MEXICO CITY — President Trump may be fine, but Mexico rejects any US strikes against cartels on its territory.
That message was echoed Tuesday by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has repeatedly said her country will not allow a U.S. attack or the stationing of troops on Mexican soil.
“That’s not going to happen,” Sheinbaum told reporters at her daily news conference. “We cannot allow interference.”
Mexican officials appeared convinced the matter was resolved, especially after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that U.S.-Mexico counterdrug cooperation was at an “all-time high,” adding, “We are not going to take unilateral action or send U.S. troops into Mexico.”
But the hot-button issue flared up again this week when Trump made some provocative and off-the-cuff remarks.
“Would I start strikes in Mexico to stop drugs?” Trump said this on Monday, repeating a question from a journalist in the Oval Office. “Everything suits me.”
Trump has not revealed any specific US attack plans. But he clearly rejected his top diplomat's optimistic assertions that Washington was pleased with Mexico's anti-drug efforts.
“Let me put it this way: I am not happy with Mexico,” Trump said. “FINE?”
Trump's comments instantly lit up news channels, websites and social media platforms in Mexico, once again raising the specter of a unilateral, potentially destabilizing US attack south of the border.
“Disgust with Mexico,” read a front-page headline in El Diario de Yucatán, citing Trump's grievances.
On Tuesday, Sheinbaum tried to allay concerns by repeating her oft-repeated mantra: “Cooperation and coordination without subordination.”
The Mexican leader said she has repeatedly emphasized that point in phone calls with Trump, with whom she appears to have a collegial relationship despite the political gulf between them: Sheinbaum, a lifelong leftist and academic, and Trump, a conservative real estate baron turned politician.
Mexico's president says she has repeatedly rejected Trump's offer to send U.S. troops south to help fight drug traffickers.
“I told him every time that we could cooperate, that [the United States] can help us with the information they have, but we operate on our territory,” Sheinbaum said. “We do not accept intervention from any foreign government.”
Trump has long seemed fixated on the idea of attacking the cartels in Mexico. During his first term, Trump suggested to his then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, “We could just fire some Patriot missiles and quietly destroy the labs,” according to Esper’s memoir, “Sacred Oath.” Esper wrote that Trump said, “No one will know it was us.”
The controversial issue of possible US strikes has resurfaced here at a sensitive moment, with opponents accusing Sheinbaum and her Morena party of running a “narco-government”. She dismissed the accusations as a political attack by right-wing opponents.
But the recent murder of a regional mayor who accused Mexico City of being soft on the cartels has sparked large-scale anti-government demonstrations. Participants demand crackdown on organized crime blamed for the murder of Mayor Carlos Manzo in the western city of Uruapan.
Polls have generally shown that Mexicans oppose any unilateral U.S. intervention but are open to Mexican cooperation with the United States in the fight against organized crime.
Trump called Sheinbaum a “brave woman” but also said she was “so afraid of the cartels that she can't even think straight.”
Trump's remarks on Monday indicate the president is comfortable with his administration's controversial attacks on suspected drug vessels. in the Caribbean and Pacific regionstrikes that claimed dozens of lives. Critics have condemned the strikes – which are among the most militaristic moves in Washington's decades-long “war on drugs” – as extrajudicial killings.
The Trump administration calls the strikes an appropriate response to what U.S. officials call narco-terrorism.
“We have closed the shipping lanes,” Trump said Monday. — Land routes will be next.
This would seem to point to Mexico, the main land corridor for illegal drugs destined for the US market. Mexico is both a major producer of synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and amphetamines and a transit hub for northbound shipments of South American cocaine.
“We know every route,” Trump said of the smuggling corridors, posing a clear threat to cartel leaders. “We know the address of every drug lord… We know their front door. We know everything about every one of them. They kill our people. It's like a war.”
On Tuesday, Sheinbaum said she told Trump: “The last time the United States invaded Mexico, they took half [our] territory”.
She was referring to the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, now widely viewed as an expansionist gambit by the United States during the era of Manifest Destiny.
However, this was not the last US military attack on Mexican territory. During the turbulent period of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), two operations took place south of the border.
In 1916–17, General John J. Pershing led the ill-fated “Punitive Expedition” to hunt down General Francisco “Pancho” Villa, a Mexican revolutionary whose forces had raided the American city of Columbus. NMUS troops never found Villa, whose legendary status only increased as he evaded capture.
In 1914, U.S. Marines and sailors invaded and occupied the port of Veracruz, ostensibly to block German arms shipments to the government of Mexican President Victoriano Huerta. This occupation lasted six months.
These antagonistic episodes in U.S.-Mexico relations may merit little more than a footnote in some mainstream U.S. history textbooks. But all Mexican children are taught what is taught as the vile legacy of the United States in the form of invasions and land grabs.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sanchez Vidal contributed.
