Thread: Mex Troops Say They'll Stay Until Fox Says To Return

Mexican troops deliver hurricane aid to Texas
Friday, September 09, 2005

By Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

MEXICO CITY -- At dawn yesterday, some 200 soldiers of the Mexican army broke camp and marched north toward the United States.

Mexican television crews followed as they crossed the U.S. border at 8:15 a.m., headed for San Antonio, site of the Alamo.

The troops were not bent on conquest, although many Mexicans felt a twinge of pride at the fact that their troops were re-entering Texas more than a century and a half after Sam Houston and his band of rebels drove them out.

Instead, they carried food, water and medicine for some of the thousands of families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

"This crossing of Mexican troops into the United States hasn't happened, according to our information, since about 1840, in the time of President Santa Anna," a Mexican customs official told reporters.

"Reinventing the Alamo," a headline said yesterday in the newspaper Reforma.

Mexican defense officials said it was the first time a Mexican army unit had crossed onto U.S. soil since the 1848 Mexican War. (Rebel troops led by Francisco "Pancho" Villa raided U.S. border towns in 1916).

The mission was also the first time that the Mexican army had participated in relief efforts outside the country's borders, said Efren Martinez Guzman, a spokesman for Mexico's defense ministry.

"The entry of the Mexican army into United States territory to provide humanitarian aid is a proud moment and shows the solidarity of the people of Mexico," President Vicente Fox said.

Some Mexican lawmakers criticized the mission when it was first announced and argued that Fox's government should have sought approval from the Senate before sending military assets abroad. Fox later sought and received Senate approval.

Mexico is one of dozens of countries to offer support to the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Cuba offered to send doctors, and impoverished Sri Lanka sent a cash donation to the Red Cross, in part to recognize Americans' generosity to the victims of last year's tsunami there.

The Mexican troops are specialists in providing aid to victims of disasters. Among other things, they carry water purification equipment and field kitchens.

"We're happy to go and help people," Manuel Diaz Torres, a solider with the unit, told Mexican television. "Our principal training is in this [relief work], and not war. We think we'll be useful there."

On Wednesday, as they prepared to cross into the United States, the troops received "a massive vaccination against tetanus, hepatitis, cholera and other diseases," wrote Victor Hugo Michel, a reporter for the Mexico City newspaper Milenio and one of several Mexican reporters traveling with the caravan. "It's as if we were headed for a tropical country, one without first-world health services," Michel wrote.

"We will stay in the United States until our president orders us to return," said Gen. Francisco Ortiz, convoy leader.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05252/568396.stm

So what does that mean? If the US tells them to go home they WON'T GO!!!!!!!! The envasion is in full swing!