Let’s say Canada, they spend 8 billion on defense. Mexican cartels, according to Wikipedia, earn between $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually. Of course there are more than one cartel and who knows how much they spend on that. But we don’t need to check every NATO budget to conclude the original comment might not be that wrong.

My numbers are almost a decade old, I can’t speak to specifics, but wanted to give a rough scale that this website is not doing justice to the complex wheels the cartels have in motion.