Foreign Troops in Mexico

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel for Borderland Beat from a El Financiero article

Subject Matter: Foreign troops operating in Mexico against El Narco
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Reporter: Raymundo Riva Palacio
After the publication of the transcripts of the conversation between the Presidents of Mexico and the United States on the 27th of January of this year, when Trump said to Enrique Pena Nieto that he was " 100% ready to send American troops to Mexico to kill narco traffickers, the newspaper the Washington Post that revealed the transcription asked, " can Trump send troops to Mexico?

Peter DeShazo, Professor of Latin American Studies at Dartmouth College, responded; "Its improbable that the Mexican Government will permit elite units, like the Green Berets or SEAL's, to confront the drug cartels, or to play a support role to the Mexican units. It is not a unilateral theme. The organized crime is an international concern, and is not a purely domestic theme from Mexico", De Shazo, said that Trump is exceeding what is required. Trump doesn't need to send troops, because his military have been in Mexico for some time.

Not in the form that the Washington Post remembers in the American invasion of 1847-48, or the American flotilla in Veracruz in 1914. This model of intervention corresponds to actions long in the past. The present deployment has distinct face and has been in Mexico for various years, since the dawn of the second world war, there has been a bilateral agreement that both countries can use, without the necessity to solicit authorization, the airports and military bases of each nation in extraordinary situations.




The Washington Post remembers the origins of a re-invigorated military cooperation, when the common narco trafficking problem produced a tactical alliance to confront them, weighed against the mistrust of the Mexican Army. That mistrust from Washington led to the central support remaining with the Mexican Marines. An important group of Mexican Marines were trained by the Marines of the United States to the same level as the SEAL's for Sea, Air and Land, the acronym for the special operations force which is the most sophisticated in the Navy.

The Americans trained them at their facilities in Virginia and Southern California, from which came three elite commando units built in the image of the American units, located at bases in Mexico City, Veracruz and Acapulco. US SEAL's are featured in the most spectacular and well known operations of several wars including the invasions of Panama and Afghanistan and the death of Osama Bin Laden, and tactically led the Mexican Commandos who killed Arturo Beltran Leyva, the lethal drug lord in 2009.

The CIA has also worked with Mexican Commandos, whom it upgraded through private contractors in secret facilities near Mexico City. The CIA, although not military, was key in the first capture of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman in Mazatlan, where US SEAL's also participated.

These participation's in Mexico are prior to Trump, and are still kept secret. The public is only  regularly informed of joint exercises by the armed forces. From 2014 to 2016, the Washington Post reported, that joint programs between the two forces had increased by 20%, ranging from intelligence sharing to air attacks, as well as land and sea attacks to drug cartels from Central to North America, as well as legal counsel to US Military Lawyers for the observance of human rights.

In that period, he added, $27 million has been earmarked to train Mexican Commandos, from close quarter combat to beach invasions. The last exercise was last July, when the Mexican Air Force, in coordination with the Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, held the third joint exercise, Amalgam Eagle, at Hermosillo Military Air Base.

The way in which the Pentagons inclusion and participation and assistance in the Mexican Armed Forces has been deep, although it does not respond to the obsolete category of analysis that Trump presented to Pena Nieto, nor to the way that Washington Post posed the dilemma of the telephone conversation between the two Presidents.

The Post, strangely, took the case of the Colombian Military Units that train together with the Special Forces of the 7th US Army Battalion to ensure that domestic policy in Mexico would not allow such a decision. Error.

That is already happening, in a deeper way, without seeming to have imported to the Mexican opposition the way in which, in particular to the Navy, they were grafted with strategic models of security of the American Navy.

There will be no troops marching on Mexican territory, even if there is an authorization from the Government and Congress, because they are not really needed. The fight against drug trafficking will not come to victory if only force is used. It requires intelligence and disarticulating their financial and money laundering networks to dehydrate their organizations, coupled with action completely different to WW2 type battles, with battalions in the trenches, but with elite units performing surgical operations such as those against Beltran Leyva or more recently, against Felipe de Jesus Perez Luna, Los Ojos, the leader of drug sellers who was shot dead in Tlahuac a few days ago in the car when he was trying to flee.

To this Trump and whomever came late to history. US Military with operational and decisions making capacity in Mexico, have long come to stay.

Original article in Spanish at El Financiero