HAS THE US INVADED MEXICO? ALMOST…BUT NOT QUITE

Early this week there was an international border incident involving the US and Mexico. This is what happened. Last Monday, a detail of unidentified men traveling by boat landed on a beach in northeast Mexico. There, they put up signs which declared the beach property of the US Department of Defense, and with a legend reading “Warning: Restricted Area”, and with the corresponding translation in Spanish.

The signs additionally stated that the area had been declared restricted by “the commander”, adding that “unauthorized entry is prohibited” and that “if you are found here, you may be detained and searched”. The warning signs additionally prohibited photography or drawings.

The beach is an area frequented by local Mexican fishermen and known as Playa Bagdad. It is also a popular local tourism destination. It was some of the local fishermen who first alerted the Mexican authorities to the fact that a group of presumed military personnel from the US had crossed the Río Bravo and erected six signs declaring the beach American territory.

US personnel on Playa Bagdad

Playa Bagdad is at the mouth of the Río Grande (known in Mexico as the Río Bravo), where it flows into the Gulf of Mexico (aggressively referred to by the Trump administration as the Gulf of America), close to the city of Matamoros in the Mexican state of  Tamaulipas. Matamoros is roughly located across the Río Grande from Brownsville, Texas. As far as can be determined to date, the beach could actually be as much as five miles inside Mexican territory. 

The move obviously raised a major controversy in both Mexico and the US. By late Monday evening the Mexican Foreign Affairs Ministry had already issued a statement to the effect that the Mexican Navy has sent a detachment to Playa Bagdad to remove the signs. In her daily press briefing the next day, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo said that she expected the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) to get involved and resolve the dispute. “The river changes its course,” she said. “It breaks loose, and according to the treaty, you have to clearly demarcate the national border.” It is worth noting, however, that the border between the US and Mexico has always been the United States north of the Río Grande and Mexico south of the river. The fact that the detail that erected the signs on Playa Bagdad had to cross the river to do it renders their motives suspicious at best.  

The IBWC mentioned by President Sheinbaum was established in 1889, as a binational agency to oversee border and water treaties between the US and Mexico. In the US, it operates under State Department guidance, while in Mexico, it is under Foreign Ministry supervision. The IBWC is responsible for how the US and Mexico share and regulate the waters of the Río Grande and the Colorado River, overseeing the building and operation of dams and reservoirs, flood control, border sanitation and water quality issues. But it is also in charge of maintaining and marking the international boundary.

Mexicans enjoying vacation days on Playa Bagdad

The US-Mexico border has been established through a series of agreements hammered out over the years. Perhaps the most important of these was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed at the end of the US-Mexican War in 1848. According to that treaty, the border between the two North American nations is the middle of the river, running through its deepest trough. But since rivers naturally change course repeatedly over time, the IBWC was established, among other things, to consistently survey the border area and place territorial markers at strategic points along the Río Grande’s course.

As such, the IBWC has been a useful tool in resolving minor territorial disputes between the two countries over the decades. One of the most important of its decisions came in 1963, and involved a century-old dispute over a six hundred-acres near El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The dispute was finally resolved in accordance with the Chamizal Convention signed between the administrations of US President John F. Kennedy and Mexican President  Adolfo López Mateos. According to that milestone agreement, the disputed land was returned to Mexico, and a decision was made to re-channel the river to create a stable boundary between the two countries.

The last time the IBWC was called upon to resolve the details of a bi-lateral treaty was in 1970, when an agreement was signed in Mexico to end remaining boundary disputes and to maintain the Río Grande and the Colorado River as the bi-national border between Mexico and the United States.

This latest boundary disagreement between the US and Mexico comes as Donald Trump has been making illegal drug trade from Latin America a major administration talking point, which he has backed up with aggressive and highly controversial actions in international waters. These actions have included the destruction of multiple unidentified vessels near Venezuela, and the killing of their crews, with no sound evidence whatsoever linking them to the drug trade. The  war-like operations in international waters, where the US has no jurisdiction, have mostly been carried out using indiscriminate drone attacks.

