MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  On February 22, 2026, a wave of violence rippled across large parts of Mexico.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Across the country, roads have been blocked, cars and buses torched. Banks and shops set on fire, by powerful criminal gangs intent on demonstrating their reach and deterring further action against them.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  It was unleashed by Mexico’s Jalisco Nueva Generación, or New Generation, cartel after the Mexican military raided and killed their leader…. Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes. Otherwise known as “El Mencho”.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Authorities in Mexico say at least 62 people have been killed following a wave of violence that broke out after the killing of the country’s most wanted man…. The government has ordered civilians to stay indoors as popular unrest spread to popular tourist destinations such as Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The operation was led by the Mexican military, but Mexican authorities said U.S. intelligence supported the raid. Many analysts believe Mexico went after El Mencho at the behest of the United States and Trump, like saying… take action, or else, U.S. troops will go in. 

And for almost a year, Trump has been threatening to do just that — send U.S. troops into Mexico to fight cartels. This is what he said two days after he bombed Venezuela in January.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  And by the way, you have to do something with Mexico. Mexico has to get their act together. Because they’re pouring through Mexico. And we’re gonna have to do something. We’d love Mexico to do something. They’re capable of doing something, but unfortunately, their cartels are very strong.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trump has his sights set on Mexico. The excuse? 

Drugs. That has been the boogie man across Latin America for decades. An excuse that has led to so much violence. The U.S. has funneled billions into allies in the region under the guise of fighting the drug traffickers. It has ripped apart countries. And the violence has only gotten worse. Decades of fighting, with little to show for it except human rights abuses, displacement, and tens of thousands of dead and disappeared. 

And Trump is turning up the temperature. 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  The Mexican cartels are fueling and orchestrating much of the bloodshed and chaos in this hemisphere. And the United States government will do whatever is necessary to defend our national security and to protect the safety of the American people.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That… in a minute

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad, in the past and the very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: Trump’s Attack.

Episode 10: Trump Re-ups the Forever Drug War in Mexico

So… in the last episode, I took you to Mexico City to walk with me through Mexico’s Museum of Interventions and witness, first hand, the looong history of foreign and, in particular, U.S. intervention in the country. Today, I’m going to bring you up to the present. And to do that, we’re going to dive head first into the U.S.-backed drug war in Mexico, which has overtaken the country in recent decades and fueled an epidemic of violence that has disappeared more than a hundred thousand people over the last 20 years. We’ll look at Trump’s threats, the repercussions they are having in the country. And we’ll also hear the voices of Mexicans who are standing up.

To begin, I want to bring in someone here who can help me set the scene to understand the drug war in Mexico within the context of the region. Her name is Christy Thornton.. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  I’m an associate professor of history at New York University. I specialize in Latin American history and particularly the history of Mexico.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Christy joined me for most of episode 9, where I looked back at the history of U.S. intervention in Mexico.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  The drug war has long been a kind of very convenient instrument to use for the deployment of US power. And so that has gone in two directions. One is to say it has been very convenient to argue for particular kinds of intervention. vis-a-vis the drug war, right, to take out people who are seen as enemies, right. If we think about the invasion of Panama, right, the justification for that was very much that Noriega was a drug trafficker when that was well known through the whole period in which he was actually supported by the United States, right. But in then in the moment that can switch and say, okay, this is in fact the reason why we should take him out. I mean, in the case of Venezuela, It’s very striking that it’s basically within a two-week period that Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras, who is convicted in U.S. courts of moving massive amounts of cocaine into the United States, and then takes out Maduro on the justification that he is a drug trafficker, right? When we know that no fentanyl comes from Venezuela, in fact, very little drugs actually leave Venezuela and come to the United States. And so, and they admit after they have him in custody that the quote unquote cartel de los soles is a fiction. It’s a thing that doesn’t exist. And so drugs remains maybe surprisingly, a kind of convenient instrument for the deployment of U.S. power um whenever the U.S. us s decides to do it. And so we’ve seen instances in which the United States very much decides to look the other way because allies are the people trafficking in drugs.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Nowhere is the failure of this drug war strategy clearer than in Mexico and Colombia. I promise to get to Colombia in a future episode. Today, I’m going to focus on Mexico.  This is the reality.

