Narcos, Inc.: drug cartels and the architecture of entrepreneurial ecosystems

As the U.S. State Department increasingly designates drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), scholars and policymakers face a pressing need to better understand the structure and behavior of these groups. This paper argues that drug cartels are more accurately conceptualized as criminal entrepreneurial ecosystems than as traditional terrorist organizations. Drawing on the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) framework, which emphasizes interdependence, modularity, adaptability, and resource flows among semi-autonomous actors, we offer a novel lens through which to interpret cartel behavior. Using in-depth case analyses of the Sinaloa Cartel, Tren de Aragua, and MS-13, alongside a comparative overview of all eight original FTO-designated cartels, we demonstrate how these organizations exhibit the core features of entrepreneurial ecosystems rather than rigid, ideology-driven hierarchies. We map each cartel’s structure and strategies across ecosystem dimensions, including network connectivity, institutional embeddedness, and mutual reliance, and show how these features support innovation, resilience, and growth. Our analysis suggests that dismantling cartels will require ecosystem-targeted interventions that disrupt interdependencies, undermine modularity, and address the social and institutional voids that cartels exploit. Reframing cartels as entrepreneurial ecosystems opens new theoretical and practical avenues for understanding and countering transnational criminal violence.