Mexico threatens to pursue legal actions against US gunmakers, accusing them of being accomplices of cartels

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum issued a fresh warning to US gunmakers that they could face legal action as accomplices of organized crime if Washington designates the country’s cartels as terrorist groups. The comment from the country’s president came as the Latin American nation continues to face pressure from US President Donald Trump to curb illegal drug smuggling.

Meanwhile, Mexico has been pushing its neighbour to unleash a crackdown on firearms trafficking in the other direction. “If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our US lawsuit,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said at a daily press conference on Friday.

She maintained that a new charge could include regarding alleged complicity of gunmakers with terror groups. “The lawyers are looking at it, but they could be accomplices,” Sheinbaum warned. The Mexican president pointed out that the US Department of Justice itself recognized that “74 per cent of the weapons” used by criminal groups in Mexico come from north of the border.

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Sheinbaum’s remarks came days after the New York Times reported that the US State Department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations”. Their list includes Mexico’s two main drug-trafficking organizations, the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, the report said.

The crackdown on these cartels became intense after Trump signed an executive order on January 20 creating a process for such a designation. The order stated that the cartels “constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime”. Meanwhile, Mexico argues that between 200,000 and 750,000 weapons manufactured by US gunmakers are smuggled across the border from the United States every year, many of which are found at crime scenes.

Last year, a US judge dismissed a $10bn lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against six gun manufacturers based in the United States. In the suit, the country claimed that these manufacturers should be held responsible for deaths from guns trafficked into Mexico.

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The case was dismissed because of lack of jurisdiction, though Mexico said at the time that its lawsuit against two manufacturers, Smith and Wesson and Interstate Arms, would continue. The Latin American nation brought a separate lawsuit in the border state of Arizona seeking sanctions against dealers that sold guns used in serious crimes over the border.

It is pertinent to note that Mexico tightly controls firearm sales, making them practically impossible to obtain legally. Despite the restrictions, drug-related violence led to the deaths of about 480,000 people in Mexico since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006.

Earlier this month, Sheinbaum angrily rejected accusations hurled by the Trump administration that her government is allied with drug cartels. “We categorically reject the slander made by the White House against the Mexican government about alliances with criminal organizations,” the president wrote on social platform X at the time. “If there is such an alliance anywhere, it is in the US gun shops that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups,” she added.

With inputs from Reuters.