by El Reportero‘s wire services
Former United States President Donald Trump has said he could use the U.S. military against Mexican cartels if he is re-elected as president on Nov. 5.
In an interview with Fox News, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate was asked whether “strikes” against Mexican cartels — which ship large quantities of narcotics including fentanyl to the U.S — were “still on the table.”
A clip from the interview of Republican Party nominee Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance with Jesse Watters.
“Absolutely,” Trump responded.
Fox News host Jesse Watters, who interviewed the 45th president of the United States and his 2024 running mate J.D. Vance, rephrased his question, asking Trump whether he was prepared to use military force against “our biggest trading partner.”
“Absolutely. Mexico’s going to have to straighten it out really fast or the answer is absolutely,” Trump said.
“They’re killing 300,000 people a year with fentanyl coming in,” he said, offering a figure that is almost triple the number of estimated drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2023.
Trump said that “Mexico is going to be given a very short period of time to police their border” and if they don’t do the job effectively, his government will take action.
“I’m sure they’re going to do not well and then you’re going to see the action start,” he said.
Trump asserted that “Mexico is petrified of the cartels because they’ll take out a president in two minutes.”
“They’re petrified of the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico,” he said.
The New York Times reported in late 2023 that Trump, while president, “talked privately about shooting missiles into Mexico to take out drug labs.”
The Times also said that “Republican lawmakers have drafted a broad authorization for the use of military force against cartels” and “pushed for designating Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
“… If Mr. Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he has vowed to push for the designations and to deploy Special Operations troops and naval forces to, as he put it, declare war on the cartels,” The Times said in October 2023.
Rolling Stone reported in May that “if he wins a second term in November, Donald Trump wants to covertly deploy American assassination squads into Mexico soon after he’s sworn into office again, according to three people who’ve discussed the matter with the former U.S. president.”
President López Obrador has categorically rejected the idea that the United States military could be used in Mexico. In 2019, he declined an offer from Trump to help Mexico combat organized crime after an attack on members of an extended Mormon family in northern Mexico that killed three women and six children.
Vance: Mexico in danger of becoming a “narco-state”
Senator Vance, unveiled as Trump’s vice president pick last week, defended the plan for United States forces to target Mexican cartels given the damage they inflict on the U.S.
“It’s funny that people accuse us of being bombastic for saying the cartels — we need to go after them. What about American citizens who are losing their lives by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, because we won’t do something serious about the cartels? That is what’s reckless,” he told Fox News.
“… I actually believe that the Mexican government, even though they couldn’t say that, want President Trump to be serious about the cartels because that poison [fentanyl] is destabilizing their country too. Fourteen billion dollars coming into the cartels, and that was a couple of years ago, it’s probably more today,” Vance said.
“They’re not going to be a real country anymore, they’re going to become a narco-state unless we get some control over this,” he asserted.
