those elements, then you can achieve some serious advances,” Aguayo said.

 

America’s impact is also not entirely positive. Mexican officials estimate up to 500,000 firearms are smuggled south each year. Sheinbaum’s government reports that 70 percent of weapons seized from organized crime originate in the United States. Last year, the Mexican government sued American gunmakers for fueling an “iron river” of arms, but the Supreme Court unanimously rejected it in June. Cartels now field IEDs, attack drones, and armor-piercing rounds.

 

But so far, it appears that Sheinbaum’s strategy—and desire—for confronting the cartels has clear limits.

 

Mexico’s murder rate is still far higher than it was in 2006, when the Mexican military first intervened against the cartels, Jones noted: “When it comes to Mexico, always bet on the status quo, even when it’s a negative equilibrium.”

Mexico’s Bold Strike Against Drug Cartels

By Gil Guerra

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

 

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, popularly known as “El Mencho” and the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was killed in an operation on Sunday conducted by Mexican security forces. Following the 2016 arrest and eventual extradition to the U.S. of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, El Mencho was the most wanted drug trafficker still operating freely in Mexico, with a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head. His death is being hailed in Washington and Mexico City as a landmark victory in the war against drug cartels.

 

While leaders in both countries have reason to celebrate, they also have reasons to fret. In addition to an ongoing wave of violence and disruption unleashed by CJNG in retaliation for El Mencho’s death, the two pillars of Mexico’s cartel duopoly—CJNG and the rival Sinaloa Cartel—are simultaneously leaderless for the first time in the modern drug war, with no clear historical model for what comes next.

 

Who was El Mencho?

 

Born in 1966 in the avocado country of Michoacán state’s Tierra Caliente, Oseguera dropped out of school after the fifth grade and illegally migrated to California in his teens. His first known brush with the law came in 1986, when he was arrested for possession of stolen property. After being deported from the U.S. following roughly three years in prison for other criminal charges, he took the unusual step of enrolling as a municipal police officer in rural Jalisco state. A TV Azteca assessment later concluded that he was endeavoring to learn the vulnerabilities of Mexican law enforcement from the inside out, knowledge that played a role in his remarkable success in evading capture once he returned to a life of crime.

 

Oseguera married into the González Valencia family, whose 15 siblings had been involved in marijuana and opium trafficking since the 1970s, and built CJNG into one of the most operationally versatile cartels Mexico had seen. The CJNG is known for combining organizational structuring with unfathomable barbarity: A raid on a crematorium in Teuchitlán in March 2025 uncovered a CJNG operation that lured recruits with job ads offering $200 to $600 a week and then put them through 30 days of combat and dismemberment training in a room called “La Carnicería,” or “the Butcher Shop.” Only 30 of 200 recruits are reported to have survived.

 

El Mencho was a central but shadowy presence in the CJNG. Every publicly circulated photograph of him was decades old, and he avoided cultivating the popular legend status of some other cartel figures glorified in narcocorridos, ballads about the exploits of drug smugglers. In past years, rivals scrawled messages claiming he had died of kidney failure; one faction split from CJNG in 2022 on the premise that he was already dead. By the time El Mencho died at the hands of Mexico’s armed forces, CJNG operated across 40 countries and nearly every U.S. state, and through roughly 90 sub-organizations.

 

Tracking a kingpin.

 

Four armed helicopters and two twin-engine planes descended on a ranch near Tapalpa at approximately 7:20 a.m. Sunday, where evidence of El Mencho’s presence had steadily grown recently. U.S. agencies had tracked medical equipment shipments to treat his chronic kidney failure into the Jalisco mountains; the presence of one of his girlfriends helped confirm his safehouse’s exact location.

 

The Mexican army engaged El Mencho’s guards in a firefight that lasted approximately three hours, leaving seven CJNG members, including the kingpin, dead. Two CJNG operatives were arrested, including Audias “El Jardinero” Flores-Silva, the cartel’s most powerful non-family operational leader, who oversaw methamphetamine production, cocaine transport, and weapons procurement. He carried a $5 million bounty from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and was considered a candidate to succeed El Mencho.

 

The army’s account of the operation warrants some scrutiny. Mexican and U.S. security sources have told journalists the decision that Mencho not be taken alive was made beforehand, but one of the biggest questions after El Mencho’s death is why Mexico’s government preferred a dead cartel leader to one who might talk.

