The aggressive campaign Mexico has sustained against organized crime for the past two decades has many of the characteristics of irregular warfare. While criminal organizations have ebbed and flowed across different political administrations and security strategies, they remain strongly in control of significant parts of the country perpetuating violence. From the militarized approach of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) to the “hugs, no bullets” one of Andres Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), no presidential administration has succeeded in curtailing their influence or significantly reducing the epidemic of violence. Instead, criminal organizations have become more powerful by diversifying their portfolio of activities and expanded their territorial control and influence. This context has made Mexico one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, alongside countries engaged in formally declared wars or major armed conflicts, such as Israel, Sudan and Ukraine.
Mexico needs to explore novel approaches in how it deals with criminal organizations of the caliber of Sinaloa or Jalisco New Generation cartels. While capturing or killing major cartel leaders has weakened groups and temporarily thwarted consolidation, this approach has been unable to alter the ingrained influence of cartels. The removal of leaders often leads to fragmentation, intensifying territorial competition and generating new cycles of violence. More importantly, no amount of leadership decapitation is fast enough to neutralize the networks that constitute the lifeblood of criminal organizations. As long as the relationships connecting criminal organizations to communities, businesses, political actors, local institutions, and international actors remain intact, criminal organizations will regenerate faster than the state can dismantle them.
A comprehensive threat network engagement approach offers a path to more effectively address Mexico’s security crisis because it moves beyond disrupting adversarial networks and places greater importance on engaging friendly and neutral networks. This shift is necessary because criminal organizations are embedded in social, economic, and political networks that sustain them through recruitment, protection, information, and resources. While leadership decapitation can weaken and temporarily disrupt criminal organizations, it cannot significantly alter the operating environment. If Mexico’s government engages friendly and neutral networks, it may be able to create synergy with allies and benefit from the activities of actors whose work directly or indirectly contributes to combating organized crime.
From Organized Crime to Governance Competition
Mexico’s security crisis is a manifestation of organized crime as irregular warfare and an advanced case of criminal governance competition. The competition for territory, population loyalty, governance legitimacy, and networks connecting communities and economies has been central to their resilience and structural continuity. While the silent expansion of criminal organizations in Mexico has been less prominent than the terrorist or insurgent activities elsewhere, it has nonetheless produced major political effects, ranging from institutional erosion to the effective control of large parts of Mexican territory. Yet armed actors have succeeded not only through coercion, but also by embedding themselves in social, economic, and political networks that allow them to shape local power dynamics.
The conceptualization of Mexico’s security crisis as irregular warfare reflects the transformation of criminal organizations into formidable adversaries. Over the last two decades, these groups have increased their control of territory, strengthened their ability to collect rents, and expanded their influence over local economies. This evolution has allowed them to exploit legitimate economic structures for logistics and money laundering. At the same time, they have influenced the social milieus in which Mexico’s children and youth grow. Joining the ranks of organized crime has become more attractive for some members of the very communities the government claims to protect, a dynamic unfolding alongside growing levels of forced recruitment.
While Mexico and the United States have recently taken a stronger position at disrupting the political protection networks that sustain these criminal organizations, the approach remains limited from a comprehensive threat network engagement perspective. Since assuming office in 2024, President Claudia Sheinbaum has targeted local politicians as part of a broader effort to disrupt adversarial networks. Although this strategy remains in its early stages, its reach and potential impact have expanded under U.S. pressure. Recently, the U.S. Justice Department accused the governor of Sinaloa and other officials of helping the Sinaloa cartel in trafficking fentanyl and other drugs in exchange of bribes and electoral support. Similar actions targeting sitting high-ranking officials have been set in motion under the logic that weakening political protection networks can dismantle the broader ecosystem that facilitates criminal activities through the disruption of corruption channels and the undermining of criminal influence over territory.
The Civil Terrain of Mexico’s Network War
If criminal organizations derive resilience from the broader network ecosystem in which they are embedded, then countering them requires more than disrupting adversarial networks. It also requires strengthening the networks that can reinforce state authority and legitimacy. The next phase to successfully counter threat networks in Mexico requires mapping the civil terrain in which criminal organizations operate to systematically understand the social, economic, political, and informational environments that sustain them. The current adversarial and criminal-actor focused approach must be complemented by a strategy for identifying the friendly networks with which federal and local governments can partner, as well as the neutral networks they can mobilize or, at a minimum, protect. Italy’s asset confiscation and social reuse model offers one example of this logic: by redirecting assets seized from mafia networks toward the work of more than 1,000 civil organizations, the state not only weakens adversarial networks but also converts their former resources into instruments of civil society empowerment and local resilience.
Engaging friendly and neutral networks has the potential of eroding criminal power via the weakening of the conditions that allow criminal organizations to operate with impunity. Friendly networks can provide local knowledge, identify patterns of violence, expose clandestine forms of territorial control, and strengthen the legitimacy of state action when treated as partners rather than as political liabilities. Neutral networks can preserve the flow of information, economic activity, and public services in areas where criminal organizations seek to impose silence, dependence, and fear. Together, these networks can reduce the informational advantage, social control, and operational freedom of criminal organizations, making it harder for them to regenerate after the state disrupts their adversarial nodes.
The starting point should be friendly networks or those elements of society already engaged in activities from which the government could benefit through partnership. One of the most striking examples of a friendly network that has been not leveraged is the movement of madres buscadoras, mothers searching for the disappeared. More than 130,000 people are officially registered as missing in the country, most since 2006. In response, families have organized more than 230 collectives that conduct forensic searches, map clandestine graves, and maintain detailed databases documenting disappearance patterns.
