Recently, Prieto-Curiel et al. (2023) published a remarkable paper in in the prestiguous journalSCIENCE dealing with the dramatically increased homicide rate in Mexican drug cartels. Describingthe dynamics by a differential equation the authors are able to model recruitment, stateincapacitation and violent conflicts as source of the cartel size variation.Descriptive models are important to derive 'what if' results. In what follows, however, we look foroptimal measures to control exorbitant violence related to cartels.The objective of the Mexican police is twofold. First and primarily, it want to reduce violence,particularly homicides. Secondly, it make efforts to minimize the power of the cartels, reflectingparticularly illicit drug trafficking. Assuming two interacting cartels, optimal control theoreticmethods are applied to derive efficient stratregies to minimize the discounted stream of a weightedmean of the two objectives just mentioned including also the costs of the instruments.Although the situation might be described appropriately as a (three-person) non-zero sumdifferential game, in the present context we restrict ourselves to a uni-lateral decision maker, namelythe Mexican government. Preliminary calculations illusdtrate that even in this simple case inherentnon-linearities lead to complex bevavior of the optimal solution paths.