BY JOHNNY HAZARD
In progressive U.S. circles, there is a lot of talk about new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s way of dealing with U.S. President Donald Trump and his repackaging of U.S. interventionism. Let’s look at some of that history and how it affects current Mexican reactions and responses, and while we’re at it, we will look at the reactions of other Latin American governments to the threat of mass deportation from the U.S. of their immigrant citizens.
An incomplete timetable of U.S. interventions in Mexico:
1836: Texas “independence”, in which crackers from Kentucky and Tennessee decided that Texas belonged to them, not to Mexico and, having moved their slaves and families in, fought to separate themselves from Mexican jurisdiction. (None of the people who died in the battle of the Alamo had lived in Texas for more than two years.)
1845: The U.S. openly annexed Texas.
1846-8: U.S. invasion, known in the U.S. as the “Mexican-American War”, resulting in the loss of more than half of what was then Mexico, more than two million square kilometers.
1914: Invasion and occupation of the port city of Veracruz for seven months because someone refused to salute the U.S. flag. Bombings and imposition of martial law. Unverifiable number of Mexican civilian deaths.
1916: In the “Punitive Expedition”, troops led by general John Pershing crossed from Texas and New Mexico into Chihuahua to look for revolutionary leader Francisco (Pancho) Villa — whose army had, weeks earlier, entered the border town of Columbus, New Mexico to confront the owner of a gun shop who owed them weapons. They never found Villa, because he was an expert guerrilla fighter hiding in his mountainous home territory, with the support of his allies and even of his adversaries who were angered by the U.S. invasion.
July 25, 2024, and beyond: U.S. military, CIA or DEA involvement in the extralegal detention of alleged narco boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, in which he was tricked into flying to the north of Mexico from his native state, Sinaloa, but really taken to New Mexico, blurring the lines between kidnapping and extradition. Then-president López Obrador demanded an explanation from the Biden administration, no credible response so far from Biden, much less from Trump. It seems that Joaquín Guzmán López, son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was negotiating to turn himself in to U.S. authorities and that the plot to kidnap Zambada was hatched in that context. As a result of this intensification of the feud between the Zambada faction and the Guzmán faction of the Cartel de Sinaloa, murders in the state, and especially in the capital city, Culiacán, went from fewer than 40 per month at the beginning of the year to 143 in September and 182 in October. Seven months after the illegal detention and extradition of “El Mayo” Zambada, the city is still in a state of siege, with few businesses and services able to open, schools often closed, and curfews frequently in effect. The U.S. has, as usual, claimed to have played no role in provoking this chaos.
Sheinbaum’s pronouncements about Trump in the wake of his imposition of tariffs and other threatening behavior are well-known; here is a look at some Latin American presidents who have been bolder and, of course, at a few others who have been lackeys:
Brazil: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a founder of the BRICS movement, whose other leaders were already agitating before the re-ascension of Trump to create a new currency, though Lula himself favored proceeding more slowly. Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, had a surprisingly conservative reaction to this proposal, boasting that Mexico was part of North America and was not interested in alternatives to the hegemony of the dollar.
Honduras: A coup in 2009 against President Manuel Zelaya was condoned and covered up by the Obama-Biden administration. This coup set the stage for the election of right-wing president Porfirio Lobo — later determined to be a narco — indicted in his country, and banned from the U.S. The current president of Honduras is Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife; she has responded to Trump’s attacks on Honduran immigrants by threatening to close U.S. military bases in Honduras. These bases were used to intervene in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, back in the good old days when some liberals and all leftists within the U.S. opposed such interventions.
Colombia: President Gustavo Petro responded to Trump’s deportation of a few hundred Colombians by refusing to let a U.S. military plane land with migrants whose hands and feet were bound by ICE thugs. He later sent the presidential plane to bring them back under more humane conditions and suggested that the thousands of U.S. citizens living in Colombia without visas or legal residency regularize their situations. He is also one of the Latin American presidents who has spoken most strongly against Israeli military policies and U.S. support of them. Petro’s moral authority has more recently been undercut by a scandal in which he promoted an ally accused of sexual violence to a high-level government position and most of his cabinet protested or resigned. Among those protesting was Francia Márquez, the first Afro-Colombian and first woman vice president.
Trump retains support from the laissez-faire gangster caucus: presidents Javier Milei of Argentina, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, and José Raúl Mulino of Panama. Milei is in free fall in recent weeks because of a scandal in which he and his associates created a crypto currency that suspiciously rose and fell erratically in value, causing many of his followers to lose large sums. This and other incidents show that Milei may be the mentor and Trump the prodigy, not the other way around. Bukele is eager to turn El Salvador into a center of violent rehabilitation for migrants in general, not just for Salvadorans, as has been the case throughout his term; he has contracted to Trump to receive deportees from wherever.
