By Todd Bensman for The Heritage Foundation
In June 2025, an alarming allegation surfaced in European news outlets: that cartel “volunteers” from Mexico and Colombia had infiltrated the Ukrainian military – considered the world’s “drone superpower” – to learn its dark arts of cutting-edge drone warfare so they could use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home. It’s still going on a year later, a new Financial Times investigation has just reported.
The need to terminate this knowledge transfer, if it’s not too late, matters because U.S. military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel are deployed for clandestine work inside and all around those countries trying to eradicate these same criminal organizations. In the hands of vengeful cartel murderers, the world’s latest and greatest battlefield-proven drone tech and tactics threaten to do to U.S. ground personnel what the Ukrainian army claims it did to 30,000 Russian soldiers just in the month of July.
If anyone thought Ukraine had quickly cleared out all the cartel infiltrators during the year since those early news reports, The Financial Times investigation just reported that Ukraine has discovered yet more Colombians with organized crime connections in-country with “unusual obsessions” about battlefield drone fighting. The exfiltration problem lives on.
“Former paramilitaries, former guerillas and former soldiers are fighting and learning together here how to operate drones,” a Colombian aid worker in Ukraine told the Financial Times for the August 6 story.
The U.S. media has largely sat this story out. Even if not yet publicly verified by the U.S. Intelligence Community or media, the as-yet to be disputed allegations now demand scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate redress.
If U.S. lawmakers really knew about this, they should see bitter irony in the idea that America’s cartel enemies were stealing drone-warfare excellence funded by some of the $70 billion in U.S. taxpayer money they appropriated to Ukraine’s war effort, and condition change on the tens of billions more in the pipeline.
What we think we know
On July 30, 2025 the French website Intelligence Online first reported that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) launched an investigation after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned that Mexican cartel fighters had infiltrated Spanish-speaking units of the International Legion.
Their alleged intention was to learn how to fly “first-person view (FPV)” drones, drone-attack tech ideas, and battlefield tactics that Ukraine’s armed forces have famously used to stall Russia’s invasion.
Foreign outlets keep turning up new information, such as Poland and Bulgaria have begun their own investigations into smuggling pipelines through their territories.
Granular details seem to bolster the reports. For instance, some volunteers already accomplished in drone fighting have joined the legion’s specialized tactical intelligence combat unit known as “Ethos” in the combat-heavy Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, according to the reports.
Polish officials reportedly revealed that private Mexican and Colombian security companies with alleged ties to drug trafficking networks financed and smuggled the volunteers into Ukraine through neighboring countries on false documents. One Colombian security firm based in Cali and Medellin reportedly recruited former Colombian Army rangers.
One smuggled Mexican legion volunteer operating under the alias “Aguila-7” registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. He proved so technically proficient during drone training in Lviv that instructors called for an investigation, which later found probable connections to Mexico’s elite GAFE air-mobile special forces (Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales), whose former personnel have joined cartels, the reports said.
Why it matters
The infiltrations coincide with President Trump’s Day One declaration of a U.S. war to eradicate the cartels, designating many as foreign terrorist organizations. If revenge-minded cartel leaders are out for what they have suffered since, their drones can find many more targetable American personnel.
No one should have felt surprised, for instance, when two CIA officers died this past April in a Chihuahua State car accident while traveling with Mexican forces after a drug lab raid. They were present because Trump has surged military and CIA personnel into Mexico and Latin America, as well as naval and aircraft assets for lethal boat bombing operations that have killed hundreds of drug smugglers. The operations have included supposed CIA-facilitated assassinations in Mexico.
An “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” of 19 Latin American countries is heavily reliant on local national security forces within which U.S. Intelligence Community operatives are embedded. Additionally, some 9,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed along 845 miles of the U.S. southern border in expanding “National Defense Areas” intended to deny cartel drug load entries along with illegal immigration.
By many accounts, cartels in Colombia and Mexico are raging mad about the killings, drug lab raids, boat bombings, profit-disruptions, and imprisonments on U.S. terrorism charges.
Any way or will?
By now, we would know if the cartels were killing more American personnel. They are not, likely deterred knowing that crossing this line would incur even more painful American wrath. But are the cartels building that capacity to get Trump off their backs in due time?
Before any reporting about cartels in Ukraine, Mexico’s cartels were already using sloppily repurposed commercial drones to drop grenades and explosives on rivals and indigenous security forces. That’s still happening in Mexico and Colombia, including the first recent attacks by FPV drones. In October 2025, a coordinated three-drone FPV attack hit the state prosecutor’s office in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, destroying six vehicles a mile from the U.S. border.
Senior Colombian officials told the outlet they are already seeing Ukraine-style first-person-view drones in recent widespread use, although a Colombian drone pilot in Ukraine told The Financial Times that pilots still hadn’t mastered replicating some technology or how to set explosive charges like the Ukrainians.
“The drone industry has exploded, and criminals have adapted the technology for attacks, which is a major challenge to battlefield aerial supremacy,” Colombian Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez told the newspaper.
What to do now
Ukraine-style drone attacks that kill any Americans in Mexico or Colombia would upend the U.S. counter-cartel initiatives, tactically – and politically. Body bags returning home are a tragedy. But they also have a way of undermining public support in any war. Tactics and strategic trajectories change as a result. Just ask Moscow.
First, the White House must forcefully leverage direct U.S. military aid to have Kyiv immediately cleanse its formations of cartel operatives and verify it.
Next, the U.S. should double down to speed and diversify current efforts to counter the emerging drone threat along the border, the same for helping to foreign allied governments protect embedded U.S. personnel.
The U.S. should do what it can to intercept drone equipment and technology imports into Latin America.
Leadership should make sure American soldiers and operatives posted abroad burrow deeper out of sight.
In the meantime, if the idea that the U.S. would go even harder if the cartels kill Americans, then the Trump administration should loudly message that they’re damned right.
Leave a Reply