On the whole, Mexicans do not support President Trump’s proposal of U.S. military strikes against the country’s powerful cartels. Nearly eight in 10 Mexicans said they opposed the idea in a national poll last month.
But in one battered corner of northwestern Mexico, where the cartels have long operated, that consensus is beginning to crack.
In Sinaloa, a state of three million people that has been stronghold of the Sinaloa Cartel for decades, residents are about 20 months into a war that began when the cartel fractured into two.
Mexican security forces now patrol the streets. Businesses have shuttered. Families have fled. Many residents here said they were desperate for peace, at whatever cost, even if it meant a U.S. military intervention.
“It’s the last option we have,” said Oliver Zamora, a 23-year-old meat seller. “We have tried everything else, and nothing has worked. What else is there left to do?”
We spoke to more than two dozen people in Sinaloa last month, and most voiced a starkly different view from the national consensus. To them, the Mexican government has repeatedly failed in its efforts to control the cartels, and so they said they were willing to entertain a U.S. attack against the groups if it could let them live in safety.
Sinaloa’s residents aren’t the only ones contemplating a U.S. intervention. In interviews last year, operatives within factions of the Sinaloa Cartel scoffed at the idea of U.S. military action, doubting that the Trump administration would actually do anything. But last month, four cartel members said the groups were now taking the threat seriously.
They described stockpiling weapons and reinforcing defenses in preparation for an American strike, including by installing lookouts who scan the skies and buying rocket-propelled grenades and anti-drone systems that could down an American drone. The four cartel members spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from their bosses.
There is a lot of paranoia, said a senior regional coordinator for a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel called the Mayitos, which is aligned with one of the cartel’s founders, Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo.
Mexican authorities have recently shown some success in their fight against the criminal groups. Last month, security forces killed Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the top rival to the Sinaloa Cartel. But El Mencho’s death revealed the vast reach and power of his cartel, igniting a wave of retaliatory violence in at least 20 of the country’s 32 states.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump mocked President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico at a summit meeting of 12 Latin American countries focused on defeating cartels and other criminal groups in the region, saying that she had refused his help. Mexican representatives were not at the meeting.
“It’s good that President Trump publicly says that when he proposed sending the U.S. military into Mexico, we said no. Because that’s the truth,” Ms. Sheinbaum said on Monday during her daily news conference. Law enforcement operations in Mexico, she added, are exclusively conducted by Mexico’s security forces.
Daily life in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, has been upended since July 2024. Then, one of the sons of the imprisoned drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, betrayed his father’s former partner, El Mayo, splitting the Sinaloa Cartel and igniting a fierce battle that has continued to this day.
At the height of the violence, people on the outskirts of the capital said they barricaded themselves indoors, sometimes for weeks, as firefights crackled across dirt roads. Bodies were dumped along roadsides, gun battles erupted in upscale neighborhoods and burned-out tractor-trailers blocked the highways.
The violence has persisted. Just in January, two lawmakers were shot after leaving the State Congress in the center of Culiacán. Ten workers from a Canadian-owned gold mine were abducted; seven of their bodies were later found. A body was recently found in a mall with its face removed.
Agustín Coppel, the chief executive of Coppel, a major department store chain, pointed to the “enormous” economic toll the violence has taken on the state.
“People don’t go out at night,” he said. “Almost everything is closed and hardly anyone is on the streets. At night it’s like a general strike, until the car thefts and other crimes go down.”
Sinaloa state lost nearly 10 percent of its gross domestic product in 2024 and 2025, according to estimates from Mr. Coppel and other business leaders.
“That means many businesses have closed and many jobs have disappeared,” Mr. Coppel said. “They’re talking about more than 2,000 companies shutting down. In sectors like hotels, tourism and restaurants, sales have dropped by about 50 percent,” he said. Even his own chain of Coppel stores in Culiacán has seen a 25 percent drop in sales, he added.
Ms. Sheinbaum has dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers, the largest influx of security forces to Sinaloa in years, if not ever, leading to the arrests of dozens of high-ranking cartel members and the destruction of many drug labs.
“Our strategy is to tighten the net,” said Gen. Guillermo Briseño Lobera, commander of Mexico’s National Guard, pointing to a recent decline in homicides in the state as evidence that the strategy was working. “People can move around the streets with more peace of mind, but it’s clear a final phase of continued security operations will still be needed in the medium term.”
Residents said the violence had somewhat eased, but a sense of fear still ran wide and deep.
At least twice a week in Culiacán, families of missing people join comb hillsides and scrubland in search of unmarked graves. On a recent weekday, a van carrying members of one search team drove two hours outside the city for another excavation.
On the ride, several spoke cautiously about the prospect of U.S. strikes. The Mexican government, they said, had failed to contain the cartels — what was left to lose?
“Yes, Trump’s idea is half crazy, because how are you going to come to another country to try to impose order?” said María Isabel Cruz Bernal, who leads a collective of mothers looking for their missing children. “But I think citizens here ask for it because we have no peace, we have no control.”
According to the group’s records, more than 18,000 people have gone missing in Sinaloa since 2006. More than 5,500 of those people disappeared over the past 20 months.
“There’s nowhere to turn,” said María de los Ángeles Campos Sierra, the mother of two boys who went missing 14 years ago. In other parts of Mexico, “there are not many people who support it, but I think the victims here feel differently.”
Three cartel operatives said the idea of a U.S. military attack in Mexico seemed to become a lot more plausible in January, when television broadcasts showed American forces swooping into Venezuela to detain President Nicolás Maduro.
Now suspicion runs deep among some of them. Some said they feared their own ranks had been infiltrated by both Mexican and U.S. government informants. Conversations have grown guarded, movements more calculated.
“Everything now has to be done with great precision, almost millimeter by millimeter,” one cartel operative said. “Every move must be surgical, because the situation right now is very dangerous.”
Worried about a U.S. strike, members of both factions of the cartel said the two sides had reinforced defenses around senior leaders and fentanyl laboratories. They have expanded their arsenal to include drone jammers, which can cost as much as $40,000 each, and can disrupt the signals that drones rely upon to navigate, forcing them to land or crash.
A 19-year-old meth cook aligned with the Mayitos faction said newly hired lookouts had been sent to the Sierra Madre mountain range, east of Sinaloa, to watch the skies for any suspicious aircraft.
He said those lookouts also stopped unfamiliar vehicles, interrogating drivers, even those in FedEx vans.
Some Sinaloa residents have questioned what a U.S. intervention would accomplish. Several said they feared it could instead inflame the violence.
“I think it would get ugly — that it would get much, much worse,” said Rocío Torres, 19, a nutrition student. “There are a lot of innocent people here.”
Others said they simply rejected the idea on principle. The United States, they said, should stay out of Mexico.
“They should attack the problem from the inside, not the outside,” said José Valde Pino, 66, a retired teacher. “We’re not the problem. They have the highest rate of drug addicts in the entire world.”
Paulina Villegas is a reporter for The Times based in Mexico City, where she covers criminal organizations, the drug trade and other issues affecting the region.
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