On 26 November Presidenta
Sheinbaum wrote to Donald Trump concerning his threats to impose a tariff of
25% on all Mexican exports to the USA. I have not been able to find the text of
the letter, but the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations issued the following
statement (my translation):
We will not address the phenomenon of migration nor of the
consumption of drugs in the USA with threats: Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum.
This Tuesday 26 November the Head of the Federal Executive
will send to president elect Trump a letter stressing the importance of
cooperation and of understanding between the two nations.
The Presidenta of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, made it clear to
president elect of the USA, Donald Trump, that we cannot deal with the
phenomenon of migration nor of the consumption of drugs in the USA with
threats.
“We need cooperation and mutual understanding to deal with
these great challenges. One tariff will be followed by another in response and
so on until we risk harming our shared businesses. Yes, shared. For example,
the principal exporters from Mexico to the USA are General Motors, Stellantis
and Ford Motor Company, which came to Mexico 80 years ago. Why impose a tax
that will harm them? This is not acceptable and would cause inflation and
unemployment in the USA and in Mexico.”
This is what she stated in a letter that she read in this
morning’s press briefing, “The people’s morning meetings [mañaneras]”,
that will be sent this Tuesday 26 November to the president elect of the USA,
who yesterday announced on the social media network, Truth Social, that one of
his first executive orders on assuming office, will be to impose a tariff of 25
per cent on all the products of Mexico and Canada, as well as a 10 per cent
tariff in addition to the existing tariffs on Chinese imports.
In her letter, the Presidenta of Mexico stated that she is
convinced that the economic strength of North America is founded on its
commercial sector, since this will maintain competitiveness against other
economic blocs.
“I think dialogue is the best route to understanding, peace
and prosperity in our nations, [therefore] I hope that our teams can meet
soon”, she added.
She emphasized that Mexico has developed a policy of
integral treatment of migrant people from different parts of the world who
cross Mexican territory and whose destination is the frontier of the USA,
therefore, as a result of this policy and according to the figures of the US Customs
and Border Protection (CBP in its English acronym), frontier crossings on the
frontier between Mexico and the USA have decreased by 75 per cent from December
2023 to November 2024.
“Moreover, half of those who arrive, do so with a legal
appointment given to them by the US program CBP One. Therefore, caravans of
migrants no longer arrive at the frontier”, she added.
The Chief of the Federal Executive pointed out that together
the two nations should agree another model of labour movement and of dealing
with the reasons why families leave their homes; she therefore argued that if a
percentage of what the USA spends on war were expended on peace and
development, we would address the root cause of population movements.
She recalled that Mexico, for humanitarian reasons has
always been ready to prevent the fentanyl epidemic in the USA, which she
described as a consumption and public health problem.
“So far this year, Mexico’s armed forces and prosecutors
have seized tons of various kinds of drugs, 10,340 weapons and arrested 15,640
people for violence related to drug trafficking. A constitutional reform is in
the legislative approval process in my country in order to declare that the
financing, production, distribution and sale of fentanyl and other synthetic
drugs is a serious crime”, she revealed.
Nevertheless, she pointed out that it is well known that the
chemical precursors for the manufacture of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs
are imported into Canada, the USA and Mexico illegally from Asian countries.
Therefore, international collaboration is necessary, she stated.
Moreover, she informed president elect Trump that 70% of the
illegal arms confiscated from criminals in Mexico come from the USA.
“We do not make weapons; we don’t consume synthetic drugs.
Unfortunately, we supply the dead killed by organized crime in response to the
demand for drugs in your country” she stressed.
The Presidenta of Mexico later declared in a question-and-answer
session in her morning press briefing that she foresees an agreement with
president elect Trump because our economies complement one another and our
nation is free and sovereign, and therefore sustains relations on the basis of
equality with all nations of the world.
“Let all Mexicans, all entrepreneurs, businesses in the USA
and Mexico, our common entrepreneurs, Mexican entrepreneurs who have
investments in the USA, know [that an agreement will be reached]. All this
creates employment in the USA and strengthens the economies of both nations,
and also in Canada. So, be sure that we will reach an agreement, she declared.
Thus, our national leader repeated her call for markets to
be calm, since we are working jointly on the Plan México and a dialogue will be
established with the USA.
“We have a government, we are a people, we Mexicans are
united in this, we have differences on other matters and so we should since we
are a democracy, but on some topics we are united and we will come to an
agreement and so we will enter into dialogue with president Trump and his
team”, she declared.
She disclosed that she will send a letter to the prime
minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, which will set out how Mexico has worked to
strengthen commercial relations between the three countries, since, in the
automotive sector alone in our country, foreign direct investment from 2006 to
2024, from the USA and Canada was 33,357 millions of dollars; in contrast,
investment from China was only 590 millions of dollars.
“And we have a plan, called the ‘Plan México’*. And we will
also present this plan, at the appropriate time, to president Trump and also to
Canada because, in truth, Mexico treated Canada very generously, because Canada
was about to be expelled from the [North American Free Trade] Treaty during the
negotiations in 2018, and it was President López Obrador [Sheinbaum’s
predecessor] who spoke and advocated that Canada should remain in the Treaty.
That’s why we say that we complement one another”, she concluded.
