Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, in her morning press conference on Oct. 23, joined the chorus of leaders from the Caribbean warning the Trump administration against taking the law into its own hands in the region, carrying out extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean and now off South America’s Pacific coast and regime change in Venezuela, all in the name of “fighting drugs.”
“We do not agree,” Sheinbaum stated. “There are international laws on how to operate when dealing with the alleged illegal transport of drugs or guns on international waters, and we have expressed this to the government of the United States and publicly.” (Later that afternoon, U.S. President Donald Trump implicitly threatened to unilaterally carry out strikes inside Mexico, with his remark that “Mexico is run by the cartels. I have great respect for the president.... She’s a very brave woman. But Mexico is run by the cartels, and we have to defend ourselves from that.")
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spoken out this week three times, so far. “If this becomes the norm, everyone will believe they can invade another country’s territory to do whatever they want,” he warned on Oct. 24 from Indonesia, TV Globo reported. “Where does that leave respect for the sovereignty of countries?” In his press conference on Oct. 23 on his Indonesia visit, Lula had suggested President Donald Trump does not understand “international politics,” adding that “you’re not there to kill people, you’re there to arrest them and put them on trial. That’s the minimum expected of a head of state.”
Before leaving for Asia, on Oct. 20, Lula, speaking of the “growing polarization and instability” in the Caribbean, declared that “keeping the region as a zone of peace is our priority,” and warned that “interventions can cause more damage than what they seek to prevent.”
