Let’s Invade Mexico! (replay)

This is an old essay by Fred Reed, who is no longer writing.   He lived in Mexico for many years with his Mexican wife. He was a prolific, beloved and popular writer.  I replay this in relation to the US threats to Mexico, Colombia and serious threats to Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, accusing Maduro of being a drug lord and inventing a few more cartels that Maduro supposedly runs.

The Latinos have a lively sense of humor, and this is what is posted in the region.

Over to Fred, who very practically explained what a cartel is and where a cartel is.  Some of the informational aspects are now old, for example, the President of Mexico is now Claudia Sheinbaum and not AMLO.

—

In Washington some damned fool Republican, actually Lindsey Graham, R-SC, suggests sending the US Army to Mexico, “to fight the drug trade,” this to be done “with Mexico’s permission,” which is Washington talk for “after buying Mexico’s President.”Whether this is luminous stupidity or malign intent isn’t clear. It is militarily absurd. Why?

First, the population would be united against it. Mexico, like most of the world, has bad memories of invasion by Euro-Americans. Mexico remembers, as historically illiterate gringos do not, losing half of their country to Washington in the Mexican-American war. They remember Pershing’s incursion, and the shelling of Veracruz. They, like most of the world, do not see America as benign. They fear that their country could be the next Iraq, Syria, Libya,or Afghanistan.

Next, imagine a company of GIs, tricked out in battle gear with all sorts of martial clutter attached to them, in Guadalajara, a huge city. They are conspicuous to say the least. The narcos look exactly like everybody else. What, prithee, do the GIs do to oppose them? Or to find them? Check IDs? Polygraph them?  Spanish-speaking GIs will be regarded as traitors and perhaps targeted by the cartels.

Next, the narcos, armed well, are not pushovers. They are accustomed to fighting the Mexican army. What do the GIs do when snipers begin killing them or ambushing groups? The narcos are good at this. Typically GIs, poorly trained, poorly disciplined, and of low quality to begin with, will start firing wildly, killing bystanders, intensifying hatred, and uniting Mexico behind the cartels. The GIs can throw Mexico into chaos, likely the purpose of the thing, but they can do nothing against narcos in the cities.

The countryside? The Sierra Madre mountains, source of and home to many of the narcos, , are steep, heavily forested, with few roads. The narcos know these regions well, and Americans not at all. The villagers will protect the narcos as these often engage in charity in their regions of origin to buy goodwill. It works. There are musical groups, notably Los Tigres del Norte, famous for ballads lionizing the narcos.

An attempt to use drones against the cartels will result chiefly in killing the wrong people and will arouse fury. What are GIs going to do in such parts?

The deserts of northern Mexico are rocky, as inhospitable as anywhere on earth. Vehicles would be useless. So would infantry.
When the invasion doesn’t work, Washington will want to send more troops in its standard mission creep. More soldiers will require more bases. It will be discovered that helicopters are needed, and then fighter-bombers. Welcome to Mexighanistan.

So much for military aspects. But is Washington really concerned with the drug trade? No.

Consider. A (very) major factor in keeping the cartels in business is their possession of large quantities of military-grade weaponry, allowing them to outgun the police. where do these arms come from? The United States. In large quantities. Someone is making a bundle on the trade.

Washington knows this. If it wanted to oppose the narcos, it would stop the flow. It doesn’t. Whether this is due to electoral fear of the NRA or contentedness with a highly lucrative status quo can, perhaps, be argued.

Why end a good thing? The narco trade is the best racket going on the planet and the American public an invaluable resource to be bled from the high schools up. The business is said to involve some forty billion green ones a year. That much honey draws a lot of flies, including some big ones. So much money is not going primarily into the pockets of dirtball narcotraficantes in Sinaloa. Whoever is getting it–banks, hedge funds, intelligence agencies, and of course crooked pols–cannot possibly want the magic fountain to dry up.

So if Washinton does not really want to end the drug trade, and knows that the military cannot do it, why the idea of sending troops? Because the mere idea is intimidating to Mexico, suggesting the possibility of Mexico’s becoming a sort of Latin Iraq. Few here believe that Americans, once in, would ever leave.

Washington regards Latin America, as Mexicans know well, as its private realm of dominion and pillage. The State Department says openly that it wants Latin America’s resources. Among its standard techniques for getting what it wants are coups, embargos, color revolutions, sanctions, assassinations, and the sowing of chaos. Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil are current examples. Washington, of course, wants to control Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil and looks with equal covetousness at the lithium triad of Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, which has much of the world’s reserves of the metal.  Mexico has oil and, as recently discovered, lithium. It also, weirdly for Mexico, has a president who is not for sale. He, AMLO, has said clearly that Mexico’s resources are Mexico’s, and are going to stay that way. He has also refused to support Washington’s war in the Ukraine, calling for negotiations. He has further said that Mexico is not an American colony and, most recently, that it is not going to accept US troops. In short, he is a very bad person.  (Presidente Claudia carries out AMLO’s previously set priorities).

Interestingly, AMLO has said that if the Republicans keep pushing for an invasion, he will urge all Latinos in the US to vote Democrat. Now, that’s a hoot. The meddlers get meddled. Question: What is the margin of victory in presidential elections in the US, and how many registered Latino voters are there? Just asking.

—

Mexico’s most well known leftist magazine, featured this editorial:

Interventionism & Latin American Unity
By Mexico Solidarity

This editorial originally appeared in the August 11, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Last Thursday, the 7th, US Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, without evidence, of collaborating with groups such as the Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa cartel, and announced that the White House had increased the reward to $50 million (more than 900 million pesos) for information leading to the arrest of the Bolivarian leader. The following day, The New York Times revealed that Donald Trump secretly instructed the Pentagon to begin using military force against the eight drug cartels his administration classified as terrorist organizations in February of this year, including the two that Maduro allegedly aids. It should be remembered that U.S. law empowers the president to use armed forces against any person or institution he arbitrarily accuses of terrorism, without requesting authorization from Congress and without criminal or administrative liability for civilian deaths and property damage caused during his military aggression.

Given Washington’s history of attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan government and install a puppet regime in Caracas, it would be naive to think these events are unrelated. With a full understanding of Trump’s interventionist intentions, Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced any military operation without the approval of our sister countries as an aggression against Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a fundamental contradiction to our principle of liberty. He recalled the call of the liberator Simón Bolívar, “Liberty or death!” Petro also reaffirmed the brotherhood between Colombia and Venezuela, which he considered to be the same people, the same flag, the same history, while also reaffirming his solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic.

The first left-leaning chief executive in Colombia’s history is right to denounce the interventionist motivations behind the attacks against Maduro. He is equally correct when he claims that the destruction of the Venezuelan economy, orchestrated from Washington and backed by the European Union and the Latin American far right, benefits the criminal groups it aims to combat, leaving millions of people with no alternative but a career in crime while depriving the state of urgent resources to meet the needs of its inhabitants and combat the powerful cartels.

It would also be dangerously optimistic to believe that Trumpism’s imperialist ambitions are limited to the efforts of the White House tenants of the last quarter-century to put an end to Chavismo with the ultimate goal of seizing the planet’s most abundant oil reserves.

On the contrary, it is clear that the designation of the cartels as terrorist organizations and the directives to undertake military operations against them are a threat to any country that defends its sovereignty against US interference in particular and Western interference in general. Therefore, Latin American and Caribbean unity is revealed as an imperative for mutual protection and the rejection of Washington’s stubborn insistence in ruling the destinies of the region.