President Donald Trump is pressuring Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo to allow greater military involvement against drug cartels, “people familiar with the discussions” told The Wall Street Journal.
According to a report by José de Córdoba, a WSJ reporter in Mexico, and Santiago Pérez, the newspaper’s deputy editor for Latin America, this demand turns security into a point of contention between the two nations, which are currently engaged in intense negotiations on trade and migration issues.
The New York newspaper’s article, titled “Trump and Mexico’s Sheinbaum clash over drug cartels,” highlights that tensions escalated toward the end of a 45-minute phone conversation on April 16, “when Trump pressed for the US military to take a leading role in combating Mexican drug gangs that produce and traffic fentanyl to the United States, according to the sources. Sheinbaum told Trump that her administration would cooperate on issues such as intelligence sharing, but would not accept a direct military presence, the sources added.”
Trump has publicly stated that the United States would take unilateral action if Mexico does not dismantle the cartels. “Mexico is terribly afraid of the cartels,” Trump told the Spanish-language network Fox News shortly after the April 16 conversation. “We want to help her. We want to help Mexico, because you can’t govern a country like that. You simply can’t,” the journalists quoted in their report for the WSJ.
