MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico and the United States on Wednesday agreed during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to keep collaborating on cross-border security, including the trafficking of drugs, guns and fuel, but made clear it would be done from their respective sides of the border, respecting each other's sovereignty.
What had initially been advertised as the signing of a broad security agreement evolved into the possibility of a memorandum of understanding, but in the end was a reaffirmation of the collaboration Mexico and the U.S. have said they’ve been doing all along.
The priorities remain stopping fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into the U.S., and the high-powered guns bought in U.S. gun shops from being smuggled into Mexico, while continuing to control migration, which has fallen dramatically. The new development is the establishment of a “high-level implementation group" that would be the mechanism for that continued collaboration.
“This is a high-level group that will meet and coordinate on a regular basis to make sure that all the things we are working on, all the things we have agreed to work on, are happening, are being implemented,” Rubio said.
“It’s the closest cooperation we’ve ever had, maybe between any country, but definitely between the U.S. and Mexico,” Rubio said.
Rubio spoke after meeting with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday to stress the importance the U.S. places on cooperating with Washington on Western Hemisphere security, trade and migration. Rubio will visit Ecuador on Thursday on his third trip to Latin America since taking office. Sheinbaum has voiced fears of the U.S. encroaching on Mexican sovereignty.
The meeting came a day after President Donald Trump dramatically stepped up his administration’s military role in the Caribbean with what he called a deadly strike on a Venezuelan drug cartel.
Trump has alienated many in the region with persistent demands and threats of sweeping tariffs and massive sanctions for refusing to follow his lead, particularly on migration and the fight against drug cartels. Likely to heighten those concerns is the U.S. having deployed warships to the Caribbean and elsewhere off Latin America and announcing a lethal strike on an alleged Tren de Aragua gang vessel carrying narcotics.
Mexico's president pushes back on Trump saying she's not ready to target cartels
Trump has demanded, and so far won, some concessions from Sheinbaum’s government, which is eager to defuse his tariff threats, although she has fiercely defended Mexico’s sovereignty.
Sheinbaum again rejected Trump’s suggestion that she is afraid of confronting Mexico’s cartels because they have so much power.
“We respect a lot the Mexico-United States relationship, President Trump, and no, it’s not true this affirmation that he makes,” she said.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday before meeting with Rubio, she said that what her administration planned to agree to with the United States is a “cooperation program about border security and the application of the law within the framework of our (respective) sovereignties.”
In a State of the Nation address this week marking her first year in office, she said, "Under no circumstance will we accept interventions, interference or any other act from abroad that is detrimental to the integrity, independence and sovereignty of the country.”
Sheinbaum has gone after Mexican drug cartels and their fentanyl production more aggressively than her predecessor. The government has sent the National Guard to the northern border and delivered 55 cartel figures long wanted by U.S. authorities to the Trump administration.
Sheinbaum had spoken for some time about how Mexico was finalizing a comprehensive security agreement with the State Department that, among other things, was supposed to include plans for a “joint investigation group” to combat the flow of fentanyl and the drug’s precursors into the U.S. and weapons from north to south.
A senior State Department official has downplayed suggestions that a formal agreement — at least one that includes protections for Mexican sovereignty — was in the works.
Sheinbaum lowered her expectations this week, saying it would not be a formal agreement but rather a kind of memorandum of understanding to share information and intelligence on drug trafficking or money laundering.
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Associated Press writers Megan Janetsky and María Verza contributed to this report.
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