When one of my nephews was a wee lad, he learned the joy of peeing outside. At one point, he excitedly exclaimed, “I’m going to pee on everything — I’m going to pee on the whole world!”
I’m reminded of that story when reading this nonsense:
Within Donald Trump’s government-in-waiting, there is a fresh debate over whether and how thoroughly the president-elect should follow through on his campaign promise to attack or even invade Mexico, as part of the “war” he’s pledged to wage against powerful drug cartels.
“How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior Trump transition member. “That is the question.”
I’m no expert on Mexico or war, but it would appear to me, as someone who’s spent a couple of months there in the past couple of years, that any “invasion” would be pretty daunting. The Mexican border from, say, Nogales west to Tijuana, is crowded border towns surrounded by huge, dry desert. Heading east from Nogales, there’s a lot of desert until you hit Juarez, then the Rio Grande and Big Bend, which is some of the most remote country in North America. So, an invading army would be faced with urban warfare in those big towns, or having to maintain hundreds of miles of supply lines through the desert. The minute the war started, what the hell would happen to the maquiladoras (US corporate manufacturing plants) in Mexicali, Nogales, Saltillo and other places where cars, appliances, clothing and the like are manufactured?
Even if we’re going to unilaterally have airstrikes and drone attacks on cartels, how the hell would we find them? It would be guerrilla warfare with a pretty determined, wealthy and decently armed enemy.
Why is this in the press all of a sudden? I’m guessing it’s because a 62-year-old Jewish woman who happens to be the current President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, shit in Trump’s Wheaties the other day. After threatening reciprocal tariffs, she did this: [probably paywalled link]
Sheinbaum read out the entire letter, which in its penultimate paragraph said that a U.S. tariff on Mexican exports would be met with another tariff “in response.”
In her letter, the president also:
- Told Trump that Mexico has developed a “comprehensive policy” to attend to migrants who “cross our territory” en route to the United States. She told the president-elect that he “probably” isn’t aware of the efforts Mexico has made to stem migration to the U.S.
- Highlighted that “encounters” between United States authorities and migrants on the Mexico-U.S. border declined 75% between December 2023 and November 2024.
- Told Trump that Mexico and the United States need to jointly develop “another model of labor mobility” that responds to the U.S. need for workers and provides “attention to the causes that lead families to leave their places of origin.”
- Told Trump that if the United States allocated “a percentage” of what it spends on “war” to “the construction of peace and to development,” it would be able to substantially reduce migration.
- Pointed out that Mexican authorities have seized tonnes of drugs so far this year, confiscated more than 10,000 weapons and arrested over 15,000 people “for violence related to drug trafficking.”
- Highlighted that 70% of “illegal weapons” seized in Mexico come from the United States.
“We don’t produce the weapons, we don’t consume the synthetic drugs,” Sheinbaum wrote in her letter to Trump.
“The deaths due to crime that responds to the demand for drugs in your country, unfortunately, we are the ones who … [suffer] them,” she told the president-elect.
Claudia, like her predecessor AMLO, has a daily morning press conference (“mañanera”) where she meets the press to make her statement of the day. When I was following Mexican politics more closely, it was clear that AMLO (who’s a bit of a weirdo, IMO) would use some of that time to grind axes about some of his favorite grudges. Claudia’s latest mañaneras have been on the topics of trade and violence against women. She strikes me as a more serious, more focused leader than AMLO.
Anyway, I hope she keeps it up. She’s got big work ahead of her in a country with a lot of problems.
Also, I thought it was funny that Ryan Cooper and Jon Favreau discussed mañaneras and thought they were a good idea — honestly, they might be, because we could learn something from how Morena (Claudia and AMLO’s party) communicate.
So Trump’s Gonna Invade Mexico – Yeah, RightPost + Comments (100)
