NBC News Reports: Trump plans military action in Mexico?

This past April, according to NBC News, the Trump Administration was considering launching drones on the heads of Mexican drug cartels.

After the story broke, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said as a sovereign country, Mexico rejected any form of intervention or interference.

“ Mexico coordinates and collaborates, but does not subordinate itself,” said Sheinbaum. ( Source: NBC News.)

Seven months later, according to the same news source, the Trump Administration has begun planning for a new mission to send U. S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to two unnamed U. S. officials and two former senior intelligence officials.

According to the NBC News report:

“The early stages of training for the potential mission, which would include ground operations inside Mexico, has already begun, the two current U.S. officials said. But a deployment to Mexico is not imminent, the two U.S. officials and one of the former U.S. officials said. Discussions about the scope of the mission are ongoing, and a final decision has not been made, the two current U.S. officials said.”

This Tuesday, however, during Sheinbaum’s daily morning news conference, Mexico’s first female president flatly denied those news reports, saying that she has repeatedly rejected such offers from President Trump. (Source: The Guardian.)

“I’ve always said thank you very much, President Trump. But no, Mexico is a free, independent and sovereign country,” Sheinbaum said.

As pointed out in the Guardian story, the U.S. and Mexico have together tackled drug cartels in a collaborative effort in the past, and currently, the two countries have reached a security agreement that was negotiated over a span of several months.

“We are going to continue working within this framework of understanding, which has very clear principles … which respects our sovereignty and our territoriality,” said Mexico’s president.

In December 2006, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon initiated a “war on drugs,” which worked about as well as that of the war the U.S. has been fighting since at least the 1980s with its own “war on drugs,” when former First Lady Nancy Reagan came up with her famous line: “Just say no.”

In Mexico, Calderon’s war against the few major drug cartels in existence at the time – the Gulf Cartel, Sinaloa, and the Tijuana Cartel — upset a balance of sorts, fractured those top cartels that ran the country’s illicit drug business, dissolving the drug business into what it is today – a country sadly steeped in blood and violence with an unknown exact number of smaller criminal organizations that are far bloodier and more violent that was the case south of the border prior to December 2006.

This Tuesday, President Sheinbaum spoke to that very bit of past drug-related history: “Some are calling for militarization and war, as happened with the war on drugs. That didn’t work.” (Source: The Telegraph.)

In reference to the NBC News report about Trump’s alleged plans to send U.S. troops into Mexico, Sheinbaum said during her Tuesday morning press conference: “It won't happen. we have no reports that it will happen... And besides, we don’t agree to it.” (Source: Reuters.)

Meanwhile, over in Venezuela…