Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, took office a little over a month ago. She arrived at the National Palace enjoying widespread support, with a significant majority in the country’s legislature, the Congress of the Union, and with the endorsement of Morena, Mexico’s new hegemonic political party.
Sheinbaum sparked excitement among capitalists and the political elite, as her governance is projected to be more “rational” and business-friendly than that of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). But her plans have been overshadowed by the new terrain developing in the wake of Donald Trump’s triumph at the ballot box.
The Pros and Cons of Not Being AMLO
Many were relieved by Sheinbaum’s more moderate rhetoric and less “populist” style compared to those of her predecessor. AMLO built his popularity on social programs and policies, presenting himself as a populist, anti-neoliberal leader with strong grassroots support since the 2006 protests against electoral fraud. His presidential style combined progressive rhetoric, reminiscent of other Latin American “pink tide” governments of the last two decades. He sought to foster a direct relationship with the masses by traveling across the nation and holding daily morning press conferences in which he spoke directly to the people. Each day, he antagonized the opposition, as well as key centers of political power, such as the press, the Spanish monarchy, and even the government of Javier Milei in Argentina. This allowed him to strengthen his link with the working class and the oppressed.
Jorge Zepeda Patterson, author of a recent biography of Sheinbaum, enthusiastically praised the new president:
She projects a professional, scientific, and modern image of public administration, and she has the vision and capabilities to adjust, fine-tune, and improve the 4T in its second generation.” This “improvement and adjustment” could be discerned by the inclusion in the cabinet of figures who are less “confrontational” in the eyes of the business community and the opposition, for example, figures such as Marcelo Ebrard and José Ramón De La Fuente in the strategic positions of Economy and Foreign Affairs. All the while, she has deployed a discourse oriented to empathize with sectors of the women’s movement. The media highlights all this as the establishment of a more “dialogic” way of governing, that is, a government more open to compromises with the capitalists.
Undoubtedly, the meeting Sheinbaum held with business leaders and her multiple nods to the economic establishment are aimed at giving the capitalist class some peace of mind. If, during AMLO’s six-year term, Mexico’s biggest companies maintained and increased their profits (which was never in question according to his priorities), the Sheinbaum administration would maintain the line of corporate-friendly continuity, but with a style far from the polarization of the Obrador administration. This change, however, will not necessarily be an advantage.
In the case of AMLO, his rhetoric against neoliberalism and in defense of national sovereignty helped him galvanize broad popular support and avoid splitting many of his voters, who questioned whether militarization, labor precariousness, and the continuity of bureaucracy in the unions were at all progressive. Given the danger of the neoliberal opposition’s return, it was better to maintain support, at least critical, for AMLO, the lesser evil as it were.
This is something that most analysts do not consider, because they are concerned about avoiding polarization and building the so-called democratic dialogue between the government’s supporters and its opposition. It must be considered, then, that a more technocratic and modern government (in the sense that Patterson and others understand it) will have fewer tools to deal with the popular discontent that Sheinbaum’s administration will face, even more so if, as it is expected, political circumstances will harshen under a Trump administration.
Storm Clouds Arriving from North of the Río Bravo
Sheinbaum and her team were surely counting on the smooth continuation of an economic and political status quo, one that appeared to be stable at the end of AMLO’s government, thanks to the hegemony achieved by the latter and the weakness of the conservative opposition. But, in light of the complications appearing on the horizon, these may be pipe dreams.
For the time being, Sheinbaum’s day-to-day life during the first month of her term was marked by the consequences of the last major reform bequeathed to her by AMLO, a controversial judicial reform that allowed judges to be elected by popular vote instead of appointed, a reform that left deep political polarization in its wake. It led to a judicial strike of several weeks, the resignation of most of the Supreme Court judges, the judiciary’s attempts to declare the reform unconstitutional — which for now has not happened — and threats to take the case to international courts. All this reflects a crisis that shows no sign of resolving and that will mark the first period of the new government. After all this confrontation, the Morena party has maintained its refusal to negotiate the reform with the conservative opposition.
