Trump ‘will send kill teams’ to take out Mexico cartel bosses
Ex-president favours radical solution to growing fentanyl crisis should he return to White House
DONALD TRUMP is planning to send US assassination squads into Mexico to kill the leaders of drug cartels if he returns to the White House, according to a report.
The former president, 77, has spoken publicly of his determination to tackle America’s fentanyl crisis by “waging war” on the criminal gangs who fuel it.
Mr Trump’s plans, according to Rolling Stone, involve covertly deploying – with or without the Mexican government’s consent – special operations units tasked with eliminating drug lords.
Three Trump allies, cited by the magazine, claim the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee has privately endorsed the missions.
He has yet to decide on specific details such as how many US troops would be sent into Mexican territory.
Rolling Stone reports conversations with his inner circle during which Mr Trump has insisted that the US military has “tougher killers than they do” and pondered why such assassinations have not been carried out before.
The magazine’s sources, which include at least one Republican lawmaker, suggest Mr Trump argued that killing the “kingpins” of the most powerful cartels would seriously damage their operations and ability to supply drugs to America.
During these conversations, Mr Trump compared the plan to the US military raid he ordered in 2019 that resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, according to Rolling Stone.
One source recalled Mr Trump saying that the US government should have a “kill list of drug lords” that US special forces would be assigned to kill or capture.
Mr Trump’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment by Rolling Stone.
On the campaign trail ahead of November’s presidential election, Mr Trump has already said he hopes to “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations”.
During his presidency, Mr Trump also mooted the idea of attacking the cartels’ drug labs with missiles, according to former defence secretary Mark Esper’s memoir.
While that suggestion was dismissed, the concept of military action in Mexico appears to have growing appeal among Republican politicians.
Ron Desantis, the Florida governor and rival to Mr Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, pledged that if he were elected president, he would order special forces to enter Mexico “on day one”.
Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John Neely Kennedy last year backed legislation that would “give the military the authority to go after these organisations wherever they exist”.
The proposal provoked an angry reaction from Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, who denounced it as “an offence to the people of Mexico”.
“We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene,” he said last March.
US military experts have warned against attacks in Mexico, arguing that they would have limited impact on the drug trade and harm diplomatic relations with America’s southern neighbour.
General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year that invading Mexico was a bad idea.
“I wouldn’t recommend anything be done without Mexico’s support,” he told Defense One, a specialist publication for national security issues, insisting that tackling the cartel-fuelled drug trade is a law enforcement – not a military – issue.
‘We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory’