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HOW WILL MEXICO’S NEW PRESIDENT DEAL WITH TRUMP, MIGRATION, AND
DRUG CARTELS?  
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Walden Bello
January 2, 2025
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Journalist Laura Carlsen discusses how Mexican President Claudia
Sheinbaum will navigate a series of domestic challenges and a changing
U.S.-Mexico relationship. _

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In June 2024, Mexicans elected a female president, Claudia Sheinbaum
to replace Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Arguably, Mexico is
Washington’s most significant foreign policy partner, playing a
central role in two issues that Donald Trump manipulated to win the
2024 presidential election: migration and drugs.

Laura Carlsen, one of Mexico’s most distinguished progressive
journalists and political analysts, takes stock of President
Sheinbaum’s performance so far and how she plans to deal with Trump.
Carlsen is based in Mexico City, where she directs the international
relations think tank, Mira: Feminisms and Democracies. She also
coordinates knowledge and global solidarity with Just Associates,
JASS. Holding graduate degrees from Stanford, she is a dual Mexican-US
citizen.

_HOW IS THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT TAKING TRUMP’S THREAT OF MASS
DEPORTATIONS?_

The Mexican government estimates there are 4.8 million Mexicans in the
United States without papers and 11.5 currently with some form of
legal residence, so the demographic implications could be enormous.
President Claudia Sheinbaum and her cabinet have taken a dual approach
to Trump’s threat to immediately begin a campaign of mass
deportation after taking office. On the one hand, the
government—along with many analysts in the United States—has
questioned how far Trump will actually go, pointing out that the U.S.
economy would suffer, experiencing labor scarcity, loss of tax
revenues, inflation, and deceleration if Trump carries out the threat.
Mexico is preparing facts-based studies to discuss the real impact on
the U.S. economy and society with Trump’s team and find other
solutions.

That doesn’t mean that the Mexican government isn’t taking it
seriously though. Several days ago, Sheinbaum warned Mexicans in the
United States that they are facing “a new reality” as of January
20. On this side of the border, Mexico is actively preparing for the
possibility of mass deportation. Although we don’t yet have all the
details, the government is working on plans to receive returning
Mexicans, including reducing paperwork and obstacles to
reincorporation in schools and employment, and some sort of support.
The Secretary of Foreign Relations Juan Ramon de la Fuente announced
measures for Mexicans residing in the United States, including a
“panic button” to alert the nearest consulate and relatives if
apprehended for deportation, and know-your-rights campaigns.
Consulates have already registered a spike in queries and widespread
fear in immigrant communities. With Tom Homan as border czar—founder
of the family separation policies that stripped children from their
parents with many still not reunited after years of
searching—concerns run deep. The government has also been talking to
Central American countries to develop plans for safe return to other
countries of origin. The threat to apply a 25 percent tariff on all
Mexican exports to the US (80 percent of Mexico’s trade) has
increased pressure to accept and accommodate deportees even from other
countries.

In 2016 after Trump’s first election, we organized a “caravan
against fear” along the border on the U.S. side to register
reactions in immigrant communities. Families were literally afraid to
leave their homes and mixed-status families faced the disintegration
of the home. Daily routines fell apart and the stress was palpable.
This time around threatens to be worse and no matter how fast
deportation proceeds or how deep it goes, millions of
lives—especially children’s—will be irreparably traumatized.

_DO YOU THINK THE RESULTS OF THIS POLICY WILL DEPART SIGNIFICANTLY
FROM THAT OF OBAMA AND BIDEN?_

It is a fact that Biden continued Trump’s hardline immigration
policies and by the end of his administration had surpassed the first
Trump administration in deportations. A new report
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there were 271,000 deportations in fiscal year 2024, more than
Trump’s peak year of 2019 and only less than Obama in 2014. That the
highest levels of deportation have occurred under Democrats reveals
the paradox of Trump’s accusing Biden of “open borders.” This
line, repeated over and over and often embellished with outright lies
due to ignorance or indifference to the truth, seems to have swayed
millions of voters to vote for Trump.

