Mexico

[blindpig]

After Weeks of Political Chaos and Uncertainty, Mexico’s Judicial Coup Fizzles to Nothing
Posted on November 8, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

President Claudia Sheinbaum, her governing party, Morena, and arguably Mexico as a whole just dodged a rather large bullet.

Despite her landslide victory and her party’s super-majority in both legislative houses, allowing for constitutional changes, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent assumption of power has been all but smooth. As we reported just over a month ago, on the third day of her presidency, Mexico’s Supreme Court plunged the country into a constitutional crisis by seeking to derail, or at least delay for as long as possible, the now-former AMLO government’s judicial reform package, which had already passed both houses:

For the first time ever, Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) has decided to submit a constitutional reform for review. The reform in question involves a root-and-branch restructuring of the judicial system* and it has already passed both legislative houses with the necessary two-thirds majorities. It is bitterly opposed by members of Mexico’s opposition parties, the judiciary, big business lobbies, and the US and Canadian governments.

[On October 3] the SCJN admitted an appeal against the government’s judicial reform program by a majority of eight votes to three. With this ruling, the Supreme Court hands over the dispute consideration to one of the judges that voted in favour of the resolution. The court could also issue a stay, essentially suspending the constitutional reform. The Mexican financial daily El Financiero described the ruling as “the last bullet” (interesting choice of words) against the now-former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Plan-C” reforms.

That last bullet has now been spent, and it missed the target narrowly. On Tuesday [Nov 5], the Supreme Court met to rule on whether to strike down key parts of the judicial overhaul, including drastically scaling back the election of judges and magistrates by popular vote, one of the most controversial aspects of the reform.

If the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the resolution and the Sheinbaum government stuck to its guns, it would set up “a direct confrontation between two pillars of government that, legal scholars say, has little to no precedent in recent Mexican history,” wrote the New York Times last week (h/t Robin Kash).

Sheinbaum said she was unwilling to negotiate “what the people have decided and is already part of the Constitution” while the eight judges who had voted to admit the appeal were now expected to vote in favour of it. For the resolution to pass, eight out of eleven votes were needed. A full-blown constitutional crisis seemed inevitable — until one of the eight judges broke ranks and voted against the resolution, arguing that the country’s highest court does not have the power “to say what the Constitution should or should not include.”

“Wow, Wow, Wow!”

Eight versus three suddenly became seven versus four: one vote short. But then the unthinkable happened: the court’s president, Norma Piña, suggested that the minimum number of votes be reduced from eight to six. Even some of Piña’s fellow judges were struck by this desperate attempt by Mexico’s most senior judge to change the rules of the game in the middle of the game. The judge sitting next to Piña, who had voted against the resolution, summed up the moment with three words (in English): “wow, wow, wow!”

“It was blatant confirmation of the court’s political intentions, which went far beyond what you’d expect in a judicial debate,” said the veteran political commentator Denise Maerker. “It disqualified [the whole process]… It was a political ruse that ended up exposing the president of the court and the terrible job she has done presiding over the court.”

Days before the hearing, it was revealed that in December Piña had met up with the leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, at the home of fellow Supreme Court judge Juan Luis González Alcántara Carrancá — and not at the Mexican Institute of Culture, as Piña had claimed. Among the issues discussed was the development of a joint plan between Piña and the main opposition parties to prevent Sheinbaum and Morena from winning the June 2 elections.

The plan clearly didn’t work: Sheinbaum ending up winning the biggest majority in modern Mexican history while Morena secured qualified majorities in both legislative houses, giving them the power to pass sweeping reforms to Mexico’s constitution.

In the end, most of the judges rejected Piña’s absurd proposal to reduce the minimum majority needed for the resolution to pass from eight to six, including even Carrancá, who presented the resolution, leaving Piña little choice but to grudgingly reject the case. In a statement, the court announced that “in absence of the… eight votes necessary to invalidate various precepts contemplated in the draft resolution, the plenary of the Highest Constitutional Court dismissed the concepts of invalidity.”

“Plan D”

Even if the court had voted in favour, Sheinbaum apparently had a plan B — or as she calls it, “plan D” — up her sleeve, which would have essentially involved choosing a new Supreme Court judge who would take the oath of office in December, after the scheduled departure of Minister Luis María Aguilar. That way the ruling party would have four judges in its favour and thus leave the Supreme Court’s plenary unable to approve actions of unconstitutionality on future occasions until the election was held in 2025.

But by December Mexico’s three legislative branches would be locked in an unprecedented constitutional showdown. The crisis would no doubt have extended beyond Mexico’s borders.

As I reported in my previous post, the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has agreed to hold a session on November 12 to hear the complaints of the Mexico’s National Association of Circuit Magistrates and District Judges (JUFED) regarding the judicial reform. At the hearing, the delegation representing JUFED will be able to present its arguments for why the judicial reform represents a breach by the Mexican State of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights.

