South Texas rancher Antonio Céspedes Saldierna, 74, was driving his pickup on his ranch in Mexico when his vehicle ran over an improvised explosive device (IED), detonating it.
The force of the explosion flipped his truck onto its side, killing the retiree and his friend inside. A third occupant, his friend’s wife, was hospitalized.
The incident happened in January near the Mexican town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas, just south of the border from Brownsville, Texas.
Saldierna, a U.S. citizen, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s to pursue the American dream, according to his son, U.S. Army veteran Ramiro Céspedes.
He told The Epoch Times that his father, who worked on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, was a victim of Mexican cartel terrorism.
Céspedes, a veteran of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is all too familiar with IEDs. He was awarded a Purple Heart after being injured by an explosive device during a tour of duty.
He said IEDs and drones are something fairly new that the cartels are using in their turf wars with rival organizations.
“I’ve stated that the way that my father was killed was a terrorist tactic because I saw those tactics in Iraq,” Céspedes said.
Céspedes said the cartels have armor-plated vehicles, Kevlar vests, night vision technology, and 50-caliber sniper rifles—equipment every bit as sophisticated as that of the Mexican military.
“Nowadays, it’s more like defending a small army against another small army—and there’s a lot of collateral damage,” he said of the cartels.
“I think President Trump’s policy is putting a lot of pressure on Mexico. I can see it here at the border.”
The incident spotlighted the growing sophistication of the cartels, whose criminal human and drug smuggling operations have flourished in recent years.
In the past four years, some 11 million foreign nationals have crossed into the United States illegally, with most crossing the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
U.S. President Donald Trump campaigned on securing the U.S. border, deporting millions of illegal immigrants, and stopping fentanyl from pouring into the country.
In February, the U.S. State Department designated the Sinaloa, Gulf, United, Northeast, and Jalisco New Generation cartels and La Nueva Familia Michoacana as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
During his March 4 address to Congress, Trump signaled that he is determined to directly confront the threat that cartels pose to the United States.
“The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels,” he said.
Super Cartels
When U.S. Vice President JD Vance visited Eagle Pass, Texas, on March 5, he highlighted the crime and national security risks presented by Mexican cartels that have grown powerful and wealthy.“We had record increases in migrant crime, in fentanyl deaths, and in just floods and floods of people who shouldn’t be in our country,” Vance said.
“We also have a number of ways in which the cartels became more advanced, better warfighters because [President] Joe Biden opened up the American southern border and allowed the cartels to turn it into their playground.”
Ammon Blair, intelligence consultant and senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Texas Initiative, said the cartels have military-grade weapons and equipment, including advanced surveillance technology.
Their technical abilities have grown to include undetectable drones, military-grade encryption built into their own cellular networks, and access to an Israeli Pegasus spy system that can break into any cellphone undetected, Blair said.
According to Blair, some cartels have shown signs of joining forces to counter U.S. pressure, creating super cartel networks in hopes of surviving the next four years.
“What we’re seeing is cartels consolidate,” he said.
He gave the example of cooperation between Gulf Cartel factions such as the Metros and Scorpions, although other groups continue to battle for territory.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond agreed.
“What we’ve observed is that coordination between cartels,” he said. “This is dangerous business.”
Drummond told The Epoch Times that Oklahoma has become a hotbed for cartels because of its proximity to the Texas border with Mexico and because Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018.
The intense law enforcement presence in Texas led the cartels to seek Oklahoma as a haven, leading some—such as the Sinaloa Cartel—to put down roots, he said.
About 37 cartels and criminal groups from countries all over the world, including China, are operating in Oklahoma, according to Drummond.
“It became a fertile ground for the Mexicans, in concert with the Chinese syndicated crime organizations, to work together in Oklahoma,” he said.
Law enforcement in his state has discovered “kingpin” Chinese nationals working with Mexican cartels to distribute drugs.
He said law enforcement has intercepted information indicating that China’s ruling communist regime has recruited indigent Chinese and put them on ships sailing from Fujian, a coastal Chinese province known for mafias and immigration corruption, to the Sinaloa coast in Mexico.
Sinaloa Cartel members then move the Chinese nationals, carrying fentanyl precursor chemicals, across the southwest border into Oklahoma, where they are absorbed into mafia-led criminal operations, he said.
Drummond said law enforcement occasionally finds Chinese nationals running criminal operations in Oklahoma, with Sinaloa Cartel members working under them to produce fentanyl, distribute black market marijuana, and traffic people.
In 2024, Chen Wu, a Chinese national, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of four fellow Chinese nationals at an illicit Oklahoma marijuana farm.
The facility where the four Chinese worked was operating under an illegally-obtained license to grow marijuana for medical purposes.
Prosecutors said Wu demanded the return of his $300,000 investment in the marijuana operation shortly before shooting and killing the four workers.
By designating Mexican cartels as terrorist groups, Trump has given law enforcement more tools for disbanding the criminal enterprises, Drummond said.
