Throughout his first presidential marketing campaign in 2015, Donald Trump blamed Mexico for taking US jobs whereas exporting drug traffickers and rapists. However 5 years later, he had up to date the treaty binding their economies and referred to as his Mexican counterpart a “great guy”.
Mexico’s enterprise leaders felt they weathered the primary Trump storm comparatively properly. Some imagine President Claudia Sheinbaum can observe the playbook that labored for her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador: don’t criticise Trump and provides him what he needs on migration.
However a second Trump administration poses much more severe challenges for Mexico, the most important buying and selling accomplice of the US. Business leaders and consultants on the bilateral relationship worry that the fledgling Sheinbaum authorities just isn’t properly positioned to navigate them.
Trump shall be a extra highly effective president this time, with possible majorities in each homes of Congress, He shall be decided to press a tougher discount together with his weaker southern neighbour, which is affected by drug-related violence and sluggish progress.
“Trump redoubled is much more difficult to deal with . . . he is a bully, and [Sheinbaum] is an inexperienced national politician,” mentioned Andrés Rozental, a former Mexican deputy overseas minister. “I get the impression that it’s going to be a lopsided relationship, with the Americans demanding constantly more from Mexico, and Mexico being unable to commit or even to make a major difference.”
Trump’s marketing campaign threats — blanket tariffs, inducements to US corporations to carry manufacturing again residence, the mass deportation of round 11mn unlawful migrants and the designation of drug cartels as terrorist teams — would hit Mexico disproportionately exhausting.
Round half the migrants residing with out papers within the US are Mexican, Mexico is residence to 2 of the world’s largest and most feared drug cartels, and the nation relies on the US marketplace for 83 per cent of its exports.
Trump shall be one of many largest challenges for Sheinbaum, a leftwing celebration loyalist and scientist whose educational background and stiff public method might hardly be extra completely different from the previous New York property tycoon’s swashbuckling previous.
Mexico’s first feminine president has mentioned little to date about how she plans to take care of Trump, apart from that there was “not a single reason to worry” in regards to the nations’ “good relationship”.
Her predecessor and mentor López Obrador constructed an unexpectedly sturdy private rapport with Trump. Regardless of the 2 males’s ideological variations, they shared a choice for an authoritarian populist, nationalist type of presidency and transactional diplomacy.
López Obrador deployed the military-led Nationwide Guard to dam migrant routes and agreed to take again third-country migrants as they waited for his or her US asylum claims to be heard, whereas Trump backed off on threats to shut the border, increase tariffs and make Mexico pay for a border wall.
Beneath Joe Biden’s presidency, the connection continued alongside related traces, with the US avoiding public criticism of Mexico’s rampant drug violence and López Obrador’s assaults on democratic establishments, in return for co-operation on holding again the flows of migrants.
Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the US and Washington-based guide, mentioned that whereas Sheinbaum would in all probability be extra ideological than López Obrador, “what’s even more important is how a profoundly misogynistic man like Donald Trump will interact with the first woman president of Mexico”.
Personal sector and foreign money buyers stay looking forward to a repeat of the Trump-López Obrador love-in, with this week’s fall within the peso not as steep as when Trump was first elected. One senior banking govt mentioned most of his massive Mexican shoppers wished Trump to win, hoping the Republican’s commerce conflict with China would push extra US corporations to take a position south of the border.
“We’re interdependent whether we like it or not,” mentioned Antonio Ortiz-Mena, founding father of AOM Advisors and a former diplomat. “Mexico has more savvy and more market leverage and joint production leverage than [people think].”
However persistence with Mexico has run skinny within the US capital in recent times, with co-operation on combating drug cartels at a current low, US corporations complaining of a deteriorating enterprise local weather, and Mexico ignoring US issues a couple of wide-ranging overhaul of its judiciary.
Observers in Washington level out that the nation lacks highly effective buddies on Capitol Hill who would assist it fend off hostile legislative strikes. Sheinbaum has but to call an envoy to the US.
“I’m not sure the situation in 2024 is the same as in 2018,” mentioned Martha Bárcena, Mexico’s ambassador to the US in the course of the first Trump administration. “I see many more changes in US public opinion that is seeing Mexico less and less as a friend and more as a national security threat.”
The Mexican chief’s hard-left credentials are additionally unlikely to endear her to Trump. Sheinbaum didn’t deny claims from Colombian President Gustavo Petro final month that she was a former member of his now-defunct M-19 guerrilla motion in the course of the Nineteen Eighties and he or she just lately despatched an help cargo of oil to Cuba’s communist authorities.
Trump’s “policy towards Latin America is going to be controlled by the Cuban-Americans in Florida”, mentioned Bárcena. “They will not be happy with Mexico giving oil to Cuba, helping [Venezuela President Nicolás] Maduro . . . that will be another very big point of friction.”
Hanging over the bilateral relationship is an impending assessment of the US-Mexico-Canada free commerce settlement negotiated by Trump throughout his first time period.
“Trump has already linked trade and migration during his campaign, threatening to use economic leverage to restrict migrant flows through Mexico,” mentioned Eric Farnsworth, vice-president of the Council of the Americas enterprise foyer in Washington.
“Sheinbaum will have to decide whether to resist this approach or . . . to accommodate US priorities. With a mandated review of USMCA in 2026, the stakes are monumentally high.”
Knowledge visualisation by Amy Borrett