More than 130,000 disappeared over the last 20 years, since Mexican President Felipe Calderón kicked off the present day drug war in the country, clearly with the support of the United States. 

But Christy says this quote “drug war” strategy began long before that….

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And so the justification of going after drugs as a way to actually combat the leftist guerrilla movements, right? This is very clearly what we see in Cold War Colombia and U.S. you know security assistance in Colombia, where under the rubric of fighting drugs, there is actually like the war against the FARC and the ELN.

Then you see this happening at in the same period in Mexico so that Mexican state security forces with the assistance of the US government, the CIA, et cetera, are very much targeting particular rural areas that they see as hotbeds of guerrilla activity using the logic of drugs, using the logic of counter narco um operations. And so that actually starts before the Cold War even ends, right? It is a very convenient way to argue for the incursion of particular kinds of military forces.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  There’s a lot of really important backstory here, that covers decades of the United States and Mexico collaborating on drug interdiction and against the growing cartels since the 1980s.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  Then, of course, with the end of the Cold War the drug war becomes this new justification for U.S. intervention. And so we see security cooperation really taking off in the 1990s. This takes the form mostly of both intelligence cooperation, that is to say the CIA, the various kinds of intelligence agencies between Mexico and the United States sharing information. And then it will begin to take the form of the training of military and police forces by US officials.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The United States exports this kind of training all over the Americas, most famously at the Western Hemisphere Institute for National Security Cooperation, WINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas. 

VIDEO CLIP:  The United States Army, Navy and Air Force maintain a special intimate kind of elder brother relationship with the armed forces of Latin America that exists with no other foreign services. These young men are students at the School of the Americas. A major instrument in the U.S. Army’s Southern Command stated policy of providing strong influence, guidance and orientation to Latin Armed services.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s an old U.S. government video about the School of the Americas, when it was still housed out of a U.S. military base in Panama. Since the mid 80s, it’s been located in Fort Benning, Georgia. Some of Latin America’s most ruthless military men have received training there over the decades, as we’ve looked at before in this podcast.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And so this idea of sort of training Mexican security forces, Mexican military, right happens both on Mexican soil and also by taking Mexican military actors off into these training camps like like the School of the Americas. So that cooperation really ramps up in the nineteen eighties into the nineteen nineties But it’s at precisely this moment because the U.S. has been so heavily focused on trafficking in Colombia and they have really gone after drug trafficking organizations in Colombia in ways that destabilize that country, that transshipment of cocaine now is becoming more important into Mexico. So you begin to have more and more cocaine being shipped through Mexico. These drug trafficking organizations are starting to take on more of this business. And then as they get better at it, they’re going to stop just being sort of shippers and they’re going to start developing these commercial relationships themselves.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In other words…. as the United States pushes a widespread counternarcotic and counterinsurgency strategy and helps Colombia go after trafficking kingpins like Pablo Escobar, the Mexican business picks up. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And so the drug trade itself is really ramping up at the same moment that the United States begins to ramp up the security cooperation. This really becomes institutionalized in the mid-2000s under the president Felipe Calderon, who is from the National Action Party, the PAN, the kind of center-right party in Mexico, when he decides to launch what he calls a war on drugs and organized crime. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Calderón and President George W. Bush created the Merida Initiative, a security cooperation agreement that, between 2007 and 2021, sent more than $3 billion U.S. tax payer dollars to fight the drug war in Mexico.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  So the Merida initiative from the mid-2000s, really up through the Obama administration, um really creates this kind of institutional apparatus for this kind of cooperation and is operative in the moment when the so-called war on drugs, begins to claim tens of thousands and then eventually hundreds of thousands of lives.” 