More recently, Trump has been holding out the possibility of military actions in Mexico against the drug trade. This fact has given a great deal more traction to the incident on Playa Bagdad than it might otherwise have raised.

Trump has repeatedly offered President Sheinbaum US military assistance in taking on the drug cartels. But Mexico has seen this offer in the spirit in which it is being given—as Don Corleone would say, as “an offer she can’t refuse.” But refuse it she has, in no uncertain terms, saying, “it’s not going to happen.”

At a recent press conference at the White House, in answer to a reporter’s question, Trump said, ““Would I want strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? OK with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs.” But the implication of the US striking wherever it pleases without the permission and cooperation of the other nation involved flies in the face of international law and could easily (and rightly) be taken as acts of war. It resembles his heavy-handed ordering of military action in US cities in spite of their mayors’ and state governors’ vehement objections.

As for non-compliance with international treaties, at least one expert claims the US was in clear violation of standing agreements. According to Professor Stephen Mumme, while admitting that the mouth of the Río Grande changes with erosion, river flow and silting, “the boundary is set at middle of the most substantial and deepest channel of the river as it enters the Gulf of Mexico.” A Colorado State University professor and specialist in the field of US-Mexican water and environmental issues, Mumme went on record this week saying that, “Mexico was completely within its rights to remove the signs and lodge complaints with the US State Department.”

Professor Geoffrey Corn of the Texas Tech University Law School expressed his confusion about the signs. He said that the type of signs erected were of the sort used at US military facilities. Their purpose, he indicated, was to establish a military security zone. The placement of them at Playa Bagdad, within Mexican sovereign territory was, then, “illogical” at best.

USS Gerald Ford sent to the Caribbean

On Tuesday, the US Embassy in Mexico shared a comment from the Pentagon, stating that US “contractors” had placed signs beside the Río Grande, marking “National Defense Area III”. The Pentagon sought to justify this unilateral action by stating that, “Changes in water depth and topography altered the perception of the international boundary’s location. Government of Mexico personnel removed six signs based on their perception of the international boundary’s location.” While this sounded a lot like the six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other argument, the Pentagon added that the contractors would work with “appropriate agencies to avoid confusion in the future.”

Whatever the case may be, the incident stands as a further escalation of less than neighborly actions by the US Defense Department established earlier this year, when a new two hundred sixty-mile-long National Defense Area (NDA) was set up on the US-Mexico border in Texas. At the time, the head of the US military’s Northern Command, General Gregory Guillot, posited that,  “The establishment of a National Defense Area increases our operational reach and effectiveness in denying illegal activity along the southern border.” In more common terms, however, the setting up of NDAs is tantamount to militarizing border zones, assigning combat troops and equipment to areas that would normally be policed by the Border Guard.

They form part of a policy put in place by the Trump administration last April when the president signed a memorandum titled Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions. The hyperbolic title was in keeping with the Trump White House’s attempt to equate immigration difficulties and drug-trafficking on the southern border with a “foreign invasion”, so as to be able to justify the involvement of the military, rather than going to the trouble of creating policies that seek to make policing efforts more robust, and to establish a more effective immigration policy.   

According to the Northern Command website, the Defense Department enforces a “controller perimeter” in the NDAs to “repel unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and other cross-border criminal activities”. Suspected trespassers can be detained in NDAs, but then should be turned over to the custody of local law enforcement.

There are other Texas NDAs besides the new one. Another one spans Cameron and Hidalgo Counties. There are NDA militarized zones in other states as well—one in Yuma, Arizona, another in New Mexico, and others near the border between California and Mexico.

