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Andrés Manuel López Obrador warned on Friday, the 29th of November 2019, that he would never allow the United States to conduct a cross-border invasion after Donald Trump vowed that he was determined to designate all 80 Mexican drug cartels operating in all 32 States in Mexico as terrorist organizations. Trump has been talking extremely tough on the powerful drug cartels since one of them was allegedly responsible for the horrendous massacre on November 4th in northern Mexico of nine innocent members of the LeBarón family – six of them small children – all of them holding dual U.S. – Mexican citizenship. Within hours, Trump tweeted that the U.S. was ready to assist Mexico “to wage war on the drug cartels” saying: “It takes an army to defeat an army!”. That of course insulted the national pride of our government which still deeply resents a long history of armed interventions – the last one notably in 1916-17 of a 12,000 man expeditionary corps under the command of General “Blackjack” Pershing ostensibly searching for Pancho Villa. It was therefore to be expected to hear AMLO respond by announcing that “Armed foreigners cannot intervene in our territory. We will not allow that”. And he added: “In the unlikely case that a decision is taken that we consider affects our sovereignty, the we will act within the framework of international law”. Interestingly, that has been interpreted in the Mexican media as the invocation of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter permitting armed self-defense against an armed invasion – and with full justification. Trump repeated his controversial comments during an interview when asked: “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones?” Trump replied: “I don´t want to say what I’m going to do, but they will be designated!”. This oblique response seems to indicate that he is indeed contemplating the use of stand-off weapons systems such as armed drones, long range unmanned cruise missiles and J-Dams – intelligent bombs which can be guided by pilots with precision accuracy against such targets as residential compounds, vehicle and arms storage facilities, even individual persons belonging to the cartels. Trump has certainly used these systems massively and with devastating results against terrorist organizations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. As if to underline his bellicose intentions, Trump sent his Attorney General, William Barr, to Mexico City on Thursday, December 5th to explain to López Obrador, Alejandro Gertz Manero and Marcelo Ebrard what he has already publicly stated: ”The U.S. has offered the Mexican government to let us go in and clean it out and the president of Mexico has so far rejected the offer. But at some point, something has to be done!”.

Well, if AMLO believes he can prevail by countering William Barr with the argument that the real problem, which has resulted in the deaths of some 250,000 Mexicans since Felipe Calderon’s war against drugs, are firearms smuggled in from the United States, he is badly misguided. Barr, who is a bullish, aggressively abusive character, slavishly loyal to Trump, will never give in to the smuggled firearm argument, but insist on the talking points provided to him for his trip to Mexico by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA): “Overview: Mexican Transnational Criminal Organizations continue to control more and more lucrative smuggling corridors, primarily across the Southwest border and maintain the greatest drug trafficking influence in the United States, with continuing signs of growth. They continue to dynamically expand their criminal influence by engaging in business alliances with other transnational criminal organizations including independent criminals, and work in conjunction with U.S. based street gangs, U.S. prison gangs, and Asian money laundering organizations. Mexican transnational criminal organizations export immense quantities of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana and fentanyl into the United States annually. The drugs are delivered to user markets in the United States through transportation routes and distribution cells that are predominantly managed by Mexican transnational criminal organizations and with the cooperation and participation of street gangs on both sides of the border. Drug-related murders in Mexico continue to reach epidemic proportions. 127 murders were committed in only one day, December 1, 2019!”

We must prepare ourselves for very violent events – especially since Felipe Calderon, in his War on Drugs, entered into an agreement with permitted the operation of unmanned American aircraft in a 100 km. zone of our territory along our northern border.