Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry said on Saturday he would get the US military involved in Mexico’s war with drug cartels, in comments likely to upset the Mexican government.
The remarks appear to be a new misstatement on foreign policy by the Texas governor who is struggling to hold on to the mantle of frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Perry said that as president, he would work with Mexico in the same way the US has worked with Colombia to combat drug cartels.
“The way that we were able to stop the drug cartels in Colombia was with a coordinated effort,” he said in a campaign speech in New Hampshire.
“It may take our military” working with the Mexican government to win Mexico’s drug war, he said.
The US military has advisers in Colombia who are involved mainly in training, logistical support and intelligence backup for the Colombian armed forces as they fight cocaine traffickers and leftist guerrillas.
However, there are no US armed forces in Mexico fighting the drug war and Mexico strongly opposes any US military involvement in its territory, although it has received more than US$1 billion in US aid to take on the cartels.
Perry has stumbled before on foreign issues. He gave a rambling answer during a debate between candidates last month to a question about what he would do as president if the Taliban got hold of nuclear weapons.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
RSS