Donald Trump spoke of sending troops south of the border to take care of “bad hombres” while on the telephone with his Mexican counterpart, according to a transcript cited by the Associated Press.
Trump was said to have made either an offer – or a veiled threat – of the US military weighing in to fight Mexican gangs in a conversation on Friday that Enrique Peña Nieto’s office later described as “constructive”.
According to reports that were apparently based on a leaked White House document, the US president told Peña Nieto: “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”
The overall tone of the conversation is unknown and who the “hombres” are is unclear but in a separate report Mexican journalist Dolía Estévez said it referred to drug cartels.
It portends a further souring of relations between Mexico and Trump, who partly built his election campaign on vilifying Mexicans and promising to make the southern neighbour pay for a border wall.
Peña Nieto called off a trip to Washington last week after Trump tweeted that it was not worth coming unless paying for the wall was on the agenda. Trump and Peña Nieto ended up speaking on 27 January by telephone and reportedly agreed not to speak publicly about who would pay. It was a conversation Peña Nieto’s office called “constructive and productive around the bilateral relationship”.
Mexico’s foreign ministry denied any threats were issued by Trump in his talks with Peña Nieto, saying in a statement on Tuesday evening that the information in Estévez’s report “didn’t correspond with reality”. It reiterated that the tone of the telephone conversations between Peña Nieto and Trump “was constructive”.
Some reporting suggested the transcript came from an internal White House summary of the phone call and was not a verbatim account – though the “bad hombres” reference reprises comments Trump made during the 2016 election campaign about evicting Mexican criminals from the US.
CNN had its own version of the conversation: “You have some pretty tough hombres in Mexico that you may need help with. We are willing to help with that big-league, but they have to be knocked out and you have not done a good job knocking them out.”
Estévez, who is based in Washington, reported earlier on Tuesday that Trump had “humiliated” Peña Nieto and threatened to slap import duties on Mexican-made goods to pay for a border wall.
Sources told Washington-based Estévez that Trump said: “I don’t need the Mexicans. I don’t need Mexico. I’m going to build a wall and you’re going to pay for it, like it or not.”
Estévez wrote in the Mexican publication Proyecto Puente: “Trump signalled that Mexican soldiers are not doing a good job in combating narcotics trafficking and therefore suggested that he would have to send US troops to assume the duties of defeating the cartels.”
The Mexican military has battled drug cartels for a decade in a crackdown that has cost an estimated 200,000 lives and left another 25,000 people missing.
Mexico has captured dozens of cartel kingpins and increasingly extradited them to the United States – most recently two-time escapee Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was sent north on the eve of Trump’s inauguration.
Talk of troops violating Mexican sovereignty stirs up strong emotions in Mexico, which lost half its territory – including California, Arizona and Nevada – in the Mexican-American war of the 1840s.