By Berta Hernandez
San Francisco, California, February 22, 2026
Following sustained pressure from the Trump administration, President Claudia Sheinbaum authorized a high-profile military operation to capture Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the country’s most powerful cartel. The U.S. government provided the intelligence to locate and target him this February 22. This action occurs under Trump’s repeated threats of direct intervention in Mexico via drone strikes.
Trump’s hard-line approach is hypocritical: in December 2025, he pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. federal court for conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine. The contrast is blatant; while fentanyl causes greater devastation in the U.S. today, optics are Trump’s priority. The spectacular takedown of a Mexican capo delivers the public message he seeks regarding the opioid crisis.
Sunday dawned with the thunder of road blocks. In Tapalpa, Jalisco, the federal operation killed “El Mencho,” a central figure in the symbiosis between organized crime and the state’s repressive forces. The response was immediate: highways set ablaze, businesses in flames, and entire cities paralyzed across Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guanajuato.
While the smoke from the “narcobloqueos” stifles millions of workers, the PAN, PRI, and PRD back the President, lining up behind her precisely due to Trump’s pressure. They attempt to hide that, alongside Morena, they have been active collaborators in sustaining the model destroying the country. There is no real opposition in the administration of barbarism; there is a class consensus to maintain an order that suits the elites and satisfies Washington.
This crisis is not one of management, but the result of a system where the border between legality and crime has dissolved. We are not witnessing a “failed” State, but one that operates through the institutionalized exchange of kickbacks (prebendas). Military and police commanders administer territories and profit from allowing certain factions to operate; the cartels act as the paramilitary arm for the social repression and territorial control that official institutions cannot exercise formally.
This symbiosis reaches the economic heart. Drug money flows into the banking, real estate, and construction sectors, injecting liquidity into capital when formal markets stagnate. The State does not fight drug trafficking because it is a key piece of its economic backbone. In this machinery, all the employers’ parties—Morena, PAN, PRI, PRD, the Green Party, and the PT—are responsible and complicit.
From across the border, Imperialism feeds the fire. Operations like “Fast and Furious” proved that U.S. agencies flooded Mexico with weapons for their own strategic ends. Today, Trump uses the chaos to label cartels as “terrorists” and justify an invasion under the mask of “security,” seeking control of resources and Mexico’s submission to his drones and boots.
The only way out requires breaking the logic of war through the total legalization of drugs, a measure capable of destroying the mafias’ extraordinary profits and stripping Imperialism of its pretext for invasion. This implies transforming the military budget into free rehabilitation centers and scientific education that treats drug use as public health and not a crime.
Security will not come from colluding generals or the parties that manage the chaos. Worker and Popular Self-Defense is the only real guarantee against violence and state abuse. The exit from barbarism will only be built by a Workers’ Government that owes no favors to business owners or generals, expropriates mafia capital, and expels foreign intervention.
WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THE CARTELS?
To end the mafias, it is not enough to “cut off heads” that the system replaces in hours; their material base must be destroyed:
Expropriation of Mafia Wealth: Immediate seizure of assets, companies, and lands linked to crime and its political partners. These resources must be managed by Workers’ Councils for health, education, and housing.
Ending the Monopoly on Blood: Total legalization and state regulation to eliminate the profits that buy armies and loyalties.
Justice and Popular Self-Defense: Formation of Popular Tribunals and strengthening of Worker and Peasant Self-Defense groups. An organized people is the only barrier against hitmen and generals.
Internationalist Class Solidarity: Mobilization of international workers’ and human rights organizations to block arms shipments, denounce imperialist intervention, and demand the freedom of political prisoners. International labor unity will break the siege.
Hands off Mexico, Trump and Imperialism!
Total drug legalization to disarm the business of death!
Scientific education and health against prohibition and alienation!
For the independent organization of workers and popular self-defense!
For a Workers’ Government to break with the Narco-State and Capital!