President Trump has ordered military action against Latin American drug cartels and has threatened a new tariff. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has pushed back.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is flying to Mexico on Tuesday for talks with top officials on security, drugs and migration issues, as U.S.-Mexico tensions continue to rise following months of pressure from President Trump.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has been engaged in a delicate balancing act with Mr. Trump. She is trying to cooperate in areas where the two nations have mutual interests, but must also show Mexicans she is not bowing to what many people in her country consider to be bullying by an American leader.
Mr. Rubio is making his third trip to Latin America as secretary of state, and he plans to travel to Ecuador after his stop in Mexico. During his 14 years as a senator representing Florida, he tried to shape policy in Latin America, taking a hard line on Cuba, where his parents are from, and on Venezuela.
Mr. Trump has tried to project greater U.S. power and dominance across the Americas, and has threatened governments that have been traditional partners, including Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Panama.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have insisted that Mexico crack down harder on drug cartels, even though law enforcement agencies under Ms. Sheinbaum have made many more arrests compared to recent years. Mr. Trump has blamed the cartels for manufacturing fentanyl and other highly addictive synthetic drugs in large quantities and moving them into the United States.
Mr. Trump has secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to take military action against certain Latin American drug cartels that the administration has labeled terrorist organizations, The New York Times reported last month.
At the Pentagon on Tuesday, officials were scrambling to follow up on Mr. Trump’s abrupt announcement of a U.S. strike on a “drug-carrying boat” linked to Venezuela. Mr. Rubio wrote on social media that “today the U.S. military conducted a lethal strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”
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Several large Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, are among the criminal groups in Latin America that the State Department in February designated foreign terrorist organizations.
Mr. Trump has also said Mexico should do more to keep migrants from crossing into the United States, even though the number of crossings has plummeted in recent months. And citing what he called the Mexican government’s weak stance on cartels, Mr. Trump threatened to impose a tariff of 30 percent on goods shipped from Mexico, one of the main trading partners of the United States.
American companies importing Mexican goods would pay the tariff and almost certainly pass on the costs to American consumers.
Ms. Sheinbaum has said she is working on the terms of a new security arrangement with the United States. Officials from both countries have discussed a broad agreement that would encompass intelligence sharing and cooperation between security forces. But Ms. Sheinbaum and her aides have insisted that any arrangement guarantee that the United States respects Mexico’s sovereignty, meaning the U.S. military would not take unilateral action inside Mexico against people or cartels.
Mr. Rubio is expected to discuss questions around such an arrangement in meetings on Wednesday in Mexico City.
Mexican officials have been watching the Pentagon’s deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to the border between the two nations. And they are worried that the U.S. military could conduct drone strikes in Mexico, as it has done in the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia under Republican and Democratic administrations this century.
Mexican officials are asking their American counterparts to work harder to limit the flow of weapons from the United States to Mexico. Mexican cartels are using military-grade weapons while fighting one another and law enforcement agencies. Among the arms being used are Claymore land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars built from gas-tank tubes and armored trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.
Mexican officials say that most of the weapons originate in the United States. Criminal groups are also burying improvised explosive devices and arming drones bought online with toxic chemicals and bombs. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/us/politics/rubio-sheinbaum-cartels-mexico.html)
