(Washington) Flights to or from El Paso International Airport near Mexico were suspended for a few hours Wednesday and then restored, with a U.S. official accusing Mexican drug cartels of violating U.S. airspace.
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The case comes against a backdrop of tensions between Washington and Mexico, linked to drug trafficking and trade disputes between the two countries.
A US official told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that drones belonging to Mexican drug cartels had entered US airspace.
The Pentagon has “taken steps to put the drones out of use” and has determined with the civil aviation regulator (FAA) that there is “no threat to commercial transport,” this source said.
“We have no information regarding the use of drones at the border,” declared the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, during her traditional press conference, assuring that her government was willing to share any information with its American neighbor.
During the night, the FAA declared on its website that “no pilot (was) authorized to fly an aircraft in the areas affected by this notice”.
The airspace restriction, which also targeted the neighboring town of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, affected both cargo and commercial flights.
It was originally scheduled to end on February 21, but the FAA announced its suspension shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, almost eight hours later. “The temporary airspace closure over El Paso is lifted. Commercial aviation is not threatened. All flights are resuming normally,” the regulator said on X.
“No immediate threat”
PHOTO JOSE LUIS GONZALEZ, REUTERS
Activity resumes at the El Paso airport.
The authorities of this Mexican border town have suggested that they had not been consulted.
“Based on the information that my office and I have been able to gather (…), there is no immediate threat to the community in the surrounding areas,” Veronica Escobar, who represents the city in Congress, wrote on X shortly before the suspension of this measure.
“No one in the local government or the local military base was given more than a few minutes’ notice, nor was the mayor,” the Wall Street Journal local elected official Chris Canales. “We’ve never seen anything this radical.”
In January, after destroying maritime vessels suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which left more than 100 dead, Donald Trump announced that the United States was going to carry out “ground strikes” against the cartels, without however specifying exactly where.
“The cartels run Mexico. It’s very, very sad to see and watch what happened in this country,” added the American president on the Fox News channel.
Donald Trump also invited Mexico to “get its act together”, after months of pressure on the issues of the fight against drug trafficking and trade balance.
The President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, tried to calm things down, ensuring that her government was working to “strengthen coordination” bilaterally in matters of security.
El Paso Airport, which welcomed 3.49 million passengers in the first 11 months of 2025, is served by major U.S. airlines.
