Posted on 10/27/2025 3:57:10 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The Mexican Senate is considering a bill to increase the tobacco tax, arguing that it would improve health by discouraging use and increase the government’s bank account.
It could also fill the accounts of some of Mexico’s major cartels. Experts say the cartels have a significant hand in Mexico’s black market for cigarettes and stand to gain an even bigger share from the tax.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for raising Mexico’s ad valorem tobacco tax from 160% to 200%. The per-cigarette quota tax would nearly double by 2030.
The inevitable result would be a bigger black market for cartels to exploit, said Manuel Perez Aguirre, a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Mexico.
“The government, the representatives, are looking for more money, but they are not taking into account the side effects of that,” he said. “It’s a huge thing in terms of money, not for the Mexican government, but it’s a lot of money for the criminal organizations.”
Mr. Perez identified Mexico’s two most prominent cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, as particular players.
He said estimating the cartels’ additional take from the tax would be difficult. The amount would depend on how much consumers turn to the illegal market and how much the organizations control.
A large shift, though, is imaginable.
When tobacco taxes were raised in 2011, illegal cigarettes jumped from 2% of the market in 2010 to nearly 17% by 2013, according to one study that year. The latest estimate puts the figure as high as 20%, though it’s unclear how much would go to cartels.
President Trump’s quick action to shut down migrant smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border has hit the income of Mexican cartels.
Still, the organizations have been increasingly diversifying their activities.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Yeah right.
I know Christ said that the poor will always be with us, but do the drug cartels also have to always be with us?
When I was a kid in the sixties one of my friend’s dads would regularly drive his ‘65 Mustang from Tampa, Florida to, if I recall, South Caralina where he would buy cigarettes without taxes. He’d fill up the Mustang...a car with almost no carrying capacity, with untaxed cigarettes and sell them in Tampa. Even if the tax is very little, people will go out of their way to cheat.
Anytime they put a few cents tax on gas in one county, cars will often drive to another county to buy gas. I figured out one of my neighbors was using up any tax savings with the extra miles. He was so pissed about the tax; he did it anyway.
I was doing some work at a hotel in Mexico and part of the deal was all my bar drinks, restaurant food, and cigarettes were free for me, I use to consume all of them in large quantities, such as 3-4 packs of Marlboro a day, it was obvious the cigarettes were fake Marlboros, they were not even close, and weren’t even good.
I’d buy from cartels too if I could avoid state/federal criminal taxes on fine tobacco and premium cigars. $5-$10 for a fine cigar? Eat me.
Imagine I am part of the corrupt Mexican regime. I am losing my percentage of the profits for human- and drug smuggling. But if I raise tobacco taxes to confiscatory levels, I know the cartels will become the sellers of first resort, and my percentage of the cartel profits will make up for what I’ve lost in the ending of the smuggling racket.
I don’t hear much of that now, probably because of vapes, but when we first moved to the DC area 25 years ago, they were regularly busting people from New York and Boston for trying to evade tobacco taxes. They’d often get box trucks full of cartons.
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