Stranger things
Mexico's worst-case scenario handbook
Welcome to a news roundup edition of The Mexpatriate.
One of my younger sisters was a fan of a bright yellow book dedicated to avoiding disaster when we were kids. “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” included step-by-step illustrated guidance on everything from venomous snake bites to quicksand to charging bulls (the newest edition includes how to survive if your smart home outsmarts you).
Since Trump’s election, Mexico has had to dust off its own worst-case scenario handbook, and so far, President Sheinbaum seems well-versed in how to survive attack by executive order.
In fact, she may be learning that—to invert one of her mentor’s favorite phrases—the best domestic policy is a good foreign policy (or at least, the best way to achieve unity on the home front). Her approval ratings in recent polls stand at 65% to 81%, and could go even higher following her widely-lauded tariff negotiations last week (more on this below).
While Sheinbaum’s cool-headed, “Keep Calm and Carry On” strategy seems to be working for Mexico—for now—the energy being expended around the world to get inside Trump’s head is so massive it could probably power ChatGPT for a week (or DeepSeek for a year).
Should Trump be taken seriously, or literally, or just with a big grain of salt and a stiff drink? After all, we’re only three weeks into four years.
In today’s newsletter, I cover reading the tariff tea leaves, the deployments to the border and unrest in Sinaloa.
Fasten your seat belts—rounding up the news these days is a bumpy ride.
The tariff man
*Update: Trump said Sunday afternoon that he will be announcing a new 25% tariff on all aluminum and steel imports on Monday. Mexico is one of the top sources of imported steel, aluminum scrap and alloy in the United States.
I’ve never watched much reality TV, but I’m starting to think I should as an analyst of global politics in 2025. We’ve got the histrionics, the bogus cliffhangers, the humiliations—and a new storyline every week. Last week, the North American Trade War episode lasted slightly only longer than the U.S. TikTok ban, which seems to have set the pace for this Trump redux era.
Between the publication of the executive order on Saturday, Feb. 1 to implement 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and the deadline for them to take effect on Tuesday, the sky was falling. According to estimates from BBVA analysts, the tariffs could lead to a 2.5% contraction of Mexico’s GDP if they were of “prolonged duration.” After all, about 80% of Mexico’s annual exports go to the United States.
But the North American economies are so deeply entwined today that the side effects felt in the U.S. would be much broader than just more expensive margaritas and guacamole (Trump himself admitted there could be “some pain” felt in the U.S. in this trade war).
Mexico has leverage too.
In 2024, Mexico again edged out China and Canada as the largest trading partner of the U.S., with a 5.2% increase in bilateral trade to reach a record US $839.9 billion. Trump’s first-term trade war with China helped push Mexico into this position, and the USMCA (which he once proudly dubbed the “best agreement we’ve ever made”) fortified the integration of North American supply chains for producing everything from cars to computers to beer.
In order to implement these tariffs and skirt the USMCA, Trump’s Feb. 1 executive order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as a response to the “national emergency” of illicit fentanyl trafficking and migration. Trump had previously planned to use the IEEPA in 2019 to put a 5% tariff on Mexican imports before then-President López Obrador agreed to increase border security and receive migrants under the Remain in Mexico policy.
Trump was asked at a press conference on Jan. 31 if Mexico or Canada could do anything to avert these tariffs, and he said no. But it turns out, they could—and fast.
On Monday, Feb. 3, President Sheinbaum posted to X that she and Trump had reached an agreement to postpone the tariffs for a month. When asked at the mañanera to describe their phone conversation, Sheinbaum answered (with a smirk): “I’d say it was long.”
She went on to explain the deal she and Trump made on “issues of shared concern” like fentanyl trafficking, including the deployment of 10,000 National Guard (GN) members to the northern border, while also noting that she’d asked for more U.S. help to stop illegal weapons trafficking.
On Wednesday, Sheinbaum told reporters that the 30-day pause isn’t a concern, since she expects the postponement will be “permanent.” Canada too wrangled a reprieve, by agreeing to appoint a fentanyl “czar,” beef up border security and label Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.