Biden did not significantly change Trump immigration policy, although
he quickly reversed some Trump measures including child separation,
safe third-country agreements and the Muslim ban and increased legal
immigration and refugee resettlement. Since his administration
continued detention policies, his actions had little or nothing to do
with high migratory flows to the US during his administration.
Corporate extractivism, the profound inequality and poverty caused by
neoliberal policies in the Global South, violence, and displacement
caused by climate change are among the primary causes of increased
immigration to the US. They are structural causes inherent in the
global system and as such will not reverse, although there may be
temporary fluctuations.

Although there have been more apprehensions at the border, many are
repeat attempts, and the numbers are neither unprecedented nor in any
way threatening. The “backlash” against immigration evident in the
2024 campaign was almost completely a result of the fomentation of
racist and nativist fears. It is interesting to note that districts
with the highest Trump vote often correlated with very low
immigration, meaning that these voters have little direct contact or
impact from immigration in their daily lives and yet were convinced
that immigrants pose a threat to the American “way of life.”

Since at least Bill Clinton, the Democrats made a strategic decision
to abandon the defense of human mobility and human rights in migration
and embrace the Republicans’ national security framework that
presents immigration as a threat. Although both parties now employ
similar anti-immigrant arguments and policies and in the last election
tried to outdo each other in terms of restriction and repression,
there is reason to believe that Trump will institute more hardline
policies that will further endanger and disrupt the lives of
immigrants. Homan has announced a return to family separation, and
anti-immigrant mastermind Stephen Miller is expected to find more ways
to cut off rights to asylum, family reunification, and legal
residence.

_HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE AMLO’S APPROACH TO THE DRUG CARTELS? WAS IT
SUCCESSFUL OR MERELY A CONFESSION THAT MEXICO HAD LOST THE WAR ON THE
CARTELS? SOME SAY THAT UNLESS IT IS ABLE TO CONTROL THE CARTELS, THE
MEXICAN GOVERNMENT’S OTHER INITIATIVES AT REDUCING POVERTY AND
PROMOTING DEVELOPMENT WILL HAVE LITTLE POSITIVE IMPACT. IN OTHER
WORDS, THE CARTELS POSE A REAL EXISTENTIAL CRISIS TO THE FUTURE OF THE
MEXICAN STATE._

Mexico has always been forced to follow U.S. policy in the war on
drugs. Since Richard Nixon announced the war on drugs in the United
States in 1971, the policy has been imposed on Mexico through trade
sanctions, military strong-arming, and even temporary border closure.
The Bush administration’s Merida Initiative, funded by Congress
during the Obama administration, tied Mexico to the DEA strategy of
drug seizures and arrests or killing of drug lords, known as the
kingpin strategy. The Mexican president at the time, Felipe Calderon,
agreed to an unprecedented level of U.S. involvement as part of his
own war on drugs.

By 2018 it had become clear that the strategy was a disaster for
Mexico. Homicide rates shot up, disappearances became a tragic reality
for thousands of families, and cartels that had previously restricted
activities to drug trafficking to the U.S. market, had been
fragmented, causing more violent turf wars between cartels and a
diversification into other criminal activities including extortion,
human trafficking, and territorial control. AMLO campaigned with the
promise to end the war on drugs and address root causes.

Some of the social programs for youth did address some of the root
causes, but the kingpin strategy and U.S. control of Mexican security
policy continued. The “hugs not bullets” strategy, continuously
mocked by conservatives and the macho press, could have been a solid
conceptual approach, but due in large part to U.S. pressure it was
never really applied. The vicious cycles set in motion by the drug
war’s militarized response to cartel crime continued and even
deepened. Although the last years showed some reduction in the
homicide rate, the AMLO administration registered the highest homicide
rate on record, with more than 115,000 disappearances and high rates
of injury and gender violence compounding the problem.

The binational effort to defeat cartels militarily in Mexico instead
of addressing the economic roots of black-market smuggling and sale of
prohibited substances—mostly found within the borders of the United
States–led to massive bloodshed in Mexico. It also stimulated more
economic gain for the U.S. arms industry and opened the country up to
much more expansive U.S. presence in Mexican security. It reinforced
social and patriarchal control by emphasizing macho militarist models
of domination and militarizing regions where indigenous peoples, rural
populations, and urban poor carry out defense of land and resources.

