The number of Americans arrested in Mexico for offenses related to organized crime increased by 457% – or nearly sixfold – during the 2018-24 presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador compared with his predecessor, according to a new report.
Since the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum, took office in September, 185 US citizens have been arrested by the Mexican army on organized-crime related charges – an average of three a day.
According to an investigation by the local news site Animal Político, which cited Foia (Freedom of Information Act) requests, open-source data and interviews with local authorities, during the presidency of López Obrador (known popularly as Amlo), 2,500 Americans were arrested for crimes such as drug trafficking, compared to just 449 during the previous administration of Enrique Peña Nieto.
The report found that out of the nearly 4,000 foreigners arrested by federal authorities for organized-crime related offenses in the last six years, more than two-thirds were Americans.
The investigation suggests that Americans have increasingly become pawns for Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs northwards and weapons and cash back across the border.
“The truth is [Americans] aren’t being recruited as sicarios,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security analyst, using the slang term for gunmen. “But there are a lot of things that cartels buy in the southern United States … the technology of war that is used by the cartels. And for all those purchases, well, yes, it’s very useful to have a gringo that can easily come and go into the country.”
Guerrero also noted that some of those Americans recruited by Mexican cartels may be drug users who end up indebted to the cartels.
“To pay off their debts, the organization asks them to start selling,” Guerrero said. “They start out as clients and consumers and end up being employees without a way to escape the criminal organization.”
The report is backed by numbers from the US: according to data from the US Sentencing Commission, of the 3,000 fentanyl trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2023, 86% of those sentenced in the United States were American citizens.
“When you see the cases in courts that are at the border, those that are related to large-scale trafficking,” said Cecilia Farfán, an expert on organized crime, “these are operations that involve Mexican and American citizens.”
The report from Animal Político comes as Donald Trump has increasingly attacked Mexico for the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order designating certain drug cartels as ‘“foreign terrorist organizations”. Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on all goods flowing from Mexico and Canada, “because of the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our citizens”.
Trump later paused the tariffs on Mexico for a month after President Sheinbaum agreed to send an additional 10,000 national guard troops to the US-Mexico border.
According to Farfán, these arrest numbers may also indicate an increased push from Mexico to demonstrate that drug trafficking is a bi- or trinational problem.
“Those numbers have a lot to do with precisely wanting to get away from this narrative of the cartel that wants to poison the poor ignorant American citizen,” she said. “It’s a way of saying that this is a business that requires actors from both sides of the border, drug trafficking, but also arms trafficking.”
The report from Animal Político also points out that, while Americans may be the foreigners most likely to commit crimes in Mexico, they are also the most likely to fall victim to organized crime, with more than 700 US citizens reported as missing or disappeared.
According to Animal Político, between 2022 and 2023 307 Americans were murdered in Mexico, by far the highest of any nationality killed in the country.
But Americans are also being recruited in significant numbers to smuggle people across the border. Between July 2021 and August 2024, more than 1,000 US citizens were detained by Texan authorities for people smuggling, local government data shows, with Americans making up more than 70% of the nationalities arrested on those charges.