The rapid (if temporary) lifting of the tariffs before they went into effect begs the question: Is this really about trade at all? Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior trade counselor, told Politico on Feb. 4: “The president is fighting a drug war, not a trade war.”
Meanwhile, Robert Lighthizer, the architect of Trump’s trade policy in his first term (who has been left out of the administration this time) wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times last week:
“By imposing tariffs on China (and threatening to impose them on Mexico and Canada), he [Trump] has taken an immediate measure that is driven by an urgent national security issue — the fentanyl crisis, which is killing thousands of our citizens every month. But using tariffs as leverage on security matters should not be confused with the fundamental fact that the global trading system has failed our country. It has not faltered because free trade doesn’t work. It has failed because free trade doesn’t exist.”
In other words, Trump’s seemingly erratic tariff strategy is both a favorite stick used to beat concessions out of world leaders for political gain and a move towards economic protectionism.
Trade policy also reveals the fault lines in the motley MAGA coalition. Some of the most prominent allies of the Trump administration have long reaped the rewards of globalized free trade and aren’t necessarily fans of this “external revenue service” that will hit their bottom line. However, Trump’s working-class base wants him to deliver on promises to protect U.S. jobs.
Where does this leave Mexico? While Trump and Sheinbaum come from opposing sides of the political spectrum, they do share a disgust with the perceived sins of neoliberalism, particularly multinational companies they see as profiting at the expense of the U.S. or Mexican worker.
For Morena, this has meant a lot of talk about “sovereignty” and raising the minimum wage, and for MAGA Republicans, it means a lot of talk about “controlling our borders” and the U.S. trade deficit.
If Trump continues to be the “tariff man” like his hero William McKinley, Mexico has merely won a skirmish in what will be a longer war—and may need to follow through on its own economic nationalism by reducing its dependence on the neighbor to the north.
The militarized zone
In the midst of the marathon executive order-signing in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day, Trump said “stranger things have happened” when asked about the potential of sending U.S. Special Forces into Mexico.
One of these EOs declared a “national emergency”—so many emergencies!—at the border with Mexico and 1,500 active-duty troops were deployed there on Jan. 23, to add to the 2,500 already sent there during the Biden administration. Another 1,500 U.S. troops were deployed to the southern border on Feb. 7. Mexico has started its own deployment of 10,000 National Guard members to the border, as part of Sheinbaum’s agreement with Trump.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Air Force plane was spotted flying near Cabo San Lucas last week (Mexico’s Department of Defense said it was over international waters, outside Mexican, airspace) and U.S. ships have had “more visibility” near Mexican waters, according to one anonymous San Diego naval base official quoted in Expansión.
Cartel gunmen reportedly fired from Mexico at U.S. border agents on Jan. 27 in Fronton, Texas, though Sheinbaum seemed skeptical of the circumstances when asked about the incident. However, Mexican law enforcement did later confirm finding a hideout (with ammunition, guns and radios) on an uninhabited island in the Rio Grande, where the Texas Department of Public Safety said the shooters had fled.
Could an incident like this one be the spark for a U.S. incursion into Mexico? While the EO designating Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) has caused concern as a potential pathway towards military action, perhaps a more likely (and imminent) scenario is an escalation of what happened in Fronton.
“The border” has become a stage for political parables, making it hard to know what is real anymore. Biden is of course the “open borders” villain in the Republican narrative, but his administration was also the biggest contractor for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history (and received more campaign contributions from these companies than Trump in 2020).
Immigration to the U.S.—legal and undocumented—has been steadily rising for decades, but according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 saw the highest percentage (14.3%) of immigrants as a share of the population since 1910.
However, this trend was starting to reverse by the end of the Biden administration, with deportations hitting a 10-year high in fiscal year 2024. According to the Migration Policy Institute:
After the record arrivals witnessed at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021 and 2022, driven by complex and diversifying trends in the Western hemisphere and beyond as well as the destabilizing effects of a global pandemic, Trump has now inherited from Biden a border that is quieter than it has been in the past five years.
