Mexico's President Asks U.S. to Coordinate on Drug Boat Strikes

Mexico's president has spoken out against the new American policy of destroying suspected drug boats with airstrikes, calling for more cooperation between the two nations on addressing the perennial problem of narco-trafficking.

"We do not agree with these interventions and we have a model, a protocol that has yielded many results," Sheinbaum said Wednesday.

She told Telemundo that she instructed Foreign Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente to summon the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, and try to improve the coordination protocol for drug interdictions. Her proposal was to run joint Mexican-American naval missions to conduct intercepts at sea, resulting in arrests rather than fatalities. The objective, she said, was to ensure against any harm to Mexican nationals or breaches of Mexico's own sovereignty.

"We never want any violation of our sovereignty, nor do we want these types of operations in the economic zone, precisely because action is being taken," Sheinbaum said. "And secondly, because there could be a Mexican, whether a criminal or not, a suspected criminal, on one of these vessels."

Mexico has a longstanding relationship with the U.S. Coast Guard-led Joint Interagency Task Force - South (JIATFS), which handled interdictions in U.S. Southern Command for decades - but these responsibilities are now handled by II Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp LeJeune, using lethal methods. The program has killed 61 people to date, including Colombian, Trinidadian and Venezuelan nationals; three people have been rescued alive.

The initiative has drawn strong objections from Venezuela and Colombia. Questions about its constitutionality have been raised by legal scholars, the Trump administration's political opponents, and elements of the Pentagon's own legal corps, centering around whether the president can use lethal force against unidentified suspects in international waters (without prior Congressional authorization).

The Trump administration has provided targeting information to the U.S. Senate for oversight purposes, selecting a limited group of Republican senators to receive briefing materials, according to ABC.