The media’s role in selling the next military misadventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age.
Over the past month or so, the New York Times has published no fewer than four articles about the grisly fentanyl trade, three of which focus exclusively on the Mexican side of the business. The scale and timing of the output have prompted accusations in Mexico that the Grey Lady is helping to prepare the ground for the incoming Trump administration’s plans to intervene militarily in Mexico, just as it has helped drum up support for many of the US’ previous military misadventures of recent decades, including, perhaps most famously, the second Gulf War.
The media’s role in selling the next military adventure should never be underestimated, even in this media-skeptic age. In a 2010 article, the late Australian war journalist John Pilger cited a quote from the then-US commander General David Petraeus. Writing in the US army manual on counterinsurgency, Petreaus had described Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters, Pilger wrote, is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”.
A few sample headlines:
The New York Times headlines during US military interventions
"How to Strangle Iraq"
"Bombing Iraq is not enough"
"American bombs make Iraq stronger"
"Bomb North Korea Before It's Too Late"
"Bomb Syria, even if it's illegal"
"To stop Iranian bombs, bomb Iran"The spirit… pic.twitter.com/mNuBUNksMB
— Sprinter Observer (@SprinterObserve) August 7, 2023
The most recent Times article, published on December 29, has sparked a storm of controversy inside Mexico. Titled “This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel Fentanyl Lab”, the article recounts how two courageous NYT reporters, including the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau chief, Natalie Kitroeff, and a photographer witnessed the alleged manufacture of fentanyl in a cramped, makeshift kitchen in downtown Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state, “on a bustling street full of pedestrians, cars and food stalls.”
As the article’s accompanying photos show, the kitchen is crammed with pans, utensils, a selection of bottled Mexican sauces, what appears to be a jar of mayonnaise as well as a half-finished bottle of Corona beer. The cartel’s cook wears the flimsiest of protective equipment in a poorly-ventilated apartment (Lambert would not be impressed).
‘This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel #Fentanyl Lab. @nytimes reporters witnessed the dangerous fentanyl production process inside a secret lab in Culiacán run by Mexico’s most powerful criminal syndicate. https://t.co/tSDuSb2Il5 via @nytimes #ToxicDrugCrisis
— André Picard (@picardonhealth) December 29, 2024
“We wore gas masks and hazmat suits, but the cook had on only a surgical mask,” the report claims. “He and his partner had rushed here to fulfill an order for 10 kilograms of fentanyl. While one sniff of the toxic chemicals could kill us, they explained, they had built up a tolerance to the lethal drug.”
The idea that Mexico’s fentanyl “cooks” can build up such high levels of tolerance to fentanyl that they no longer need protection from the gases generated by the chemical reactions beyond a pair of rudimentary rubber gloves, a balaclava and a baseball cap in a room with two small ventilation vents seems rather fanciful. As the Mexican journalist Jesús Escobar Tobár notes, it simply “doesn’t pass the smell test” (pun presumably intended).
José Jaime Ruiz writes, acidly, in Milenio, that the big takeaway from the Times‘ latest expose is not that Mexico’s drug cartels are producing fentanyl in primitive kitchens with only the most basic kitchen utensils at their disposal, which according to some experts is possible though highly dangerous; it is that the cooks themselves have developed superhuman resistance to a substance so toxic that it is killing off close to a hundred thousand people in the US each year.
The Mexican government has responded to the report by accusing the NYT reporters of having “over-active imaginations” — inspired, perhaps, by popular TV shows like Narcos and Breaking Bad. President Claudia Sheinbaum herself described the article as “lacking in credibility”. That’s not to say that fentanyl is not being produced in Mexico in large quantities, including in makeshift facilities similar to the one featured in the report, but rather that certain details are clearly being exaggerated.
“Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than morphine, both in toxicity and potency, depending on the dose,” said Dr. Alex Svarch, director of Mexico’s IMSS Bienestar health system at Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference roughly a week ago. “There is no scientific physiological phenomenon known as lethal tolerance to toxicity. This explains why there is inexorably a need for a laboratory where exposure conditions can be controlled, where there is specialized equipment to carry out chemical synthesis and with professional ventilation systems, not a domestic kitchen, as the report shows.”