If the Supreme Court had voted in favour of Carrancá’s proposal to amend the judicial reform and the Mexican government had chosen to ignore or dismiss that verdict, it would have signified the country’s “rupture” with the inter-American system as well as with international conventions on justice and human rights, notes Argentine constitutional theory professor Roberto Gargarellait.

Several international organisations are already following events in Mexico closely, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the United Nations Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, the UN Human Rights Council and the Venice Commission, a consultative body of the European Council on constitutional law, of which Mexico is a member.

Dodging a Very Large Bullet

In other words, President Sheinbaum, her governing party, Morena, and arguably the Mexican people at large just dodged a rather large bullet. The judicial reform’s last legal obstacles are finally out of the way — thanks to the vote of one judge. The protests and strikes of judges and court employees are also fizzling out. Even the US government appears to be holding its tongue after AMLO took the largely symbolic step of putting his government’s relations with the US and Canadian Embassy’s on ice following their recent attempts to derail the judicial reform.

Now that the reform has finally overcome the myriad legal impediments in its way, the Sheinbaum government can begin focusing on the rest of its sweeping reform agenda. That agenda includes over a dozen proposed reforms that the government intends to enact in the areas of energy, mining, fracking, GM foods, labour laws, housing, indigenous rights, women’s rights, universal health care and water management.

The mining reforms include a proposed ban on open-pit mining while a package of agricultural reforms proposes to enshrine in the constitution the AMLO government’s 2023 decree banning the use of genetically modified corn for human use — an issue that is already the subject of an investor state dispute between Mexico and its North American trade partners, the United States and Canada. The government is also seeking to authorise a constitutional ban on fracking.

Earlier this week, Mexico’s Senate passed a reform that will allow the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit) to build and lease homes for workers — for the first time since the ’90s, according to El Imparcial de Oaxaca. The reform proposes modifications to Article 123 of the Constitution aimed at establishing Infonavit as a social housing system. This will allow workers to access sufficient credit to acquire, build or improve a home — or at least that is the intention.

Some of those reforms, if effectively implemented, will affect the ability of corporations, both domestic and foreign, to stuff their pockets. For decades they have been able to count on the support of a pliant judiciary that has faithfully served and protected the interests of the rich and powerful. They include Mexico’s third richest man, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, whose conglomerate, Grupo Salinas, the Supreme Court insulated from having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars it owes in unpaid taxes as well as to US investment funds. Said funds are now trying to recoup their investment by suing the Mexican government at the World Trade’s arbitration court.

While Sheinbaum has insisted that the judicial reform is strictly a pro-democracy measure that will have little to no impact on Mexico’s business landscape in an attempt to assuage investor fears, AMLO, who devised the plan, said in one of his last press conferences that some of the sweeping changes are aimed squarely at foreign companies.

“Corrupt judges, magistrates, ministers, it is not possible for them to defend that… Are they going to continue defending foreign companies that come to loot, to steal, to affect the economy of Mexicans?… Are they going to continue to represent these companies?”

Time will soon tell. Now that the way is clear, the first batch of elections of judges and magistrates is scheduled to take place on June 1, 2025 when a total of 850 judges will be chosen by popular vote. In the meantime, the Sheinbaum government will be shifting its focus from a barely averted constitutional crisis at home to a challenge of arguably even greater proportions on its northern border: the election of Donald J Trump, and what that could mean for Mexico. And that will be the topic of a future article.



* As I’ve written before, the reform includes a provision that judges and magistrates at all levels of the system will no longer be appointed but instead be elected by local citizens in elections scheduled to take place in 2025 and 2027. Sitting judges, including Supreme Court judges, will have to win the people’s vote if they want to continue working. New institutions will be created to regulate procedures as well as combat the widespread corruption that has plagued Mexican justice for many decades.

This, insisted the AMLO government, is necessary because two of the main structural causes of corruption, impunity and lack of justice in Mexico are: a) the absence of true judicial independence of the institutions charged with delivering justice; and b) the ever widening gap between Mexican society and the judicial authorities that oversee the legal processes at all levels of the system, from the local and district courts to Mexico’s Supreme Court.

There is some truth to this. And making judges electorally accountable may go some way to remedying these problems, but it also poses a threat to judicial independence and impartiality, of which there is already scant supply. As some critics have argued, with AMLO’s Morena party already dominating both the executive and the legislative, there is a danger that it will end up taking control of all three branches of government — just like the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that held uninterrupted power in the country for 71 years (1929-2000).

That said, as I wrote in my previous piece on this issue, the AMLO government has the constitutional right to pursue these reforms, enjoys the support of roughly two-thirds of the Mexican public in doing so, and is following established legal procedures.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11 ... thing.html

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The economic power that will accompany Claudia Sheinbaum in her cabinet
Marco Vinicio Dávila, member of the BP of the CC of the PCM 15.Sep.24 Fight against social democracy

Both President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum maintain the narrative of the separation of political power from economic power. In reality, in the next cabinet, the Secretaries of State and high-level officials represent and have ample ties to monopolies and big capitalists. The path of the next government will correspond to its captains.



