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Trump’s 2026 decision to brand Mexico’s most powerful cartels as foreign terrorist organizations detonated the old model of “quiet cooperation.” Overnight, a drug war became a war on terror, with all the legal firepower that label unlocks. Asset freezes and material-support prosecutions were only the beginning; the quiet deployment of surveillance and strike drones inside Mexican territory signaled a darker possibility. Elon Musk’s musings, as head of DOGE, about precision drone strikes on cartel leaders no longer sounded like science fiction, but like the soft launch of a new cross-border doctrine.