If this was the contentious backdrop to Mexico’s national politics in October, we can now say that when it rains, it pours. Donald Trump’s triumph has generated much concern in the government and among political and economic analysts, including several who have no sympathy for the Fourth Transformation, or 4T, another often used term to refer to the Morena party. They all agree that we are facing a supercharged Trump 2.0, who will try to renegotiate the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the most recent North American free trade agreement, in force since 2020. With this renegotiation, the Trump administration will likely attempt to put a stranglehold on China — whose investment in Mexico has grown more than official data acknowledges, as stated by Enrique Dussel Peters here — and impose even stronger rules of origin, or the criteria to determine a product’s country of origin. Mexico is the United States’ main trading partner.
At the same time, Trump will likely promote measures to keep manufacturing in the U.S., which would dampen the hopes created by nearshoring, promoted first by AMLO and now by Sheinbaum. All this would take place amid a major toughening of anti-immigrant policies, which may involve not only closing the borders and the massive deportation of undocumented immigrants, but also the expulsion of millions of beneficiaries of different legalization programs, such as DACA. There will likely also be new demands to ramp up the so-called war on drugs, whose imperialist discourse is that Mexico “allows” fentanyl to enter the United States.
Trump promised that he will bomb fentanyl laboratories in Mexico, blockade Mexican ports that transport its chemical components, and designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations. Trump intends to keep this at the top of his agenda for Mexico, which also allows him to please his social and electoral base. This will encourage the strengthening of anti-immigrant paramilitaries on the border as a companion to the police and armed forces.
As Elias Camhaji recently noted,
In terms of trade, their strategy for updating the USMCA is very protectionist. There may be very strong pressures for the negotiation, and China’s presence [in Latin America] may weaken. What worries me is nearshoring. Trump will push for manufacturing investments to stay in some U.S. states to energize the economy and give the perception that he is doing something. The issue of tariffs is another constant threat to coerce Mexico into doing what he wants on all issues, including security. The fentanyl issue is the most important. Trump has oscillated between military invasion and drones to pressure Mexico. It would really be a problem and a very serious intervention, although it is the least possible scenario.
In view of this, the Sheinbaum, after Trump’s victory, managed to say only that “there is no reason for concern.” Meanwhile, the peso fell to its worst levels in two years. It is evident that Morena is trying to plan for the possible consequences, and to devise how to face a much more difficult scenario than expected in its relationship with the country’s powerful trading partner to the north.
Trump will take office in a much more convulsive international context than that of his first presidency. As a recent article puts it, “Wars of all kinds have become more common and lethal around the world in recent years, and conflict between superpowers (a concern that had largely subsided in the post–Cold War era) has returned to the forefront of the agenda.”
In this context, Trump will likely strengthen control over the “vital space” and deploy protectionist measures to put a brake on the United States’ main competitor, China. To this end, Trump can count on an institutional strength superior to the one he had in 2016: he has a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as in the Supreme Court, which is no minor thing, considering that some of the Mexico policies he tried to adopt in his first term were blocked. Regarding plans to close the border, Antonio Sarukhán, former ambassador to the U.S., said rather bluntly,
Would the courts, the Congress, the agro-exporting states (mostly Republican), or the reality of the costs of such a decision slow it down? Unquestionably. But this does not cancel out what we will see: deportations of tens of thousands of migrants at the beginning of his administration, provoking terror and dislocation in the Mexican diaspora and a social, economic, and public security crisis in the Mexican border municipalities and states, triggering another diplomatic confrontation.
The Unsettling New Agenda for Mexico
Under the Biden administration, anti-immigrant policies were strengthened in the name of fighting the “war on drugs.” With Trump, this will only continue and will also be accompanied by a greater demonization of Mexico and migrants, exceeding even what we saw in 2016–20, with new xenophobic and racist attacks. A preview of this was seen in his campaign, when Trump said that Haitians residing in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the community’s pets, encouraging neo-Nazi marches aimed at terrorizing migrants. In addition, mass deportations will have an economic effect on Mexico. With more than 30 million Mexicans and their descendants living in the United States, remittances are a critical source of income for many families in Mexico. In 2023, the Bank of Mexico reported remittance income at $63.313 billion, representing 4 percent of GDP.
