The Role of Social Media in Cartel Recruitment

In a U.S. Southern Command Posture Statement to Congress, Navy Admiral Craig S. Faller made the point that “we can’t interdict our way out of the narcotics problem”—a conclusion reverberated by his successor, Army General Laura Richardson. While interdiction plays a critical role in reducing the number of illicit drugs crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, without a plan to stop the cartels from plenishing their ranks, the United States will continue to spend billions of dollars on human capital at the border, putting U.S. servicemen and women in danger. Recent actions by Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum have also focused on interdiction, but unlike her predecessor, who espoused dubious anti-recruitment efforts, her evolving security strategy has the potential to include evidence-based policies to tackle recruitment, particularly focused on youth. With platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Signal now central to the recruitment process, it is imperative to understand how social media and messaging platforms have transformed organized crime recruitment into a scalable and decentralized process.

Vulnerabilities of Mexican Youth

Cartels exploit resentment of economic inequality and step in to fill a void left by the state to promote social mobility. While on paper the employment rate in Mexico has averaged 96 percent for 20 years, in reality, over 56 percent of those employed report being part of the informal sector. This percentage is nearly double what other large economies like Brazil report (37 percent). Workers in the informal economy not only make half the amount, on average, of their formal-economy counterparts, but also lack any benefits typically associated with a formal position, such as access to medical care, paid leave, social security, and pension plans, making it almost impossible for them to retire in old age. Unlike Islamist terrorist organizations—which are guided by religious ideology—cartels are mainly guided by economic gain, and so are their recruits.

Labor informality rates present a unique opportunity for cartels to make inroads even in populated city centers across Mexico. Earlier this year, Mexico’s Ministry of Interior reported states and localities with the highest cases of youth recruitment by criminal organizations in 2024, among them were border towns and disadvantaged localities in city centers or tourist destinations. Localities in Mexico City with high labor informality and poverty rates, like Iztapalapa (45.3 percent informality and 35.0 percent poverty) and Gustavo A. Madero (45.3 percent informality and 28.0 percent poverty), figured among the top. The stark discrepancy in wages between the formal and informal sectors has a significant impact on perceptions of inequality. The difference in wages in Iztapalapa, for example, is MXN 8,910 per month in the formal sector compared to the MXN 4,450 in the informal sector. To illustrate the appeal of cartel recruitment, some posts advertising jobs with the Sinaloa Cartel promise MXN 4,500 per week (or USD 920 a month) or more “depending on performance.”

Intermunicipal and interstate labor migration has been a constant feature within Mexico, but recent reports suggest that cartels have been able to recruit not only from various states in Mexico but also from other countries in Latin America, like Guatemala and Colombia. In Guatemala, reports suggest Mexican cartels posing as private security companies target former and active Kaibiles, the name given to the elite soldiers of the Guatemalan Army who receive specialized combat training. They offer these Guatemalan groups between GTQ 24,000 and GTQ 56,000 per month (USD 3,000 and USD 7,000). In Colombia, Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) focuses on the trafficking of women and also on the recruitment of former military personnel to join its ranks. In these cases, the modus operandi is not digital recruitment, but instead, these people are contacted by an alleged security agency to work in Veracruz with a monthly salary of COL 7 million (approximately USD 1,750). Upon arriving in Mexico, it is evident that the job offer was a front for cartel employment. Arguably, the more ubiquitous digital recruitment becomes, the more opportunities the cartels have of reaching their target audience, thus theoretically decreasing their reliance on forced recruitment.

Shockingly, many youth approach cartels themselves. One Meta employee cited anecdotal evidence that the social media company discovered nearly half of recruitments taking place on the Facebook platform from individuals asking cartel-affiliated pages how to join. These users often romanticize cartel life, having been influenced by viral content, and also look for a way to take home a higher salary.

Having a young and capable workforce is essential for cartels to sustain violent turf wars and expand their operations, given that cartels lose an estimated average of 350 members per week. Mathematical modelling done by the magazine Science revealed that cartels in Mexico were the fifth-largest employer in the country, outpacing large-scale national employers like PEMEX or Pepsi Co. Furthermore, working for a criminal organization has lower barriers to entry. High dropout rates, particularly after middle school, are common in cartel-dominated regions. In states like Sinaloa, for example, only 20 percent of the population finishes high school, and 10 percent completes university. Working for an established and resourceful criminal organization may present opportunities for young people to achieve a lifestyle otherwise out of reach.

From Alleyways to Algorithms

Cartels are, by nature, enterprises that adapt to emerging forms of technology in the interest of recruitment and maintaining their ranks. Cartel members and their allies have long used social media for what is understood as “propaganda” efforts by cartel organizations. These posts focus more on glamorizing narcoculture and normalizing cartel membership. It is common to see social media posts exhibiting exotic animals as pets, as well as luxury vehicles and jewelry. In recent years, however, cartels have expanded their use of these tools to identify and engage with potential recruits, allowing them to reach remote areas of the country and gain access to a more tailored audience.

The shift from street-level recruitment to algorithm-enhanced digital outreach leverages the best qualities of social media: An account will be shown to a user who seems interested in, or who has engaged with, similar or relevant content, leading to more specialized content in a cyclical way. Another benefit of social media is maintaining de facto anonymity, while providing opportunities for further engagement via direct messages and oftentimes moving the conversation from the social media platform to an end-to-end encrypted messaging app like WhatsApp or Signal.

Recent reports about a ranch in the state of Jalisco that was allegedly used by criminal organizations to hold and train (and some say, kill) recent recruits chilled the international community. The subsequent investigation revealed that one of the most efficient methods for recruitment by cartels in Mexico is by posting opaque job ads on social media and advertising the lifestyle these positions can bring to the recruit. The posts depict employment listings like security personnel or personal drivers, and in the captions or main frame, the posts include combinations of letters, numbers, and emojis that allude to the major Mexican cartels. A report by Colegio de Mexico laid out the different emoji combinations seen in over 100 recruitment posts on TikTok, a platform notorious for its lenient content moderation guidelines.

While the media has often referred to those whose remains were found in the camp as “forced recruits,” the nexus between employment offers and recruitment can be deduced by the language used in some of these posts. The “rooster emoji” for example (see Figure 1), is used as an allusion to the leader of the CJNG—Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho (or “The Lord of the Roosters”), and the “NG” emoji is used to bypass censorship filters on social media and still allude to the CJNG. There is a possibility that cartels use conventional media (like newspapers and neighborhood announcements) to deceive people into believing they are offering standard jobs, or that cartels use coercion and blackmail to force people into working for them.