The cartels have historically been a violent and economically powerful
corrupting force in the country, but they focused primarily on the
lucrative business of trafficking drugs to the U.S. black market. 
Now they are entrenched in battles for territorial control between
rival cartels and with state armed forces. This means that the
violence has permeated civic life much more than before.

It can’t be conceived of as a criminal versus state battle because
the lines are so blurred. State actors at all levels, including the
armed forces, often act with and for the cartels. The war on drugs
shifts allegiances and balances of power between cartels, but never
advances in terms of common-sense objectives such as abating the flow
of illegal drugs, reducing the power of cartels, or increasing rule of
law, and it causes more, not less, violence. The last kingpin capture
orchestrated by the U.S. government, of El Chapito, Joaquin Guzman
López, and Ismael Zambada, is just the latest in a series of hits
against specific cartels that trigger inter-cartel battles and end up
favoring the first cartel’s rivals.

_CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE OTHER KEY CHALLENGES THAT FACE THE SCHEINBAUM
GOVERNMENT AND HOW IT PLANS TO TACKLE THEM?  ASIDE FROM THE CARTELS
AND THE UNDOCUMENTED MIGRANTS ISSUE, I WOULD IMAGINE THE LIST WOULD
INCLUDE THE TRANSGENIC CORN ISSUE, AGRARIAN REFORM, CLIMATE CHANGE,
CORRUPTION, AND GENDER INEQUALITY._

That’s a big question. Her political platform of “100 steps toward
Transformation” in reference to the continuation of what AMLO dubbed
the Fourth Transformation of Mexico—after Independence, the Reform
Period, and the Revolution—includes: A “moral economy” with
fiscal control and pension reform; development with well-being and
regional perspective and broad infrastructure plans; streamlined
policy-making and enforcement; social rights and welfare and reducing
inequality, health rights; reducing violence against women and
assuring equality; Indigenous and Afromexicans; energy sovereignty,
rural development; environment, water and natural resources; science
and culture and democracy. Among these, some challenges are more acute
than others. Mexico has to make the space to determine its own
development and security policy, but continues to be under the U.S.
thumb. The policies of immigration repression that Trump demands of
Mexico is at heart a tool to keep the Global South under control as
capitalism intensifies at an even more predatory and brutal stage.
Mexico is under pressure to serve up key natural resources including
oil, water, and labor. U.S. policies such as the drug war and
Trump’s climate change denial run counter to the stated aims of the
new government. Finding ways to stand up to pressure without provoking
economic reprisals from a volatile and unpredictable U.S. president
with an America First—or rather America Only—view on U.S.
domination will be a constant challenge.

Specifically, several controversies are on the horizon. President
Sheinbaum has reaffirmed that Mexico has the right to limit the import
and prohibit the cultivation of U.S. genetically modified corn to
protect native landraces, indigenous rights, health and food
sovereignty. Mexico just lost
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a NAFTA court on the question of import restrictions. A powerful civil
society movement has been working for decades to defend Mexico’s
right to make its own decisions on GM corn. Now they will be forced to
abide by the decision while continuing to try to protect native corn
and customs. There will be more legal and political run-ins on this
and related issues, with powerful transnationals such as
Bayer/Monsanto seeing Mexico’s bid for food sovereignty as a
dangerous global precedent.

Sheinbaum also faces a major challenge in ending discrimination and
reducing violence against women, and repairing the relationship with
feminist and women’s rights organizations in the country. While
declaring support for women’s equality, Sheinbaum inherits the
conflicted relationship established by AMLO, who accused women’s
groups that protested against violence as being pawns of the
conservative opposition and tended to see women’s equality solely in
terms of parity in formal representation. The femicide rate continued
to be very high throughout his term and yet the government minimized
the crisis of gender violence.

Now several feminist leaders form part of the government and
Sheinbaum’s platform includes the goal of reducing femicide and
preventing gender violence, although without many details on how. In
the economic sphere, most of the emphasis is on continuing with
existing social programs, which have reduced female poverty somewhat
but have not addressed structural discrimination and inequality or
patriarchal relations.