The economic power that will accompany Claudia Sheinbaum in her cabinet



After the president-elect announced the two military officers who will occupy the positions of Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense on Friday, September 6, the cabinet that will accompany her in her six-year term has been completed. It is, therefore, time to analyze the composition of the cabinet, to see how economic power fits behind political power in the next six-year term.



We already stated, when we analyzed the composition of AMLO's cabinet, that the new social democracy distorts reality with demagogic discourse and phraseology to cover up the true interests it represents. López Obrador achieved this by hammering home throughout his campaign and a good part of his six-year term that the cause of all the ills that we workers in Mexico suffer is corruption, and that he focused his speech on combating this scourge. Today, Claudia Sheinbaum has not focused her campaign speech on combating corruption – because that, according to AMLO, is over – but on the fact that she represents the continuity of the Fourth Transformation with the so-called Plan C, which aims to continue “democratizing” the country through the 20 reforms proposed by the current president last February. Now, how can we convince workers that this democratization is advancing and consolidating? By distorting reality with more demagoguery.



That is why when Claudia Sheinbaum launched her presidential campaign, in her initial speech she declared: “ I will govern with a clear division between political power and economic power. I will never submit to any power, neither economic nor foreign, I will always work for the supreme interest of the people of Mexico and the nation .”



However, even before the presidential campaigns began, both Sheinbaum and Gálvez showed the interests they were going to defend in that contest, since both met in February with Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock, one of the main financial monopolies in the world; that is why we affirm that in this electoral process they were both representing the same interests, the interests of big capital.



For this very reason, at different times throughout the electoral campaign, both women met almost simultaneously with different sectors of the business world, with representatives of the economic power that both aspired to represent politically at that time. The candidates at that time were not competing for the vote of the masses, but for the favor of the large national and international economic consortiums, of the monopolies.



The candidate of the Let's Keep Making History Coalition met at the end of February with members of the Industrial Club; in March with businessmen from the construction sector; in April with bankers, at the National Banking Convention, as well as with businessmen from various industrial chambers of Mexico and the world, among which the presence of CONCAMIN, the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), the Mexican Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of European Countries (EUROCAM) and the American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico, (USA) stood out, and with whom she promised not to increase taxes or to carry out a fiscal reform; in May she met with the Mexican Business Council. She also had meetings with businessmen from Jalisco and with CANACO-Servytur of Monterrey.



For her closing campaign, the MORENA-PT-Green Party candidate invited several dozen businessmen from the main monopolies that benefited during President Obrador's six-year term, including Mota-Engil and Grupo Vidanta.



Once Sheinbaum's victory as virtual president-elect was known, one of her first actions was to announce, for the month of October, the creation of a Business Council that will be coordinated by businesswoman Altagracia Gómez, head of the Grupo Promotora Empresarial de Occidente (PEO) and which is a monopoly that benefited from the privatization process initiated during the Salinas de Gortari period and with a presence in the automotive, transportation, real estate, food and warehouse sectors. To demonstrate Altagracia's efficiency, both women met last June with the general director in Mexico and member of the Regional Executive Committee for Latin America of Black Rock, Sergio Méndez.



So, although the president-elect has stated at the beginning of her campaign that in her government there will be a clear division between economic power and political power, we can clearly see that in reality there is not, nor will there be, such a separation, but on the contrary: those who hold economic power today will be those who continue to hold it; although the same president-elect affirms, as she did at the end of her campaign, that neoliberalism will never return. It seems that this affirmation does not frighten the great national and foreign capitalists who know they are well represented by the current president and her cabinet.



By stating that the monopolies feel well represented by the current government, we are not ignoring the fact that even within the monopoly groups there are contradictions and that there is a permanent commercial struggle between the different imperialist blocks of the world, which turn national politics into a coliseum.



All individuals in society represent economic interests according to the place they occupy in production. Below we will see how the members of the cabinet proposed by President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, due to the place they have occupied in production as entrepreneurs, shareholders, business consultants, members of boards of directors or managers, are representatives of economic groups that hope to continue benefiting from political power in the next six-year term.



Here we must not lose sight of the fact that even though some of the proposed characters are presented as eminent academics with lengthy CVs (Julio Berdegué's CV alone covers 21 pages), the truth is that these academics - even as consultants or officials of international organisations such as the UN, FAO or UNESCO, given that it is well known what these international organisations represent in the world today - have made their careers receiving funding from NGOs or foundations linked to various monopolies, applying a business vision in their proposals for solutions to social problems. Such is the case of Alicia Bárcena, David Kershenobich, Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, Juan Ramón de la Fuente and Julio Berdegué himself .



