The Trump administration is once again threatening U.S. military intervention in Mexico, supposedly to deal with drug cartels which it has designated as “terrorist” organizations.

Both Mexico and Venezuela are being blamed for the presence of fentanyl in the United States.

The threat to invade is an extremely provocative move. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has denounced Trump’s threat to take military action within Mexico as an unacceptable violation of her country’s national sovereignty. Sheinbaum is extremely popular among the Mexican public, so if Trump sends troops in to invade Mexico, they will be resisted by the whole nation.

The Communist Party USA repudiates these imperialistic maneuvers, which will solve neither the issue of fentanyl, nor the other touchy issue of mass migration to the United States. On the contrary, such intervention will exacerbate these issues.

In the same manner Secretary of State Marco Rubio is threatening military actions against Venezuela, whose government Trump and previous administrations falsely claim to be illegitimate. In his first term Trump arrogantly designated his choice of little known Juan Guaidó to be Venezuela’s President. Trump and Rubio accuse Venezuelan President Maduro of heading a criminal organization called “Cartel de Soles,” or Cartel of the Suns, and recognize a right wing clique as the real government.

Bringing up historical precedents helps us understand how dangerous Trump’s and Rubio’s threats really are.

In the case of Mexico, the U.S. has sent in troops on several occasions, as well as intervening in other ways. In 1846–48, the United States invaded Mexico, resulting in a war in which the U.S. stole more than half of Mexico’s national territory. In 1913, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, helped engineer a violent military coup against the elected president of Mexico, Francisco Madero. Madero and his vice president were murdered. Later in the First World War, the United States twice sent troops into Mexico, first into the port of Veracruz to respond to an “insult to the flag,” and then into Northern Mexico to try to capture the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

On top of all this, the United States has connived with corrupt politicians in Mexico to set up trade arrangements, specifically NAFTA, which have harmed the livelihoods of working class and poor farming Mexican citizens. It is estimated that some two million Mexican farmers were driven off the land by NAFTA, because they could not compete with a flood of subsidized maize and other products which poured into Mexico from the United States. This social fracturing also stimulated the drug trade, because it helped the cartels to recruit people economically distressed by the loss of their livelihoods.

In the case of Venezuela, the late president Hugo Chavez, along with Cuban president Fidel Castro, was instrumental in building an alliance of Latin American states for the purpose of resisting U.S. imperialist domination in the Western Hemisphere. This resistance has caused imperialism to unceasingly work for the destabilization of Venezuela and Cuba through economic warfare, severely damaging the welfare of the people of those countries.

There are few countries in Latin America and the Caribbean which have not been impacted by similar actions on the part of U.S. imperialism, either by economic domination, by direct or indirect military action, or both. In Guatemala, Haiti, Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere, democratic and progressive governments have been overthrown with strong U.S. connivance. Brutal dictators have been kept in power in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Argentina, Paraguay, and in other countries.

The imposition of unequal and unfair neoliberal trade policies has created desperate poverty in Central America, Jamaica, Haiti and many other countries, all with the purpose of increasing the profits of U.S. multinational corporations and the ultra-wealthy U.S. ruling class. These economic and military policies generate mass migration to the United States. Far from constituting an “invasion,” as the Trump administration claims, these migrations are a natural response on the part of workers and poor farmers to find a solution to a radically declining standard of living. They feel compelled to come to the U.S., there being no other place they can migrate to, to earn enough money to live and to send back money to keep their families and communities above water in their countries of origin.

The impoverishment of Latin America, the overthrow of progressive governments and protection of dictators has gone on under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but the Trump White House and the Rubio State Department are escalating the attacks to an especially dangerous degree.

The independence and right to self-determination of Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries of our hemisphere deserve our full political support.

Solidarity with our southern neighbors requires us to educate, organize, and mobilize our communities — including unions, civil rights and community groups, and religious and student organizations to put maximum pressure on the U.S. government to stop such madness.

We demand an end to U.S. policies of invading other countries.

We demand that our representatives in the Senate and House of Representatives take immediate legislative action to block the Trump administration’s threatened military action against Mexico and Venezuela.

We further demand that Congress end the U.S. economic, trade, and financial blockade against Cuba by supporting the United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2025 S. 136, sponsored by Senator Wyden (D-Oregon). Elected officials in Congress must join the effort to defeat the GOP’s vitriolic anti-Cuba legislation, and end interference in the affairs of Venezuela.

There is no time to lose. The suffering and the danger are increasing daily.

Contact your Senators here.

Images: Claudia Sheinbaum discurso de la victoria by EneasMx (Wikipedia); Mexican farmworkers pick romaine lettuce in a field near Yuma, AZ by Peter Haden (CC BY-NC 2.0)