Before Osama Bin Laden, there was Pancho Villa. Neither needs an introduction. However, it is not widely known that the Mexican revolutionary organized what many consider the first terrorist attack on United States soil and a massive manhunt on foreign soil.
On March 15, 1916, 10,000 American troops invaded Mexico, storming across the border in Chihuahua. Just 70 years earlier, nearly 80,000 United States soldiers and sailors attacked Mexico.
These conflicts tore apart already tenuous relations between the nations. Yet, they alone did not poison the atmosphere that prevented the countries from being staunch allies. The earlier aggression marked only the second time the United States declared war. Significantly, it was an expansionist war, one that dispossessed Mexico of half its territory.
From the outset, Mexico and the United States were destined to be antagonistic neighbors. Tension and conflict best characterize ties even today. It became a long-running story of a powerful and aggressive nascent empire—the United States—trampling, bullying, and even brutalizing a weak and troubled country, Mexico. Today, official contact between Mexico City and Washington is tense and even tortured. Proximity has bred mistrust and dislike. There is also hubris and disdain that have long informed the official United States view of Mexico.
On August 13, 2025, a video shows Trump stating: ‘Mexico does what we tell them to do and Canada does what we tell them to do because we have the two borders. ‘”
On February 1, 2025, President Donald Trump uttered menacing and poisonous lies about a country with which it shares deeply rooted ties. Few countries are as naturally linked. Trump’s words were those reserved for enemies.
“The Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico. The government of Mexico has afforded safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.
Trump’s fusillade went on.
“This alliance endangers the national security of the United States, and we must eradicate the influence of these dangerous cartels.
“The sustained influx of illegal aliens,” he alleged, “has profound consequences on every aspect of our national life – overwhelming our schools, lowering our wages, reducing our housing supply and raising rents, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing crime.”
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 