 

Charitably, it would be reasonable to assume that the Mexican government determined that keeping him alive would risk a potential CJNG rescue operation or extended reprisals as a way of pressuring the government to release him. In 2020, the Mexican government released El Chapo’s son after determining that the price of keeping him in custody was too high, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum may have been hoping to avoid a similarly embarrassing incident.

 

Viewed more skeptically, the decision could be seen as an attempt to keep El Mencho from revealing dealings and connections between the CJNG and members of Sheinbaum’s political party, Morena.

 

Personal reasons may have also come into play. Omar García Harfuch, the security secretary who oversaw the operation, had reasons to prefer finality: In 2020, CJNG deployed 25 to 28 gunmen to assassinate him on a Mexico City boulevard with .50-caliber Barretts and fragmentation grenades, firing over 400 rounds and wounding him three times. In a show of defiance, García Harfuch tweeted from the hospital. Six years later he got the opportunity to return the favor, with more successful results.

 

Why did Mexico act now?

 

The El Mencho operation was almost certainly the product of a ratcheting pressure campaign from the U.S., which has been intensifying pressure on Mexico to take more aggressive action against cartel figures.

 

The opening salvo came on the first day of the second Trump administration. Executive Order 14157 designated cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

 

These steps were accompanied by a broad institutional reorientation toward fighting drug cartels. The FBI established a Counter Cartel Coordination Center (C4) to integrate its Criminal Investigation and Counterterrorism divisions, while its approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces took on cartel-related responsibilities alongside their traditional caseload. FISA Section 702 surveillance, which Congress had already expanded to cover counternarcotics in April 2024, became fully applicable to designated cartel networks, meaning any information connected to the designated groups qualified as “foreign intelligence,” even beyond their narcotics activities. The National Counterterrorism Center also pivoted, adding more than 35,000 cartel-linked identities to the classified terrorist database and standing up a new Interagency Fusion Cell to feed intelligence directly to law enforcement in the field.

 

On February 1, President Trump signed 25 percent tariffs on most Mexican imports. A phone call between Trump and Sheinbaum resulted in a one-month delay on the tariffs and Mexico’s first security concession, in the form of sending 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to the border. Later that month, Mexican officials transferred 29 cartel figures facing charges in Mexico to U.S. custody in a single day.

 

The dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over the administration’s desire for action and Mexican concerns over sovereignty reached a peak in early May when Sheinbaum confirmed that Trump had offered to have the U.S. military “take a leading role” in fighting cartels on Mexican soil. She publicly responded by saying, “Sovereignty cannot be sold,” and Trump shot back, telling reporters Sheinbaum was “so afraid of the cartels she can’t walk.”

 

Sheinbaum’s defiance masked continued concessions. In August, days after the New York Times reported that Trump had secretly signed a Pentagon directive authorizing the use of military force against cartels, Mexico transferred another 26 people to U.S. custody, including Abigael González Valencia, CJNG’s financial architect and El Mencho’s brother-in-law.

 

The most recent inflection point came on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces entered Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, who was then arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom on drug charges. Buoyed by the successful capture of Maduro, Trump began raising the matter of American troop deployments in calls with Sheinbaum. Trump’s desire for unilateral American military action in Mexico grew even clearer—in an interview on Fox News five days later, he warned that “we’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by water, and we are going to start now hitting land.”

 

On January 15, the Pentagon launched the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel in Tucson, Arizona, under Northern Command. The task force fused military intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the DEA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a single targeting operation modeled on the network-mapping methodology used against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Five days later, Mexico delivered a third mass transfer of 37 suspects, for a cumulative total of 92. On February 15, 19 members of SEAL Team 2 arrived at a Mexican naval facility in Campeche to help train Mexican counter-drug forces.

 

One week later, El Mencho was dead.

 

What does this mean for the cartels?

 

For most of the last decade and a half, Mexico’s drug trade has been dominated by a duopoly. In addition to El Mencho’s CJNG, Mexico’s cartel landscape has also been heavily influenced by the older and more established Sinaloa Cartel, which was built by figures like El Chapo Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

 

Between them, the two organizations controlled the vast majority of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine entering the United States. Their competition was brutal, but the duopoly formed two poles around which alliances, disputes, and territorial arrangements organized themselves.

