As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy faces a critical test. Mega-events no longer function solely as platforms for projecting democratic values; they increasingly expose the gap between international rhetoric and domestic governance. The tensions between the internationalism of global sport and hardline migration and border-control policies—particularly in the U.S. context—show that debates around boycotts are not causes but symptoms of deeper governance failures. There are reputational and democratic risks at stake, but action can restore credibility to democratic sports diplomacy.
In a former contribution published in 2024, The US and EU Can Build a More Democratic World with Sports Diplomacy, I argued that sport could serve as a strategic vector for democratic cooperation and international leadership. At the time, sports diplomacy was largely framed as an opportunity: a shared platform to project values of openness, inclusion, and dialogue in an increasingly polarized world.
Today, that proposition faces a far more demanding test. As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy has shifted from aspiration to accountability. Mega-events no longer merely project democratic values; they expose whether those values are sustained through policy, governance, and institutional coherence. In this new context, sport has become a stress test of democratic credibility.
The 2026 World Cup illustrates this transformation with particular clarity. As a tri-national tournament, its success depends structurally on cross-border mobility. Fans, athletes, journalists, officials, and civil society actors must be able to travel freely and safely for the event to function as a genuinely global gathering. Mobility, in this sense, is not a logistical detail. It is a democratic condition.
That condition now sits uneasily alongside increasingly hardline migration and border-control policies in the United States. Expanded enforcement mechanisms, uncertainty around visas, and the growing prominence of a deportation-first logic risk transforming a global celebration into an experience marked by fear, exclusion, and arbitrariness. The tension between the internationalism of sport and fortress-style politics is no longer abstract; it is fast becoming operational.
Mega-sporting events are built on hospitality, openness, and shared experience. Restrictive border regimes, by contrast, are built on deterrence, suspicion, and control. When these logics collide, sport becomes politically incoherent. The reputational consequences are significant. Hosting a World Cup under conditions perceived as hostile or unpredictable does not enhance soft power; it erodes it. The very visibility that once made mega-events attractive as diplomatic tools now magnifies policy contradictions.
It is in this context that discussions of boycotts have resurfaced. These debates are often treated as emotional reactions or ideological gestures. That interpretation misses the point. Boycotts are not the cause of the problem, but a symptom of governance failure. They emerge when the gap between democratic rhetoric and administrative practice becomes too visible to ignore.
The question, therefore, is not whether boycotts are effective as a tactic. It is why they become thinkable in the first place. Concerns voiced by fan groups, journalists, advocacy organizations, and sporting stakeholders point to a deeper anxiety about access, safety, and rights during the World Cup. The potential chilling effect on attendance, participation, and media coverage represents not only a logistical challenge, but a profound reputational risk. When mobility becomes conditional and enforcement overshadows hospitality, the soft-power dividend of hosting rapidly evaporates.
This dynamic highlights a broader shift in sports diplomacy. Symbolism alone is no longer sufficient. Ceremonies, slogans, and narratives cannot compensate for governance gaps. Sport has entered a post-symbolic phase, in which policy choices and institutional arrangements matter more than messaging. Mega-events now test whether democratic systems can align domestic governance with international projection.
A brief comparative glance reinforces this point. The Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics offer an imperfect but instructive European benchmark. Framed around sustainability, territorial cohesion, and long-term legacy, the Games reflect an effort to embed sport within broader governance frameworks rather than treating it as a standalone spectacle. Europe’s own contradictions—particularly on migration—are well documented. Yet the lesson is clear: credibility does not stem from flawless performance, but from coherent governance and transparent commitments.
Looking ahead, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games represent a narrow but critical window for correction. Unlike the World Cup, they allow time for institutional learning and policy adjustment. Clear and transparent visa regimes, safeguards for freedom of expression, protections for athletes and journalists, and effective coordination across federal, state, and local authorities could transform LA 2028 into a credible demonstration of rights-based sports diplomacy. Failure to do so would have the opposite effect, amplifying perceptions of democratic inconsistency rather than leadership.
If sports diplomacy is to remain credible, values must be operationalized through policy. To that end, several concrete steps are essential.
Policy Recommendations
The U.S. federal government should establish a dedicated World Cup mobility framework guaranteeing transparent, expedited, and rights-based visa and entry procedures for fans, athletes, journalists, and civil society actors.
FIFA should condition hosting agreements on binding human-rights and mobility guarantees, including independent monitoring of border and enforcement practices during the tournament.
Host cities and states should adopt clear protocols limiting the role of immigration enforcement agencies in and around sporting venues to prevent intimidation and arbitrary detention.
The European Union and partner governments should articulate minimum democratic standards for mega-event hosting, using Milano–Cortina 2026 as a benchmark for rights-based governance.