After analysing the images and videos published by The New York Times, Juana Peñaloza Ibarra, a precursor chemical analyst at Mexico’s Navy Department, concluded that the report does not show a series of chemical precursors necessary for the manufacture of fentanyl, nor the requisite machinery, much less the minimum personal protective equipment, without which it is impossible to avoid intoxication from toxic gases during the manufacturing of the drug.
“Therefore,… there are insufficient elements to demonstrate that the information presented in the article of The New York Times documents a laboratory for the synthesis of fentanyl hydrochloride.”
Some Mexican journalists have suggested that the NYT reporters may have fallen victim to a hoax hatched by one of Sinaloa’s drug gangs. Mike Vigil, a former DEA agent, speculates that they may have paid the cartel members for the scoop, and paid a very high price in the process. One journalist, Claudia Villegas, suggested that now that the world knows just about everything there is to know about Mexico’s side of the drug trade, perhaps it’s time for the NYT to conduct some investigative reporting on how the fentanyl reaches US streets after crossing the border.
So far, the Times has issued two statements backing the reporting “fully”, including, apparently, the heavily disputed claim that people can develop substantial resistance to the drug:
The New York Times responds to criticisms about our reporting on fentanyl production in Mexico: pic.twitter.com/xW7fu0xNMu
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) December 30, 2024
The second statement ends with a few words of self-congratulatory smugness:
“The role of independent journalism is to document the world as it is, bringing the truth to light to audiences everywhere”
The Sheinbaum government admits that illicit fentanyl production is a problem in Mexico, but it takes issue with the tabloid way in which the NYT garnishes its reporting. It also asserts that the main driver of the US’ opioid epidemic is demand rather than supply. Although trafficking of the drug in Sinaloa has not ceased, authorities argue that legal reforms and inter-institutional coordination have helped frustrate criminal operations. This has coincided with a commitment by China to rein in the production of critical chemicals for the manufacture of fentanyl as well as a sharp decline in drug overdose fatalities in the US in recent months.
But articles like this New York Times one serve a larger purpose — namely, to further Washington’s geostrategic interests in Mexico as well as helping to shift responsibility for the US’ largely homemade drug problems. For months senior Republican lawmakers have been crafting a narrative in which blame for the US’ opioid epidemic and other drug problems is pinned exclusively on outside actors — in this case, Mexico and China — while absolving domestic players of any responsibility, including the US government, US drugs regulators and the pharmaceuticals that got the ball rolling roughly three decades ago.
“A Staggering Failure”
This all forms part of a new intensification of the US’ 53-year War on Drugs — a war that has been a “staggering failure” — at least in terms of its ostensible goal of combating illegal drug use, as even a NYT op-ed admitted in 2022. Authored by Christy Thornton, an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins, the article concludes with this sobering paragraph:
Ultimately, more than four decades of the U.S.-led war on drugs abroad has not only failed to reduce the supply of illicit substances, it has actually made them more dangerous. A recent U.N. report found that global drug use is up 26 percent from a decade ago. Another survey by the Drug Enforcement Administration confirmed that despite decades of these source control measures, drug prices remain steady, purity and potency remain high, drugs remain widely available, and overdoses are skyrocketing.
Recent reports by Reuters (including here and here) reveal how unfettered global trade, particularly in the age of online commerce, has made it all but impossible to block imports of the chemical precursors needed to produce synthetic opioids, much as the original NAFTA helped fuel the modern drug trade, turning Mexico into a vital link in the global narcotics supply chains:
In January 2023, U.S. federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico.
They estimate that over the previous two years, the gray-bearded courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living soul in the United States several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver.
Even more astonishing is what fed this circuitous route: a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States.
This change to trade policy has upended the logistics of international drug trafficking. In the past few years, the United States has become a major transshipment point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexico’s cartels to manufacture the fentanyl that’s devastating U.S. communities, anti-narcotics agents say. Traffickers have pulled it off by riding a surge in e-commerce that’s flooding the U.S. with packages, helped by that trade provision.
In short, a regulatory tweak fueling America’s online shopping habit is also enabling the country’s crippling addiction to synthetic opioids.
From the other Reuters piece:
The problem for regulators: Many of the same chemicals used to make fentanyl are also crucial to legitimate industries, from perfumes and pharmaceuticals to rubber and dyes. Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl’s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process – rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities.
