Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum insisted Friday that there would be “no invasion of Mexico” following reports that President Donald Trump had ordered the U.S. military to target Latin American drug cartels.
“There will be no invasion of Mexico,” Sheinbaum declared after The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump had secretly signed a directive ordering military force against cartels his administration has declared terrorist organizations.
“We were informed that this executive order was coming and that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel or any institution in our territory,” Sheinbaum told her regular morning news conference.
AFP contacted the Pentagon to confirm the order but has not yet received a response.
The Times said Mr. Trump’s directive provided an official basis for military operations at sea or on foreign soil against the cartels. Separately, the Reuters news agency, citing law enforcement documents, reported that the FBI is seeking to add drug cartel suspects to the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly, while not confirming the reports, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s “top priority is protecting the homeland, which is why he took the bold step to designate several cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.”
In February, the Trump administration designated eight drug trafficking groups as terrorist organizations. Six are Mexican, one is Venezuelan, and the eighth originates in El Salvador.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday the administration could use the designations to “target” cartels.
“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.”
After the designations were announced in February, Sheinbaum also warned that Mexico would never tolerate an invasion by the United States.
“This cannot be an opportunity for the U.S. to invade our sovereignty,” she said at the time. “With Mexico it is collaboration and coordination, never subordination or interventionism, and even less invasion.”
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration designated another Venezuelan gang as a foreign terrorist organization, the Cartel of the Suns, which has shipped hundreds of tons of narcotics into the United States over two decades.
On Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department doubled to $50 million its bounty on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, whom it accuses of leading the Cartel of the Suns.
Venezuela has denounced the allegations.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil dismissed the bounty as “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen.”
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