Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has rejected the idea that the US might invade Mexico after news reports suggested Donald Trump had authorized the use of military force targeting drug cartels deemed terrorist organizations in Latin American countries.
“The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military,” she said during a daily news conference on Friday. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”
The Mexican president said her government had been informed of the executive order but insisted that “it had nothing to do with the participation of any military or any institution on our territory. There is no risk that they will invade our territory.”
News of Trump’s secret directive to the Pentagon was first reported by the New York Times, which cited people familiar with the matter, and noted that the order “provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels”.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the move would enable the US government to use the military to target trafficking organizations.
“It allows us to now target what they’re operating and to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever … to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Rubio said.
“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.“
Trump has made going after Latin American drug-trafficking organizations a top priority of his administration: in February, the state department designated seven organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations, including five powerful cartels in Mexico.
At the time, the White House claimed these groups constituted “a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime” with activities including “infiltration into foreign governments across the Western Hemisphere”.
It is unclear how much impact that designation has had, as US agencies already have a range of tools to target transnational organised crime groups by restricting their members’ abilities to travel or do business.
But the designation would widen the range of potential targets for prosecution to include anyone who provides “material support” to the cartels.
The Trump administration has also deployed thousands of active-duty combat troops, as well as drones and spy planes to the south-west US border in order to crack down on the northward flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl, as well as staunch the flow of immigrants.
Related: Trump administration doubles reward for arrest of Venezuela’s president to $50m
If confirmed, this latest order would represent a profound and unprecedented escalation of tactics by the US government in Latin America, potentially opening the door for unilateral American military assaults across the region.
Last month, the US treasury department announced it was designating the so-called Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, as a global terrorist group, claiming the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was the head of the organization.
US prosecutors describe the Cartel of the Suns as a government-run drug-trafficking group, but analysts in the region say that it is more of a network of trafficking organizations groups protected by elements within the Venezuelan state.
On Thursday, the state department and justice department announced that the US was offering a $50m reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest, claiming he has been a leader of the group “for over a decade” as it has trafficked drugs into the US.
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