MEXICO CITY: President Claudia Sheinbaum said Saturday that she had rejected an offer from US President Donald Trump to send American troops to Mexico to help combat drug trafficking.
“I told him, ‘No, President Trump, our territory is inviolable, our sovereignty is inviolable, our sovereignty is not for sale,’” she said at a public event, referring to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal that described a tense exchange between the leaders.
During the recent call, Sheinbaum said, Trump had asked how he could help fight organized crime and suggested sending troops.
She said she declined, telling him that “we will never accept the presence of the United States Army in our territory.”
Sheinbaum said she offered to collaborate, including through greater information-sharing.
Trump himself said in an interview last week with conservative outlet The Blaze that he had offered to help Mexico fight the drug cartels, but that he had been turned down.
Without providing details, Trump told his interviewer: “You could say at some point maybe something’s gonna have to happen. It can’t go on the way it is.”
In her appearance Saturday, Sheinbaum said she had urged Trump to stop the cross-border arms trafficking that has contributed to a wave of violence lasting nearly two decades, claiming more than 450,000 lives in Mexico.
Trump, on his part, has complained repeatedly about cross-border drug smuggling and has pressured Mexico to crack down on criminal cartels.
Trump angered Mexicans in early March when he said America’s southern neighbor was “dominated entirely by criminal cartels that murder, rape, torture and exercise total control... posing a grave threat to (US) national security.”
Trump has also long complained — and uses as an argument for imposing tariffs on the country — that Mexico has not done enough to stop the trafficking of migrants and drugs, particularly fentanyl, into the United States.
Those topics have been part of an ongoing diplomatic dance between the countries over the trade tariffs.
Mexico, as the largest US trade partner and the second-largest economy in Latin America, is considered one of the most vulnerable to the US president’s expansive import duties.
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