Trump's Threat to Invade Mexico Cannot Stand
February 6, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign with vicious insults and threats against Mexican people, calling those coming across the border “rapists” and “drug dealers.” Now that he is actually president, Trump is making threats to invade Mexico.
Last week Trump and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto held a phone conversation. According to the Associated Press, Trump blustered to Peña Nieto that he “was ready to send U.S. troops to stop ‘bad hombres’ down there unless the Mexican military does more to control them.” The White House described Trump’s comments as “lighthearted.”
Think about this for a minute: Trump, the “commander in chief” of the most powerful military in world history, the man with his “finger on the button” of an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons, is threatening to invade a neighboring country. This is no fucking joke. Trump’s threats against the country and the people of Mexico are saturated with racism, hatred, and the swaggering bravado of a long-time bully. They are also deadly serious.
And yet this was not in any significant way opposed by the leading Democrats or from any other quarter. No demand to put a halt to any actual moves in the works toward carrying out Trump's threats. No demand that this whole fascist regime be held accountable for the gravity of what was said to another sovereign country.
The Theft of Mexico and the “Shaping” of the U.S.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of U.S. military aggression against Mexico knows that Trump’s comments are anything but “lighthearted.”
Invasions of Mexico, domination and exploitation over that country, and the endless torment of the Mexican people have shaped the U.S. Shaped it literally, in the sense that the U.S. stole over half of the country as the “spoils” of its 1846 war against Mexico. While the principal reason for the war was to expand slavery into Texas, it was also to extend U.S. reach to the Pacific Ocean and across what is now the U.S. Southwest.
During the rest of the 19th century, the U.S military repeatedly staged incursions into Mexico, especially along the border. During the Mexican Revolution, a U.S. force invaded northern Mexico, and the U.S. Navy blocked and occupied the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico coast. All of this was also driven by America’s dominant outlook—the widespread racism and contempt towards Mexican people and the sense that the U.S. somehow has a “right” to control and dominate Mexico. That outlook continues, and further underlines the possibility of U.S. invasion once again.
In recent decades, the pretext of “drug wars” has been the main way the U.S. has deepened its involvement with the Mexican military and federal police and with the Mexican government. The U.S. has supplied them with billions of dollars through a pact called the Merida Initiative. Far from stabilizing the situation, U.S. involvement through this “aid” to Mexico has resulted in a horrific increase of drug and police/military related violence: over 200,000 people have been murdered, and 25,000 disappeared in the past decade.
Two-Edged Sword
The rulers of the U.S. are acutely aware of the strategic vulnerability to their system, the “two-edged sword,” that comes from sharing a 2,000 mile border with a Third World country, and from the people that they have exploited and oppressed for over a century—on both sides of that border. A very large portion of the 11 million or more undocumented people in the U.S. are from Mexico. They have been “allowed” in—while treated as shit in underpaid, super-exploited jobs in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing—because they are essential to the profitability of much of U.S. capitalist-imperialist production within this country. At the same time, their undocumented status has pushed them into the “shadows,” trying to avoid as much as possible any interaction with the authorities.
The Trump-Pence fascist regime has called for the round-up and deportation of millions of Mexican immigrants, with and without documents. They intend to build a wall across the entire southern border and “make Mexico pay for it.” And now Trump has personally delivered the message that his regime is more than willing to move into Mexico militarily if developments there become a threat to the fascist regime’s plans to make America “first” in the world. This is not the boast of a madman. Trump’s braggadocio expresses the needs, workings, and fears of a system that has long feasted on Mexico and its people. Now the Trump-Pence fascists are in the driver’s seat of this imperialist system, and they seek to bring that domination to entirely new levels of violence, extortion, and exploitation. No insubordination on the part of Mexico will be tolerated.
The Trump-Pence threats and aggression against Mexico, whatever their pretext or justification, must be fiercely resisted and opposed by everyone with any sense of justice. Why the hell should Trump, or any U.S. president, be able to threaten a war of aggression against another country and impose the will of U.S. imperialism over it? The U.S. has NO right to do this!
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.