Regardless of the reality on the ground, the “war on migration” is the new “war on terror”—border czar Tom Homan used the term “shock and awe” to describe the new immigration enforcement policies and Trump announced plans to expand the small migrant detention center at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba to hold up to 30,000 prisoners.
On this side of the border, the sudden shutdown of the CBP One app upon Trump’s swearing in left thousands of asylum-seekers in desperate limbo. The Mexican government has built 10 new migrant shelters in six border states to receive Mexican deportees, as part of the “México te abraza” or “Mexico embraces you” program for repatriated citizens, which offers a small stipend and assistance with transportation and paperwork, since many will not have any Mexican I.D. documents (CURP, voter’s ID, etc). As of Friday, Sheinbaum reported that nearly 11,000 deportees (8,425 of them Mexicans) had been received in Mexico since Jan. 20.
Culichis take to the streets
On Sunday, Jan. 19, a family was attacked by gunmen while driving in Culiacán, Sinaloa. The father, Antonio de Jesús Sarmiento, died at the scene; Alexander (12), Gael (9) and their cousin, Adolfo (17), were severely wounded. The young brothers died within days in the hospital; their cousin survived.
“There is a built-up collective rage that has no escape valve, and sooner or later it’s going to blow,” wrote a columnist in Ríodoce newspaper as civil unrest followed the Sarmiento family murders.
There have been multiple protests on the streets of Culiacán in the weeks since—and demands for the resignation of Governor Rubén Rocha Moya (Morena). A poll of sinaloenses published by Reforma newspaper on Feb. 4 found 62% of respondents in favor of Rocha’s resignation, and 75% said they were very worried about insecurity in their city.
“We are doing all of our activities, with stadiums full, schools full, we’re working…perfectly well,” Rocha said in an interview a few days before the Sarmiento family was gunned down, saying his state unfortunately suffers a “stigma” when it comes to violence.
Sinaloa has experienced a tsunami of violent crime since war broke out between factions of the Sinaloa Cartel in September. The official statistics show 835 homicides in the past five months, though they have declined to 138 in January from a monthly peak in October (182)—there have also been 952 disappearances reported.
According to the latest national urban security survey (ENSU) carried out in December, 90.6% of people in Culiacán reported feeling unsafe. This is a precipitous change since September (55.7%) and puts it in the top six worst-rated cities in the country. The federal head of public security, Omar García Harfuch, has been stationed in Sinaloa since a federal agent was ambushed and killed in Culiacán in December and federal authorities are overseeing the Sarmiento investigation.
Rocha is hardly new to scrutiny. Captured Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada claimed he was brokering a meeting between the governor and a political rival, Héctor Melesio Cuén Ojeda, when he was kidnapped and then put on a plane bound for Texas on July 25. Cuén was found dead soon after and initially, the state authorities said he’d been shot during an attempted robbery. Federal law enforcement debunked this story (supporting Zambada’s account), and the state attorney general resigned. The federal prosecutor’s office (FGR) decided not to pursue an investigation into Rocha, who claims he was in Los Angeles on the day of Zambada’s kidnapping.
So far, the leaders of Morena have been reluctant to join in the calls for Rocha’s resignation, though Senator Gerardo Fernández Noroña suggested that Rocha could be subject to a recall referendum. Rocha himself acknowledged that the “mechanism is there.”
Meanwhile, “El Mayo” is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors, as his loyalists wage war with “Los Chapitos” in Sinaloa. Journalist Luis Chaparro has reported that U.S. sources say Zambada has been debriefing them on government corruption in recent decades:
The same source confirmed that multiple U.S. federal agencies have been combing through Zambada’s narco-encyclopedia to determine the full extent of narco-political connections.
His next hearing is scheduled for April 22.
“I read the newspaper every morning in Spanish. Then I read The Mexpatriate and it clears everything up.” - Brian
Thank you for reading and feel free to send me your suggestions, comments and questions at hola@themexpatriate.com. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get full access to every newsletter, and support my work.
All so very, very disturbing.