At the same time, the new administration will seek to deepen (even more!) the commitment to the so-called war on drugs and the fight against migration, all of which requires greater militarization in Mexico. The military will be used to “combat drug trafficking” (which has already left a trail of hundreds of thousands of dead and disappeared) and to stop the influx of international workers coming into Mexico in order to cross its border in the United States from Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. This, all the while guaranteeing the economic interests of the imperialist companies that plunder natural resources and whose links to “organized crime” groups have been widely documented.
Also inevitable is a renegotiation of the USMCA, in which the threat of sanctions is intended to force even more favorable conditions for U.S. and Canadian companies. All this shows that the proclaimed economic integration of the North American economies is built on the subordination of Mexico, with the increasing precariousness of its labor force. Wages in Mexico, although they saw an increase under AMLO, are far from livable, and they are well below those of the U.S. and Canada. Transnational corporations rely on these asymmetric conditions to extract further superprofits for themselves.
Overall, under the Trump administration, Mexico’s subordination to U.S. imperialism and its economic, political, and military interests will expand.
Negotiations and Subordinations
In his first telephone call to Mexico, Trump told Sheinbaum, “There is the issue of the border.” She said goodbye with a friendly “See you soon,” while announcing her participation in the G20 summit, the main annual meeting of imperialist and emerging countries. She seeks to repeat AMLO’s formula: what her close circle calls appealing to the “transactionalist” spirit of the Republicans. Marcelo Ebrard, secretary of economy in Mexico, is anticipated to play a leading role in this. It is assumed that he will be of help thanks to his ties with major economic power through his diplomatic experience, enabling him to negotiate the terms of the difficult relationship ahead.
But the AMLO-Trump relationship (and, after that, AMLO-Biden) did not lead to a negotiation between equals. The Mexican government accepted a renegotiation of the USMCA that allowed greater U.S. interference in the country. And this was accompanied by a new cycle of militarization, which deepened that of former Mexican presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto, from the conservative party. The “progressive” AMLO created the National Guard, which threw away AMLO’s campaign promises to return the military to its barracks and signaled another clear alignment and bending toward Washington’s demands. And let’s not forget that militarization was a direct result of agreements with Trump first and Biden later, that Mexico acts as a buffer state for the U.S. The National Guard under AMLO was responsible for repressing migrants on the southern border and receiving, on the Mexican side of the border wall, tens of thousands of deportees. This, while real state crimes were perpetrated, such as the killing of 41 migrants in the fire at the Ciudad Juárez immigration station.
Now, given Trump’s reelection, the results of accepting imperialist demands will be worse. This is the result of the 4T’s “progressive” politics: beyond its nationalist rhetoric, Morena maintained the basis of dependent capitalism and has not challenged the recolonization of Mexico by U.S. imperialism, guaranteed by the previous governments of the conservative and neoliberal PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and PAN (National Action Party). The convulsive changes in the international situation encourage the most reactionary tendencies in U.S. imperialism, which in these circumstances will seek to tighten the chains with which it subordinates the countries of Latin America. Mexico, far from being an equal trading partner, is considered by the imperialists to be their backyard.
A fundamental challenge is to build a political alternative that raises the banners of anti-imperialism and internationalism, based on the unity of Mexican workers with the multiethnic working class of the United States and Canada and with the peoples of the region as a whole, to confront imperialist policies. This must be done independently of the Morena government and the right-wing opposition. It must propose full civil, social, and political rights for our migrant brothers and sisters from not just Mexico, but Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, against xenophobia and racism, and against the action of the National Guard and Border Patrol. And to uphold, in contrast to the agreements and treaties built in the interests of the big imperialist transnationals and their local partners, the strategic perspective of economic, political, and social integration for the benefit of the great working-class majorities of North America. This can be achieved only by putting an end to imperialist domination and capitalism, in a socialist and revolutionary perspective, toward building a society without exploiters and exploited.
Originally published in Spanish on our sister site La Izquierda Diario
Translated by Kimberly Ann
Originally Published: 2024-11-25 16:48:17
Source link
