Mexico's Hybrid Violence: Cartel Tactics, Tactical Evolution, and the Impact of the 2025 FTO Designations

From Criminal Organizations to Hybrid Violent Actors

By 2025, cartel violence in Mexico looks markedly different from the sporadic criminal brutality of previous decades. As government enforcement capacity has grown, major criminal groups have gradually transformed from purely profit-driven organizations into what analysts term 'hybrid violent actors.' These organizations have widely adopted tactics associated with foreign terrorist organizations — including improvised explosive devices (IEDs), drone warfare, political assassinations, disinformation campaigns, and coordinated urban disruption operations — adapting them to Mexico's terrain, institutional structures, and social context.

Violence is no longer merely a tool of drug trafficking; it is deployed as a coercive instrument to control territory, influence local governance, and reshape local order. U.S. policy has simultaneously undergone a significant shift. In February 2025, the U.S. State Department formally designated several Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) under Executive Order 14157. This designation represents a major escalation both symbolically and operationally — reframing cartel violence from organized crime to a national and transnational security threat.

The Definitional Debate: Terrorism and the Nature of Cartels

The definition of terrorism remains highly contested in academic and policy circles. Most definitions generally emphasize the use of violence or intimidation to generate fear, with targets that extend beyond immediate victims to pressure governments or civilian populations toward ideological, political, psychological, or social ends. This conceptual framework is particularly complex in the Mexican context: cartels are not ideologically driven organizations in the traditional sense, nor can they be simply equated with terrorist groups. Their core objectives are profit, market protection, territorial control, and organizational survival.

Scholar Correa-Cabrera provides important analytical insights. She emphasizes a fundamental distinction between terror as a tactic and terrorism as an organizational category. She argues that these organizations operate according to the internal logic of transnational corporations, treating organized crime as a 'transnational enterprise phenomenon' in which violence stems from commercial rather than revolutionary logic.

Scholar Jorge Ramírez further argues that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) should not be viewed merely as a drug cartel, but understood as an organization that 'produces' organized violence and transforms it into a profitable commodity — with violence becoming central to cartel power, competition, and survival.

Major Cartels Designated as FTOs in 2025

In February 2025, the U.S. State Department formally designated the following Mexican criminal organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations:

• Sinaloa Cartel
• Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG)
• Cárteles Unidos
• Cártel del Noreste (Northeast Cartel)
• Gulf Cartel
• La Nueva Familia Michoacana

In November of the same year, the Cártel de los Soles was separately designated. Among all listed groups, the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG remained the most consequential actors throughout the year due to their operational reach, tactical flexibility, and territorial influence.

Structural Foundations of Hybrid Violence: Corruption and Institutional Weakness

In Mexico, pervasive corruption, institutional weakness, and uneven state enforcement capacity have collectively created conditions in which criminal organizations can grow and consolidate, establishing criminal governance systems in specific regions. This pattern does not originate with any single government or political cycle; rather, it reflects deep structural continuities across different political eras — the U.S. conviction of former Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna stands as a defining case study of institutional penetration and state-criminal collusion.

Scholar Benjamin Lessing argues that organized crime does not rule purely through violence; it governs out of practical necessity — setting norms, resolving disputes, and substituting for core state functions, thereby establishing a form of utilitarian legitimacy among populations for whom survival is the primary concern. Louise Shelley's analytical framework further reveals that corruption is not merely a consequence of organized crime, but the key mechanism that enables criminal actors to operate, grow, and embed themselves within state institutions.

From this perspective, framing cartels primarily as terrorist threats risks misdiagnosing the underlying problem. The core issue lies not only in the violence they inflict upon the state, but in the degree to which state institutions have been penetrated, reshaped, and in some areas effectively replaced by forms of criminal governance.

Drone Tactics: A New Dimension of Cartel Violence

By 2025, cartel violence has advanced well beyond existing analytical frameworks as the state intensifies its crackdown. Criminal groups increasingly operate as hybrid actors, continuously refining their tactics and adopting methods similar to those of foreign terrorist organizations — with drone warfare standing out as a particularly notable development.

Cartel use of drones has evolved from purely reconnaissance functions to offensive applications, including explosive-laden drone strikes against rival factions, security forces, and civilian targets. This tactical adoption reflects not only criminal organizations' rapid adaptation to emerging technologies, but also further blurs the boundaries between organized crime, insurgent operations, and terrorism.

Practical Effects of FTO Designation: Adaptive Reorganization Rather Than Effective Containment

The central argument of this analysis is that the primary effect of FTO designation has not been containment, but rather adaptive reorganization: organizational fragmentation, deepening reliance on proxies, and the proliferation of insurgent-style tactics that further blur the line between organized crime and internal security threats.

Scholar Cengiz identifies the convergence of organized crime and terrorist networks as one of the most significant current security trends — with criminal groups adopting coercive tactics associated with terrorism, while terrorist organizations increasingly rely on criminal financing. This convergence does not erase distinctions between the two, but it generates hybrid forms of violence that challenge conventional analytical approaches.

Researchers Garay-Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán note that these organizations are composed of nodes performing specific functions, with individual nodes not necessarily aware of or directly dependent on other nodes within the same network. This cellular, decentralized structure provides critical operational advantages: resilience, adaptability, deniability, and the capacity to maintain interdependent networks rather than relying solely on rigid hierarchies.

Conclusion: An Analytical Framework for Hybrid Violence

Taken together, these dynamics point toward a new paradigm for understanding hybrid criminal non-state actors. Modern drug trafficking organizations are no longer traditional criminal enterprises; they are decentralized, multidimensional entities that pursue economic objectives while deploying political coercion, territorial control, and systematically scalable violence as tools of profit and influence.

Embedded within larger illicit governance ecosystems, these hybrid actors operate at the intersection of organized crime, paramilitary force, proxy governance, and state capture — challenging national sovereignty, eroding public institutions, and threatening regional stability across borders.

These tensions should not be read as analytical contradictions, but as evidence of the hybrid nature of cartel violence: profit-driven organizations increasingly adopting coercive tactics that blur the lines between crime, insurgency, and terrorism, without fully belonging to any single category. Understanding this hybridity is a prerequisite for developing effective policy responses.

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