The International Olympic Committee should treat LA 2028 as a pilot case for democratic hosting, integrating freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and independent oversight as core Olympic requirements.
Sport cannot repair democratic deficits. But it can reveal them with unmatched visibility. As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup and beyond, mega-events will not simply ask whether democracies can host the world. They will ask whether democracies are prepared to govern themselves coherently under global scrutiny.
Raül Romeva i Ruedaholds two PhDs, one in International Relations and another in Sport Science and Education. He is currently Professor of Global Politics and Sport Diplomacy at Universitat Ramon Llull and EADA Business School. He is also a former Member of the European Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Institutional Relations, and Transparency in the Catalan Government.
Kelsey Coolidge (she/her) is the Director of the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of peace and security, climate change, and the environment.
Mass deportations, the terrorizing of immigrant communities, and the illegal detention of immigrants—whether documented or not—are a defining feature of the second Trump Administration. It was a campaign promise delivered at stunning (and illegal) speed, and one now set to be bolstered by $170 billion in the “Big, Beautiful Bill”. These deportations are underpinned by erroneous claims of disproportionate migrant crime rates1, white supremacist and nationalist narratives, and the scapegoating immigrants as the driver of social ills.
The national security infrastructure in the U.S. appears uncomfortably primed to engage in mass violence against civilians on its own soil (putting aside, for this paper, the gross violations of civilian rights as part of military operations beyond our borders). Astronomical sums of money are proposed to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to thoroughly militarize U.S. immigration policy, while humanitarian and aid programs are totally gutted. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is ugly for immigrants—Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is now the largest federal law enforcement agency (with a budget larger than most of the world’s militaries2) with $45 billion for new “detention centers” to “double immigrant detention capacity” with extremely limited Congressional oversight, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.3 How has the country of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” come to embrace such an anti-immigrant stance?
There is an unexplored driver of a militarized approach to immigration. Mass deportations and border militarization is a national security priority not only because of President Trump’s racist claims—but also because our country’s national security leaders have deemed it a consequence of a warming world. Climate change, and specifically the Pentagon’s strategic planning for climate change, has justified mass deportations as a national security issue. By securitizing climate change, we have (perhaps unintentionally) securitized migrants, naming people as a security threat of climate change, and thereby undermining their human rights and dignity.
Academics write about securitization theory as a framework to explain how policy issues become urgent, necessitating extraordinary action beyond what is considered normal.4 A policy becomes securitized in part by how political elites frame and understand the issue. Immigration has been securitized by military and political elites’ narrative framing of mass immigration as key national security threat of climate change. Rather than pursue strategies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing collaboration among regional partners, the U.S. has set itself on a crash course of violent, costly, and inefficient responses to both immigration and climate change. An alternative approach is available, grounded in our common humanity with immigrants and a belief that global warming can proactively address through meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
SECURITIZING CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change has been effectively framed as a security threat by epistemic and national security communities. There were good intentions behind this effort—elevating the risks of climate change as “hard” security was thought to facilitate more urgent action. However, this approach fails to account for the role of militarism in U.S. national security and foreign policy, and the massive environmental toll of military operations. Militarism elevates military solutions as the means to attain safety and security; and with it, an adherence to the use of force, domination, and lethal violence. Climate change cannot be bombed away.
The very system that produces bombs, ships them, and drops them around the globe is wildly exacerbating the climate crisis through its massive consumption of fossil fuels and GHG emissions. According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, military GHG emissions are estimated to be around 5.5% of the world’s total emissions making it the fourth largest “country” in terms of total carbon emissions.5 As the largest military spender in the world, the U.S. military emits an extraordinary amount of GHG. According to new estimates by Neta Crawford, “from 1979 to 2023, the Pentagon generated almost 4,000 [metric tons of] CO2e – about the same as the entire 2023 emissions reported by India, a country of 1.4 billion people.”6 The U.S. military is also reported as the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil (and correspondingly the highest institutional emitter of GHG).7
The unintended consequence of this security framing has diverted away from actions that meaningfully mitigate GHG emissions, increase resilience against climate-related natural disasters, or invest in the necessary green economic transition. Ironically, a security framing of climate change has reaffirmed the centrality of fossil fuels to our national security policy by situating the military as an actor to protect the country against the effects of climate change instead of addressing how military activities themselves contribute to the crisis.
THE PENTAGON’S APPROACH TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND MIGRATION
For decades, the Pentagon has advanced the idea of climate change as a national security threat and detailed plans for an anticipated military response. Corey Payne and Ori Swed conducted a review of Pentagon strategy documents finding that overall, “the military does not see saving the planet from a climate catastrophe as a goal that falls within its mandate,”8 and, “views its job [as] to ensure that the United States will be among the “winners” of the unfolding climate catastrophe.”9 While the majority of these strategy documents detail the ways in which the effects of climate change effect operational readiness and scenario-planning, it is impossible to ignore the frequency of dehumanizing, anti-immigrant language that directly names migrants as a security threat.