What has drawn heightened attention to the Playa Bagdad incident is the bull-in-a-china-shop nature of Trump’s current policies in the Caribbean and Latin America as a whole. It is a throwback to the darkest days of American interventionism in Central and South America, under a bastardized view of the Monroe Doctrine. In recent months, the Trump administration has deployed major military force, including B‑52 bombers and elite special operations troops, and the USS Gerald Ford (the most powerful aircraft carrier ever built)to the Caribbean, citing security concerns and the threat of an “invasion” by Venezuelan drug gangs. Trump is also considering land attacks in Venezuela to curb the flow of illegal drugs and has authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations in Venezuela for the same purpose.

The Monroe doctrine was originally created in 1823—under America’s fifth president, James Monroe—when the US was still a fledgling nation. It was a statement of America’s stand against European colonialism in America, and presumed solidarity with Latin American nations that were struggling to shrug off Spanish colonialism and to forge US-style democracies.

But in the twentieth century, it was reinterpreted under several administrations to underscore US influence throughout the Americas and to bend the will of Central and South American states to fit US policy mandates. This was a policy stance that was prevalent into and through the 1980s—with positively notable exceptions, such as the Carter administration—with the US backing and being involved in the rise of some of the worst, if pro-American, dictatorships on the continent. The Falklands War between Britain and the pro-US Proceso in Argentina, and the death of the formerly US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile served to set a new course for US policy in post-dictatorial Latin America, with the most openly cooperative periods for US policy in the Americas being under the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Trump’s two administrations have been marked, in both domestic and international policy, by a government nostalgia for the bad old days—pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-human rights, and pre-international cooperation—with a return to the twentieth-century interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine (very likely without the administration’s conscious knowledge that that’s what it is) and gunboat diplomacy.

A number of noted historians have made observations regarding the bastardization of the Monroe Doctrine’s original purpose. They have noted that while the doctrine contained a commitment to resist further European colonialism in the Americas, it resulted in some aggressive implications for US foreign policy, since there were no limitations on its own actions mentioned within it.

Venezuelan fishermen in the type of boat the US is 
indiscriminately blowing out of the water.

Among others, US scholars William Appleman Williams, Jay Sexton and Noam Chomsky have provided some of the most succinct analyses of the doctrine’s post nineteenth-century applications.   Williams has referred to the twentieth-century interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as justifying American imperialism. Sexton saw it as becoming what it had been implemented to prevent, being used to justify a similar colonialism to that under which the US itself suffered in the pre-Revolutionary War era. Chomsky, for his part, has viewed contemporary use of the Monroe Doctrine as successive administrations’ tool for the declaration of American hegemony in the Americas and as a statement of their “right” to intervene throughout the continent.

Since September 2^nd, the US has conducted at least twenty-one military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing about eighty people. Again, it should be noted that there has been no compelling evidence forthcoming from the government that any of these attacks in international waters was justified. In the absence of such evidence, it is just as likely that these were fishing or small private or commercial vessels as that they were boats involved in drug trafficking.  

President Sheinbaum has made it clear that she has repeatedly told both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that her government refuses to entertain any notion of US intervention on Mexican soil.

She was recently quoted as saying that, “He (Trump) has suggested on several occasions, or has said, ‘We offer you a United States military intervention in Mexico or whatever you need to combat criminal groups’.”

President Claudia Sheinbaum Prado 

Sheinbaum said she was open to accepting collaboration and intelligence-sharing with the US military, but reiterated that her government would not permit outside intervention from the US or any other country within Mexican borders.

Specifically, President Sheinbaum said, “I’ve told (Trump) on the phone. I’ve said it with the State Department, with Marco Rubio. We do not accept an intervention by any foreign government.”

It is worth noting that this is, by all accounts, the general sentiment throughout the Americas. Even though Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro is not broadly supported by leaders of other countries throughout the region, Trump’s gunboat diplomacy with regard to that country will only serve to galvanize regional support for Venezuela, if not for its leader, then at least for the country in the face of American aggression. This is mainly true because, contrary to the Trump administration, political leaders in the rest of the Americas do indeed read and recall history. They are, then, bound to be wary of the sort of actions that once had disastrous consequences for self-determination, when US imperialism reigned throughout the continent.