In this area, as in most areas, a huge obstacle is that the “Fourth
Transformation” under AMLO largely froze out the movements
responsible for demanding and making social gains and for electing
MORENA. Without the active participation of women’s groups—and
indigenous, campesino, urban, environmental, etc.
organizations—top-down measures cannot be effective and lasting.

_WHAT FOREIGN POLICY INITIATIVES SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM THE NEW
ADMINISTRATION? WILL IT PROVIDE PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP FOR THE REST
OF LATIN AMERICA AS WELL AS THE GLOBAL SOUTH? HOW WILL IT WADE INTO
THE TRANSNATIONAL CONFLICT THAT NOW PITS LULA AND THE LEFT AND MILEI
AND THE RIGHT?_

AMLO took a leading role in reinvigorating regional South-South ties
explicitly with the aim of reducing U.S. hegemony in the region and
taking advantage of newly elected left to center-left governments.
Later, in his term however, this work declined as the focus shifted
back to the United States. Sheinbaum has specifically promised to
”recuperate CELAC” (Community of Latin American and Caribbean
States) and strengthen regional ties, work with CELAC on an initiative
to provide needed medicines, and work together on a new model for
immigration that kind of keeps getting launched and never quite takes
off. The relationship with the United States is also listed as a
priority. Controlling illegal gun smuggling from the United States to
Mexico is a critical issue for Mexico and will continue to be. The new
government emphasizes multilateralism and in print anyway wants to
strengthen Mexico’s role. This could be positive, but actual efforts
have been sporadic and it’s not clear how much emphasis and
resources will be devoted to it. Nor is it clear to what degree the
new Mexican government, keen on preserving U.S. investment as key to
the neoliberal model still very much in place, will buck U.S.
hegemony.

_HOW WOULD YOU COMPARE PRESIDENT SCHEINBAUM TO THE OTHER DOMINANT
FEMALE LEADER IN LATIN AMERICA, CRISTINA FERNANDEZ KIRCHNER OF
ARGENTINA, IN TERMS OF THEIR ABILITY TO NAVIGATE A CULTURE OF MALE
POLITICAL LEADERSHIP?_

Sheinbaum’s response to Trump’s vow to enact 25 percent tariffs on
Mexican exports “on Day One” if Mexico did not do enough to stop
immigration and control cartels was firm. She underlined all that
Mexico was already doing but also said the nation would develop its
own policies and the United States should do the same. This is a
departure from the chummy and often subordinate relationship with
Trump that AMLO’s foreign secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, and Lopez
Obrador projected.

Trump is a public misogynist and has little respect for women, even
those who are world leaders (as shown in his treatment of Angela
Merkel). Sheinbaum seems to be taking a practical approach in the
relationship with Trump that takes into account the need to sustain
the bilateral relationship but draws the line at sovereignty. Her best
bet is to maintain as much distance as possible.

Globally, so far she looks solid as a leader. She has strong
experience as former mayor of Mexico City, and while she is unlikely
to be a feminist leader on the world stage, she seems to know how to
hold her own. Some other leaders, notably Dilma Rousseff, have
underestimated the power of patriarchy, old-boys networks, and
misogynist memes with tragic results. The male vote, organized in
online clubs and chats with explicitly anti-women’s rights positions
that draw on insecurities and a particularly virulent form of
modern-day misogyny, elected Donald Trump and Javier Milei. Now they
feel vindicated and emboldened globally by these wins.

The irony is that the United States—self-proclaimed as beacon for
democracy and progress—proved itself unready to accept a woman in
the highest position of power while Mexico—constantly derided as
macho– elected its first woman president in a landslide. Now
Sheinbaum will have to prove her leadership on the world stage in an
increasingly hostile environment for women leaders.

_FPIF commentator Walden Bello is co-chair of the board of Focus on
the Global South and honorary research fellow at the State University
of New York at Binghamton. More articles
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_Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls”
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* Claudia Sheinbaum
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* Mexico
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* Immigration
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* Mexican Drug Cartels
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* Donald Trump
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