Climate migrants are to be, “approached as a security issue and [met] with a militarized response.”10 In his book All Hell Breaking Loose, Michael T. Klare provides a deeply uncritical but comprehensive review of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change, detailing to extent to which migration has been named and blamed as the security threat stemming from climate change.11 It is almost comical how badly migrants are portrayed in this book, writing about the likelihood of, “massive waves of human migration and help spread infectious disease, producing disarray across the planet,”12 or how, “more privileged states [will be] besieged by waves of desperate “climate refugees.”13
Throughout the book, Klare references the security threat of migration as a persistent concern emanating from the Pentagon’s plan to address climate change. “Whenever U.S security analysts have considered the risks of climate change, a perpetual concern has been that extreme events and prolonged droughts could trigger a massive flight of desperate people seeking refuge in other locales, provoking chaos and hostility wherever they travel…and it has remained a major theme to the present day.”14 Some references include:
A 2007 CNA Corporation report warned that climate change, “can fuel migrations in less develop countries, and these migrations can lead to international political conflict.”15 Klare writes that the CNA report suggests “the primary security threats to the U.S. arise from the potential demand for humanitarian aid and a likely increase in immigration from neighbor states.”16
A 2015 National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and Changing Climate report17 which pulled insights from the military’s six geographic combatant commend centers (Northern, Southern, European, Africa, Central, and IndoPacific) and found “the threat of mass migrations arising from extreme drought, coastal flooding, food scarcity, and state collapse was a recurring theme in several of these reports.”18
In a 2014 report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John F. Kelly, “emphasized the importance of taking steps to prevent future climate refugees from entering the United States,” detailing how SouthCom’s exercises modeling the military’s response to a mass migration event used, “Guantanamo Bay to oversee a mock crisis-response mission.”19
The underlying logic of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change is based off an assumption that climate change will create clear and predictable “winners” and “losers” on a global scale.20 An early commissioned report from 2003 suggests that “the United State could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.”21 While it is not egregious to suggest that wealthier countries are best suited to withstand the shocks of climate change, it is also naïve to underplay the fundamental ways in which the U.S economy is reliant on imported food and migrant labor.22 Further, the defining feature of climate change is unpredictability. “Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades of longer. Today’s “winner” could be tomorrow’s big-time loser.”23 To create a response based on an assumed, predictable outcome on continued dominance is short-sighted, at best, and at worst wholly underestimates the possible severity of catastrophic outcomes.
POLICY PROPOSALS
We have, during the second Trump administration, watched Pentagon hypotheticals and training exercises move into actual practice. There was no guarantee that the Pentagon’s preparations for a “mass migration event”, meant enacting such a response at Guantanamo Bay, yet now the base is holding site for mass deportations.24 As the War on Terror transformed the imperial spoils from naval base to infamous extralegal prison, the militarized response to immigration is expanding it yet again into the front line of an undeclared war on refugees. Even if the military’s assistance in Trump’s mass deportation scheme is not directly linked to its views on climate change, it is certainly the vision of the future that the Pentagon is preparing for as climate change accelerates. If anything, the Pentagon is actively refining its approach in front of our eyes.
Personally, I cannot subscribe to that vision as the only path forward. Ever the optimist, I believe that we can still mitigate the effects of climate change, bring an end to the era of fossil fuels, and orient our national security, foreign, and immigration policies on shared values of human rights and dignity. A 2007 joint report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security summed on the national security implications of climate change summarized it nicely: “In order to emerge form a period of severe climate change as a civilization with hopes for a better future and with prospects for further human development, the very model of what constitutes happiness must change. Globalization will have to be redirected…This can occur either as the result of the collapse of the present system, or by its purposeful reconfiguration.”25
Let us detail what a “purposeful reconfiguration” may look like.
