FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan 9, 2026
Media Contact: Melissa Garriga | [email protected]
CODEPINK Statement: Trump’s Threat to Bomb Mexico Is an Outrageous Step Toward War in Latin America
CODEPINK condemns President Donald Trump’s dangerous threat to “start hitting land” inside Mexico, a sovereign nation, a major U.S. ally, and home to 130 million people.
By declaring, “we are going to start now hitting land… The cartels are running Mexico,” Trump is openly threatening U.S. strikes and special operations on Mexican soil under the same failed “war on drugs” logic that has already devastated Latin America.
For more than 20 years, Washington has sold militarized drug policy as the solution. Plan Colombia, for example, poured billions of U.S. dollars into the Colombian military and police under the promise of cutting cocaine at the source. Yet even the U.S. Government Accountability Office review found that potential cocaine production in Colombia was higher in 2006 than in 2000.
The pattern is always the same: more troops, more weapons, more funding for security forces, and in return, more violence, more displacement, more human rights abuses. And the more weapons the U.S. pumps into the region, the more cartels acquire military-grade firepower of their own, often trafficked or diverted from the very same U.S. weapons pipeline. The only thing that doesn’t disappear is the drug trade.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has categorically rejected U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and Mexico, insisting that Mexico is a “free and sovereign country” and that foreign armies will not be allowed to operate on its territory. She has insisted that cooperation on security is possible, but only without violations of sovereignty: “Cooperation, yes; subordination and intervention, no.”
Trump claims cartels are “killing 250,000 to 300,000 Americans a year” and uses that to justify escalation. But we know that what actually drives the overdose crisis is a U.S. health system built around profit, not care, pharmaceutical companies and distributors that flooded communities with opioids and domestic demand, economic despair, and lack of treatment, not a lack of foreign bombs. The war on drugs has been a political cover to avoid confronting Wall Street pharma, poverty, racist policing, and a deadly health system at home.
We reject Trump’s attempt to dehumanize an entire nation, to normalize violations of the U.N. Charter, which explicitly prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, and to turn Latin America, historically a zone of peace, into a battleground for U.S. military experiments, fresh off the operation in Venezuela and open threats toward Cuba and Colombia.
If the U.S. can bomb Mexico under the excuse of “cartels,” then no country in the region is safe.
We stand with the people of Mexico, with President Claudia Sheinbaum’s rejection of intervention, and with all those in the region who say:
- No to U.S. wars. NO TO U.S. intervention
- No to the militarization of Latin America
- Yes to sovereignty, solidarity, and life.
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