U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that Mexico isn’t doing enough to combat drug cartels and suggested that the United States could act unilaterally against such criminal organizations in Mexican territory.

In remarks to reporters outside the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, Rubio also asserted that narco-terrorist organizations — i.e. drug cartels that the U.S. government has designated as foreign terrorist organizations — control large parts of Mexico.

SECRETARY RUBIO: There are territories, vast territories in Mexico, that are not governed by the state. They are controlled by these narco-terrorist organizations. pic.twitter.com/udRGZXv0xU

— Department of State (@StateDept) September 9, 2026

The secretary of state, who traveled to Quito to speak with President Daniel Noboa about security cooperation between the United States and Ecuador, had been speaking about criminal threats in the Western Hemisphere when a reporter put it to him that if he was “talking about groups that are stronger than the state and fracturing the states, it sounds like a pretty similar situation to Mexico.”

“Mexico’s bad. It’s a bad situation,” Rubio responded.

The reporter then asked the secretary of state what the U.S. government’s plan was for combating organized crime in Mexico “given the fact that the Mexican government isn’t welcoming, or draws a pretty bright line about what it will accept in terms of U.S. military involvement.”

“How can you overcome that and have this kind of more tough approach that you’re describing?” she asked Rubio.

“The case of Mexico … [is] an even graver challenge because of the size of the country, because of the power of the cartels that are there,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery to anybody that there are territories, vast territories in Mexico, that are not governed by the state; they are controlled by these narco-terrorist organizations,” Rubio said.

He added that, “in fairness, the Mexicans have done more than they’ve ever done before to go after these groups.”

Indeed, the current Mexican government has captured or killed significant numbers of alleged cartel members and leaders, including Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) kingpin Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera, sent scores of prisoners to the United States to face justice and seized more than 500 tonnes of drugs and over 34,000 firearms.

However, in Rubio’s view, what the Mexican government has done is “still not nearly enough.”

“They know that, we’ve expressed that to them,” he said.

“And we hope to work cooperatively with them to do more because … the head of the snake are these cartels in Mexico,” Rubio said.

“And they are a threat to the Mexican state, and the people of Mexico will tell you that. The number one issue in Mexico, poll after poll shows, is security. Political candidates are routinely assassinated in Mexico; judges — routinely assassinated; journalists who report on the cartels — routinely assassinated by these groups. So these groups pose an enormous threat right on our border. They have drones now. They’re using drones to try to traffic drugs and people across the border,” he said.

“These groups are very dangerous, they’re very well financed, they need to be confronted,” Rubio said, referring to criminal organizations such as the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel.

“Our hope and our intent is to do it in partnership with Mexico. That’s the ideal. But eventually, that threat will have to be confronted, one way or the other. But our hope is to do it cooperatively with Mexican authorities,” he said.

Rubio’s “one way or the other” remark alluded to the possibility of the United States taking unilateral action against cartels in Mexico. Asked about his comments at her Thursday morning press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum characterized them as electorally motivated given that the U.S. midterms are coming up in November.

The secretary of state is by no means the first Trump administration official to suggest that the United States could act on its own against cartels in Mexico. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said in June that the United States “would take military action” in Mexico “if we feel like we have to to protect our people.”

Like Rubio, Vance said that the United States wants “to work with the Mexican government,” but he asserted that the U.S. has to “reserve the right” to take unilateral action against cartel threats.

For his part, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson told U.S. senators in March 2025, shortly before he took up his post, that on “any decision to take action against a cartel inside Mexico, our first desire would be that it be done in partnership with our Mexican partners.”

However, he added that, “should there be a case where the lives of U.S. citizens are at risk, I think all cards are on the table.”

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump said himself that the United States — whose military has targeted suspected drug boats at sea — was going to start “hitting” cartels on land. No confirmed U.S. attacks on Mexican criminal groups in Mexico have occurred since then, although CNN reported in May that the CIA facilitated a “targeted assassination” of an alleged Sinaloa Cartel member in México state in March.

Trump: The US will ‘now’ start hitting Mexican land targets

Is Rubio’s cartel control claim true?

In asserting that cartels control “vast territories in Mexico,” Rubio echoed claims made by Trump and other current U.S. government officials, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. In 2021, General Glen D. VanHerck, commander of the United States Northern Command at the time, asserted that criminal organizations operate in “ungoverned areas” of Mexico that account for 30% to 35% of national territory. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promptly rejected his claim.

Sheinbaum has also rejected claims about cartel control in Mexico. However, there is, according to Ioan Grillo, a Mexico-based British journalist who specializes in organized crime, a “duopoly of power” in parts of the country.

A 2024 article published on Grillo’s site CrashOut is headlined “How Much of Mexico is Governed by Cartels?”

The subheading reads, “A: None 100%. But there is a duopoly of power in chunks of the country.”

“Cartels certainly exert an amount of control in chunks of Mexico. This can be seen in squads of gunmen operating openly, running checkpoints, ordering curfews, dictating what journalists can report, charging quotas on sales of avocados, moving votes for candidates, and controlling (or assassinating) mayors,” Grillo wrote.

“Yet unlike with the Islamic State caliphate, the Mexican government still operates in those turfs. It provides electricity, sends teachers and collects garbage. And the army can still go in (while the cartel gunmen hide) and then leave (and they come out again),” he wrote.

Later in his article, Grillo wrote that in his “subjective judgement,” about “a third of Mexican states have a severe cartel presence and high levels of violence; another third have a medium (but still important) level of cartel problems and bloodshed; and a last third have levels of violence compared with regular U.S. cities, and less serious problems from gangsters.”

Since that article was published in late January 2024 — around nine months before Sheinbaum took office —  homicides and other high-impact crimes have declined, according to official statistics, suggesting that Mexico’s overall security situation has improved. Nevertheless, cartels continue to operate, fight turf wars and pose major challenges to authorities in various parts of the country.