An alleged incursion by Mexican cartel drones into US airspace and the sudden closure of El Paso’s airspace has drawn renewed attention to the use of high-powered weapons by organized crime groups in Mexico.
There were conflicting accounts on Wednesday about whether the city’s airspace was shut down due to cartel drones or a disagreement over the Pentagon testing of counter-drone technology, but experts say the use of drones by drug gangs at the border has become increasingly common.
Veronica Escobar, a Democratic congresswoman representing El Paso said forays by Mexican drug-trafficking groups into American airspace was “nothing new”.
“There have been drone incursions from Mexico going back to as long as drones existed,” Escobar said at a news conference.
As Mexico’s cartels have grown more moneyed and powerful, they have also become increasingly well armed: drug traffickers and hitmen are no longer just wielding pistols and rifles, but also drones that drop bombs, improvised explosive devices, armored vehicles, landmines and grenade launchers.
“The cartels are preparing for war,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security analyst. “They have a lot of money and the capacity to bring into Mexico a large amount of state-of-the-art weaponry.”
According to Guerrero, the cartels have become so well-armed that they have surpassed the capabilities of Mexican authorities, which must go through a complex bureaucratic process to obtain weapons.
“The criminals are much more up-to-date, much more technologically advanced,” he said. “They don’t face any bureaucratic hurdles. They simply bribe officials or bribe vendors, and with money, they get what they want. And they have very advanced weaponry.”
Among that weaponry, drones have become a key part of the drug gangs’ arsenal.
“The drone is fundamental,” Guerrero added. “If you have a good drone strategy, and you can acquire them quickly on the black market, and you combine that with artificial intelligence, forget about it. You become incredibly powerful.”
First weaponized in 2017, drones are used by Mexican cartels for reconnaissance, the delivery of drugs and, increasingly, to bomb rivals and sow terror in rural communities, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed groups at the Brookings Institution.
“We have seen activities by the cartels such as carpet bombing of rural areas in Michoacán [state] with the purpose of driving populations out of an area,” said Felab-Brown. “The reporting in Michoacán has been of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people displaced as a result of the scorched-earth policy through drones by [the Jalisco New Generation cartel].”
The use of drones has also given crime groups a significant advantage in attacking their rivals.
“On the battlefield one of the big implications is the ability to conduct crime as well as warfare over greater and greater distances,” said Felbab-Brown.
Increasingly, that long-distance capability of drones has been used by cartels to cross the US-Mexico border.
In July, Steven Willoughby, director of the counter-drone program at the US Department of Homeland Security, testified before Congress saying that cartels were using drones to conduct surveillance and convey drugs across the border “nearly every day”.
In the last six months of 2024, Willoughby said, more than 27,000 drones were detected within 500 meters of the southern border. In October, according to Willoughby, customs officials seized a drone carrying 3.6 pounds of fentanyl pills.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, disputed Willoughby’s allegations the next day, saying during her morning news conference that “there is no information on any new drones currently at the border”, adding: “There’s nothing, let’s say, in particular to be alarmed about.”
On Wednesday, Sheinbaum again rejected claims of a drone incursion in El Paso: “There is no information regarding drone use at the border,” she said. “If the FAA or any other US government agency has any information, they can ask the Mexican government.”
But whether or not there was a drone incursion on US airspace this week, Guerrero warned that, if cartels do use drones to strike targets on US soil, the Trump administration could use it as an excuse to launch its long-threatened ground attack on Mexico to tackle the country’s drug gangs.
“Here in Mexico, cartels have been using drones for some time to attack state and municipal police,” he said. “But if they tried to do something like that in the United States, that would be the perfect pretext for the US to launch a ground offensive against Mexico.”
