Mexico's own offensive against the cartels is making progress

This position holds that Mexico's own offensive against the drug cartels is making real progress and does not need foreign intervention. Its advocates point to captures, arrests, extraditions, seizures and the dismantling of cartel networks as evidence that the Mexican state is delivering results.

Outlets grouped with Western and allied states carry it, eighteen publishers in all. It appears in the dispute over the cartel war and the state's response, where it is framed as progress in the security offensive. Its wording runs across Spanish, English and German coverage of arrests and operations.

No competing position is recorded against it. Recent events give it support and complication in equal measure. The Mexican army captured a senior leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and the Sinaloa Cartel's Ismael Zambada, known as El Mayo, was sentenced to life in a US court. At the same time, US authorities arrested former Sinaloa officials and reports described a CIA campaign against cartels in Mexico, which feeds the dispute over US intervention that the position rejects.