For decades, the U.S. government has focused its anti-narcotics efforts in Mexico on drug lords. Now it’s increasingly looking at politicians suspected of supporting them. President Trump has gone so far as to declare that “the cartels run Mexico.” How much influence does organized crime have in Mexican politics? How has that changed in recent years? How much can President Sheinbaum do to combat groups that are no longer just cocaine traffickers, but sprawling enterprises that control territory and install their own mayors? As Washington adopts a more aggressive stance on Latin American drug gangs, veteran journalist Mary Beth Sheridan recounts her experiences tracking the elusive ways cartels have changed and become more prominent social, economic and political actors in Mexico.

About The Speaker:

 Mary Beth Sheridan has been a journalist for 40 years, reporting from the United States, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East for four U.S. news organizations. She has been a Pulitzer finalist twice, and won three Overseas Press Club awards for investigative work. 

She began covering Latin America in 1994, as bureau chief in Colombia for the Miami Herald. Two years later, she arrived in Mexico as a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. She reported on the NAFTA opening, the recovery from the peso crisis and the transition to democracy – culminating in Vicente Fox’s victorious campaign for the presidency in 2000. She moved to Washington the following year, but couldn’t get Mexico out of her system. She returned to Mexico City in 2018 as a reporter for The Washington Post, and for the next seven years, wrote about the bilateral relationship during the Trump and Biden presidencies, the rise of the Fourth Transformation and the increasing penetration of organized crime in the Mexican government and economy. In between her two Mexico assignments, she had a variety of beats at The Post in Washington – ranging from immigration to diplomacy – and also served as deputy foreign editor.

Ms. Sheridan has been a Nieman fellow in journalism at Harvard University and a Knight-Bagehot fellow in journalism at Columbia University, and in 2021 won the Maria Moors Cabot award, for career excellence in reporting from Latin America.

Since 2025, she has written from Mexico for CNN.com and the New York Times Opinion Section, and served as a fellow at the Americas Institute at Georgetown University. She divides her time between Mexico City and Washington.