American spy airplanes seek information about Mexican drug cartels while increasing surveillance flights

CNN
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The United States Armed Forces have significantly increased their monitoring of Mexican drug cartels in the last two weeks, with sophisticated spy airplanes flying at least 18 missions on the southwest of the United States and in the international airspace around the peninsula of Baja California, according to open source data and three American officials familiar with the missions.

Flights, made for a period of 10 days at the end of January and early February, represent a dramatic escalation in the activity, say current and previous military officials, and occur while President Donald Trump orders the military to ensure the border and deter The drug smuggling operations of the cartels.

According to a military ex official with extensive experience in defense of the national territory, the Pentagon has historically carried out only a surveillance mission per month at the border between the United States and Mexico. In general, officials focus these planes on the collection of information on other priorities, such as Russian activity in Ukraine or the search for Russian or Chinese submarines.

At least 11 of these recent flights around the United States have been made by Navy P-8 aircraft, a particularly appreciated plane with a sophisticated radar system that specializes in identifying submarines but is also able to collect images and signs of intelligence.

The activity highlights how the army has already begun to transfer the limited national security capabilities of the United States from foreign threats to the southern border, where Trump has declared a national emergency.

On February 3, a flight of almost six hours was made by an U-2 spy plane, one of the most revered recognition planes of the US army, designed during the cold war to collect images of the Soviet Union at great altitude.

Current and previous military officers with extensive experience in anti-narcotics work on the border said they did not remember that a U-2 had used to be used for this purpose.

Flight routes cover the border between the United States and Mexico, with missions in California, Arizona and Texas. CNN also identified at least one longer mission that turned the Peninsula of Baja California and passed near Sinaloa on February 4. That plane, an RC-135 “Rivet” of the Air Force, specializes in capturing communications from Earth.

The flight route surrounding the Peninsula of Baja California has been used “for a long time,” said a defense official. But “now more is being used.”

Despite flying over the American airspace along the border, these aircraft are able to collect intelligence deep in Mexico, former officials said.

The increase in military presence underlines Trump’s determination to use the Armed Forces as the main agency in the fight against drug trafficking and border security, two issues that have historically been led by national police agencies.

Less clear is how the Trump administration plans to take advantage of the information you get. It could be used to create a set of evidence for other designations of foreign terrorists, or even to identify information that could be delivered to the Mexican Army to help identify the activities of the cartels.

Some current and previous US officials expressed to CNN their silent concern about the fact that intelligence flights could be part of an effort to find objectives that the US army itself can attack.

Trump threatened to launch bombs on fentanyl laboratories and send special forces to eliminate cartels leaders, actions that could violate Mexico’s sovereignty and disturb relations with the largest commercial partner in the United States.

Trump has initiated the process of designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a measure that has raised questions about the potential of a direct American military action within Mexico.

The president also ordered the sending of thousands of additional troops in active border duty, even when migrant crosses are at their lowest level since 2020.

According to sources familiar with the plan, these troops are helping the border patrol of the United States and providing more intelligence specialists to assess threats and migratory flows. The troops are not authorized to perform functions of the law, such as arrests or seized drugs. They are also prohibited to interact with migrants, except to help them transport them.

Current and previous US officials see a clear effort to transfer more responsibility for the United States anti -narcotics mission to the army, which has decades of experience in the fight against other non -state terrorist groups worldwide that have some operational similarities with cartels .

“I think the cartels would be silly if they faced the military, but we know that they have already faced the Mexican military before, but now we have the military in the United States,” Tom Homan border tsar told ABC News on Thursday. “I hope that violence intensifies? Absolutely, because the cartels are earning record amounts of money. ”

But former officials and analysts point out that cartels also differ from Islamic terrorist groups abroad in key aspects. They are essentially commercial, non -ideological organizations. They are not interested in governing populations or seizing territories. In some cases they are deeply intertwined with sectors of the Mexican government, with which the US army actively collaborates and supports.

“Yes, parts of the State collaborate with the cartels, but there are others that resist, and we need them – and above all (to Mexican president Claudia) Sheinbaum – collaborate with us,” wrote Will Freeman, a researcher of studies on Latin America In the Foreign Relations Council, in a recent essay at The New York Times.

That makes cartels an adversary fundamentally different from what the Department of Defense is accustomed to counteract of the law such as the Administration of Drug Control and the Department of National Security.

Among those designated as foreign terrorist organizations are groups such as ISIS, Boko Haram and Hamas, among others.

Oren Liebermann and Sanika Tank CNN contributed to this report.