Dark Alliance
it goes without saying that the real driving motivation behind the latest calls to expand the war on drugs is not to stem the flow of drugs into the US, or to tackle the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America — if Washington was serious about the latter, it would have stemmed the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it was serious about tackling drug addiction, it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic in the first place. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with financial slaps on the wrists.
In the past 12 months alone, Washington has signed numerous agreements with governments in South America aimed at intensifying cooperation in the fight against the region’s drug cartels. More US-made weapons are flowing southward, more US military bases are being built, including, most recently, in the Galapagos Islands. Both the Milei government in Argentina and the Noboa administration in Ecuador have designated drug cartels as narco-terroristas, opening the way to closer alignment with US Southern Command.
On December 22, Trump pledged to do the same with the Mexican cartels. Though long anticipated, the announcement set off alarm bells on the other side of the border, inviting a swift response from President Claudia Sheinbaum. Her government, she said, will not accept foreign “interference” in Mexico. Meanwhile, the incoming Trump administration has been debating “to what extent” the US should invade Mexico while appointing a former CIA agent and Green Beret officer as its ambassador to Mexico.
Designating drug cartels as terrorists “has great appeal, not because it expands legal authority, but because it sends a loud message” to the country in question, notes a 2023 Rand Corporation report:
People view terrorism as more heinous than ordinary crime. Calling it drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder by themselves doesn’t adequately reflect the national outrage to some.
The terrorist label elevates the issue, suggesting that more must be done to prevent these kinds of acts in the future, and that, in this case, if Mexico does not do something, the United States will. Applying a terrorist label raises the possibility of military action.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made this explicit when in response to the Matamoros murders, he said, We are going to unleash “the fury and the might of the United States.” Lest anyone not get it, he explained, “It’s time now to get serious and use all the tools in our toolbox, not just in the prosecution way, not just in the law enforcement lane, but in the military lane as well.” Specifically, he called upon Congress to authorize the use of military force not to invade Mexico but to destroy drug labs.
The US already began escalating its meddling in Mexico early last year. In February, Propublica and the New York Times ran speculative pieces accusing former President López Obrador of links to the drug cartels — in the middle of the country’s presidential elections. Months later, the US flouted Mexican sovereignty by having the Sinaloan old-timer Mayo Zambada ambushed, kidnapped and flown across the border. As presumably intended, the move set off a violent turf war between two rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel as well as a crackdown by Mexico’s armed forces on the fentanyl trade, so far with a certain degree of success.
It is a foretaste of what could lie in store in the months ahead if Sheinbaum does not do as instructed by Washington and expand the war against the cartels: direct hits against cartel leaders, probably with drones, with or, most likely, without the permission of Mexican authorities. That said, as former Mexican ambassador to the US Jorge Castañeda Gutman points out, the mere designation of Mexican cartels as international terrorist organizations by the US does not necessarily mean that the US will immediately apply the principle of extraterritoriality (the application of US law to persons, conduct, or property outside its own territory).
But key factions within the Mexican are deeply concerned. A leaked internal document allegedly written by Lopéz Obrador himself and sent to the big wigs of Mexico’s ruling Morena party just before Christmas warns that US intervention could drive a wedge between the people and the government, and even spark internal armed risings among some of the affected communities: in other words, the usual MO of the Empire of Chaos.
The Empire, as always, will be able to count on the full-throated support of the NYT and other legacy media. In recent days, a number of journalists here in Mexico have revisited the role The Times played in destroying the reputation and career of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, who in the mid-90s exposed the distribution network responsible for supplying the cocaine that helped spark South Central Los Angeles’s crack epidemic. That network included the Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug cartels, LA-based drug dealers and the CIA.
In 2014, Greg Grandin recounted in an article for The Nation how the New York Times, The Washington Post and, particularly, the Los Angeles Times, rather than follow up on Webb’s findings, put together teams of writers tasked with exhaustively fact-checking Webb’s work. Interestingly, one of the lead writers was Tim Golden, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the attempted hatchet-job on AMLO for ProPublica in February. In one of the two articles on Webb’s Dark Alliance series, Golden described the series’ evidence as “thin”.
The three newspapers ultimately wrecked Webb’s reputation, driving him out of the profession he loved and into what appears to have been a suicidal depression. That said, the gun that ended up taking Webb’s life fired two bullets point blank into his head, the first allegedly into his cheek (make of that what you will).
