MEXICO CITY (AP) — Drug cartels throughout Mexico are increasingly resorting to car bombs, drone‑delivered explosives and improvised explosive devices. This escalation threatens to exacerbate Mexico’s already strained relations with the United States, where President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned of possible military action against the cartels.
On Sunday night a blast erupted outside a police station in Ojocaliente, a town 360 miles northwest of Mexico City. The explosion, involving roughly 200 kilograms of explosives, injured 11 people and damaged over 60 homes in the downtown area. Mexico’s security chief, Omar García Harfuch, reported the incident during a Friday visit to Zacatecas with President Claudia Sheinbaum.
State Attorney General Cristian Paul Camacho said Zacatecas has documented 23 explosives‑related attacks this year, six of which involved vehicles or motorcycles rigged with explosives.
The rise in car bombings has heightened concern in Mexico, despite the fact that the scale of violence remains far below that seen in countries like Colombia.
University of Coahuila professor Victor Manuel Sánchez, who has monitored car bombings in Mexico for decades, noted an early wave of such attacks, including a 1994 bombing in Guadalajara carried out by the Tijuana Cartel against Sinaloa co‑founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Zambada was later convicted in the United States.
In recent years, Sánchez added, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has stepped up its use of explosives as it expands operations nationwide.
Two recent bombings in small city centers have been linked to CJNG: a December attack in Michoacán that claimed five lives and the Sunday blast outside a police station in Zacatecas. The Trump administration has designated CJNG among several Mexican cartels as a foreign terrorist organization.
Over the past five years Mexican cartels have broadened their use of explosives, deploying them from drones to target security forces or rival groups and planting them in the ground to defend or control territory.
In 2023, roadside bombs placed by cartels in Jalisco state killed six people and injured 14 others. About a month later, the military released its first public tally, reporting the seizure of roughly 2,800 explosive devices across the country in the preceding four and a half years.
The subsequent year authorities defused nearly 3,200 explosives in Michoacán alone. In 2025 an explosion claimed the lives of eight soldiers in one of Mexico’s deadliest cartel‑related blasts. No recent nationwide seizure statistics have been released.
“It is all a bad development in Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab‑Brown, an organized crime expert at the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank. “We are facing steady intensification of violence,” she added. “This certainly greatly intensifies the atmosphere of fear and retaliation.”
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that a nationwide drop in homicides demonstrated that the government’s strategy against cartels is yielding results.
Analysts say cartels employ car bombs to intimidate rivals and authorities, exert pressure on the government, and sow fear among civilians.
Carlos Pérez Ricart, a professor of international studies at Mexico’s CIDE university, noted that car bombs also attract attention and can be used to force negotiations when criminal groups feel cornered.
Mexico has historically resisted labeling cartel violence as terrorism, partly because such a designation could invite foreign intervention and harm tourism and investment, Felbab‑Brown observed.
A further official rationale is that terrorism typically pursues political or ideological goals, whereas cartels are driven mainly by profit.
Civilians have nonetheless been deliberately targeted. In 2008 grenades were hurled into Independence Day celebrations in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital, killing eight and injuring dozens. Three years later attackers set fire to a casino in northern Mexico, resulting in 52 deaths.
The Trump administration’s designation of eight Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and its use of that label to justify military actions, has heightened the stakes of the terminology. The legality of such measures is now being contested both in the United States and internationally.
Pérez Ricart warned against applying counterterrorism tactics to organized crime. “The answer to terrorism is the disappearance of the enemy,” he said, noting that in the drug trade the opponent is not a single armed group but an entire illicit market.
