Following a New York Times report that President Trump has issued a directive authorizing the Department of Defense (DoD) to conduct direct military operations against certain Latin American drug cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has firmly rejected any U.S. military presence on Mexican soil.
“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with the military. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out,” Sheinbaum said, who was quoted by a new NYT report. She added that her administration would review Trump’s order.
She emphasized, “It is not part of any agreement, far from it. When it has been brought up, we have always said no.”
Trump’s hemispheric defense push to secure the Americas has been to target drug cartels designated as FTOs. These targets include Cartel de los Soles, Tren de Aragua, and Sinaloa Cartel. The aim here is to disrupt the financial command and control nodes first, which is underway, then the physical structure of these organizations, all to break the flow of fentanyl and human trafficking into the U.S. through the southern border.
Mexican officials claim they had no advance warning of Trump’s directive. However, Sheinbaum said U.S. counterparts had hinted that they would deploy U.S. forces for capture/kill missions, maritime interdictions, and cross-border SOF raids against high-value cartel targets.
Trump’s new directive signals a hardened approach to ending the fentanyl crisis, mainly driven by FTOs in Mexico supplied with precursor chemicals from China. This drug death crisis claims more than 100,000 American lives each year and has become a central mandate for Trump to address.
This crisis, exacerbated by the Biden-Harris regime’s globalist, open-border, nation-killing policies, amounts to what some believe is hybrid warfare waged by the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. president is now moving to put a stop to this chemical warfare on its citizens.
Here’s more from NYT’s report:
It remains unclear what plans the Pentagon is drawing up for possible action, and the order raises a range of legal questions. It is also unclear what notice the Mexican government had: Although Ms. Sheinbaum said U.S. officials had told her and her team that the directive “was coming,” three people familiar with the matter said Mexican officials had been blindsided.
Depending on what the United States does, Mexico could pull back its cooperation on issues like security and migration, those people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
For months, Mexican officials have in public and in private rejected suggestions of U.S. military action against drug cartels on Mexican territory.
The issue of U.S. military action has long raised hackles in Latin America, where the United States’ history of interventions goes back well over a century.
Arturo Rocha, who resigned late last year from the Mexican foreign ministry, commented on the Trump’s new directive, stating, “They need Mexico’s cooperation and they need Mexico’s state and society to be functioning. This isn’t Afghanistan, where the state is broken, and you can do whatever you want as there’s a void.”
“This has always been Mexico’s deepest fear, this constant sense that we could be invaded by the U.S. again,” Rocha added. “It would have major implications in terms of cooperation with the U.S. going forward. The president has been clear that our sovereignty is a redline.”
The drug war in Mexico has been chiefly led by the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration. But now the DoD appears to be getting involved, and U.S. military involvement across Latin America could spark geopolitical fallout with any country that doesn’t agree to participate in cleaning up FTO drug cartels.
Mexican banks may soon face U.S. sanctions to disrupt cartel money laundering operations. Trump has a mandate from the American people to stop the drug death crisis; a crisis that, for some reason, globalist Democrats allowed to accelerate through open borders and failed progressive policies on the city, state, and local level that have transformed some parts of U.S. cities into crime-ridden hellholes.
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