*Note. The Mexican government
states: “El Plan [México] was designed with a clear and broad objective: to
protect the lives and patrimony of Mexicans in all the regions of our
territory, before, during and after an emergency.” Essentially, it is a
disaster relief plan in the event of earthquakes, hurricanes etc. Quite what
this has to do with tariffs is not clear.
I do not know what reply Presidenta Sheinbaum might receive
from Mr Trump, although she claims that after a conversation with the
President-elect she has concluded that there will be no tariffs, but I do have
a few observations.
A number of years ago I was on the campus of UC Berkeley and
came across a student seated at a table with leaflets. The young man was a
Mexican and his leaflets explained to his fellow students that every time they
consume drugs, they fund organized criminals in Mexico and the violence those
criminals inflict on his compatriots. Sheinbaum is perfectly correct to point
out that consumption of fentanyl funds drug cartels. She also states quite
correctly that the USA arms criminal gangs with weapons that outgun Mexican
security forces and allow crime syndicates to control and tyrannize substantial
parts of Mexico’s territory. In 2023 74,702 Americans died from fentanyl
consumption; 31,062 Mexicans were victims of homicide (23.3 per 100,000 people
in 2023; in the USA the equivalent figure was 6.3 in 2022). The problem for Mrs
Sheinbaum is that the pressure in the USA is to increase gun ownership and
increase the sales of ever more powerful weapons. It is hard to imagine Mr
Trump doing anything to restrict the export of guns, legal or illegal, to
Mexico
However, it is also true that Mexican politicians at federall,
state and municipal fail to oppose organized crime, and ignore or collude with
cartels. When I commented to Jorge, our driver in Mexico City, that we had met
a municipal councillor in Bahía de Banderas, he observed that he would have
been elected on the understanding that, if a narco asked him to do something,
he would be obliged to do it. In early September El Mayo Zambada, a senior
figure in the Sinaloa cartel, was flown, against his will, to the USA where he
was arrested. The circumstances in which this occurred are obscure, but his
forcible exile was clearly the result of internal rivalries in the cartel. The
result was an outbreak of violence in the state capital Culiacán which the
forces of law and order were unable to control. Schools and hospitals closed;
citizens stayed home for their safety, in response to what the state government
referred to as “un problemita”, a “little problem.”
Large and small criminal cartels now permeate life in many
parts of Mexico. In Chilpancingo, capital of the state of Guerrero, two cartels
control public transport, and struggle violently to maintain their grip on the
bus networks. The municipal and state governments are unable or unwilling to
restrict the violence; the only significant efforts to negotiate a peaceful
arrangement were undertaken by Catholic bishops. Although the Puerto Vallarta
area, where we visit our son Chris is not afflicted by uncontrolled violence that
afflicts Guerrero, this does not mean that the cartels are absent. A neighbour
in our apartment building told me of a restaurant that was extremely
successful. This made it a useful means to launder illegal cash, so a local
narco ‘persuaded’ the owners to sell up for a minimal price.
The Mexican government mandates demanding accounting
regulations to deter money laundering by the cartels, particularly transactions
in cash. However, I am reliably told, that in northern Mexico narco parents pay
the private school fees of their children in cash, so suppliers to the schools
have to accept the cash and work out how to account for it without encountering
problems with the authorities.
Given the economic, political and military power of the
organized crime gangs, a simple demand that Mexico prevent drugs crossing the
border will do nothing to solve the fentanyl crisis. If indeed it were possible
to prevent drugs crossing the border, the cartels have the resources to reroute
exports to the USA by other means and routes. In other words, this is an
extremely complex problem. Presidenta Sheinbaum is correct to say that the
problem requires effective collaboration, not threats, but she fails to acknowledge
her own government’s responsibility, inaction and inability to reduce organized
crime. In other words, the fentanyl crisis is not solely one of consumption in
the USA, but of cross-border crime syndicates, and in the case of Mexico the
surrender of territorial control to crime cartels embedded in government.
Immigration is, similarly, a complex, nuanced matter. In our
conversations with hotel and restaurant workers, security guards, cleaners, and
taxi drivers in Bahía de Banderas we are almost invariably told that they had
spent some time working in the USA. No doubt some migrated with visas in their
passports, but many crossed the border with the help of coyotes, as the
people traffickers are known. One taxi driver told us that he has 12 brothers
in the USA, all with children who, because they were born there, are US
citizens. The driver’s only son similarly lives in the USA, is married and has
a US-born son. Our regular local driver crossed the border twice. When he was
younger, he was a keen football player and therefore fit enough to have a
chance when running from US border guards. One of his crossings, with 19 other
Mexicans, was not far from a border post, hidden behind a hill. When they were
detected, they ran. Eighteen were captured, but our driver escaped to work
picking apples on a farm in Washington state. His foreman was a Venezuelan, so
it would appear that the picking of apples relied on immigrant labour, whether
legal or not, but the Americans who consume the apples now demand their
deportation. In our experience, these Mexican acquaintances are hardworking,
honest people, not the criminals, murderers and rapists of Mr Trump’s rhetoric.
It is, of course, possible to reduce the movement of undocumented people across
the border, but even harsh and inhumane measure cannot eliminate migration into
the USA completely simply because the pressures that drive it are too powerful
