Trump Administration Plans To Invade Mexico

Read our editorial on the US deployment of troops to Latin American and Caribbean waters here.

The Trump administration has begun disclosing plans to openly invade Mexico under the guise of fighting Mexican drug cartels. According to bourgeois media NBC News, the operation will involve troops from the Joint Special Operations Command under the leadership of U.S. intelligence. Training has already begun.

The U.S. sending CIA and special forces to “fight the cartel” in Mexico is nothing new. However, operations from previous years have for the most part been covert and aimed at coercing Mexico to increase its militarization rather than engaging in direct ground operations. The White House states that the operation will primarily involve drone strikes.

The planning comes at a time when the decaying U.S. state has killed at least 67 people off the coast of Latin America through military strikes, all of whom were ordinary people such as fishermen, boat operators, peasants, and Indigenous Wayuu people living on the coast. The US aims to increase its domination of Latin America in response to heightening competition with other imperialist powers—particularly over rare earth minerals and oil—as well as growing national rebellion against imperialism.

In Mexico, the news of the planned operation is heightening the contradictions between Mexico’s bureaucrat capitalist government and its people. While the comprador president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, states that the Mexican government rejects intervention and interference in public speeches, she has already allowed the CIA to expand the surveillance flights and has sent 10,000 Mexican troops to the US border at the insistence of the US.

The cartels are certainly enemies of the people, serving as tools for imperialism. There is extensive documentation exposing the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command—which is currently planning to invade Mexico—and its close collaboration with organized crime. Members of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the elite special forces out of Fort Bragg trained the leaders of the Zetas Cartel—the deadliest paramilitary cartel in Mexican history—and worked with them to traffic cocaine.

This is nothing new, as U.S. imperialists have a long history of involvement in the drug trade to further monopoly interests in places like Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and many others. To end the cartel, one would need to end imperialism.

In Latin America, imperialists have used military “aid” to suppress rebellion, with US weapons manufacturers receiving giant subsidies in the process. At the same time, they have collaborated with criminal paramilitaries linked to big landowners and cartels to implement extrajudicial massacres in the countryside, and as a result, clearing the land for agribusiness and mining conglomerates. For example, substantial evidence has been shown in court that produce monopoly Chiquita and coal monopoly Drummond have utilized paramilitary organizations to murder union leaders and quell rebellion in Latin America.

Tensions in Mexico are escalating. On November 2^nd, Mayor Carlos Manzo of Uruapan, Michoacán—U.S.’s leading avocado supplier—was assassinated during a public Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) event. The people of Uruapan are attributing this assassination to the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) and have engaged in rebellion this week, demanding an end to cartel impunity.

US imperialism is making use of these contradictions, with political parties even more subservient to its interests such as the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and PAN (National Action Party) attempting to co-opt the justified rebellions of the masses against cartels to mobilize them behind US invasion.

Photo: Trump at the border wall with Mexico in 2020. Retrieved from the White House.

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