Can Mexico save itself?

Debates and fantasies about sovereignty and intervention

Welcome to The Mexpatriate.

A draft of this piece has been sitting on my Google Docs shelf for awhile, like an open map that fiendishly resists being folded back into its proper shape. I sometimes find the writing process feels this way; an act of destructive creation, of momentary insight followed quickly by “well, what do I do with this now?”

But here it is, readers: my analysis of the national conversation about sovereignty.

If you have feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at hola@themexpatriate.com or leave a comment below. I’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a politics + security edition of The Mexpat Dispatch.

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

—Sir Terry Pratchett

Since the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, the simmering issue of Mexican sovereignty has boiled over in the national conversation.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has been unwavering in her sovereignty mantra, yet the precarious nature of this autonomy is increasingly evident. Her government delivered another tribute of 37 Mexican traffickers to the United States last week and FBI Director Kash Patel was in Mexico City when one of the bureau’s most-wanted—a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder-turned-trafficker—was taken into custody the next day.

“How exactly did he turn himself in? Those details we don’t know,” Sheinbaum admitted to a reporter on Tuesday when asked whether Ryan Wedding had indeed surrendered, as reported by her government and by the U.S. Embassy. She is adamant that this wasn’t an arrest made by U.S. law enforcement on Mexican soil. She also defended her government’s independent decision-making when it comes to Pemex sending (or suspending) oil shipments to Cuba.

Sheinbaum’s political opponents appear unmoved by her balancing act. Neither the PAN nor the PRI condemned the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro and politicians from both parties have made not-too-subtle comparisons between Sheinbaum and the former Venezuelan president. Magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego—a possible 2030 presidential contender—praised the U.S. action and said it “gives a clear hope” to Mexicans. “Trump is the best president Mexico has had,” posted far-right political figure Eduardo Verástegui on X last week. The Morena party posted on its X account soon after: “There are some who forget that calling for intervention by foreign powers in matters that only concern Mexicans has a name: treason.”

But beneath the political rage-bait lies a deeper, older question: Can Mexico save itself?

Photo credit: Gobierno de México

The sovereignty absolutists

“The last time the U.S. came to Mexico, they took half the territory.”

This has been Sheinbaum’s repeated mañanera reminder in response to Trump’s threats of U.S. military action. Technically, the last time there was a U.S. incursion in Mexico was more recent—when General Pershing and his soldiers came to hunt down Pancho Villa in 1916—but…point taken, Claudia.

The modern nation-state of Mexico has faced both external and internal threats to its sovereignty—territorial integrity, the monopoly on legitimate use of force and autonomy to govern—throughout its history. While organized crime groups haven’t been interested in seizing political power for ideological ends, their expanding influence since 2006 has led to questioning the autonomy and legitimacy of the State from within. AMLO and Sheinbaum have both referred to the Calderón administration as a “narco government” and they stood with the families of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa who cried “It was the State” during Peña Nieto’s term.

However, since AMLO swept to power in 2018, the rhetoric of upholding sovereignty in the face of foreign meddling—not only from the superpower to the north, but also from global organizations like the U.N. or critical European MPs—has dominated the discourse. This was accompanied by renewed enthusiasm for the 20th-century non-interventionist “Estrada Doctrine” in foreign policy: steering clear of calling out leftist authoritarian governments in Venezuela and Cuba, and leading to diplomatic estrangement with Ecuador and Peru.

For the sovereignty absolutists, this bedrock principle is the foundation of peace and should be applied regardless of democratic bona fides. They see a call for outside intervention in Mexico as not only unpatriotic, but as a fantasy that history has proved dangerous.

The sovereignty-flexible

While Mexico wasn’t exactly enthused by U.S. neocon foreign policy in the early 21st century, the country’s two PAN sexenios (2000-2012) did bring a distancing from leftist regimes in the region, and a closer alignment with the United States. The Mérida Initiative security agreement, signed in 2007 and active until AMLO withdrew from it, brought in billions of dollars of U.S. military and technological “assistance” and gave more operational latitude to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Mexico.

After their electoral walloping in 2018, the opposition to Morena discovered their warnings of AMLO becoming another Hugo Chávez had fallen on deaf ears, and instead, voters continued to turn the political map maroon in subsequent elections. Ex-President Ernesto Zedillo went so far as to say AMLO had “killed” Mexican democracy, with Sheinbaum’s complicity. And as violence continued, some claimed intervention would be warranted as the State’s legitimacy had been irrevocably compromised.

Not all these voices came from opposition politicians jostling for votes. Former poet turned anti-crime activist Javier Sicilia, who led the first major grassroots peace marches in response to the explosive violence triggered by the war against the cartels, was vehemently critical of both Calderón and Peña Nieto, but also became bitterly disillusioned with AMLO. He suggested in 2019 that the U.N. Blue Helmets be called in to help Mexico confront “a profound humanitarian tragedy…that we can’t handle on our own.”

For the interventionists, sovereignty without legitimacy is itself a fantasy.

“What is evident is that the simplistic version of sovereignty, which never really meant much, has run its course,” wrote former Secretary of Foreign Affairs Jorge Castañeda of Sheinbaum’s juggling act in an op-ed published on Wednesday.

“Coordination, never subordination”

Timing, in politics as in life, is everything. AMLO’s inward-looking nationalism has gone from seeming anachronistic to prescient as the world moves at increased velocity away from globalization and neoliberal triumphalism. Opponents of the 4T are still struggling to find a defensible position in this narrative battle.

By occupying the nationalist space, Morena leaves the opposition at risk of looking treacherous, and by overtly cooperating on security with the U.S. and making a lot more arrests than her predecessor, Sheinbaum is deflating their arguments that she is soft on crime.

This approach so far appears to be an astute one on the home front. Sheinbaum’s approval ratings continue to rank above 70%, and a December Enkoll poll found that regardless of how they would vote, the majority of respondents identify with Morena, followed by “no party.”

“Anyone in the opposition who reckons that a Trump attack on Mexican targets would erode the president, and thus benefit the cause of her political adversaries, is failing to grasp that on the one hand, they’re making themselves stateless, and on the other suicidal,” wrote journalist Salvador Camarena this week.

The view from this “middle” power on the full-blooded return of history is more jaded, and less dismayed, than it might be in Ottawa or Brussels. After all, history should have taught Mexicans by now—including those who want to see Morena fall—to have few illusions about U.S. power.

Going deeper: For more historical background on Mexico’s foreign policy and the Estrada Doctrine, check out the latest episode of Mexico: The Podcast.

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