Marco Rubio begins an official visit to Mexico prioritizing fentanyl trafficking as the basis for broader negotiations. The U.S. Secretary of State aims to finalize a bilateral security agreement with President Claudia Sheinbaum while the United States threatens tariffs and a potential trade war. The United States is combining security, migration, and economic levers in its approach to Mexico. President Sheinbaum insists on agreements grounded in shared responsibility, mutual trust, respect for sovereignty and territoriality, and cooperation without subordination, rejecting unilateral U.S. military operations on Mexican soil. The U.S. has offered troops, designated criminal groups as terrorists, and executed a military strike that sank an alleged drug boat, killing eleven.
Marco Rubio, the U.S. foreign policy chief, begins his first official visit to Mexico with one priority on the table: fentanyl trafficking, from which all the other negotiations stem. The State Secretary is there to finalize a new bilateral security agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and other senior officials, but he arrived with a loaded weapon: President Donald Trump's threat that the United States will declare a trade war with tariffs as its main ammunition.
Various foreign affairs and security experts point in the same direction: the United States wants Mexico to continue dancing to its tune. Sheinbaum has repeatedly stated that any agreement with the United States will be based on shared responsibility, mutual trust, respect for sovereignty and territoriality, and cooperation without subordination. This can be seen to mean, as she has also stated on several occasions, that the United States military will not conduct unilateral operations within Mexico.
Trump has repeatedly offered Mexico troops to combat the cartels, and the White House included several Mexican and Latin American criminal groups on its list of terrorist organizations last February. On Tuesday, Trump ordered his first major strike under this new framework: a U.S. military strike sank an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea that had set sail from Venezuela, killing all 11 crewmembers.
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