And it turns out that um when you send the military into cities and you declare a war, right, you will get a war. And so we see, you know, massive increases in homicide in Mexico, the massive increases in forced disappearance in this period sort of post-2007. all in the same moment of the security cooperation with the United States. And so that kind of destabilization has really affected what drug trafficking looks like now in 2026 in Mexico, really creating the conditions for the kind of, um you know, the fracturing of the drug trafficking organizations, the creation of these new kinds of DTOs like Jalisco Nueva Generación.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  DTO’s — Drug Trafficking Organizations. Jalisco Nueva Generación was the group behind the spike of violence across Mexico in mid-February.

ABC NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin was killed during a military operation. Mexico officials say criminal groups burned cars and trucks across the country.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Last year, the Trump administration designated Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Sinaloa cartel and several other Mexican drug gangs quote “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Christy says, these are not your grandparent’s drug trafficking groups. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  In the 21st century, drug cartels are much more like other kinds of multinational corporations in that everything is kind of compartmentalized and subcontracted, right? It’s just-in-time lean production for a global market. And so you have a set of subcontractors. And if one subcontractor you know fails at their job, gets taken out by law enforcement, you just slot somebody else into that node. And so it’s much more like a loose network than it is like a kind of vertically integrated cartel.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  This means that Trump’s strategy of taking out the kingpin is going to be even less effective than in the past – and even before, it never really worked. 

Jalisco New Generation emerged in response to the intense state violence toward drug trafficking.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  Jalisco New Generation very famously has a massive sort of arsenal of military equipment, you know, the kinds of rocket launchers that can take down a plane, for example, and armored cars and very high caliber weapons, right? They’re able to kind of procure these things. And so their reasons for being the kinds of work that they do is very different than what we might think of as the traditional kind of quote unquote drug cartel. And so one of the things that researchers have shown is that these new groups tend to do things like outsource the violence that’s required to run their extortion rackets to make sure that their trafficking routes work.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And when you outsource violence, she says, sometimes things can get out of control.

And that is a great way to describe the incredible violence we have seen in Mexico over the last two decades.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  What we’ve seen is the kind of spiraling of this security cooperation into this kind of massive cooperation that is involved in the kind of wholesale destabilization of Mexican society through the quote unquote war on drugs and organized crime. The numbers are just really staggering. And so that history of cooperation that has brought us to the moment we’re in today, right, again, is another one of these kind of massive failures. It’s done exactly the opposite of what it has intended to do and created the kind of destabilization that now Trump is able to say they can’t keep their house in order. We should invade.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  More than 130,000 people forcibly disappeared over the last 20 years.

Just think about that for a moment. 

Sons and daughters. Brothers. Sisters. Uncles. Aunts. Mothers. Fathers. Gone. Just gone. Fueled by a so-called U.S.-backed drug war. 

In Mexico, someone counts as being disappeared if they are missing and they are believed to have been victims of a crime. And there are many, many people missing.

According to researchers, the cartels are to blame for a majority of the cases. We also know that state agents have been involved in some of the killings and disappearances.

The reality is harrowing. Many family members have spent years searching for their loved ones. Thousands of bodies have been found in hundreds of mass graves. But it is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Most of the bodies of the disappeared will likely never be found. Families will live on with the unknown. The doubt. The pain of their loss. The fear that someone else they know may be taken. Surviving with unanswerable questions. 

“The uncertainty of not knowing what’s happening,” one mother of the disappeared told a Mexican news outlet. “Where are they? Are they eating?. How are they? If they have them? And in the worst scenario, if he is no longer alive?”