“As many of Webb’s defenders have noted, if journalists had put half the passion into following up the implications of that report that they put to discrediting Webb, we’d know a lot more about the darkest side of America’s national security state,” wrote Grandin. But it is precisely that side that newspapers like the New York Times ultimately serve and protect.
I’d bet my 100 pennies on this article not being a hoax by a cartel on a couple of well intentioned reporters. The NYT doesn’t do that. The NYT is behind the hoax. They are the propagandists. It’s what they do.
Why , at the first quarter of the 21st century ; is it that everyone I know who is an avid NYT reader, are the second most ignorant group of people out there? There are people who literally pay no attention to news, world events, couldn’t even pick the president out of a line-up; kind of ignorant. But at least they generally understand that politicians are always lying. Whereas, the NYT crowd is the strangest combination of arrogance and ignorance put together. It is baffling. These are otherwise intelligent people, but the chasm between reality and what they believe is stunning. And talking about it is verboten.
A hit piece like these at the NYT could be forshadowing that the US gov’t wants more of a cut of the fentanyl trade. After all the us went to vietnam and got into the heroin business. South america and got into the cocaine business. Went into afghanistan and got the opium growing again. Maybe, the cia needs more black-op funding?
do they ever really “get rid” of a cartel? or do they just move in and take over…?
While I wouldn’t say that it is impossible for the US or some of its darker corners desiring more of a cut in the fentanyl trade, I’d be more inclined to believe that it’s the excuse for regime change or at least significant pressure to make existing Mexican politicians more compliant – the last couple haven’t been the most cooperative with US elite desires. The desire to contain China is powerful and based upon recent experiences Mexico has been used as a back door to sidestep US economic war strategies against China. If the US has more control over Mexico it can continue to allow US companies to operate in Mexico while using Mexico directly to support it’s economic war strategies against China by closing that back door.
Thank you. Sounds similar to the recent CNN “scoop” where one of their reporters “rescued” a previously undetected prisoner from a Syrian jail – https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/17/cnn-faces-backlash-over-staged-syrian-prisoner-rescue-report
My buddy claims that CNN was duped, probably because that is what CNN is claiming, but like the NYT, CNN are the propagandists and knew exactly what they were doing. They just got caught.
Ask your buddy about the same CNN journalist sniffing Assad’s chemical weapons leftovers in a backpack.
Just yesterday she was “kidnapped” in the Sudan. Don’t worry they let her go unharmed.
Couldn’t agree more with your take on the “combined arrogance and ignorance” of the “NYT crowd”. Just a sample of the opinions I’ve fielded over the past few months from the NYT crowd — Joe Biden is the best president of our lifetime; the current economy is the best ever; Kamala Harris lost the election because of racism, misogyny, and stupid people voting against their own interests; and my personal favorite, utter disbelief over the large number of US Palestinians who voted for Trump.
So the NYT publishes a rebuttal saying that it “quoted Mexican officials” and “documented a Sinaloa cartel lab”. Unfortunately that’s not the question: the question is whether those photographs are of the synthesis of fentanyl, which is the implication of the article. My money is on ” no”, hence the weasel-worded straw men in defence.
Sure, you quoted some Mexican official compromised by US interests and you published a picture of, at best, somebody stirring some kind of fentanyl porridge, possibly simply redissolving it or changing its final form into a salt. But nothing about that set up suggests any kind of organic synthesis lab producing fentanyl from precursors. “Back room chemists” are surprisingly smart (or not surprising at all, when you think about it). They are not street goons performing bucket chemistry like they are mixing paint.
To get decent yields in organic synthesis, you need tight control of the conditions: temperature, humidity, potentially oxygen-free atmosphere, possibly anhydrous conditions. To stay alive, you need a fume hood and/or PPE and rigorous fire/explosion risk minimisation. Most useful reactions take place in flammable, low melting point solvents that are often asphyxiating or intoxicating or poisonous or corrosive.
So you would expect to see lab glassware with ground glass joints and ptfe tape, closed apparatus runs (or with bleed pipes to outside) magnetic stirrers, inert gas supplies, cooling water lines, vacuum lines (can be simply running water in a pipe, lowering pressure in a side branch if anhydrous not needed) and electric induction heating blocks or oil baths. Not saucepans in a naked flame gas hob! You would also expect some basic reaction monitoring equipment like a thermometer! (and, given they are cheap, a benchtop analytical gadget like an IR spectroscope).