A 2021 White House report on climate migration offers a few useful starting points.26 It outlines a dual strategy of supporting the human security of migrants to the U.S. while supporting would-be migrants to “who desire to stay as long and safely as possible in their home areas” through investments in U.S. foreign assistance, humanitarian aid, and legal support services. It states, “the foreign assistance infrastructure brings together a powerful combination of tools [and] partnerships to address many elements of the complex issues of climate change and migration. However, current funding levels, structure, and coordination of U.S. foreign assistance is inadequate to meet the challenge…”27 It is safe to say that current funding levels in 2025 are even more inadequate to address the challenge of climate migrants. The hollowing out of USAID and the State Department is a heavy-handed gut-punch to the possibility of a more humane and dignified migration policy. An easy policy recommendation is to reinstate USAID and State funding at least to the previous level and absolutely oppose a reconciliation package that would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid from fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
That budget, likely inadequate, is several orders of magnitude smaller than the Pentagon’s outrageous budget of $1 trillion.28 When considering the climate impact of military emissions, we simply cannot expect to mitigate climate change while increasing the military’s budget. Instead of building up the war machine to fight people fleeing drought, starvation, and unlivable heat, the United States could scale down its military, in turn reducing production of greenhouse gases. There are available policy proposals that reduce Pentagon spending and lower the climate impact of the military, actually making the world a much safer place for people and the natural environment.
It is possible to create compassionate immigration policies29 paired with robust humanitarian and peacebuilding programs that aim to prevent the disasters that drive people to flee their homes in the first place. These kinds of proposals are inherently less climate-intensive and more dignified than a militarized response to immigration. A starting point is a complete abolition on dehumanizing language about migrants. They are not unwanted “hordes” spreading “disease” and “conflict” wherever they go—they are humans. Centering their humanity should compel us to consider our own complicity in exaggerating the climate crisis and funneling exorbitant amounts of money into a military industrial complex that harms people and the planet. There are a range of policy responses that limit the military’s GHG emissions and reduce harm, namely through military spending cuts and reducing the military’s global footprint. Closing unnecessary global military bases reduces the fossil fuels needed to support such infrastructure while offering the bonus of making it more difficult to carry-out clandestine, climate-intensive, and offensive military activities.30
We are not alone. All these efforts are amplified and improved through global cooperation and diplomacy, especially with neighboring states and international governance organizations. The investment in the military has eroded diplomatic channels that cultivated a peaceful world—we must claw back and reaffirm global relationships to see a sustainable, peaceful future.
End Notes
Brianna Seid, Rosemary Nidiry, and Ram Subramanian, “Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave,’” Brennan Center for Justice, September 26, 2024, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave.
“ICE Budget Now Bigger than Most of the World’s Militaries,” Newsweek, July 2, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Budget Bill Massively Increases Funding for Immigration Detention,” Brennan Center for Justice, March 12, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/budget-bill-massively-increases-funding-immigration-detention.
“New Estimate: Global Military Is Responsible for More Emissions than Russia,” CEOBS (blog), November 10, 2022, https://ceobs.org/new-estimate-global-military-is-responsible-for-more-emissions-than-russia/.
Nina Lakhani, “How the US Became the Biggest Military Emitter and Stopped Everyone Finding Out,” The Guardian, May 30, 2025, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/30/donald-trump-geopolitics-could-deepen-planetary-catastrophe-expert-warns.
Crawford, Neta C., “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War” (Costs of War, November 13, 2019), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf.
Corey R. Payne and Ori Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox: An Institutional Approach,” Sociology Compass 18, no. 1 (2024): 3, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13127.
Payne and Swed, 7.
Paul J. Smith, “Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response,” Orbis 51, no. 4 (January 1, 2007): 617–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2007.08.006.
Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).
Klare, 33. Emphasis added.
Klare, 34. Emphasis added.
Klare, 112. Emphasis added.
“National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” (CNA Corporation, 2007), 18, https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/national%20security%20and%20the%20threat%20of%20climate%20change.pdf.
Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 115.
“Findings from Select Federal Reports: The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate” (The White House, May 2015), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/National_Security_Implications_of_Changing_Climate_Final_051915.pdf.
Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 27.
Klare, 115–16. Emphasis added.
Payne and Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox.”
Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” n.d. Emphasis added.
“Mass Deportation,” American Immigration Council (blog), accessed June 24, 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/.
Kurt M Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” n.d., 8.
“Trump Preparing to Send Thousands of Immigrants Including Europeans to Guantanamo Military Prison: Reports | The Independent,” accessed June 26, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-immigrants-guantanamo-bay-prison-b2767628.html.
Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” 78.
“Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.
“Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.
Valerie Insinna, “Trump Administration to Request $1T Defense Budget Using Reconciliation Funds,” Breaking Defense (blog), May 2, 2025, https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/trump-administration-to-request-1t-defense-budget-using-reconciliation-funds/.
“Compassionate Migration Policies Are Also the Right Call Politically,” CIP (blog), April 12, 2022, https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/compassionate-migration-policies-are-also-the-right-call-politically/.
“Drawdown: Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad,” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (blog), September 20, 2021, https://quincyinst.org/research/drawdown-improving-u-s-and-global-security-through-military-base-closures-abroad/.
