Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said that Mexico is not going to tolerate an “invasion” of its national sovereignty after the Trump administration moved to formally designate eight Latin American crime organizations as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
“This can’t be a possibility for the U.S. to invade our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said during her every day press briefing on Thursday. “With Mexico it’s collaboration and coordination, never subordination or interventionism, and even less invasion.”
“We wish to be clear given this designation that we don’t negotiate our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum added. “There could be no interference or subordination.
“Each countries want to cut back the consumption of medication and the trafficking of illegal drugs.”
Sheinbaum said her government was not consulted by the USA in its decision to incorporate Mexican cartels on an inventory of worldwide terrorist organizations, including the the Sinaloa cartel, United cartel, the Michoacana family and the Jalisco Recent Generation cartel. Canada, too, is listing seven transnational criminal organizations — including multiple drug cartels — as terrorist entities under the Criminal Code, the general public safety minister announced Thursday.
“The Mexican people will in no way accept interventions, intrusions, or another motion from abroad which are detrimental to the integrity, independence, or sovereignty of the nation… [including] violations of Mexican territory, whether by land, sea or air,” Sheinbaum said.
Sheinbaum said Thursday she would also propose a second constitutional reform that will stiffen the penalties for Mexicans and foreigners who engage in arms trafficking, which is a top diplomatic issue for Mexico, as most guns utilized in crimes within the country are trafficked from the USA.
Get breaking National news
For news impacting Canada and around the globe, enroll for breaking news alerts delivered on to you once they occur.
Last week, she threatened U.S. gunmakers with the legal motion if Trump’s administration went through with its intentions of declaring Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“In the event that they declare these organized crime groups as terrorists, we can have no option than to increase our lawsuits against the U.S., because because the Justice Department has already confessed, 74 per cent of all firearms in possession of drug cartels come from the U.S.,” Sheinbaum said.
“So, where do the armories stand after the designation?” she added.
During her press conference on Feb. 14, she said that a brand new charge could include alleged “complicity” of gunmakers with terror groups.
On Feb. 13, the Recent York Times reported that the U.S. State Department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations.”
“The manager order called for the designations, saying the cartels ‘constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime’ and that the USA would ‘ensure the whole elimination’ of the groups,” The Times reported.
The report added that the criminal groups and their members “might be labeled foreign terrorist organizations or specially designated global terrorists” and “the designations mean the U.S. government can impose broad economic sanctions on the groups and on people or entities linked to them.”
Last August, a U.S. judge dismissed a $10 billion lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against six U.S. gun manufacturers. Mexico had argued the businesses knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to money in on that market.
Nonetheless, the judge ruled that Mexico had not provided concrete evidence that any of the six firms’ activities in Massachusetts were connected to any suffering caused in Mexico by guns.
Earlier this month, Sheinbaum accused the U.S. of harbouring drug cartels, and claimed Americans are working with organized crime groups in Mexico after Trump’s “slanderous” claims that Mexico had joined forces with drug traffickers.
“There may be also organized crime in the USA and there are American individuals who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference on Feb. 13. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl within the cities of the USA?”
Sheinbaum was responding to a reporter from the Animal Político news outlet, who mentioned an investigation they published this week that found greater than 2,600 U.S. residents have been arrested in Mexico for offences related to organized crime, including smuggling drugs and firearms, since Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018.
“The problem isn’t just that drugs go from Mexico to the USA,” she added.
—With files from Reuters
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