In other cases, although the proposed characters do not appear to be directly linked to business groups, we can locate close relatives who become managers or front men for these officials, such is the case of Marcelo Ebrard ; or that of Barath Bolaños , who everything indicates owes his position in the government to the friendship that unites him with the sons of the president, Gonzalo and Andrés López Beltrán. In the case of Omar García Harfuch and Mario Delgado , both with links between organized crime groups and business groups. We will now look at some of the most representative cases of all that has been argued above.



Jesús Antonio Esteva Medina, Secretary of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport. One of the main representatives of some monopoly groups, especially in construction, transport and railways. Although when his appointment was announced his resume as an academic and public servant was highlighted, it should be noted that this UNAM graduate is a businessman in the construction industry: majority partner of Desarrollo en Ingeniería SA de CV; founding partner and shareholder of Industrias Indalt SA de CV; and, founding partner and director of Sinergia Biomédica Hospitalaria SA de CV During his time in the Mexico City Government, during the Sheinbaum period, he favored the interests of companies such as González Soto y Asociados, ICA, Jaguar Ingenieros Constructores and GAMI Ingeniería e Instalaciones, responsible for the construction of the last section of the Mexico-Toluca Interurban Train to the detriment of the popular sectors that inhabit the west of the city, around the Observatorio area in the Álvaro Obregón mayor's office, and who as a consequence suffer effects such as lack of water, flooding, and fractures in the walls and roofs of their homes due to the heavy machinery that operates 24 hours a day in an area that is full of mines and sinkholes. The popular mobilization grouped in the assembly of Vecinos Unidos Zona Poniente, which includes neighborhoods like El Capulín, is made up of working class people who suffer from these serious problems and know very well about the indolence and apathy of the future Secretary of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation.



On the other hand, those who showed their approval for this appointment were the Transport Commission of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers and the businessmen of the construction sector. The Mexican Chamber of the Construction Industry (CMIC) recognizes in the secretary an ally, whose companies belong to the CMIC, because they hope that through Esteva Medina works and resources will now flow for this sector because they feel displaced by the SEDENA in the main works of this six-year term, in addition to the fact that they are counting on the campaign commitments of Claudia Sheinbaum since the Business Coordinating Council (CCE) hopes to participate in the projects of the Development Poles of Welfare and in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where the construction of at least one hundred industrial parks is planned, as well as in the participation schemes of the strategic works of the next government. Another sector that also congratulates itself and rubs its hands with this appointment is the railway sector. Monopolies such as Ferromex, Ferrosur and Kansas City Southern (CPKC), or Grupo México and Union Pacific, are awaiting the decisions of the new government regarding the completion and/or expansion of the Maya Train and Interoceanic Train projects, among other railway projects in the country, in order to be able to participate in their completion, construction and operation. [i , [ii] , [iii] , [iv] , [v] , [vi] , [vii] , [viii] , [ix] , [x] , [xi]



Luz Elena González Escobar , Secretary of Energy, is another character with shady business ties in the energy sector. The next secretary has ties to the pharmaceutical monopoly called Fármacos DAROVI, SA de CV, where she served as an advisor until before the then Head of Government elected in CDMX called her to join her team in 2018. If we were to start from González Escobar's business link with Fármacos Darovi, there would be enough material to show how much it benefits Grupo Kosmos of Jack Landsmanas Stern, the monopoly to which the pharmaceutical company belongs, to have a representative of its interests in the next government. Already in the current federal administration, Grupo Kosmos placed a representative of its interests in SEGALMEX, Bernardo Fernández Sánchez, and where they have obtained more than a billion pesos in various contracts, without bidding, among many other irregularities.



But what is truly interesting is that Grupo Kosmos, as a monopoly, has a variety of activities through numerous companies in many other sectors. RX Health, in the health and social services sector; Productos Serel, La Cosmopolitana, in the food sector; Fármacos Darovi SA de CV in the pharmaceutical sector; and the following consortia in the energy sector: Energía Kan, Forsu Bioenergía and WTE Land, which includes the following companies: Termoenergía CDMX Holding SA de CV, of which Jack Landsmanas himself is CEO; Termo WTE SA de CV; WTE Land SA de CV; Industrias Energrim SA de CV; Construcciones ALDESEM SA de CV; and Proactiva Medio Ambiente México SA de CV As we can see, Luz Elena González is actually directly linked to the interests of a monopoly in the energy sector, which has also distinguished itself by obtaining maximum benefits without worrying about legal formalities, being one of the most favored monopolies during the management of Miguel Ángel Mancera at the head of Mexico City and the federal government of Enrique Peña Nieto. [xii] , [xiii] , [xiv] , [xv] , [xvi] , [xvii]



Julio Antonio Berdegué Sacristán , in the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development. One of the first positions announced by Sheinbaum was that of this agroindustrial businessman and consultant for both the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank since 1991. Supporter of green capitalism. Doctor in Social Sciences from Wageningen University, Holland, and whose main research center is Wageningen Research, which in addition to working for the government of the Netherlands also carries out research work for companies and NGOs on the condition of not revealing who the funders of its research are, and where around 50% of its income comes from the business sector through "large corporations and the other half through medium and small companies."



