Mexico’s president says ‘there will be no invasion … it’s absolutely off the table’ after news reports of order

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has rejected the idea that the US might invade Mexico after news reports suggested Donald Trump had authorized the use of military force targeting drug cartels deemed terrorist organizations in Latin American countries.

“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military,” she said during a daily news conference on Friday. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”

The Mexican president said her government had been informed of the executive order but insisted that “it had nothing to do with the participation of any military or any institution on our territory. There is no risk that they will invade our territory.”

Mexico’s foreign ministry later said it “would not accept the participation of US military forces on our territory” after the US embassy in Mexico released a statement saying both countries would use “every tool at our disposal to protect our peoples” from drug trafficking groups.

News of Trump’s secret directive to the Pentagon was first reported by the New York Times, which cited people familiar with the matter, and noted that the order “provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels”.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the move would enable the US government to use the military to target trafficking organizations.

“It allows us to now target what they’re operating and to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever … to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Rubio said.

“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.“

Trump has made going after Latin American drug-trafficking organizations a top priority of his administration: in February, the state department designated seven organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations, including five powerful cartels in Mexico.

At the time, the White House claimed these groups constituted “a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime” with activities including “infiltration into foreign governments across the Western Hemisphere”.

It is unclear how much impact that designation has had, as US agencies already have a range of tools to target transnational organized crime groups by restricting their members’ abilities to travel or do business.

But the designation would widen the range of potential targets for prosecution to include anyone who provides “material support” to the cartels.

The Trump administration has also deployed thousands of active-duty combat troops, as well as drones and spy planes to the south-west US border in order to crack down on the northward flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl, as well as staunch the flow of immigrants.

This latest order would represent a profound and unprecedented escalation of tactics by the US government in Latin America, potentially opening the door for unilateral American military assaults across the region.

Jack Riley, former deputy administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency who helped lead the capture of the drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, welcomed the Trump administration’s directive, having long been a proponent of designating cartels as terrorist organizations.

Still, Riley cautioned that Trump’s order may face obstacles at home before troops can even set foot overseas.

“You’re probably going to have some legal challenges in the US to his authority to do this without congressional approval,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem to bother him.”

In Mexico, however, security analysts feared the move would not only be ineffective at eliminating drug-trafficking groups but also prove devastating to US-Mexico relations.

“It’s not a welcome development,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, head of the North American observatory at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. “And beyond the narrative, it seems to me that once again there’s been a misdiagnosis of these illicit markets and how we can weaken and dismantle them.”

The news comes at a delicate time for US-Mexico relations, with Mexico in the midst of negotiating a tariff deal with the Trump administration as well as a new security agreement, which Sheinbaum had said was close to being signed.

Mexico and the United States have often cooperated closely on security, including during the Mérida Initiative back under former President Felipe Calderón. But even then, said Farfán-Méndez, US boots on the ground was seen as a red line. This new move by the Trump administration would potentially cross that line – with devastating impacts on the countries’ relationship.

“It would have very serious consequences, where Mexico would stop cooperating,” she said. “This does seem to me like it would lead Mexico to ask, ‘what’s the incentive to collaborate with you? If you’re going to take unilateral action anyway?’”

Source: www.theguardian.com