Crystal Langford was 18 when her mom and two young brothers were killed six years ago on the highway near the town in Sonora, Mexico, where they lived.
The massacre of nine people, including six children, was largely believed to be committed by members of a brutal faction of the Juárez cartel known as La Línea. The killings south of the Arizona border shocked the region and put organized crime in Mexico in the spotlight.
“Not only at the time were we ripped away from my mom and my brothers, but we were also ripped away from our home and everything we knew,” Langford, now a mother of a seven-month-old herself, said.
The victims, who were all dual U.S.-Mexico citizens, were part of a group of independent Mormons who have long lived in Sonora. Six years later, Langford is calling for the Trump administration to designate the Juárez cartel and La Línea as foreign terrorist organizations.
“If we got the right policies in order, we could prevent this in the future,” Langford said.
If designated, the groups would join a growing list of drug cartels that the United States has declared are terrorist organizations since the start of the year. Several are based in Mexico.
While designating two more wouldn’t radically change U.S. foreign policy toward Mexico, the foreign terror designations have underpinned much of the administration’s argument for its recent actions in Latin America.
Over the past few months, the U.S. military has struck several alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and East Pacific, killing dozens of people it says are traffickers.
The military has revealed little about the identities of those killed, and the United Nations human rights head says the strikes violate international law. Stephanie Brewer with the human rights group Washington Office on Latin America agrees.
“What’s actually happening is murder,” Brewer said. “The United States government is extrajudicially killing people.”
Administration officials and President Donald Trump have defended the strikes, which they say have worked as a deterrent to trafficking groups.
“Right now, our focus … is these [narco-terrorist drug] boats and the trafficking that must stop," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said recently. "Don't get in a boat, because it's going to end poorly for you.”
Just this week, the U.S. State Department designated another group in Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization — one it says is headed by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The designation comes as U.S. warships converge off the coast of Venezuela and the possibility of armed conflict looms.
The ramp-up has some worried U.S. strikes against cartels could happen elsewhere in Latin America — including in Mexico, where many of the cartels the Trump administration designated as foreign terrorist organizations earlier this year are based.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has long said the U.S. military acting alone in Mexico would be unwelcome.
“Coordination yes; subordination, no,” has been something of a mantra for Sheinbaum since the start of the Trump administration.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the United States won’t carry out unilateral military action in Mexico, even as Trump has said he would be open to it. Experts say that kind of strike would disrupt the close trade and security ties between the United States and Mexico. Mexico is one of the United States’ top trading partners, while the United States has virtually no diplomatic ties with Venezuela.
But strikes in Mexico could still happen, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on armed nonstate actors at the Brookings Institution.
“I don’t believe at all that there is this blanket immunity that Mexico has, and that the specialty of the relationship is sufficient to offset the pressure that it is facing,” Felbab-Brown said.
Trump said in the Oval Office recently that strikes in Mexico would be “OK with me; whatever we have to do to stop drugs.”
That kind of language could be a negotiating tactic, said Antonio Hernández Macías, an international relations professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City.
“He often resorts to threats to have a negotiation more in line with his interests,” Hernández Macías said.
Since the start of the Trump administration, Mexico has heightened drug busts and transferred high-profile prisoners to the United States to face prosecution. But Felbab-Brown says there is a fear in Mexico that it will run out of deliverables.
“The Trump administration will be asking for more,” Felbab-Brown said. “And so I don’t think that there is any inevitability to the strikes being avoided.”
For Langford, whose mother and brothers were killed in Sonora, designating two additional organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations is less about a complex web of geopolitics and more about justice.
Some suspects have been arrested in connection to the killings, but Langford — like many who have lost family to cartel violence in Mexico — says justice has been too slow. She wants the United States to step in and get tough on Mexico’s organized crime problem.
“It makes me sick to think they’re out on the street and probably wreaking havoc on other families,” Langford said.
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That includes more than 11,000 non-Mexican deportees, according to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. -
Officers who received the training included some from Sonora’s new border operations division. -
Mexico is hoping to make a deal with the United States after falling short of the amount it owes the United States in a five-year cycle that ended in October. -
César Duarte is accused of a money laundering scheme that involved concealing funds diverted from the northern Mexican state he once led. -
Mexico has largely been able to contain the deadly parasite in the southern part of the country.