Tamara Pearson is an Australian-Mexican journalist, editor, activist, and literary fiction author living in Puebla, Mexico. Her latest novel is The Eyes of the Earth, and she writes the Global South newsletter, Excluded Headlines.
A state of constant fear becomes normalized when you live alongside organized crime, Hortensia Telésforo, an activist in the Indigenous community of San Gregorio Atlapulco, Mexico City, argues. “And that is a way of slowly dying,” she said, noting that social, collective, and community care is one of various antidotes to such fear.
But the Trump administration claims to be combating drug production, organized crime, and Mexican cartels by designating them “foreign terrorist organizations.” The move risks increasing racism and prejudice against Mexico while avoiding addressing the actual causes and consequences of organized crime, including preventing addiction or supporting people with addictions, the guns supplied to such groups, or the poverty and low wages that facilitate cartel recruitment.
The cartel designation came into effect on Friday, with six transnational, but Mexico-based cartels named: Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Carteles Unidos, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel del Golfo, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana. The new DEA chief, Derek Maltz, said he hoped to build a multinational “army of good to fight evil” against the Mexican drug cartels – clearly identifying the program with the demonization of Mexico.
But, “Calling them terrorists … is a fantasy. It’s clear they (the Trump administration) don’t understand the problem. All the U.S. president, Trump, does is blow his own trumpet and seek economic benefits, and he uses the terrorist designation and tariffs like a newspaper for hitting a dog on the nose. If you don’t do what I say, I hit you,” Luis Cardona, a journalist who investigated the cartels for decades, until he was kidnapped and tortured, tells me. He continues to comment on the issue, from an unknown location, under protection, his house “like a prison, covered in barbed wire and video monitoring” and with a bodyguard. He is currently dealing with two death threats, he said.
Cardona said he was taken to a field, where he was told he would be killed. He described how, in 2012, he had been writing about 15 cases of youth who were murdered because they refused to work in the poppy or marijuana fields. He received death threats, and was captured by different groups on three occasions, before he was kidnapped. “They tortured me, they were going to kill me. They took me to an open field, telling me they had already killed many people there, and today, hidden graves are being found there.”
He said he was kidnapped by police dressed as soldiers, something he was sure of because he had listened to their radio communications and knew the key words they used, and he also knew which groups used which guns. He was released though, thanks to pressure by journalists.
Mexico and the U.S. sending troops to the border is just “theater,” Cardona said, and the terrorist label “demonstrates a very childish understanding of the situation.”
Why the cartels are thriving
There were a total of 30,057 homicides in Mexico in 2024, according to official figures – typically lower than reality, as they only include those reported by state prosecutors’ offices, and exclude the roughly 10,000 forced disappearances (2023), or other unregistered homicides.
These rates have grown consistently since the U.S.-led “War on Drugs,” also known as the Merida Initiative, began. It was a campaign of military “aid” and intervention into Mexico from 2008, and it saw a sudden increase in cartels and gangs by 900% from 2006 to 2012, and forced disappearances went from 18 per year in 2004 to 3,111 in 2010.
“Declaring a war doesn’t work, we’ve already been through that. The war on drugs generated thousands of deaths of innocent people and a state of emergency that violated human rights, and nothing improved,” Raúl Caporal, lawyer and human rights and migration consultant told me.
Meanwhile, in the U.S, 48.5 million people battled a substance use disorder in 2023. The country has the highest overdose rate per million people in the world, according to one study (which compared dozens of countries, not all). Cardona argued that Mexico’s proximity to the U.S. and such high demand also contributes to the proliferation of cartels.
Further, serious restrictions on migration and access to asylum, “has been a big opportunity for organized crime … the illegal trafficking of migrants is another branch of their business, and migrant routes north coincide with drug trafficking routes,” Caporal said. “Migrants are easy prey to organized crime that then sends them on to their sales operatives in the US,” Cardona explained.
In fact, a recent investigation found that cartels are “adapting their strategies to exploit new policies from Washington” and are increasingly using industrial-size extortion rackets and kidnapping large numbers of migrants as soon as they arrive in Mexico, to the point where such actions have become the norm.
People who refuse to cooperate with crime groups, such as journalists and activists are in danger, and frequently killed. Youth, faced with forced recruitment, flee their communities, and those already marginalized and isolated towns then lose large proportions of their working-age population. There is a climate of normalized extortion and corruption, with small businesses frequently subjected to “user rights” payments – weekly or monthly payments to gangs in exchange for security (ie not being beaten up or worse). Currently, businesses in parts of Guanajuato are closed due to fear of extortionists, allegedly linked to the Cartel de Sinaloa, which La Jornada reports have demanded payments of 40,000 pesos (US$2,000).
