Good Luck Making America Safe Again Without the Mexican Military, Experts Say Vera Bergengruen - McClatchy Washington Bureau
go to original February 21, 2017

Trump's insistence that he will force Mexico to pay for a border wall led to the cancellation of a visit by President Enrique Pena Nieto last month. In a subsequent phone conversation between the leaders, leaked by unnamed sources, Trump threatened to send U.S. troops into Mexico to get rid of "bad hombres down there," saying the country's own military "is scared."

Even though the Mexican government denied the report and the White House said the comments were meant to be "lighthearted," they added to the growing tension between the U.S. and Mexico. Some of Trump's comments about Mexico on the campaign trail — painting the people as criminals, the government as an economic moocher, the military as weak — won't be forgotten easily.

"With the American rhetoric being so aggressive, it is already starting to affect the foundation of the security collaboration," said Raul Benitez Manaut, a security expert at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "Even though nothing has become law yet, it will be harder to work together now that the nationalist discourse from Trump has created a defensive reaction … with growing nationalism here in Mexico."

The partnership between the militaries took decades to build up.

"For a long time the U.S. military talked about the inefficiency and corruption of the Mexicans, and the Mexican side pointed to the imperialist attitude of the American forces," Benitez Manaut said. "But mutual trust was built up slowly, bit by bit, by a sense of shared security and shared responsibility."

Many U.S. defense officials spent their entire careers working on the relationship with their southern neighbor. Every year since the end of World War II, the U.S. Army has hosted seven Mexican army senior generals and their spouses on visits to military and civilian agencies in the United States in a bid to strengthen the partnership.

"Most Americans don't remember that we invaded Mexico at least three times, and forced it to give up nearly half of the territory they won in their independence from Spain," said Stephen Kelly, who served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico from 2004 to 2006. "Nowhere is that feeling of invasion, that Mexico has been robbed and violated, more strongly felt than in the Mexican army."

...Wall or no wall, the cooperation of Mexican authorities will continue to be crucial when it comes to sharing information. And with Central Americans making up the majority of immigrants entering the U.S. illegally through Mexico in recent years, working with Mexico on securing its southern border with Guatemala would go further to stem the problem Trump is worried about than a wall, analysts say.

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