For example, illegal immigrants working at illicit marijuana farms were not deported under the Biden administration, although Oklahoma law enforcement alerted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their presence, he said.
With Trump in the White House, Oklahoma’s Organized Crime Task Force can now work with ICE to remove criminal illegal immigrants.
At one time, there were 12,000 marijuana growing facilities operating in the state, many illegally, Drummond said. Now, he estimates that that number has dwindled to 2,800.
Some of the marijuana growing facilities are million-dollar criminal Chinese enterprises, he said. Some have hidden their Chinese connection behind limited liability companies or S corporations, he said.
Also, the cartels in Oklahoma are using more sophisticated equipment, such as modified drones that are designed by cartel engineers and hard to track.
“We’ve observed all of that,” Drummond said.
Narco Drones
Drone incursions from Mexico into the United States have become commonplace.Blair, a former U.S.Border Patrol agent, said he recalled hearing drones overhead while working along the Texas border. The drones were obviously guided by the cartels, because they were not showing up on the nonmilitary detection system used by the Texas Department of Public Safety at the time.
“You‘d be running, and you’d have a drone right above your head and tracking every move you made,” he said.
The article cites a Mexican navy official who said that drug traffickers “use real-time video to track the movement of border agents or authorities to establish illegal border crossings.”
Drones can evade detection if their chips are removed or if they are manufactured using 3D printers, Blair said.
Not only can they be used as drug “mules” to smuggle drugs into a country, but also, they can be armed with explosives and deployed for spying.
Drones are used for “falconing” or spying in drug smuggling operations to monitor a location. A “falcon” is slang for an informant who watches and reports on people or activity in a particular area. Drones provide audiovisual data used in cartel decision-making, according to the report.
But drones are just one of the cartel’s weapons. The cartels have moved into the upper echelons of spy tactics fit for a Hollywood movie.
High-Tech Spyware
During a July 2022 hearing on the proliferation of spyware before the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cybersecurity expert John Scott-Railton testified that cartels had access to Pegasus spyware.Unlike most malware, which requires the user to click on a link or download a suspicious file, Pegasus can infiltrate devices without any user action, often referred to as a “zero-click” attack.
Simply receiving a phone message can compromise a phone. Pegasus exploits vulnerabilities in common apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and others to penetrate the phone’s data without the user ever knowing.
Scott-Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, told lawmakers that Mexican journalists killed in cartel hits had been targeted using Pegasus.
Less than 20 years ago, only a relatively small set of states could engage in sophisticated, invisible-to-the-target hacking of phones and computers at nearly any scale, he said.
That is no longer the case.
“We documented the targeting of Javier Valdez, a journalist who wrote about drug trafficking and crime in Mexico and who was killed in a cartel slaying,” Scott-Railton said. “Both Valdez’s colleagues and wife were infected [by Pegasus spyware] shortly after the hit.
“Meanwhile, the phone number of Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto was selected for possible targeting with Pegasus by a Mexican Pegasus client in the weeks prior to his killing by cartel hitmen.”
Electronic Warfare
The technical warfare being waged against rivals and governments includes encrypted telecommunications.Mobile telecom systems use metadata that can be tracked to a precise location—something the cartels want to avoid.
There are reports that cartels have hired or kidnapped engineers in order to gain a technological edge, Blair said.
The hacker site’s report states that the cartel telecommunication systems had “electronic warfare capabilities” that included sophisticated signal detection and analysis systems.
The report notes that one system discovered in 2022 in the Mexican state of Michoacán used a “brilliant” technique to make decryption by outsiders practically impossible.
Endgame
Christopher Holton, senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy think tank, told The Epoch Times that the United States is facing an adversary in the cartels that rivals terrorists such as the ISIS terrorist group in the Middle East.The cartels pioneered the use of drones by non-state actors as weapons. They armed them with grenades and rocket-propelled grenade warheads to attack their rivals, he said.
And while the U.S. military has advanced intelligence-gathering aircraft, such as MQ-9 Reaper drones and Boeing P-8 Poseidon aircraft, Holton said one disadvantage the U.S. military faces with the Mexican cartels is that it would almost certainly need permission from Mexico to engage them in battle.
For that reason, he said, he does not foresee U.S. airstrikes or drone strikes targeting the cartels.
The U.S. military also has superior capabilities for monitoring and tracking cellular communications, he said.
Holton said even if the Mexican government agreed to U.S. strikes, the cartels have infiltrated every aspect of Mexican society, including the government, meaning the cartels would likely be tipped off to a strike.
He said the Mexican cartels act as a “shadow government” operating behind the official one.
According to him, the most likely military scenario would be a covert special operations campaign to take down the cartels.
Holton said counterinsurgency warfare with small groups of elite U.S. military can do just as much damage as a company of soldiers with machine guns.
Whatever happens, he said, the United States needs an endgame.
“What does victory look like?” he asked.
