LONDON — Washington is striking back at a powerful Mexican cartel that federal prosecutors say sought to treat Europe as a safe base for drugs and weapons deals. Alleged cartel operatives attempted to exchange drugs bound for the United States for battlefield weaponry in Eastern Europe.
Federal prosecutors charged four men arrested in the Czech Republic with offenses connected to the alleged scheme. Two have been extradited to the United States, while two remain in Prague awaiting extradition. All four are believed to be affiliates of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG.
“CJNG, a designated foreign terrorist organization, is killing a record number of Americans. They are a terrorist organization and will be treated as such,” Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terrance C. Cole said at a news conference announcing the charges.
According to the indictment, the cartel’s European shopping list looked less like conventional organized crime and more like military procurement. Prosecutors say the defendants sought European machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 61 mm mortar launchers, ammunition and other ordnance.
For at least one defendant, the proposed arsenal may have been familiar territory. The indictment separately states that Edgar Alejandro Lopez Velasco possessed and used a CZ 805 BREN rifle, a UK vz. 59 machine gun and an RPG-7, the ubiquitous Soviet-designed, shoulder-fired grenade launcher.
Prosecutors say the proposed weapons were to be paid for with fentanyl and methamphetamine destined for distribution in the United States, underscoring the transatlantic reach of the alleged operation. The Trump administration has adopted a multilateral approach to countering the growing overseas influence of Mexican cartels.
“Operations like this require an increasingly global approach and can involve the CIA, the FBI and Czech counterintelligence services working in concert,” said Pavel Havlicek, a research fellow at the Association for International Affairs in Prague. “These arrests demonstrate outstanding cooperation among the United States, Czechia, the European Union, Mexico and other countries working together to dismantle such networks.”
CJNG is one of eight Mexico-based criminal networks designated foreign terrorist organizations by the Trump administration. CJNG’s founder Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was killed Feb. 22 in a Mexican military operation supported by U.S. intelligence. Since then, CJNG has reorganized as a federation of affiliated factions.
“The Czech defense industry is well established, and nefarious actors have long sought weapons here. Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik also traveled to Prague in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire weapons from underworld contacts,” Mr. Havlicek said. “Such efforts sometimes succeed. But what is particularly interesting in this case is the reported search for chemical precursors. That could indicate an intention to manufacture drugs in Europe — or suggest that supplies of those chemicals from China have become more difficult to obtain.”
The Czech case fits a broader pattern of Mexican cartels seeking European partners and operational bases.
“Czechia would have served as a logistics hub for other criminal operations, not a destination for them,” said Michal Vit, a research fellow at Metropolitan University Prague. “In this case, CJNG was looking for ad hoc collaboration on an arms deal, but in the long run it could have viewed the country as a site for drug production. Europe is also a potential site for money laundering, with sectors from real estate to renewable energy offering such opportunities.”
The concern is not theoretical. In November 2025, Spanish police, working with the DEA and Dutch authorities, shut down what investigators described as CJNG’s “office” in Spain. The operation resulted in 20 arrests and the seizure of more than 2 tons of cocaine, 827 pounds of amphetamine, $318,200 in cash, about $15,000 in cryptocurrency and 31 pounds of silver. Much of that material was held in a series of mountainous safe houses.
Investigators said the Mexican organization concealed drugs in industrial shipments and worked with the Camorra — the Neapolitan crime syndicate and one of Italy’s oldest — to distribute the narcotics in Italy.
The Times also has reported on a separate European arms case involving Bulgarian broker Peter Dimitrov Mirchev and three African co-defendants. Prosecutors say the group began conspiring in September 2022 to supply military-grade weapons to Mexican cartels, particularly CJNG.
Mr. Mirchev was extradited from Spain to the United States in March. Court records say he was previously implicated in supplying arms to Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.” The United States released Bout in 2022 in exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner, who was being held in a Russian prison.
The State Department on Aug. 5 offered a $25 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the California-born Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, who controls much of the CJNG cartel.
CJNG’s expansion is part of a wider movement by Latin American cartels into Europe. Last year, Polish authorities dismantled an industrial-scale methamphetamine laboratory linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, seizing three tons of chemicals used to manufacture the drug.
The Polish laboratory, CJNG’s operations in Spain and the alleged weapons negotiations in the Czech Republic reveal a common trajectory. Europe is no longer merely a market for Mexican drug traffickers. It has an important logistics hub, money laundering center and a potential source of heavy weaponry for cartel operations in North America.
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