Organized crime also has a strong impact on governance, particularly on local governments in areas the groups want to or do control. For example, recently the CJNG allegedly kidnapped a mayor and his family in Jalisco state in order to force him to choose a head of police that favored the cartel.
Cardona estimated that around 80% of Mexican politicians collude with organized crime, but stressed, “It isn’t just corruption, if they don’t take part in negotiations with them, then they are killed, or their families are.”
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Community not coercion
It is unsurprising that cartels would thrive in a broader context of inequality (both within Mexico, and between Mexico and the US), violence, consumerism, trauma, U.S. intervention, and apathy. Tackling such a complex issue involves promoting education and values, Cardona argues, and providing people with dignified and well-paid employment.
Those who leave school early or can’t find reasonably-paid employment end up “working as informal workers and may fall into the clutches of the cartels. Wages are so low here it makes you laugh,” he said, acknowledging that the minimum wage has increased under the Morena government, but is still “miserable.” Hence working with the cartels, rather than super exploitation by local corporations or European and US-owned transnationals, can be more economically attractive.
Community dynamics also have a strong influence on whether organized crime dynamics thrive. The small group that controls the area I live in, for example, charges street venders a piso (user rights) and allegedly pays off police or politicians. This group has such a hold on the area that neighbors are afraid to speak up. Authorities have cracked down on them a few times, but then retreated, negotiating behind closed doors. The fact that no one (including media and politicians) dares to publicly criticize the group contributes to the tolerance and apathy towards them and helps to normalize their presence.
Telésforo was at a protest last September in her community that was repressed by paid and armed hooligans, while local police watched on.
“Such treatment becomes normalized,” she told me in an interview. “The population becomes accustomed to believing that is how they should be treated … while the methods of organized crime groups are extolled, almost admired,” she said.
Telésforo is a community leader in the Indigenous town of San Gregorio Atlapulco, in Xochimilco, Mexico City. After local politicians had appropriated a large, hill-top community space for their private parties and networking, the Atlapulco assembly reclaimed the space. They are now running it as the House of the People Tlamachtiloyan, with workshops, forums, Indigenous and human rights education, and more. But following this, as well as community resistance to the contamination of chinampas (Indigenous agricultural system involving small built-up islands), Telésforo received a court citation in August last year, as an attempt to criminalize such organizing.
Photo by Tamara Pearson
In many parts of the country, demand for alcohol and drugs, and therefore sale of drugs and the strength of cartels, is being boosted by replacing community and identity with a culture of consumerism and alienation. Telésforo explained how Indigenous and traditional celebrations, patron saint days, carnival, and neighborhood festivals can support community organization and identity, but “corrupt people in the government have used such events in order to tear apart the social fabric.”
She described how Indigenous customs are being stylized for popular consumption, community organizers of the events are being replaced with external companies, and the focus shifted to selling drinks and drugs. “This capitalist vision is that if you consume, you have a place in a world, and if you don’t consume, you aren’t anyone,” Telésforo said. Such a vision of self-worth then vindicates drug consumption or production as status.
Strong community and other types of organizing can, on the other hand, promote respect and self-worth through responsibility and participation. Rather than normalizing excessive consumption and violence, Telésforo believes preventing and reducing organized crime and cartels starts with people “recognizing themselves as active community members and considering how they can contribute … how we can organize in order to foster better relationships and protect our rights.”
In Tlamachtiloyan, “we are holding events that enable us to re-find ourselves as a community, re-establish social connections, and we are overcoming fear, because that’s what organized crime does … it creates a lot of fear … but this space is a way of saying that we take care of each other, and of what is ours,” she said.
“We diagnosed ourselves, as a community, and found that we have been getting sick – not just physically, but mentally … Among the youth, there is a normalization of this idea that your life isn’t worth anything, so if you get involved in crime and they kill you, well, you’ve already lived.”
The number of children and teenagers across Mexico recruited into organized crime is estimated by studies in a wide range, from as few as 35,000 to as many as 460,000. These studies consistently find that such recruitment most often takes place in areas where extreme violence and organized crime are already part of daily life, and where there is poverty, marginalization, high school-dropout rates, and low provision of public services.
On the other hand, “people who are mentally and physically healthy rarely get into issues with addictions, or wanting to get lots of money very easily,” Telésforo stressed. To prevent and reduce organized crime, “we should create a culture of taking care of our water, our environment … because with a mentality of taking care of things, it is unlikely that someone will end up being extremely irresponsible.”
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Moral and legal impunity sustains organized crime
There is a 93% impunity rate in Mexico for homicides (that is, only 7% of homicides result in a conviction). Only 6.4% of crimes in general are even denounced, and of those, only 14% are resolved, due to the corruption, lack of resources and staff, and ineffectiveness of the judicial system.