The interesting thing about this appointment is that it coincided with the acts of repression and murder of peasants in the Perote region of Veracruz, on June 20. The peasants were protesting against the harmful effects caused in the countryside by the operation of the Granjas Carroll pork monopoly, a company that has generated countless health and environmental problems for almost two decades, such as the H1N1 swine flu pandemic and the contamination of groundwater, as well as serious desertification and drought caused by the hoarding of water concessions. And while the Morena government of Veracruz was carrying out a bloody hunt for peasants, that same day the so-called Mexican Pork congratulated Julio Berdegué on his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development. Among the main members of the Mexican Pork, Granjas Carroll de México, S. de RL de CV appears first. To get a better idea of ​​the scope of the large monopolies that make up this National Association of Pork Exporters, its president is currently Luis Alberto Monarres Miranda, Export Manager of Keken. This is a monopoly that, like Granjas Carroll in Veracruz, has caused serious effects on health and the environment in the state of Yucatan.



The following contrast is significant, and a bad omen for the rural people: while the monopolies are congratulating themselves on the appointment of Julio Berdegué, the peasants are persecuted and massacred for protesting against the abuses of those same monopolies. In fact, the next secretary of the SAGARPA did not make a single mention of the bloody events in Veracruz. He has met with small producers, but not to resolve their real problems, which are, in the first place, those generated by the agro-industrial monopolies. [xviii] , [xix] , [xx] , [xxi] , [xxii]



Josefina Rodríguez Zamora , at the Ministry of Tourism. Just as the big meat businessmen congratulated Julio Berdegué, the businessmen grouped in the National Tourism Business Council expressed their congratulations for the federal designation of the restaurant entrepreneur. They have been quick to offer their good offices to collaborate with her and propose a coordinated work plan. What is the National Tourism Business Council and who are its members? According to its website, the CNET “is made up of businessmen, Chambers and Associations at a national level, committed to promoting sustainable tourism growth, through investments based on profitability and trust.” Among the chambers that comprise it, the National Chamber of Air Transport stands out, with more than 60 national and international airlines; the National Chamber of Passenger and Tourism Transportation; the National Chamber of the Restaurant and Seasoned Food Industry (CANIRAC); the National Association of Hotel Chains, Hotels for Mexico. That is to say, the main tourist monopolies established in Mexico are grouped here.



Unlike CNET, the Mexican Federation of Tourism Associations (FEMATUR) is made up of more modest members , such as artisan associations among other sectors, and hopes to get some of their share of tourism during the next six-year term, which is why they also expressed their congratulations on the appointment. [xxiii] , [xxiv] , [xxv]



Rogelio Ramírez de la O. , the next Secretary of the Treasury. International consultant. Founder of the consulting firm Economic Analysis, Ecanal, where he worked until 2021, before joining the AMLO government. He has also been an independent advisor, that is, he has been part of the Boards of Directors of large banks and international companies, among which stand out Grupo Modelo, owned by María Asunción Aramburuzabala, and Grupo Peña Verde, a monopoly dedicated to comprehensive risk management, an insurance company with a presence in Mexico, the United States, Chile and England. [xxvi]



Claudia Curiel de Icaza , in the Ministry of Culture. As head of the Ministry of Culture of Mexico City, she developed culture as a big business. She was responsible for the main mass events that took place in the capital's main square, among which the one by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs stands out, with a record attendance of more than 300 thousand people. The success of these massive concerts is defined not only by the large attendance, but by the economic spillover that they leave for the established commerce of the city and what earned her being recognized as the executive of the month by Billboard magazine in Spanish. And although one of her main achievements is highlighted as the establishment of almost 300 Points of Innovation, Freedom, Art, Education and Knowledge (PILARES), which aim to be recovered public spaces in vulnerable areas of Mexico City and offer "educational services, workshops and free activities that combine academic and community knowledge, strengthening neighborhood identity, promoting social cohesion and improving the quality of life of the community." The truth is that the entire concept of these PILARES encompasses the precariousness of teaching and workshop workers, who are not recognized as workers but as interns, which deprives them of basic labor rights such as social security, vacations and retirement contributions. On the other hand, it also implies the utilitarian use of PILARES workers, who are brought in for the political promotion activities of the city government.