That is the true cost of the drug war in Mexico. Already waged for more than 20 years. And shown to be failure from the beginning. And a drug war that U.S. president Donald Trump wants to ignite with even greater force, in the name of battling the cartels.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  As part of our commitment to countering the cartel presence in our region, we must recognize the epicenter of cartel violence is Mexico. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trump spoke to allied Latin American leaders in March at his Shield of the Americas summit. That’s where he kicked off his right-wing military alliance to attack drug cartels in the region. I looked at Trump’s summit and this new alliance in Episode 8 of this podcast.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Look, it all comes — it’s coming through Mexico. And I like the president very much. She’s a very good person. She’s got a beautiful voice, a beautiful woman, but beautiful voice. President, president, president. I said, let me eradicate the cartels. No, no, no, please, president. We have to eradicate them. We have to knock the hell out of them, because they’re getting worse. They’re taking over their country. The cartels are running Mexico. We can’t have that. Too close to us. Too close to you.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trump is taking things to the next level. But Christy says this drug war discourse has been a quote, “incredible instrument of U.S. empire” for decades…. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  It is like a kind of get out of jail free card, the drug war, as a justification for the United States to do what it wants to do around the world. And it’s sort of incredible that it remains that way, given it’s abject failures, right?

Given that drugs today are cheaper, more plentiful, and more dangerous than they have ever been, right? And so if the if the goal of the drug war was to make drugs less accessible, more expensive, make fewer people die, we have failed completely. And yet the drug war remains this very powerful justification, a very powerful instrument to use to deploy US force overseas.

I teach a class about this at NYU, and the question is, if this has failed so abjectly for the past now 55, 56 years, right, why do we continue it? What are the interests that are being served here? 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  On the one hand… like we’ve discussed, it’s an excuse for U.S-backed military intervention and occupation. It’s also endless. Impossible to win without addressing the root causes of drugs, the drug trade and drug trafficking. And there is big money to be made. Among those cashing in… are defense contractors, manufacturers of surveillance material, drones. Guns, guns, and more guns…  all more firepower for the military. And an incredible amount of weapons being trafficked into Mexico each year to arm the cartels.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  So the drug war and organized crime in Mexico need weapons for all of their illicit businesses. They need weapons to contest territory with other criminal organizations. They need weapons to control civilian populations. They need weapons to contest with those government agencies that are fighting them. They need weapons to run the migrant traffic, which they now control. They need weapons to kidnap and and extort people. They need weapons to seize legal oil that is being produced within Mexico. All of their businesses rely on firearms. And the U.S. retail gun market, just on the other side of the 2,000-mile border, is perfect for for the business model of these criminal organizations.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  John Lindsay-Poland is a longtime writer, activist, and researcher focused on human rights and demilitarization, particularly in Latin America. He also coordinates Stop US Arms to Mexico, which is a project of the human rights organization Global Exchange.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  Because it is huge. There are thousands and thousands of gun stores near the Mexican border. It’s very militarized. Those weapons have the capacity to take down helicopters in some cases. They are not available legally within Mexico, but they’re very easily purchased within these gun stores. In many places, you don’t need to go through a background check. And then the controls at the border are principally focused on south to north movements.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I’ve witnessed this first hand. Driving into Mexico from the United States. You pretty much just go. There’s no checkpoint. It’s almost like there’s no border going south. You just drive right across and suddenly you’re in another country.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  You know this is the the racism of of the border, which is all those people in Mexico are rapists and murderers. And you know in the U.S., there’s nothing bad that could be coming from the U.S. side into Mexico. And so all of the drones and the and the the walls and the border patrol staffing and all of that infrastructure is focused on stopping things and people coming north and not stopping on stopping guns from going south. So there are, at the most conservative estimate, about 135,000 guns per year that are purchased in the United States and trafficked over the border into Mexico.

Of the guns that are recovered in Mexico very consistently over the last 15 years, 70% of those guns, when they are submitted for tracing, were are traced to a U.S. purchase.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  135,000 guns per year. That’s like buying a weapon for every man, woman and child from say New Haven, Connecticut each year and sending them to be used for drug trafficking in Mexico. If Trump – or any US president for that matter – really wanted to stop drug violence in Mexico, he could take serious measures to stop the trafficking of weapons out of the United States. But of course, guns are the bread and butter of many of Trump’s supporters and his administration has meant big business for the gun industry.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  There’s this idea that, hey, if I get a gun, there will be less violence and that the replication of that in a massive level means that there are more people armed and more people killing each other or hurting each other.

