Pete Hegseth warned of US military action if Mexico fails to meet Trump’s border demands
The US defence secretary’s closed-door comments have unnerved Mexican officials negotiating to avoid 25 per cent tariffs.
It was the first call US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth held with Mexico’s top military officials, and it wasn’t going well.
Hegseth told the officials that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the US military was prepared to take unilateral action, according to people briefed on the Jan. 31 call. Mexico’s top brass who were on that call were shocked and angered, feeling he was suggesting US military action inside Mexico, these people said. The Defense Department declined to comment.
Hegseth’s private warning – echoed by other Trump administration officials – now looms over Mexico’s trade talks with President Trump. Their fear: Demands that Mexico end fentanyl smuggling and migrant trafficking are quietly backed by potential US military action – and not just 25 per cent tariffs that would cripple the country’s economy.
Trump said those tariffs would go into effect on Mexico and Canada – the US’s two biggest trading partners – on Tuesday, along with another 10 per cent on China, sparking a mad dash among those countries in recent days to find a way to head off the levies.
“We still have three days,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said early on Friday. A spokesman for Sheinbaum declined to comment on January’s call with Hegseth.
Senior Mexican officials are focusing on delivering tangible results on the border and drugs that Trump can see as signs of progress, but there are worries that it won’t be easy to avoid tariffs as it was on Feb. 3, when Sheinbaum got a month-long reprieve by sending 10,000 National Guard troops to the border.
In a post on his social-media platform Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said “drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels.” Tariffs would go into effect “until it stops, or is seriously limited,” he said.
Mexico’s extraordinary handover this week of 29 drug gang bosses facing charges in the US marks another concession for Trump, said former US officials.
Another concession floated by Mexican officials involves one common trade rival: China. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg TV on Friday that one “very interesting proposal” the Mexican government has made was matching the US on China tariffs.
A spokesman for Mexico’s Economy Ministry declined to comment.
The proposal comes after Mexican authorities have recently raided shops and confiscated Chinese-made electronics and other goods thought to have breached import rules. Mexico’s government has also halted plans by Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD to open a factory in the country, launched a program to substitute imports from China, and started antidumping probes into imports of various Chinese products.
“There’s a sense that Trump wants specific things,” such as troop deployment, said one person familiar with the bilateral talks.
This week, half a dozen Mexican cabinet ministers flew to Washington where they met with Hegseth and other US officials on Thursday to give an account of the actions Mexico has taken to shut down the fentanyl trade. Even before the meeting started, Mexico had already begun the historic rendition of the Mexican capos, including Rafael Caro Quintero, a notorious drug boss who is accused of killing Drug Enforcement Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985.
Mexico’s Attorney-General Alejandro Gertz said that the prisoner transfer was made at the request of the US government on Thursday. Mexico’s government approved the handover invoking the country’s national-security laws because the extradition of many of those criminals had been bogged down in Mexican courts, four decades in the case of Caro Quintero and 11 years in the case of another criminal sent to the US, Gertz said at a news conference on Friday.
He said the criminals represented a threat to both countries. “There’s no way to justify sanctions against Mexico,” Gertz said.
The State Department said Thursday’s meeting represented a new stage of bilateral security cooperation. “Both parties agreed upon the importance of making sure there was continued action beyond meetings and suggested the implementation of a timetable and touchbacks to target clear goals and sustainable results,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said in a statement on Friday.
Canadian officials are now aiming to convince the Trump administration that they have reinforced their border. A delegation of Canadian officials visited Washington in recent days to make the case that fentanyl and drugs are under control on the northern border, but officials say they suspect the numbers don’t seem to matter to Trump.
Trump has no incentive to allow Canada and Mexico appear to have solved the border issues, said Barry Appleton, an international trade lawyer and co-director of the New York Law School’s Center for International Law. By declaring an emergency on the border, Trump has a lot of leeway to impose tariffs, he said.
“If he loses his emergency, he loses his authority,” said Appleton. “So there’s nothing that could ever be good enough for the president on that until the president gets what he really wants. He wants a number of crown jewels, but he hasn’t actually decided what they are.” Senior Mexican officials believe that they can make a deal with Trump on trade and migration. But the military tension with the US is something new that is far harder to solve.
Hegseth’s suggestion of a potential US military action struck a raw nerve for Mexico’s generals, who are brought up on stories of past US armed interventions, including the 1846 Mexican-American war that cost the country half its territory.
Since the Jan. 31 call, Hegseth has repeated the same message publicly, from the US-Mexico border, which he visited a few days after the call, to the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he visited this week.
“We’re taking nothing off the table. Nothing,” he said when asked if he would rule out military strikes in Mexico.
The once-improbable scenario that the Trump administration could make good on its threats to take military action has reverberated in Washington.
On Thursday, a group of former US and Mexican military and trade officials, congressional staffers, analysts and drug policy experts gathered around a long table on Capitol Hill for a three-hour exercise to lay out what would actually happen if the US carried out military strikes in Mexico. The exercise mapped out severe economic disruptions between the two countries, border closings, violent flare-ups, and civil unrest on both sides of the border.
At the same time, it could endanger security collaboration to crack down on drug cartels, including programs that allow US drones to feed intelligence to Mexican law enforcement.
That same day, a group of two dozen US lawmakers released a resolution condemning “any call for US military action in Mexico without authorisation from the US Congress and the consent of the Mexican government.”
The document highlighted that any such action could trigger “severe bilateral consequences.”
Dow Jones Newswires
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