 

That structure has been shaken by recent law enforcement action targeting the leadership of both cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was hit first—in July 2024, El Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán López lured Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to a meeting before incapacitating him and flying them both to U.S. custody in New Mexico on a private plane. This triggered a destructive internal war, pitting two Sinaloa Cartel factions against each other and leaving almost 2,000 dead and another 2,000 missing. U.S. courts gave El Mayo life without parole and hit him with $15 billion in forfeiture, one of the largest in DOJ history. As a result of El Mayo’s capture and the internal fighting, the Sinaloa Cartel is thought to have lost 30 of its 42 trafficking routes.

 

Only a few weeks before the Tapalpa raid, García Harfuch told reporters: “For many years, Mexico and the United States targeted only one drug trafficker. And what changed? Nothing.”

 

Every prior cartel disruption in modern Mexican history occurred with at least one top-tier organization intact, providing a grim but real anchor of stability. With El Mencho dead, that condition may no longer hold. CJNG’s own succession crisis is acute, but the picture is more complicated than a pending collapse. The retaliation waged by cartel members itself should give pause to anyone predicting a rapid disintegration or fragmentation: Road blockades from the U.S. border to Puebla and Oaxaca, coordinated across at least 15 states within hours, suggest a high degree of centralization and unit loyalty.

 

What comes next?

 

In the best-case scenario, the Mexican government will be able to leverage the unprecedented assistance and focus from the U.S. and permanently shatter the power structures of Mexico’s two largest cartels. In the worst-case scenario, the process of trying to accomplish this may result in a CJNG that is fragmented but not crushed, triggering a new wave of mass violence in Mexico as internal CJNG factions vie for control over the organization and dozens of regional criminal groups consolidate and fight among themselves in an attempt to capitalize on the weakness of the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel. The violence that comes from this fighting will be less viral than the initial CJNG retaliation—and harder to stop.

 

This summer’s World Cup will be the first major test of whether Mexico is capable of imposing a monopoly on violence within its borders. Estadio Akron, located in the same Zapopan municipality where cartel forces killed six National Guard troops on Sunday, is scheduled to host four group-stage matches this summer, including Mexico vs. South Korea on June 18. Soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, will undoubtedly be concerned about whether Jalisco remains a viable location for these matches, and the organization holds unilateral authority to relocate games at its discretion.

 

Before Sunday, CJNG’s monopoly in Jalisco actually simplified things for Mexican security planners, giving them one actor to deal with who was theoretically capable of enforcing a truce and who had economic incentives to keep Jalisco calm during the tournament. That logic died with El Mencho. Instead of needing to negotiate only with the CJNG, Mexican authorities may now face a dozen splinter groups, none of which has an incentive to keep the peace and several of which could be actively fighting each other for control.

 

For the United States, El Mencho’s death is a short-term political gift to the administration. President Trump enters Tuesday’s State of the Union address with a 39 percent approval rating, stinging from a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown and a Supreme Court ruling that struck down one of his key tariff authorities. The death of El Mencho represents a win for Trump, and he will likely tout it alongside Mexico’s 92 extraditions, the maritime strikes off Venezuela, and declining fentanyl-related deaths.

 

Whether the discipline visible in Sunday’s CJNG retaliation translates into a coherent succession or the spectacular end of a chapter in Mexico’s long drug wars remains an open question. Given their competing domestic priorities, Sheinbaum and Trump may be hoping for different answers.

The Forgotten War No Longer

By Michael Baumgartner

Saturday, October 04, 2025

 

When Americans walk the National Mall, they see monuments to the great struggles that shaped our nation. World War II, Korea, Vietnam — each has a fitting place in our capital’s national memory. Yet the war that made the United States a continental power, the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848, is conspicuously absent. There is no national memorial in Washington to honor the 13,000 Americans who died and the more than 100,000 who served in that conflict, or the immense national transformation that flowed from their sacrifice.

 

This is a startling omission. The Mexican War was the third-most-important territorial war in American history, behind only the Revolution and the Civil War. It expanded U.S. territory by nearly 25 percent, including the territory that became the State of California. It resolved the Texas question, established a durable border with Mexico that was defined by treaty, and propelled America into the Pacific world with deep-water ports and new trade routes. Within months of peace, the 1848 Gold Rush began, drawing global migration to San Francisco and fueling the rise of America’s industrial might. Without the Mexican War, there would be no continental republic, no Pacific gateway, and no secure foundation for the United States’ emergence as a world power.