In terms of the the ways in which drug policy has persistently failed to reduce either the consumption of narcotics or the level of addiction or the level of trafficking of illegal narcotics. It’s a fundamental mistake to think that if someone has an addictive use of a substance, that going after the people who are producing that substance is going to stop your addiction. Because what is happening is inside you. It’s internal. And this is a function of imperialism, is that it externalizes the problem. It says this is outside of us and therefore we have to go after it outside of our own borders. And the same thing happens at a personal level.

So unless you go after those issues of addiction, and of poverty and inequality, you’re not dealing with the structures that are leading large numbers of people into this industry. An industry that’s very destructive, but you have to deal with the structure of that industry.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  John says it’s clear Trump isn’t interested in actually resolving these problems, but making headlines and pretending to look tough.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  When Trump identifies problems, he does not identify structures. He identifies leaders. So you can see that in you know in going after Maduro in in Venezuela, in going after Khamenei in Iran, in going after El Mencho in Mexico, that he has a belief that that if you go after the leaders, this is the kingpin strategy, kind of on steroids in a way, that if you you kill or capture the leader, that it will have some big effect.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Mexico on edge. Following the Mexican government operation that killed the cartel kingpin known as “El Mencho.”

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  If we just take the example of the killing of El Mencho, in Mexico. This happened on February 22nd. El Mencho Nemesio Oseguera was the undisputed leader of the New new Generation Jalisco cartel, which largest cartel in Mexico, perhaps in the world. And he was killed in an operation led by Mexican military.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s the Mexican military operation I talked about in the start of this episode.

JOHN LINDSAY-POLAND:  But the entire structure of the cartel remains in place… all of the personnel, the demand for their products, you know whether it’s illegal drugs or other things, is still in place. The relationships that allow them to function are still in place. The guns that are supporting them are still there. During that operation, that killed El Mencho, the Mexican military recovered seven firearms, plus a couple ah rocket launchers, which are not available on the U.S. retail market. But the firearms, that included a .50 caliber rifle. Every day, on average, there are 369 firearms that are trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico by the most conservative estimate. So there were seven guns recovered, and then tomorrow there will be 369 more coming into the country. And then the next day, 369 more, and the next day. So there is nothing in that against that structure that the killing of El Mencho affected.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Nothing. But the response from the cartel was immediate and intense.

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Violence has broken out across Mexico hours after the army confirmed it had killed one of the country’s most feared drug lords.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The Jalisco cartel responded to El Mencho’s killing by unleashing a wave of violence around the country. 

It’s a familiar story: The violence of the drug war fuels more violence. And like so many ripple effects of US-backed militarization and intervention, the people ultimately hit hardest are often among the most vulnerable – poor and rural communities, migrants, youth. 

As this latest spike of violence broke out, Mexicans across the country were concerned. Many do believe that Trump played a heavy hand in forcing the Mexican military to act.

I asked a journalist friend of mine in Mexico City, Clayton Conn, to speak with people on the streets about their thoughts on El Mencho’s killing, the threat of U.S. intervention and the relationship between Mexico and the U.S., today.

Adriana is a 70-year old odontologist who lives in Mexico City. 

She says, “I think that the death or the capture of the drug trafficker, El Mencho, did trigger something very… very appalling, very terrible, its like if you bite the wasp hive, many negative and aggressive reactions are going to come out… More and more aggression,” she says.

“A leader of a cartel dies or is murdered, and another arrives and there are ten more behind him,” says researcher Alejandra Gonzalez. “So, the problem is much deeper and more structural. And that is what the Mexican government should be thinking. Not only with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, but with all the cartels in Mexico.”