That was no more a lab than a Baskin Robbins is an ice-cream factory!
It was a site for final processing and packaging of fentanyl, if it was anything other than a kitchen and some cornflour. Maybe they were dissolving a brick of fentanyl formed into an object (statue, ceiling tile etc) with binder, to recover the pure product from the mixture for recrystallisation and sale. Maybe.
Of course the US wants to “tame” the Mexican drug trade…just like it did in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, in Central America with the Contras, and most recently in Afghanistan. Alfred McCoy wrote extensively about the CIA’s dalliance with drug organizations since WWII.
Douglas Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime and Gary Webb’s mysterious “suicide” immediately come to mind. On a recent podcast I listened to, someone posited the theory that the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan because fentanyl could be much more economically produced than could heron from poppies.
Yes…funny how the NYT doesn’t mention the biggest drug trafficker in the World, the CIA…It’s almost like the Deep State controls the NYT…..
Yes my first thought on the above was that the CIA doesn’t want the drug pusher competition.
Yes, some have noted that DEA fights some drug gangs while ignoring (protecting?) others. But what happens if DEA and CIA each dance with rival gangs?
Also, it has always amazed me that, given the scale of multi-level drug marketing in the US, upper level sales managers rarely get caught…only person-to-person sellers on the street.
Andres Oppenheimer, Latin America columnist for Miami Herald, wrote a whole book about IBM Argentina, Citibank, drug trafficking and money laundering…but the trail went cold at a bank in the Cayman Islands.
Here’s another recent book which describes the CIA and DEA’s involvement in Southeast Asia since WW2 – Narcotopia – In Search of the Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA.
The book describes events from the point of view of the Wa people and also uses research from CIA types. To hear the author tell it, the CIA and DEA are a bunch of dangerous buffoons who actively opposed each other much of the time, with the DEA trying to eradicate drugs at the same time the CIA was trying to promote them. Hilarity ensues, if keeping people in poverty and ignorance with some torture and death thrown in for good measure are what you consider funny.
Demand and distribution are just as important as the supply side, the ingredients and manufacturer (labs).
If there is no change in the demand the suppliers will just move their labs to Canada, a super yacht off the coast, or somewhere else!
The “war on drugs” had little to do with reducing demand. Probably mostly to do with insuring profits go to certain slush funds.
In the end, reducing demand, will be the only way to stop the drug trade. Decriminalization and treatment programs would go far further in reducing Deaths from overdose. If that is actually the goal…. who really knows?
No surprise that the supply side of things would be the focus from a policy perspective, given how that sausage us made, and by whom. If you want to reduce demand for drugs like fentanyl, there are things to be done, such as making college free, or less expensive, taking some action towards rent control, and reducing healthcare costs -you know, giving people a reason to live. These are drugs of despair and hopelessness.
Also, vis a vis an invasion, however limited, of Mexico: if an administration wanted much more immigration, this is exactly what they’d do, namely further destabilize their southern neighbor. Lunacy.
Also laundering the money afterwards. I wonder if there are any erratic billionaires who’s companies seem to mysteriously never run out of money and have oddly high valuations. And would have businesses that import large amounts of material from Mexico and China in a way that bypasses customs. And if they were feeling nervous about investigations may engage in a high-profile bear-hug strategy with political leaders.
No idea who would match that, something to keep an eye out for.
Running off the book operations requires off the book funding. I imagine there’s never enough.
Maybe the New York Times should have brought in CNN’s Clarissa Ward to make their kitchen chemical story more believable. Hard to think of how the US could intervene in Mexico these days and it is not like they could do another Pancho Villa Expedition-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Villa_Expedition
If the US sends in military vehicles then the Mexican military would simply block them. Sending in military snatch squads by air could also prove problematical. That is how you got Mogadishu in ’92. And some of those cartels are highly trained and equipped which would probably includes manpads. Trump could order the US-Mexico border totally blocked but Mexico could say that such an action would mean that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was now null and void. Not a lot of good choices.
Those New York Times headlines reminded me of a video that I stumbled across today about how many Americans are willing to bomb countries they know nothing about. So they asked people on the street if the US should bomb North Korea and if they said yes, out came a board with a map of the world and they were asked to point out where North Korea was. Most could not even identify which continent North Korea was in.