 

Even those who had opposed the war came to carry forward its legacy. Abraham Lincoln, as a young Whig congressman, criticized President James K. Polk’s conduct of the conflict. Yet as president, Lincoln relentlessly pressed the expansion made possible by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — supporting the transcontinental railroad and telegraph, agricultural expansion, the land-grant university system, and homesteading policies that knitted together the nation’s new lands.

 

The war represents both a geopolitical hinge point and a continuity of American purpose: to complete the continental project and unleash the full power of a republic that spanned from shore to shore.

 

But the case for a memorial goes beyond territory and economics. The Mexican War also left profound institutional and moral legacies that shaped America’s character and deserve remembrance.

 

·        It was the Army’s proving ground: Nearly every major commander of the Civil War learned the trade of war in Mexico. Grant and McClellan fought as junior officers, gaining the field experience that later preserved the Union.

 

·        It taught us hard lessons in insurgency and occupation: U.S. forces quickly achieved battlefield dominance but then faced a stubborn guerrilla resistance. It was here that General Winfield Scott issued his famed General Orders on martial law — prohibiting pillage, protecting civilians, and establishing military commissions. These orders balanced firmness with restraint and became a direct forerunner of the Lieber Code and the international Geneva Conventions. They showed that America could temper victory with law, a principle that endures in our armed forces today.

 

·        We learned the value of diplomatic doggedness: While Polk sought quick leverage for land concessions, politics in Mexico made early negotiations impossible. It fell to Nicholas Trist, the State Department’s envoy, to ignore a presidential recall and press on with talks. His defiance, explained in a 65-page memorandum, helped produce the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — a framework that secured peace, normalized relations, and established the U.S.–Mexico border we still observe, with only minor changes later after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Trist’s stubborn professionalism reminds us that diplomacy requires courage as well as patience.

 

In all these ways, the Mexican War left marks far deeper than most Americans realize. It is not simply a “war of expansion,” as critics called it, but a crucible in which the Army was professionalized, the law of war advanced, and American diplomacy proved resilient. We would not be the America we know today but for the Mexican War.

 

That is why, as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, Congress should act to close this gap in our national memory. A fitting vehicle is before us: H.R.5510, the United States–Mexican War Memorial Act of 2025 that would designate Arlington Memorial Bridge as the U.S.–Mexican War Memorial Bridge. Built in the 1930s as a symbol of North–South reunion after the Civil War, the bridge stretches across the Potomac as a literal and figurative link in our civic landscape. To co-designate it for the Mexican War would extend that metaphor: from east to west, from shore to shore, honoring the sacrifice that completed America’s continental destiny. It would connect hallowed ground — Arlington, the nation’s resting place for its fallen — to the National Mall of remembrance, affirming that those who died in Mexico stand alongside the honored dead of every other American war.

 

Every war that shaped the United States should be honored in our capital. The Mexican War gave us California, secured the Southwest, opened the Pacific, and forged the officers and institutions that preserved the Union. The war’s 13,000 American dead fought and died as bravely as those in any conflict, and their legacy is with us still. On the Semiquincentennial of our Republic, it is time to ensure that this “forgotten war” is forgotten no longer.

Mexico’s Corruption Problem Is America’s Problem

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, August 01, 2025

 

One of the recurring observations of this newsletter is that the U.S. media covers issues about the U.S.-Mexico border on a regular basis but pays much less attention to what is actually going on in Mexico. I suspect this is because the preferred narratives in most of the mainstream media are that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol are mean and scary, those coming across the border are sympathetic poor people who just want a better life, and those who want U.S. immigration laws enforced are deplorable xenophobes. Looking too closely at the Mexican government, and its policy choices, are an impediment to those narratives.

 

Minimizing U.S. news coverage of the Mexican government has not succeeded in making Americans think better of it. Many Americans believe that the officials running the country from the National Palace in Mexico City are corrupt and incompetent. A poll in August 2024 found that 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Mexico; two-thirds of U.S. adults said the Mexican government is doing a bad job dealing with “the large number of people seeking asylum at the border, including 48 percent who say it is doing a very bad job.”

 

In June 2024, Mexico elected a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a leftist. (That’s not a pejorative, it’s how the Associated Press labels her — a term it does not use for Bernie Sanders.) She is the protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “AMLO.”

 

In September, AMLO rammed through sweeping constitutional reforms before he left office effectively eliminating judicial independence by making all judges elected. In June, Mexico had those judicial elections, with 13 percent turnout. Sheinbaum called the election “a complete success.”

 

(Did you hear any American progressive objecting to these elections? I don’t ever want to hear another complaint about low turnout in American elections again.)