“Yes, I do believe that they may have acted to a large extent under pressure from the US government,” says Fernando, a 47-year-old teacher from Mexico City. “Not only to please Trump and to prevent him from placing tariffs, for example, but also within the context of the revision of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. It may be that they did that, among other things, to send the message that they are a reliable partner and not to get into more trouble with such an erratic person like Trump.”

And Christy Thornton says this is not necessarily new. The Mexican military has a long history of toeing the line in the drug war in Mexico to remain on the good side of U.S. leaders.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  The Mexican government, long before Sheinbaum, has been very good at sort of strategically turning over drug traffickers when there is a particular reason to do so, when there’s a particular threat. When it’s felt that doing so will make Mexico look good in the eyes of the United States. So we saw this under Peña Nieto. We saw this under… López Obrador, and we’re seeing it now under Sheinbaum, where all of a sudden we can actually figure out where El Chapo is, right? We can mysteriously locate El Mencho at a particular moment.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  President Claudia Sheinbaum has said that there will be no U.S. troops in Mexico. But Christy says the threat of U.S. intervention is real. Sheinbaum knows it and Mexico is doing all it can to signal that it is willing to do what is necessary to ingratiate Washington without compromising Mexican sovereignty. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  I do think that the decision to go after El Mencho was very much strategic in trying to forestall these threats from Trump. And it seems to have worked for the moment. The question of whether that will continue to be the case, I think, remains a really important and open one. And I’m sure it’s one that the Sheinbaum administration is thinking about.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The threat is real. 

And, as we have all seen in recent months. Anything is possible. 

But Mexicans are also standing up.

That is where I want to take you right now. See… like few other countries in the region, Mexicans have been protesting against Trump, his threats against Mexico, his invasion of Venezuela. His disastrous oil blockade of Cuba. Against his policies up and down the region. They have been protesting and speaking out.

I asked, journalist Tamara Pearson to visit one of these protests against Trump and his actions. She attended this march and rally in Mexico City about two months ago. 

TAMARA PEARSON:  Earlier this morning there was an anti-US intervention march from the Independence Angel to the main square in the center of the city. Now there is a protest event being held near the square in a key part of the city that has been renamed by Solidarity Movements, Plaza Palestina Libre or Free Palestine Square.

There is a festive atmosphere here in the square. I’d estimate that some 50 collectives, organizations and movements have come together in what they have renamed Free Palestine Square. They’ve closed off one of the main roads in the center of Mexico City for the next 12 hours in order to protest U.S. intervention into Latin America, its threats towards Mexico and towards Cuba, the bombing of Venezuela, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on our rights to water, various different issues are coming together here today.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She spoke to numerous people in the crowd. 

“I’m here, because this is a moment of unity,” Gabriel Morales told her. He works with refugee communities in Mexico. He has a salt and pepper beard and a grey free palestine t-shirt.

“We need look for how we can build connections and ties to defend ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to support each other,” he said.

He says that when the United States attacked Venezuela, the response from other countries was tepid — lukewarm. 

“So what worries me,” he says, “is that if Trump decides to do something against Mexico, the other countries won’t do anything either, because we have all remained silent.” 

“This is really concerning. and I think that as Trump sees that he is getting away with things and there are few or no consequences, I think it is very worrying the possibility that he is feeling empowered to take these actions,” said Gabriel.

José Manuel Galván sells books and art on the streets. He’s been involved in theater and culture since the 1960s. He has white hair, a goatee and he’s wearing a blue baseball cap backward.

“We should reflect on letting there be national sovereignty for the people of each country, to decide for each other, like in a democratic system, which is supposedly the best thing we’ve found as a civilization. So we should ask that the United States, both the citizens and their representatives, respect the sovereignty of the peoples,” Jose said.

“Mexico is scared of Trump, so yeah, it’s gone to another level, I think.”

Steve Ayala is from Voices in Movement, an independent media collective in Mexico. He was born in the U.S., but he’s been living in Mexico for the last 20 years. He has a big mustache and he wears a white shirt with the words, “viva la libertad”, long live freedom.