Thus, the private and corporate philanthropic sector, through curators and people from the world of culture for the elites, will try to promote a Law of Patronage; in such a way that even if the next secretary of culture affirms that among her priorities will be “those at the bottom,” the experience of her administration in Mexico City makes us think that the working conditions of the unionized workers of INAH and INBAL will not improve, who practically during the entire six-year term that is about to end worked under protest due to countless violations of their labor rights as a result of “republican austerity” since the budget for the cultural sector was reduced, including museums and archaeological sites in the country. Another risk is that with Claudia Curiel’s business vision, and her success in mass concerts, they will try again to take these to archaeological sites – as has happened in the past, in other six-year terms, with the mass concerts in Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá – to the detriment of the cultural heritage that these archaeological sites represent. [xxvii] , [xxviii] , [xxix] , [xxx] , [xxxi]



Edna Elena Vega , at the Secretariat of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu), is close to the Mexican Chamber of the Construction Industry, of which the Mexican Association of Real Estate Professionals of Mexico City AC is a part and which groups together individuals dedicated to real estate activities such as: Administrators, Marketers, Mediators, Appraisers, Promoters, Financing Advisors and Consultants; as well as the Mexican Real Estate Bank (BIM); among others, such as the College of Architects of Mexico City. [xxxii] , [xxxiii] , [xxxiv]



In conclusion , if in capitalism democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, in its highest phase, imperialism, this dictatorship is increasingly losing its democratic façade because the omnipotence of the monopolies in social life, and therefore in politics, is increasingly suffocating, less democratic. That is why it is more necessary to mask the economic power of the monopolies. We therefore foresee that the government of Sheinbaum Pardo will be deeply demagogic, just like its predecessor.



The continuity of the Obradorist project, the program of social democracy, is in reality the continuity of the strengthening of class oppression, which allows that while the capitalists accumulate wealth more quickly, in the same way the working masses become rapidly impoverished by losing the purchasing power of their wages and seeing their labor and social rights increasingly reduced; but with the safeguard of control and social stability that social democracy still guarantees, whether through demagogy, charity or through the ever greater and more diversified militarization.



In the next six-year term we will see not only the continuity of the political project of the 4T, but also the continuity and expansion of an economic policy that has only favored one social class, the big monopolistic bourgeoisie; which continues to be legally equipped with constitutional reforms and secondary laws to the detriment of the country's working class, including migrant workers, proletarian women and youth, indigenous peoples and communities. For the working class and popular field, there is no other option than organization and struggle to achieve true social transformations, for the construction of a superior society led by workers.


Texto completo en: https://elcomunista.nuevaradio.org/el-p ... mpanara-a/

Google Translator

So-called 'corruption' is part and parcel of capitalism but it is an effect that will never be eliminated while capitalism and perhaps money itself are eliminated.

[blindpig]

Mexican President Sheinbaum Responds to Trump’s ‘Annexation’ Suggestion


Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Dec. 9, 2024. X/ @manmunoz74


December 10, 2024 Hour: 9:43 am

Previously, he suggested that Canada and Mexico should become U.S. states if they continue receiving billions in subsidies.

On Monday, President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that Mexico and Canada should join the United States because of the subsidies they had received.

“Mexico is a free, sovereign and independent country. We all know that and we always defend it,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference at the National Palace.

On Sunday, Trump said that Americans are “subsidizing Canada to the tune of over US$100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost US$300 billion. We shouldn’t be—why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state.”

Sheinbaum dismissed these statements, noting that the “subsidies” Trump mentioned could be related to the increasing Mexican exports to the United States. “The only way to compete with other regions of the world is to maintain and strengthen the trade agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, because we should not see each other as competition, but as complementarities,” she said.

WATCH: Trump suggests that Mexico and Canada should become U.S. states if they are going to keep receiving subsidies from the United States. #trump pic.twitter.com/xJXAlh5HAo

— VIRTUE.NEWS (@virtuemediacorp) December 9, 2024
On Monday, the Mexican president also referred to the immigration issue, assuring that “not much more budget is required” to deal with Trump’s mass deportations and other restrictive immigration policies.

Sheinbaum said that the National Institute of Migration (INM) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) have enough resources to deal with deportations and the migratory flow when the Republican politician takes office on January 20.

Currently, there is concern about Trump’s promises of mass deportations from the U.S., where Mexicans are about half of the 11 million undocumented people and their remittances represent almost 4 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP), which this year would receive a record of US$65 billion.

On Tuesday, Sheinbaum will lead a meeting of the National Security Council with all the country’s governors, with whom she hopes to put together an immigration plan in light of the mass deportations. Although daily migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen by 75 percent since December 2023, irregular migration through Mexico rose by 193 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year to more than 712,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Unit.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/mexican- ... uggestion/

******

Communist Party of Mexico
30th anniversary of the reorganization of the PCM
November 20, 2024 Visits: 1204

30 years of struggle for power for workers,

for Socialism-Communism



To the working class,

To all workers, to working women,

To the youth:

Thirty years ago, on November 20, 1994, after six months of discussion, the National Organizing Commission of the Mexican Communist Party was formed, which was announced with the publication of the November 20 Manifesto.



This marked the beginning of steps to reverse what Eurocommunist opportunism decided in 1981, when it organically liquidated the Mexican Communist Party.