 

This morning, the New York Times ran a fairly in-depth article under the headline, “Corruption Scandal Puts Mexico’s President on Defense Against Trump” (remember, it’s not merely that the corruption scandal is bad in and of itself; it is bad because it is weakening Sheinbaum in her disputes with the Trump administration):

 

At the scandal’s center is the senator, Adán Augusto López Hernández, a former interior minister and governor of Tabasco State, and a close confidante of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Two men Mr. López appointed in Tabasco, a secretary of security and state police chief, are now wanted by the Mexican government and Interpol, facing charges of leading a criminal group involved in drug trafficking.

 

Actually, the Interpol red notice against Hernán Bermúdez Requena, the former Secretary of Security of Tabasco, says that he allegedly founded a criminal group. Hey, who says government officials never demonstrate initiative or want to get a better understanding of the business world?

 

Mr. López has not been accused of any crimes, and President Claudia Sheinbaum and her ruling party, Morena, have closed ranks behind him.

 

But the case strikes at the heart of one of Mr. Trump’s most sensitive accusations: that Mexico’s political elite is unwilling to purge itself of the corruption that has long provided the cartels cover and impunity. The Mexican government has denied those allegations.

 

In January 2024, ProPublica published a report that should have been a bombshell — the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had collected evidence that major cocaine traffickers had funneled some $2 million to AMLO’s first presidential campaign, in exchange for promises that AMLO would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations. In other words, the Mexican president had been in the pocket of the cartels the whole time.

 

(Keep that in mind when you read that in June 2024, President Joe Biden “thanked President López Obrador for the strong and constructive partnership they have built to enhance our bilateral economic cooperation, manage migration at our shared border, and advance regional security and prosperity.” All of this was after President Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, former Senator Ken Salazar, had demonstrated a “worrying pattern” of “contradict[ing] his own government’s policies in the interest of aligning himself with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”)

 

The Times continues:

 

The case may demonstrate a break between Ms. Sheinbaum and her mentor, Mr. López Obrador. During his six-year term, violence skyrocketed across Mexico and cartels expanded their territory as he pursued a “hugs not bullets” strategy, directing less government confrontation of criminal groups and more social spending.

 

As the Washington Post wrote back 2018, “‘Abrazos, no balazos’ — or ‘hugs, not gunfire’ was one of AMLO’s campaign slogans.”

 

A Mexican presidential candidate running on a slogan offering “hugs for drug cartels” sounds like something out of a Christopher Buckley novel.

 

In February, “Mexico recorded its worst score ever on Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and in so doing fell 14 spots to a ranking of 140 out of 180 nations surveyed.” All of that corruption makes Mexico look like a bad place to do business; in May, “Norway’s wealth fund, the world’s largest, has sold all its fixed income investments in Mexican state oil firm Pemex, it said on Sunday, citing what it called an unacceptable risk that the company is involved in corruption.”

 

Juan Pablo Spinetto, writing for Bloomberg:

 

At home, the economy is faltering. Formal job creation contracted for three consecutive months through June; investment is drying up as business confidence erodes. Growth is expected to be a meager 0.2% this year and 1.2% in 2026. Yes, the peso has been one of the winners of the dollar’s depreciation, but that has hurt the competitiveness of Mexican companies, including those in the key tourism industry. On the external front, the US is ramping up tariffs and sanctions, forcing Sheinbaum’s administration into defensive, crisis-management mode.

 

Sheinbaum’s attempts to blame the “neoliberal” governments between 1994-2018 for every failure that Mexico faces doesn’t resonate as it once did. Without obvious enemies and with control over most of the country’s institutions, the president still needs to achieve a balance between defending the record of her political boss and tackling the many problems he left, from an unsustainable fiscal situation and a collapsing Pemex to a decaying health system and grandiose statist projects that burn more and more money.

 

Blaming previous officeholders who left office in 2018? What year is this?

 

How you feel about Donald Trump denouncing corruption in Mexico does not change the level of corruption in Mexico, nor the consequences of that corruption. The Mexican government has serious, far-reaching problems with cartel-driven corruption, and U.S. policies must reflect and address that unpleasant fact.

 

Speaking of corruption . . .

 

Ukraine: Hey, Never Mind About Those Anti-Corruption Changes

 

Some good news out of Ukraine: The country’s parliament and President Volodymyr Zelensky approved new legislation that restores the independence of anti-corruption agencies.