“There was a lack of recognition from the start by the government that there were cartels, and that ultimately gave them a strong amount of impunity,” said Cardona. Further, officials and media who are, by force or desire, colluding with cartels, are hardly going to denounce the problem.
This silence, along with their use of violence, is a “guarantee of their existence” Cardona argued, describing how organized crime uses threats, physical attacks, through to disappearances and murder against anyone who stands in the way of their profits or operations.
“Now this is all basically normalized … to the point where the population has learned to live with criminals,” he said.
Beyond legal impunity, moral impunity promotes such tolerance. When President Sheinbaum recently kept Francisco Garduño as the head of the National Migration Institute (INM) even though he was charged in 2023 with illicit exercise of public service after 40 migrants were killed in a fire in a state migrant “center” in Ciudad Juarez, she sent a message about the extreme amount of tolerance for human rights violations. Migrants were locked inside the center and unable to escape the fire, and top migration officials were accused of failing to ensure their safety.
Such a culture of impunity teaches us not to bother denouncing individual criminals in court.
“This idea that you can do whatever you want and nothing will happen, is part of, and leading to a lot of apathy,” Telésforo said.
Countering cartels involves “increasing the amount of responsibility we all feel towards a region,” she said, describing how Indigenous peoples and others are ending permissiveness by leading by example and showing that you don’t just let those with power do what they like in your community. Otherwise, criminals “don’t care if someone sees them or not.” Communities, she argues, should be spaces people are accountable to.
Protect human rights rather than guns and militarization
At least 70% of firearms recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing from 2014 to 2021 were U.S.-sourced. According to Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico, that means that in 2019, for example, more people were killed by U.S. guns in Mexico than in the U.S. Effectively, U.S. manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock, and Ruger, are supporting the violence committed by cartels in Mexico.
Sheinbaum said Mexico would expand its lawsuits against these companies if cartels are classified as terrorists. Various U.S. arms companies have also profited from the genocide in Gaza, for example, so it is ironic that the U.S. government feels entitled to pass judgment on other countries.
The “terrorist” label implies military solutions to the drug cartels problem, as does Trump’s recent demand, met by Sheinbaum, that Mexico send 10,000 more troops to the border. But militarization of the borders and of Mexican society only serves to criminalize migrants and communities. Further, security forces are renowned for collaborating with organized crime and for extorting migrants – not for protecting them. They treat them as an enemy, killing six and injuring 10 in just one incident last October, for example.
On the other hand, “Opening the borders would remove a lot of the pressure to end up working for these criminal organizations, but really its about legalizing (regularizing) migration and recognizing the human rights of all people, to dignity,” Cardona said.
Likewise, Caporal stressed the need to “strengthen the justice systems, rather than militarization. That should be the starting point, a perspective of social justice, of creating a culture of peace.”
The more rights migrants have, including access to transit or humanitarian visas in Mexico (currently limited) and access to requesting asylum in the U.S. (severely restricted by Biden and halted now by Trump), the less vulnerable they would be to cartels, and the harder it would be for cartels to make money trafficking them.
Photo by Tamara Pearson
Real impact of the “terrorist” designation
Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations may result in concrete measures with an outside impact on those already hurt by cartels – from complicating remittances and financial transactions, to throwing a wider net for the prosecution of people or groups suspected of assisting cartels (including migrants forced to pay ransoms), human rights restrictions, or even incursion. Even if none of those consequences come to pass, the designation serves Trump as an ideological attack designed to frame Mexico and Latin America as an enemy to be controlled rather than sovereign peoples to be collaborated with.
The designation is clearly no solution to addictions or violence, experienced here in Mexico or in the U.S. For many of my compatriots in Mexico, already crushed by fear, it is common to take refuge in the ease and perceived safety of apathy, or in the delusion that consumerism can bring status. And yet, activists and movements are particularly clear that avoidance, silence, and numbing only protect the perpetrators, and are not so different from drugs. Having marched and protested for 10 years now to demand justice for the 43 students disappeared or killed by organized crime and security forces, and for six years for murdered activist Samir Flores, and so on – it is their determination to speak up that counters the moral impunity of organized crime and that will actually prevent further violence.
In response to the introduction today of the Migration Stability Resolution by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) and his colleagues, the Center for International Policy issued the following statement from Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams:
“For too long, the U.S. approach to migration has focused on barricading our borders rather than addressing the realities compelling people to leave their homes — including crises exacerbated by U.S. policies. We applaud Congressman Casar and his colleagues for taking this critical step to review and move toward better U.S. policies to address the conditions giving rise to increased migration and displacement.”
