Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned Friday he would not allow the United States to conduct cross-border armed operations, after Donald Trump vowed to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups.
The U.S. president has been talking tough on the powerful drug cartels since one was allegedly responsible for the massacre of nine women and children from a U.S.-Mexican Mormon community in northern Mexico on November 4.
Trump tweeted after the killings that the U.S. was ready to help Mexico “wage war on the drug cartels,” and he followed up this week by vowing to add Mexican cartels to the U.S. blacklist of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
That insulted national pride in Mexico, which resents a long history of armed interventions by its giant northern neighbor, and where Trump’s comments have been taken as a threat of armed cross-border operations.
“Armed foreigners cannot intervene in our territory. We will not allow that,” Lopez Obrador said.