U.S. Troops In Mexico?

President Donald Trump has offered President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico U.S. troops to help combat organized crime in Mexico. The offer came in a recent phone call between the two heads of state, and the offer was sharply rejected by Sheinbaum, who reminded the U.S. president that "we can share information but we are never going to accept the presence of the U.S. Army on our territory."*

 

Trump is doubling down on militarizing the handling of drug trafficking, assigning all blame for the fentanyl crisis to China and countries south of the U.S. border with Mexico. He has declared the drug cartels "terrorist organizations," and equates drug trafficking and illegal immigration with military invasion, i.e., outright war, which gives him wartime powers, or so he believes. In line with this, he's cutting $163 billion from budget allocations for education and social services, raising military spending $375 billion, and flooding the border with U.S. soldiers, all part of an effort to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. 

 

Attempting to solve the complex problems of drug trafficking and consumption as though they were features of a Hollywood action movie susceptible to easy solution by generous doses of gratuitous violence is beyond ludicrous. As the late Edward Said observed, Hollywood productions are a form of science fiction with relevance to no one's actual life, which is why the Hollywood-like "war on drugs" has had no discernible impact on eliminating the drug trade, though it has contributed substantially to horrifying bloodshed and major human rights violations. Recall that under the U.S. Army's two-decade long occupation of Afghanistan heroin trafficking soared to record levels.

 

In official Washington, political thinking about drugs and almost everything else has yet to reach beyond adolescent fantasy.

*In the war of 1846-8, the United States invaded Mexico on the false pretext of self-defense, robbing half its national territory, which later became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, half of Texas and Colorado, and bits of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

Sources:

 "U.S. Troops In Mexico: Not Now, Not Ever," La Jornada (Spanish), May 4, 2025

John Gibler, "Mexico Unconquered, - Chronicles of Power and Revolt,"(City Lights, 2009) p. 121