The absence of the working class party for more than a decade was a hard blow to the workers as a whole and to their struggles, it favoured the interests of capital in the class struggle, contributed to ideological confusion, and was a factor in the general delay of social progress. History teaches that the proletariat, in the struggle for its immediate and historical objectives, must rely on its own political party, the Communist Party.

We do not deny that the reorganization process of the Mexican Communist Party was initially affected by the prevailing ideological confusion, and that for a period of almost 15 years it lagged behind in fully assuming its Marxist-Leninist, classist and internationalist characteristics; but it was from the first moment the indispensable organic framework for the proletariat to rebuild its revolutionary party.

We pay homage with emotion to the comrades who made that decision, and to those who over the course of these 30 years have given their freedom or their lives for the Communist Party of Mexico. We recognize Eliseo Macín Hernández and Gonzalo Hernández Cruz. We pay homage to Narciso Sánchez, Héctor Ramírez Cuellar and Mario Rivera; to our comrades Juan, Verónica, Fernando and Soren, who fell in Sucumbíos; to Enrique López, a politically disappeared person; to Raymundo Velázquez Flores, Samuel Vargas, Enrique Solano, Luis Olivares and Ana Lilia Gatica, who were murdered in Guerrero. These valuable lives are seeds that bear fruit in new cadres, in a stronger Party, in the development of the revolutionary struggle for the seizure of power and a Socialist Republic. We also bow our red flags with the hammer and sickle in memory of comrades who, now deceased, once assumed the role of general secretary of the PCM: Héctor Colío Galindo, Sergio Quiroz Miranda and Antonio Castañeda de Luna.

The framework in which the reorganization began was that of the temporary defeat of socialist construction in the USSR, the disbandment of a good part of the revolutionary forces, and the ideological and political predominance of the counterrevolution. This initially prevented the PCM from assuming positions that are key to the proletarian struggle for socialism. The development of this debate in the international communist movement, and the concrete experience in the national class struggle, led to the point where the PCM managed to rid itself of the legacy of opportunism, which had nested freely for several decades in the communist movement of our country: fundamentally, the crucial question of revolutionary strategy and the clash with the mistaken conception of the strategy of the intermediate stages. It could not be resolved superficially or automatically, but over a period of several years, until in 2009, with the process for the IV Party Congress, the way was opened for the recovery of the Leninist theory of organization, the elaboration of a new Program based on the Marxist-Leninist study of capitalism in its imperialist phase and Mexico's place in it, the development of monopolies, the study of the working class and the popular strata, the manifestations of the capital/labor antagonism and the need for the Socialist Revolution. The key element for the PCM and for the international communist movement has been to draw lessons from the construction of socialism in the 20th century, which show us the essential characteristics of socialism: revolutionary workers' power, socialization of the concentrated means of production, workers' control of production, central and scientific planning of the economy, incessant combat against market relations.

The PCM guides its activity by Marxism-Leninism, it goes to the invaluable source of communist theory that is found in the classisms of Marxism, especially Marx, Engels and Lenin. And we consider the ideological confrontation with the bourgeois currents of thought, and with opportunism in its different forms, to be an ever-present task; the clash with the distortion carried out by social democracy in the region, with the so-called progressive processes, where they even call the management of capitalism that they carry out socialism, is becoming relevant in this direction.

Throughout these three decades, the PCM has been part of the workers’ struggles against privatization and austerity policies, against the various measures that followed the 2008 crisis of overproduction to devalue the workforce, and now against the social democratic management of capitalism – first by Obrador and then by Sheinbaum – with a clear anti-worker direction. We have been with oil workers, electrical industry workers, education workers, health workers, miners, dockers, university workers, logistics and application workers, call center workers, food industry workers, automotive industry workers, communication workers, maquila workers, transport workers, construction workers, agricultural workers, migrants and with workers who are unemployed. We work tirelessly for the resurgence of a class-based labor and union movement, resolute in its antagonism with capital and with the bosses, in every workplace. Along with the struggles for the immediate demands of the workers, we communists connect with the historical objective of the working class. The Communist Party of Mexico is the party of the working class.

We are convinced that the struggle of the working class will be incomplete without the participation of that half of the working class, which is the working woman, who faces the greatest obstacles to the struggle, since she is subject to wage exploitation, oppression and inequality based on sex. We know that without the struggle for women's emancipation, socialism is impossible, and that without socialism, women's emancipation will not be achieved. Therefore, the Communist Party is the party of women's emancipation.

The PCM also fights alongside poor peasants, the ejidatarios, against the dispossession of lands and territories, and for the alliance of the working class with poor peasants. We demand the right of the indigenous peoples to their lands and territories, and to self-determination. We also fight for the organization of the popular strata, and for the structuring of all these struggles against our common enemy, monopoly capitalism. The Communist Party is the party of the anti-capitalist and anti-monopoly social alliance.