The cooking photo-op lacks a CNN reporter smelling the broth, in order to confirm that it is indeed fentanyl made from Chinese sourced precursors.
Thank you for a terrific, thought-provoking article. Well-sourced and compelling.
I wonder what’s in the pot? Clam chowder? Perhaps an extra zesty clam chowder? This is what makes you rich? Or this is what gives you heartburn? Hard to tell with this behind the scenes look into someone’s kitchen.
To think that there won’t be blowback into this country if we militarily attack cartels in Mexico, Graham must be smoking some strong stuff himself, as he always is.
If the USA is so concerned about Drug overdoses damaging the health of the USA population what about food “overdosing” as in the USA obesity epidemic?
One can imagine a USA War on Obesity taking on all the obesity pushers: the industrial junk food companies, the fast food outlets, the retail stores that sell the food and their advertising “obesity” pushers in the media.
The USA would not need to invade a foreign country as the obesity “pushers” are in the USA.
But it is difficult to imagine Donald Trump going lean and leading this war.
Look at the big picture, here. Trump talking about grabbing Greenland, for strategic bases and minerals, from Denmark, either outright or as an alliance. Don Junior landed this morning at Nuuk in a Trump plane, for God’s sake. Trump talking about “taking back” the Panama Canal, that ditch the French started and we finished. Trump talking about making Canada a bunch of new states and now Trudeau resigning. And, as this article discusses, Trump talking about moving into Mexico, ostensibly about drugs but just as likely about land and resources. What is happening here, lightning fast, lightning, is a return of Manifest Destiny, the expansion of the US system, now with a direct focus on making all of North America an invulnerable gigantic trading bloc separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. This is what is going on and this isn’t just Trump, this is Trump somehow releasing or bringing forth a deep need in the American public for expansion, stamping out imprint on the rest of the earth. Manifest Destiny, again, rising as it did before when oligarchs ruled.
My sense here is that a majority of the American public will embrace this expansion, fully, and eagerly. The chattering class will tut-tut and scold and clutch pearls and declare aghastitude, but this falls right in line with MAGA and represents the best possible response to the China-BRICS alignments……
Just wait….
Well………
There are bigly players who don’t like the AMLO/Sheinbaum/Morena politics and would be all in on overturning it, but a cover story would be helpful. Adam1 above had similar thoughts.
I get a terrible feeling that the office chair warriors are even more emboldened by the ME outcomes.
If I little country lsrael can dominate, through unscrupulous,ruthless and illegal means, all its determined foes, why shouldn’t the US do the same against its potential peers?
I’m beginning to think that Covid induced brain damage is having an effect on American Foreign Policy.
The higher your rank or position the more likely it is that you have had multiple infections, masks are for the plebes and it is vitally important to show your smile if you are among the elect.
Invading Mexico is so effing stupid I can’t find a better explanation.
Has insanity become America’s 52’nd State?
There are a great many interests in the US regarding Mexico, that are trying to use the state to enrich themselves, including (surprise!) big oil. It turns our there are some significant oil reserves just across the border. If you want what I have come to see as the best information available on the US/Mexico/Cartel war, and surrounding politics, I cannot recommend following @ElParece on twitter enough.
Thanks for the heads-up, Arkady. Will check him/her/it out.
thank you Nick for this excellent article. I read an article in La Jornada this morning where Sheinbaum makes similar points as you reference, I went back and saw it was from last week’s press conference. the Hobson’s Choice leadership’s continued policy of chaos in action.
ps read Alice X comment above – brings to mind a color revolution to counter Morena…..Blanco would fit nicely.
Perhaps Mexico should purchase some S-400 air defense systems to defend themselves.
I hear that Turkiye might have some used ones cheap.
(Note, I am making a joke, but given that I have a history of my jokes turning into reality, I need to add this disclaimer.)
The first of many truly horrific ideas that Trump will likely try hard to implement. There was a lot of false equivalence on here during the election that the two candidates were somehow similar yet we are very quickly going to see they weren’t.
Of all of the ideas that things Trump has yammered about over the past year, this is hands down the single worst idea he has had. It promises no offramp once it starts and all kinds of horrific escalation and blowback including the kind of cartel violence including bombings & public official assassinations Mexico has routinely seen on this side of the border. It will also make the U.S. a global pariah including in its own hemisphere.