Cartel war and state response

Mexico's confrontation with its drug cartels centres on the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), fought through militarised operations, high-profile leader captures and extraditions to the United States, and running violence that has not been durably reduced. The story carries a persistent own-goal dimension: indictments and arrests reaching into the state itself — a Sinaloa governor accused of cartel ties, a former state security chief in US custody — feed a narco-state critique of collusion, corruption and impunity that even sympathetic outlets advance. Coverage divides between a security-offensive reading that treats captures as progress, a friendly-critic reading that treats militarisation as a failing strategy compromised from within, and a Russian/Chinese framing that blames US drug demand and the southward flow of American guns.