“And all the things that we’ve seen has only been within one year, one year of him being president. He has three years left, so people are scared. I just came back from the United States, and people are scared. People feel hopeless. They’re trying to organize. I see more resistance than I’ve seen before, so that’s good. People are resisting. People are fighting from middle schools, from high schools, to older people. My parents, who are in their 70s, who have never marched in their life before, are marching, taking to the streets, so it’s beautiful. There’s resistance, but it’s because we’re seeing this authoritarian government of Trump trying to take power around the world.”

Before I go, I want to take you back to Mexico’s Museum of Interventions. Remember, this is the place I visited for much of the last episode where I talked about the history of U.S. and foreign intervention in Mexico.. Today… I’m taking you to this room that looks back on Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, not far from El Paso, Texas. And U.S. Brigadier General John J. Pershing’s pursuit of him all over Northern Mexico.

Remember Pershing chased Pancho Villa with thousands of U.S. troops for months…. Like almost a year. From March 1916 to February 1917. 

In the museum, the room is cool. Cream colored walls. Red tiled flooring. There are all these old black and white pictures of Pershing and Pancho Villa, either marching or riding horses alongside endless rows of troops. There’s a map showing the route Pershing took as he chased Villa around the Mexican state of Chihuahua. There’s a copy of an old sign from March 1916 offering an award of $5,000 dollars for the capture of Pancho Villa. That amount is equivalent to roughly $150,000 in today’s money. 

Music about Pancho Villas ride plays from speakers overhead. It’s punctuated by a narration about Pershing’s chase, which was originally called, the U.S. Army’s quote “Punitive Expedition.”

There are two things about this so-called “expedition” that are  really important to underscore, even today. … First, the United States called Pancho Villa a Bandido, or bandit. An outlaw. 

This fits with that same motif of say the infamous Texas Rangers, or the marines, or even Superman… going after the so-called bad guys, even when they’re on foreign soil. It’s the U.S. officials, police or soldiers fighting for truth, justice and the American Way. You know, they would say the same thing about rebel leader Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua a decade later. They’d call him a bandido, too, an outlaw, a bandit. Even though, the United States was the invading force in both of these cases. And both Pancho Villa and Sandino were fighting for their countries, in their own ways. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  Yeah. That’s a narrative that begins in colonial times, the narrative of the bandit as sort of you know somebody who is just looking out for their own interests and willing to sort of rob and pillage. And in fact, that then gets layered into our understandings of the Latin American guerrilla writ large, right? From the early 20th century, people like Sandino up through the kind of guerrilla wars of the Cold War, right? So that the idea of the the bandit as a kind of explanation for why there would be armed resistance to state power, right, becomes a kind of very powerful trope. And so you see that, you know, not only during the Cold War, when you have the emergence of these guerrilla movements in Mexico, but also obviously across Central America and in South America as well.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But Christy says it doesn’t stop there. There’s a connection into today, Trump’s discourse and U.S. actions.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  We have some bad, bad people in this country that have to go out. We have to get them out. We’re gonna secure the border. And once the border is secured at a later date, we’ll figure out all of the rest. We have some bad hombres here and we’re gonna get em out.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That was Trump in the debate before his first election victory.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  You begin to see it in the way that we talk about drug traffickers, right? In the way that we talk about um the kind of destabilization of these drug trafficking organizations and the narratives that we tell about the quote unquote cartel and what that looks like. I think that there is a kind of long through line about the threat to stability, right? and a particular version of what that stability looks like that we can trace all the way back to you know the 19th century and the understanding of these people as as merely bandits.

For the United States, the bandits become drug trafficking kingpins or even unruly heads of state who aren’t willing to get in line with the U.S. agenda, be it Manuel Noriega, in 1989 Panama, or Nicolas Maduro, in 2026 Venezuela.

