Emir Olivares and Alma E. Muñoz
La Jornada newspaper
Thursday, August 21, 2025, p. 5
President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo ruled out again that there is a “special operation” set against drug lords on the northern border of Mexico, as announced by the drug control administration (DEA, for its acronym in English) of the United States. He emphasized that the statement issued by that agency in this regard “has nothing to do with reality.”
In the morning of yesterday, he demanded that instance of the White House clarify what objective seeks to have disseminated an agreement that does not exist.
“What interest does the DEA have to publish what she published two days ago? I don’t know. Probably mean that ‘things changed.’ What has to be very clear to the people of Mexico is that the president will never put sovereignty at risk, ever. And that we collaborate, we coordinate, but there will never be subordination,” he said.
He pointed out that the only security agreement with Washington is the one working on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Department; In that sense – more forward – he said that a visit to Mexico of the head of that US instance, Marco Rubio, to close this collaboration, is “likely”.
– What do you think is the intention of the DEA? He asked.
– I don’t know what your intention is, the truth. To say that “there is a special operation on the border”, when there is not. In any case, they would have to say why, what is their intention, ”replied the chief of the Executive.
When speaking for the second consecutive day of the issue, after the DEA announced on Monday an alleged agreement with the Government of Mexico to launch a project called Goalieaccording to which we seek to “dismantle the cartels” of drug trafficking in coordination with her Mexican counterparts, the federal president stressed: “When the DEA statement comes out, because no, it has nothing to do with reality. What there is is the security agreement that is already to be completed with the State Department.”
He recalled that in neoliberal governments there was a clear interference of the United States agencies directly in the operations in Mexico, including the DEA, especially in the six -year term of the Felipe Calderón spurious.
That changed, he stressed, from the administration of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, when there was a distancing with that agency, particularly for the detention, “without evidence”, of the former head of the National Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos.
“Who did that arrest? The DEA. From there, President López Obrador puts more limits to the agencies in Mexico; those limits continue in our government,” he accentuated.
The president remarked that the operations that have to do with national territory correspond only to federal, state or municipal forces.
“But they are a matter of Mexico, of our institutions. You can collaborate in the sense that they give information. They have agents in Mexico that have to clearly comply with the National Security Law and now, with the addition we made to article 40 of the Constitution, but they cannot be operating in the territory,” he said.
To a later question, the president said that he will not leave Mexico from here to December, but will receive visits in the coming weeks of representatives of other governments: Secretaries of State in Brazil; Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney; The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, and “Rubio’s possible visit is being seen.”