The main challenge in activating a friendly network of this type is to remove the antagonistic lens through which the government often views them. Rather than being treated as partners and valued for their local knowledge, community legitimacy, and extraordinary persistence while performing a dangerous job the state itself should be doing, these groups are frequently perceived as exposing the incompetence, corruption or collusion of local, subnational and federal authorities. In addition to remaining largely disconnected from formal security strategies, they have become frequent targets for organized crime. The state has yet to develop mechanisms to systematically integrate the intelligence these groups generate, protect them as strategic assets, or leverage their networks to strengthen state legitimacy in contested areas.
The absence of a holistic approach to countering criminal networks can also be seen in the way the Mexican government approaches neutral networks such as journalists. Practicing journalism independently and without fear of reprisal has become increasingly difficult. Criminal organizations have achieved significant control of territories and the information domain because independent reporting has effectively disappeared from entire regions. The absence of an independent press at the local and subnational level has created information blackholes that allow criminal networks to operate with minimal scrutiny and accountability.
The consequences of failing to engage friendly and neutral networks extend far beyond journalists and victim’s collectives. Local businesses face systematic extortion while teachers, healthcare workers, and civil society organizations must navigate constant threats. Neglecting these actors means losing valuable sources of information and locally-grounded ideas on how to counter the roots of criminal power. This amounts to lacking basic knowledge of which local actors support, oppose, or could be persuaded to support state authority. More importantly, it limits the state's ability to identify emerging criminal groups before they consolidate power. The objective is not to convert neutral networks into instruments of the state, but to protect their ability to operate independently in environments where criminal organizations benefit from silence, fear, and institutional absence. If Mexico is to transition toward a full-spectrum network engagement approach, it must build the institutional infrastructure necessary to understand, engage, and leverage these networks.
A Whole-of-Society Network Strategy
A whole-of-society strategy is the logical extension of a comprehensive threat network engagement approach. If criminal organizations derive power from networks spanning government, society, and the economy, then the response must mobilize actors across those same domains. If Mexico is to change the trajectory of the conflict, it must move beyond disruption alone and begin shaping the broader network ecosystem in which criminal organizations operate. The transition to a more than an adversarial-oriented network engagement approach to one that puts attention to friendly and neutral networks could be the first step into getting Mexico operate within a whole-of-society approach to security. Under this scheme, government institutions at federal, subnational and local levels, as well as civil society, the private sector, and local communities, become active participants in strengthening the networks that sustain lawful governance.
A whole-of-society network engagement strategy would continue disrupting adversarial networks while institutionalizing partnership with friendly networks and protecting the neutral networks whose independence can limit criminal governance. Civil society organizations, victims’ collectives, community groups, universities, and professional associations are a starting point because they possess legitimacy and local knowledge needed to strengthen state presence where credible mechanisms for cooperation exist. This strategy, however, requires the buy-in of the Mexican government, which has often harassed or financially choked organizations perceived of exhibiting the corruption of Mexico’s government. It also must account for a political environment in which external support can expose civil society actors to accusations of foreign interference. For this reason, U.S. involvement may be most useful in continuing to disrupt political-protection networks and financial channels through indictments, sanctions, or other measures that increase the reputational, legal, and financial costs of participating in adversarial networks. Engagement with friendly and neutral networks, by contrast, should remain primarily Mexican-led, while the United States supports them indirectly by increasing their visibility, protection, and technical capacity. This could include U.S.-based awards for Mexican journalists who generate independent information and expose corruption networks, public recognition of silent heroes such as the madres buscadoras, and grants or fellowships for investigative journalists, digital forensics specialists, and civic actors whose work can help transform local knowledge into actionable intelligence.
Yet the main barrier to engaging friendly and neutral networks is the impunity that protects the very actors they could expose. As the madres buscadoras movement has put it, “the state does not search because, if it searches, it would find itself.” In a country where roughly nine out of ten crimes are never reported and fewer than seven percent of total crimes result in an investigation file, this creates an operational environment of impunity for criminals and their protectors. This is the reason the current U.S. emphasis on Mexico’s political protection networks represents an opportunity to create the conditions that could lead to a whole-of-society approach that moves Mexico closer to a comprehensive strategy for addressing its security crisis.
Mexico is confronting a form of criminal power unprecedented in scale and sophistication, and responding effectively will require a strategy that is equally networked. As long as the state continues to focus primarily on disrupting adversarial networks, it will remain trapped in a cycle of adaptation and regeneration. Consequently, the long-term solution to Mexico’s security crisis depends on reshaping the network environment through which authority, information, and economic activity flow. It requires building civil intelligence capacity to understand the environment, partnering with friendly networks that strengthen state legitimacy, and protecting neutral networks whose independence limits criminal governance. Until Mexico adopts a whole-of-society approach that systematically engages adversarial, neutral and friendly networks, it is unlikely to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the conflict. Until then, Mexico will continue fighting a network war without a network strategy.
Javier Rojas is an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security at Rabdan Academy in Abu Dhabi, where he teaches intelligence analysis and transnational organized crime. He previously served as Director of Risk Analysis at Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior and as Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the President of Mexico. His academic research focuses on intelligence analysis and intelligence history, with work published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and Israel Affairs; his policy research examines organized crime, irregular warfare, U.S. security policy, and U.S.–Mexico relations.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, Department of the Army, Department of War, or the United States Government.
Main image is a mural of one of the pioneers of madres buscadoras taken from Wikimedia Commons.
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