If re-elected, former US president Donald Trump has vowed to send "assassination squads" of US special forces into Mexico to take out the heads of drug cartels, according to a report.
The Republican presidential nominee told three of his allies that the American military has “tougher killers” that can be used to "wage war" on Mexico's drug cartels amid the US's growing fentanyl crisis, according to a report by Rolling Stone.
The former president pitched for a hit similar to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by the US military in 2019. Talking to his close allies, Trump floated the idea of deploying special operation units that would carry out assassinations in Mexico's most notorious drug cartels - with or without the consent of its government.
Trump also told an ally that the US government should have a “kill list of drug lords” that the US special forces should use to assign troops to kill or capture.
In these discussions, the former US president also wondered why similar hits have not been carried out by the US government before, claiming that getting rid of the heads of cartels would strike fear into the hearts of “the kingpins" and dismantle their drug operations.
Trump has publicly vowed to “make appropriate use of Special Forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations" if he returns to the White House.
The 77-year-old Republican frontrunner has not, however, revealed details of his plans including how many such squads or troops he would be willing to send to Mexico and the level of cooperation with the Mexican government.
Trump's pitch for "kill squads" has slowly gained support from Republican lawmakers and think tanks
Florid governor and former rival Ron DeSantis made a similar pledge of ordering US forces to enter Mexico "on day one" if he were elected president. Republican senators have in the past backed legislation that would “give the military the authority to go after these organisations wherever they exist”.
The proposal has been denounced by the Mexican president who called it “an offence to the people of Mexico”.
“We are not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government's armed forces intervene,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's president said.
