On the Radar: Mexico’s Criminal Pressure Points: Drugs, Corruption, and CJNG Fuel Theft

Who is winning the drug war – governments or drugs?

Is Mexico’s ruling party cracking under pressure from President Trump and organized crime?

What is in the crosshairs of the latest OFAC sanctions against the Jalisco Cartel target?

1. Four decades into the War on Drugs, drugs are still winning.

Global cocaine production has more than quadrupled over the past decade to over 4,000 tons, while methamphetamine seizures are climbing 13% a year, according to the UN’s latest World Drug Report 2026. Much of that growth has Mexican fingerprints on it: as InSight Crime has reported, Mexican meth trafficking networks have expanded far beyond supplying just the United States, offering production expertise in clandestine labs across Africa and Europe, and participating in supply chains across Asia and Oceania, remaking themselves into wholesalers for a booming global market. 

The latest report is a reminder of the limitations of record seizures, which can just as easily mean more product is moving than ever before, rather than real progress against drug trafficking.

2. Mexican Officials Are Informants: NYT

At least a dozen active and retired officials, many from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party, have quietly approached the DEA about turning informant, according to reporting from the New York Times this week. That follows the indictment earlier this year of 10 current and former Sinaloa officials—including Governor Rubén Rocha Moya—for allegedly protecting the Sinaloa Cartel’s Chapitos faction, which was the first time Washington publicly sought charges against a sitting, elected Mexican governor. As InSight Crime touched on in its analysis of the Rocha Moya case, the indictment exposed how deeply criminal governance runs through Sinaloa’s institutions. 

President Sheinbaum has blasted United States drug-trafficking probes into her allies as “foreign interference,” but the latest revelations suggest not her whole party agrees.

3. Treasury Sanctions CJNG Fuel Theft

The US Treasury this week sanctioned two Mexican businessmen and nine companies for running a fuel-theft network that funneled smuggled American gasoline through shell companies to benefit the CJNG. Huachicol, as fuel theft is known in Mexico, has grown into a massive earner for criminal organizations in Mexico, and InSight Crime’s reporting on CJNG’s huachicol networks shows how that business is fueling violence. One industry estimate, from consultancy PetroIntelligence, puts the toll at $24 million a day in lost tax revenue for the Mexican state—a sign fuel theft is as much a fiscal problem as a security one.

This week’s three stories point in the same direction: Mexican criminal networks are diversifying and going global faster than enforcement built around drug interdiction can keep pace with. This, as political cracks widen inside the Mexican party leading that fight in one of the region’s most significant drug-trafficking hubs.