Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said that Mexico will not tolerate an “invasion” of its national sovereignty after the Trump administration moved to formally designate eight Latin American crime organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
“This cannot be an opportunity for the U.S. to invade our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing on Thursday. “With Mexico it is collaboration and coordination, never subordination or interventionism, and even less invasion.”
“We want to be clear given this designation that we don’t negotiate our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum added. “There can be no interference or subordination.
“Both countries want to reduce the consumption of drugs and the trafficking of illegal drugs.”
Sheinbaum said her government was not consulted by the United States in its decision to include Mexican cartels on a list of global terrorist organizations, including the the Sinaloa cartel, United cartel, the Michoacana family and the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Canada, too, is listing seven transnational criminal organizations — including multiple drug cartels — as terrorist entities under the Criminal Code, the public safety minister announced Thursday.
“The Mexican people will under no circumstances accept interventions, intrusions, or any other action from abroad that are detrimental to the integrity, independence, or sovereignty of the nation… [including] violations of Mexican territory, whether by land, sea or air,” Sheinbaum said.
Sheinbaum said Thursday she would also propose a second constitutional reform that would stiffen the penalties for Mexicans and foreigners who engage in arms trafficking, which is a top diplomatic issue for Mexico, as most guns used in crimes in the country are trafficked from the United States.
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Last week, she threatened U.S. gunmakers with the legal action if Trump’s administration went through with its intentions of declaring Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“If they declare these organized crime groups as terrorists, we will have no option than to extend our lawsuits against the U.S., because as the Justice Department has already confessed, 74 per cent of all firearms in possession of drug cartels come from the U.S.,” Sheinbaum said.
“So, where do the armories stand after the designation?” she added.
During her press conference on Feb. 14, she said that a new charge could include alleged “complicity” of gunmakers with terror groups.
On Feb. 13, the New York Times reported that the U.S. State Department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations.”
“The executive order called for the designations, saying the cartels ‘constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime’ and that the United States would ‘ensure the total elimination’ of the groups,” The Times reported.
The report added that the criminal groups and their members “could be labeled foreign terrorist organizations or specially designated global terrorists” and “the designations mean the U.S. government can impose broad economic sanctions on the groups and on people or entities linked to them.”
Last August, a U.S. judge dismissed a $10 billion lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against six U.S. gun manufacturers. Mexico had argued the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market.
However, the judge ruled that Mexico had not provided concrete evidence that any of the six companies’ activities in Massachusetts were connected to any suffering caused in Mexico by guns.
Earlier this month, Sheinbaum accused the U.S. of harbouring drug cartels, and claimed American citizens are working with organized crime groups in Mexico after Trump’s “slanderous” claims that Mexico had joined forces with drug traffickers.
“There is also organized crime in the United States and there are American people who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference on Feb. 13. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl in the cities of the United States?”
Sheinbaum was responding to a reporter from the Animal Político news outlet, who mentioned an investigation they published this week that found more than 2,600 U.S. citizens have been arrested in Mexico for offences related to organized crime, including smuggling drugs and firearms, since Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018.
“The issue isn’t just that drugs go from Mexico to the United States,” she added.
—With files from Reuters
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