Mexican president touts successful crackdown on cartels despite Trump’s threats of intervention
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that efforts to crack down on Mexican cartels and slow northward migration were yielding “compelling results” in an effort to head off talks of intervention by the Trump administration.
The comments come after US President Donald Trump last week threatened action against Mexican drug cartels by US forces. Mr. Trump told Fox News last week that the United States had “eliminated 97% of drugs coming in by sea” and that the United States was “now going to start hitting land, as far as the cartels are concerned.” The Trump administration has also begun to add militarized zones to the southern border.
Sheinbaum, a left-winger who boasts of confronting chaos with “a cool head,” has sought to appease Mr. Trump and, unlike Maduro, worked to build strong relations between the Mexican and U.S. governments. A drama American military raid on Venezuela which filed former president Nicolas Maduro in early January put much of Latin America in tension, fueling fears that Mr. Trump could soon turn American forces against other countries, especially Cuba and Mexico.
On Thursday evening, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mexican Foreign Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente issued a joint statement after a phone call, saying they agreed that “more needs to be done to address common threats.”
Sheinbaum, discussing the call Friday during his morning press briefing, said the Mexican government has made significant progress in cracking down on the cartels, citing a sharp drop in the homicide rate, far fewer seizures of fentanyl by U.S. authorities at the border and sparse migration. Mexican authorities seized more than 1,500 pounds of methamphetamine from clandestine laboratories across the country earlier this week.
She stressed that this was a joint effort with the United States. “The joint cooperation and the work carried out by Mexico have produced very convincing results,” she said.
She reiterated her call for the United States to end arms trafficking to Mexico and stressed that drug use in the United States is a key factor fueling cartel violence in Mexico.
“The other side must also do its part. This consumer crisis that they are experiencing there must also be addressed from a public health point of view, through educational campaigns,” she said.
Sheinbaum and Mr. Trump also spoke by telephone on Monday. Sheinbaum said it was a “very good conversation.”
“We told him that for the moment everything is going very well, that it is not necessary and that in addition there is the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Mexico and he understood,” she said.