 

When you write about Ukraine regularly and think we ought to help those folks fight off the Russian effort to conquer their country, there’s always some ninny in the comments or on social media who claims, without any proof, that you’re doing so because you’re getting paid by the Ukrainian government.

 

If the “let’s help Ukraine” contingent in the public discourse is all being secretly funded by the Ukrainian government, you would think these people would have tried to defend the Ukrainian government’s boneheaded decision to weaken the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. At minimum, they would have averted their eyes and tried to ignore the topic.

 

But in fact, we saw the opposite. As far as I can tell, not a single Western supporter of the Ukrainian cause publicly argued that the change was a good idea, and the Ukrainian government got ripped a new one all over the Western media world. (On various pro-Ukraine text chains and Signal chats I’m on, the response was entirely variations of, “What the hell are they thinking?”)

 

Besides Noah and myself, Zelensky and the parliament got told off by Max Boot of the Washington Post, Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, the editorial board of The Economist, the editorial board of the Financial Times, Owen Matthews of the Daily Telegraph, Svitlana Morenets of The Spectator, and I’m sure I’ve missed others.

 

You can agree with those folk, or disagree with them, but one thing that is clear is that they’re not reflexive cheerleaders of the Ukrainian government. We support Ukrainian independence and the Ukrainian people as a whole, and some days that aligns with supporting what the Ukrainian government is doing. But not every day.

 

ADDENDUM: Axios says, “Former President Biden’s top political aide Mike Donilon told congressional investigators Thursday that he was paid $4 million for his work on Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and would have made an additional $4 million if Biden had won, according to a person familiar with his testimony.”

 

For perspective, in 2024, Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught 100 passes, 1,130 yards, and six touchdowns, and was selected to play in the Pro Bowl. He made $3.2 million. And he gets tackled a lot by 200-some pound cornerbacks, safeties, and linebackers. Last year, Mike Donilon wasn’t even tackled once.

 

Now, when you have a financial incentive of $4 million for the president’s reelection, how likely are you to tell your boss, “Joe, I love you, but you’re getting too old for the job and it’s time to pass the baton to someone else”? Some would argue that Donilon had 4 million reasons to roll the dice on Biden’s reelection bid, no matter the consequences for his party or the country.

The Mexican Flag Is the Confederate Banner of the L.A. Riots

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

 

Do you want to make your national flag a symbol of lawlessness and defiance of federal authority?

 

Well, then, here’s a one-step plan: Prominently wave it at violent anti-ICE protests.

 

The foremost image of the L.A. riots so far is a masked motorcyclist holding a Mexican flag as he does donuts around a burning car with smoke billowing in the air and police cars in the background — Mad Max for haters of ICE.

 

We’re told that the Mexican flag “gives people a sense of pride,” and, sure, most people are proud of their country of origin and will display the flag of their homeland at their homes, during important national festivals, or at ethnic parades.

 

No one can object to seeing Mexican flags on Cinco de Mayo or Irish flags on St. Patrick’s Day.

 

That’s not the context here, though. This isn’t flying the Greek flag on Greek Day. It’s waving Bandera de México as a sign of opposition to U.S. laws being enforced by officials of the United States government.

 

Functionally, El Tricolor has taken on a measure of symbolism closer to that of the Confederate flag during secession than, say, the French flag on Bastille Day.

 

It is being waved not just during peaceful protests, but during shameful attacks on law-enforcement officers and public property.

 

The response of sensible Mexican Americans should be, “How dare you abuse the flag of our homeland for such a low and dastardly purpose.”

 

This is especially so when the people who are being arrested by ICE are nationals of another country. Waving a foreign flag in their behalf only emphasizes that they are foreigners who shouldn’t be living and working here in the first place.

 

The better play for protesters would be to brandish exclusively American flags to make their attachment to this country unmistakable and make the further point that, from their perspective, the targets of ICE raids represent fundamental American values such as devotion to family and hard work.

 

Instead, the foreign flags are, in effect, “otherizing” the illegal immigrants that the demonstrators seek to support.

 

The Mexican flags aren’t helping, but the best advice the protesters could get would be, more fundamentally, not to obstruct federal law enforcement in the first place or engage in mass lawlessness.

 

Since they aren’t inclined to take that advice and they consider legitimate acts of the United States government — in keeping with long-standing, duly enacted laws of our national government — to be out of bounds, maybe it really is best that they are waving something other than Old Glory.