Thousand of trucks heading for Texas thunder down the highway each day towards Nuevo Laredo, the busiest crossing point for freight on the Mexico-US border.
Top business leaders visited on Thursday to inaugurate a $100mn international rail freight bridge over the Rio Grande, described by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as a symbol of North American integration. But three days earlier, Nuevo Laredo hit the news for a different reason.
Masked gunmen sprayed bullets from heavy automatic weapons as they fought the Mexican army on a bridge into the city. Municipal authorities told residents to stay home to dodge the gun battles, which erupted after security forces arrested a man they said was the second-in-command of the Cártel del Noreste drug-trafficking gang.
Nuevo Laredo’s two faces — a bustling border trade hub and a bullet-strewn drug battleground — bring together the issues on which US President Donald Trump has taken Mexico to task, and the struggle Sheinbaum faces in trying to placate him.
About 3mn trucks a year transit Nuevo Laredo, but the city has become so dangerous that executives from the nearby business hub of Monterrey avoid it at all costs. “I never go there because of the security situation,” said one wealthy financier. “I have a home in San Antonio, Texas [two and a half hours north of Laredo by car] but I always fly, rather than drive.”
As part of a hastily agreed deal to avert Trump’s threat of tariffs of 25 per cent on all Mexican imports to the US — a move that spelled disaster for Mexico’s export-oriented economy — Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 extra National Guard troops to the border to stem illegal exports of the highly potent opioid fentanyl. This was a top priority for Trump.
But with about 20,000 trucks and 208,000 cars crossing the border every day, few experts believe a few thousand extra troops will make much difference along a 2,000-mile frontier as they hunt for a drug so concentrated that a year’s illegal US supply would fit into a few pick-ups.
“The Mexican government was at first very accommodating with crime . . . and it was a kind of snowball that grew bigger, and when they wanted to combat it they realised it was a much bigger monster than they thought,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security expert. “They haven’t had and don’t have the capacity to defeat this enemy.”
Especially awkward for Sheinbaum was a White House executive order last Saturday accusing the Mexican government of an “intolerable alliance” with drug cartels.
While many Mexicans privately believe that administrations going back decades may have had such links, no US government has ever made such a wounding assertion in public, and Sheinbaum issued an indignant rejection of what she called a “White House slander”.
The leftwing Mexican leader now faces a big challenge to convince Trump she is delivering results quickly.
Her government inherited a dire security situation from her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose “hugs, not bullets” policy of appeasing the cartels led to an increase in violence. US Northern Command has estimated that drug cartels control between 30 and 35 per cent of Mexico’s territory.
The cartels have mushroomed over decades, with the biggest mutating into transnational organised crime syndicates competing to make and smuggle drugs, extort businesses and traffic migrants.
Last year, seven of the world’s top 10 cities by murder rate were in Mexico. The “narcos” set off car bombs, post torture videos online and hang their enemies’ bodies from bridges. Mexicans routinely cite security as their top concern in polls.
Trump is focused on the Mexican traffickers’ role in supplying fentanyl, which has become a leading cause of death among young people in the US.
“Synthetic drugs are too easy to transport due to their highly concentrated nature,” said Duncan Wood, president of the Pacific Council on International Policy. “You could stop 90 per cent of the fentanyl coming out of labs and still have a major public health problem.”
Sheinbaum has taken a more aggressive approach since her inauguration in October last year. She has increased seizures of drugs, including the largest-ever haul of fentanyl, and mounted more military operations against cartels. But her strategy has yet to calm the most violent hotspots, while budget cuts have taken a toll on operations; security is fragmented between the military and the local police.
Speculation is rife in Mexico that Trump may have extracted other, as-yet-undisclosed commitments from Sheinbaum as part of their deal, which also covered moves to cut illegal migration across the US border — a straightforward task for Mexico, compared with tackling the cartels.
The US-Mexican deal might include permission for the US military and anti-drug agents to operate more freely, said people following the discussions. The Mexican government has not commented.
“It’s an opportunity for a reset,” said Ray Donovan, former chief of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration, referring to the US-Mexico security relationship. “The hope is that Mexico . . . would want to collaborate all across the board. That would make a lot of sense for both nations.”
A US military reconnaissance aircraft flew around the coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula in international airspace early this week, plane spotters reported. One Monterrey business executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, called this “a clear message to the Sinaloa cartel [the country’s largest drug-trafficking group] from the Americans”.
Further turning up the heat, Trump has signed an executive order to start designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorists, a move that could unleash economic sanctions and open the way for military action. In a memo on Thursday, the Justice Department ordered the “total elimination” of the groups.
Trump and other Republicans have suggested a range of armed interventions in Mexico, from drone strikes on drug laboratories to special forces operations.
Asked this week whether he could “go after” drug cartels in Mexico, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News: “All options are on the table.”
A December opinion poll by Parametria showed most Mexicans would support some degree of US involvement against drug trafficking, including sending in drones and funding, equipment and training to Mexican security forces — but not sending in US agents.
Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, researcher at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, said Americans would not have carte blanche. “The Mexican government has shown that it is willing to have these conversations, and it wants to address these issues, but it also has red lines.”
The most sensitive issue is the allegation of links between organised crime and Mexican authorities, with local media asking whether Trump has seen specific intelligence to back up his claim.
That is fuelled by the kidnapping and rendition to the US of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in June, after he was betrayed by a former business partner. Zambada was for decades the prime political dealmaker of the Sinaloa cartel.
Guerrero said: “He had become the great patriarch of Mexican organised crime, and was a man with a lot of information that he is surely giving up.”
Cartography by Cleve Jones
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