CIP was proud to stand today with @RepCasar , @RepJayapal, @RepKamlagerDove & their incredible partners & allies as they took this critical step to review & move toward better U.S. policies to address the conditions giving rise to increased migration & displacement. https://t.co/ZGMjKtZU5A
On February 6, Members of Congress and progressive movement leaders gathered at a conference hosted by the Center for International Policy (CIP), demanding changes to US foreign policy decisions as a necessity in a consequential year that will determine the trajectory of the US both at home and globally.
In a keynote address seen by over 60,000 people, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argued that the concentration of wealth and power foments war, violence and mass insecurity for everyday people globally, benefiting billionaires at the expense of whole families, nations, peoples and regions and declared that, “For many decades we have seen a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign policy—a consensus which, sadly, has almost always been wrong.”
Pointing to the distorting influence of moneyed forces ranging from AIPAC, super PACs, big defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, oligarchs supporting Putin, Trump and other autocrats, and other multi-billionaires and multinational corporations; as well as the growth of right-wing extremism, tax havens and economic inequality, Senator Sanders declared, “It’s hard to overstate just how fundamentally this broken global financial system undermines faith in democracy and saps our ability to deal with the pressing crises we face today.”
“We live in a world where a small number of multi-billionaires and multinational corporations exert enormous economic and political power over virtually every country on earth,” added Sanders. “That reality has a huge impact on all aspects of our foreign policy and whether or not we will be able to effectively address the major crises we face.”
In a “Congress and Progressive Foreign Policy” session, Members of Congress discussed their personal pathways to foreign policy and outlined key challenges and opportunities for a “people-centered national security” that delivers for people in the US and the Global South, recognizes the interdependence of domestic and foreign policy on issues like migration and climate change, and allows the outside world to interact with the US in positive ways like refugee resettlement rather than negative, militarized interactions.
“Nowadays, most people are interacting with the United States through drones, through weapons that are made in the US that are in the hands of dictators, police or their military, or they’re interacting with us in regards to sanctions that are making it hard for them to have necessary medication and food. And that creates a national security problem for us,” said Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
“We’ve spent more on border security since 2013 than was in the immigration reform bill of 2013. And we’ve seen no improvement in anything because we haven’t fundamentally shifted the system. So we have to think about, how do we invest in other countries? Our foreign policy is directly tied to this,” added Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).
“What I would like to see is a people-centered security, where the United States can actually engage with people of a nation, and help empower them, help them pursue freedom and dignity on their terms, not necessarily our terms,” concluded Representative Jason Crow (D-CO).
In “Prioritizing a Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda,” regional experts discussed strategies for the US to reorient its relations to better serve the people and address the realities and needs on the ground. Speaking to the pitfalls of Great Power Competition and the Cold War as frameworks for US-China relations, China expert Ali Wynedeclared, “Diplomacy is not something that you do out of kindness to competitors. It’s something that you do to advance your own national interest.” “We can’t support a progressive movement in Ukraine if they’re dead,” emphasized Terrell Jermaine Starr. Speaking on Latin America, María José Espinosa Carillo stressed, “We have deep connections with the region, not only through our borders, but also through funding and economic ties. But what’s more important, there is a renewed vision of the region.”
In “The Political Necessity of a New Foreign Policy,” movement leaders from MoveOn, Center for American Progress, AFL-CIO and Win Without War explored the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, offering their analysis of policy tradeoffs and highlighting how they see these issues moving the progressive base.
“That [progressive foreign policy] actually is not just a morally and ethical position, but it is an electorally salient one, one that is a winning position in elections,” declared MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting. “With Biden, he campaigned in 2020 promising to end endless wars, and that helped him win. That was one of the reasons I believe helped him win in that election cycle. And now we see Donald Trump poised to exploit the current situation in Israel Gaza and how that’s going to show up in November.”
Center for American Progress president and CEO Patrick Gaspard described the threat of antidemocratic forces at home and abroad, and said, “We’re now in a place of the world where you win votes by arguing that you build a moat around yourselves and pull up the drawbridge, our progressive transnationalism, internationalism is not actually ascendant. We should recognize that and we should fight fiercely.”
This fight for democracy at home and abroad takes place not just at the ballot box but in workplaces too. Cathy Feingold, International Director for the AFL-CIO, arguedwe must recast our priorities in favor of “ worker-centered security,” explaining, “It sends a very specific message to people in this country and around the world who are working day in and day out and want to make sure that they can live with dignity. I have found that workers here and workers around the world are interconnected.”
Win Without War executive director Sara Haghdoosti added, “We talk about foreign policy like there are not people in this country who have family connections, and deep commitment to what happens around the world. And it’s just not okay. That’s not how people work.”
View all the key moments from the conference on YouTube here and read opening remarks from CIP president and CEO Nancy Okail here.