There’s another takeaway from the Pancho Villa story that resonates through to Trump’s threats of intervening in Mexico today. The idea that Mexico, or other countries in the region, can’t take care of themselves. And therefore the United States is obligated to intervene, with or without Mexico’s consent. This, of course, is reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that quote, “the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly…  to the exercise of an international police power.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  There is an important parallel today. The idea of Mexico just sort of not being able to get its own house in order, not being able to keep track of the various sorts of violence that might spill out over the border and therefore threaten the United States is very much of a piece with what we’re seeing with Trump’s threats today.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs. It’s OK with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs. We know their address. We know their front door. We know everything about every one of them.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  If Trump does take action, it’ll be up to a number of factors. Most importantly, how president Claudia Sheinbaum is able to navigate her relationship with the United States. Walking the tight-rope between protecting Mexican sovereignty and answering Trump’s demands.

Christy Thornton.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  I do think that it’s not a foregone conclusion that the Mexican government has managed to forestall this crisis. Thus far, they have been successful, but Trump is very unpredictable. I do think that the intervening history from, say, the 1970s to today and the way that security cooperation and military intelligence sharing has worked really is one of the things that’s informing whatever restraint still exists with regard to Trump’s threat to intervene in Mexico in that way.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But that is a serious tight-rope, particularly when you consider the history and hubris of the United States.

Here’s just one example. In late March, U.S. soldiers entered Mexican territory in the city of Nogales without authorization from Mexican authorities and remained there for roughly an hour. Sergio Garcia, a correspondent with the Mexican news outlet La Silla Rota, filmed the incursion. La Silla Rota posted it on X.

The video shows armed men in camo gear. A group of U.S. soldiers appear to be working on the fence behind them.

A local Nogales resident speaks to them from a few steps away trying to get them to understand that standing on Mexican land is an affront to Mexican sovereignty. “They wouldn’t let Mexican soldiers over there on that side,” he says.

Journalist Sergio Garcia points out in a separate video that the frustration from residents living  near the wall in Nogales has a long history.

On August 27, 1918, fighting broke out along this same U.S.-Mexican border in Nogales. The U.S. army invaded and occupied portions of the city. Remember… this was just two years after Pershing’s Pancho Villa invasion. 

In the Nogales battle, a handful of U.S. soldiers were killed, but most of the casualties were Mexican. Many of them were civilians. Reports indicated that as many as 130 Mexicans may have been killed. And three hundred wounded.

The fight became known as the Battle of Ambos Nogales. It’s noteworthy that due to the battle… the first permanent border fence was built in the city separating the United States and Mexico.

A wall that more than a hundred years later is still dividing people… along a border that has become synonymous with Trump’s agenda in the United States. 

###

That is all for today. Thanks for listening. 

I’m your host Michael Fox. 

Folks… a couple of things before I go… First, we’re going to be taking a short break from Under the Shadow for a couple of months. I am working hard on a 5-part narrative podcast series about free speech, the history and the Trump Administration’s attacks on this important right. We plan to release that ahead of America’s 250th Independence anniversary in July. Once that’s out, I’ll be back with more from Under the Shadow. Thanks for your patience. 

In the meantime, if you haven’t heard Season 1 of this podcast, I recommend you go back and check it out. This year is the 40th anniversary of the breaking of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Considering Trump’s war on Iran… it’s an important moment to remember. I dive deep into that history in Episode 10 of that season about Nicaragua and the contra war. I’ll add a link in the show notes.

Folks, I mentioned this last time, but I’ve placed some pictures of Mexico’s Museum of Interventions on my Patreon page. You can find those at Patreon.com/mfox. Or you can follow the link in the show notes. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work.

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show.

I really want to thank Christy Thornton and John Lindsay-Poland for sitting down with me for this episode. You can find more information about them and their great work in the show notes. In particular, please check out John Lindsay-Poland and Global Exchange’s campaign “Stop US Arms to Mexico.”

As always… if you are looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting.

The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. 

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.