The PCM finds that in Mexico the conditions for the construction of socialism-communism have matured. That capitalism is responsible for the dissatisfaction of the needs of the workers and the people; that this system based on the exploitation of wage labour and the private appropriation of socially produced wealth is responsible for the suffering of the Mexican people, for the extreme poverty of millions, for the barbarism, for the missing, for the clandestine graves. We have already experienced all the bourgeois political options in government: the PRI, PAN, MORENA, that is, liberalism, Christian democracy and social democracy, and it is clear that the difference in management does not modify the essence of the capitalist system: they administer the State to protect the profits of the monopolies, to preserve the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The program of socialism-communism is the route to put an end to this unjust and putrid society, to break with the T-MEC and put an end to the shameful anti-immigrant policy. The Communist Party of Mexico is the party of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

The Communist Party of Mexico expresses its unequivocal opposition to the imperialist war, it opposes both sides of the capitalist countries that are already clashing militarily in Ukraine, and that are developing conflicts in the Middle East and in the Asia Pacific, that are terrifyingly increasing military budgets, placing the costs on the workers, and that are leading us to a generalized imperialist war. We express our solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon against the aggressor State of Israel. We reaffirm our solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and our rejection of the blockade and any sanction against the heroic people of Cuba. We support the struggles of the workers and the peoples against imperialism. We resolutely oppose the different manifestations of anti-communism, such as those promoted by the European Union, or by Maduro in Venezuela against the PCV. The PCM will always know how to fulfill its internationalist and solidarity tasks. The Communist Party is the party of proletarian internationalism.

The PCM is aware of its shortcomings and seeks to correct them. It has organic democracy within itself and full unity in its policy, strategy and tactics; it has a militant and determined membership that is willing to sacrifice itself for the revolutionary objectives of the proletariat.

Yes, classist, internationalist, Marxist-Leninist. Like the Phoenix , the Communist Party of Mexico was reborn and acts tirelessly to lead workers to change the course of History, to transform the World.

Proletarians of all countries, unite!

The Political Bureau of the Central Committee

http://www.comunistas-mexicanos.org/ind ... on-del-pcm


The main shortcoming is it's Trotskyist tendency, ignoring Lenin and Stalin's insights on the correlation of forces within capitalism and refusal to understand communism with Chinese characteristics. But these hindrances can be overcome.

[blindpig]

The US Just Opened Its Biggest Ever Embassy in… Mexico, Amid Souring Relations Between the Two Countries
Posted on December 20, 2024 by Nick Corbishley

Twenty years ago, the largest US embassy in the world was in occupied Iraq. Today, it is in Mexico. And the first person to take charge of the new facilities will be a former CIA agent and Green Beret.

The US’ outgoing Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, just “opened” the United States’ new embassy building in Mexico — a full two years behind schedule. Obviously, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic will have hindered progress. Indeed, the new embassy is still not quite open to the public yet — hence the use of inverted commas in the first sentence– and is expected to remain that way until late 2025.

Work began on the project in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term. It was also the year that the revamped NAFTA trade deal, or USMCA, was signed.

Built on the site of a former Colgate-Palmolive factory that required extensive toxic clean-up (nice little metaphor), the new facilities cost $1.2 billion to build, measure 49,000 square meters and, once fully operational, will house 1,400 employees. It will be the US’ largest embassy in the world, according to Salazar, seeing off competition from the likes of Canada (#5), Afghanistan (#4), Pakistan (#3), Lebanon (#2) and Iraq (#1), which has been significantly downsized from an initial staff of 16,000 to just 349 today.

Note that two of those countries have been militarily occupied by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan, which was eventually abandoned by US forces in 2021). Lebanon is currently under attack by Israel for the umpteenth time while Pakistan has a been key strategic ally of Washington’s for decades, especially from the time the US began supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). And then there’s Canada, whose government is probably smarting from the fact that Mexico has once again leapfrogged its way to the top.

The new US embassy campus in Mexico provides a “secure, modern, and environmentally sustainable platform” for US conniving diplomacy, according to Davis Brody Bond (h/t upstarter), one of the architectural firms chosen to design the project:

The Embassy is sunken several stories into the ground, and designed around a large covered open air courtyard, responding to the scale of the neighborhood and climate of the region. Several additional smaller courtyards permeate the dense office block, providing sunlight, air, and natural scenery deep within embassy operations. The exterior façade is protected by a large, bronze brise-soleil that minimizes heat gain without diminishing views out of Mexico City.

The new facility incorporates rigorous sustainability and energy-saving goals, aiming to reduce environmental impact, optimize building performance, and enhance the self-sufficiency of the campus…



It is certainly a relief to know that the US’ Mexico-based spooks and spies will soon be doing their plotting in a facility that is both sustainable and energy-efficient. During the ceremony to mark the embassy’s near-inauguration, Salazar described the scale and ambition of the new facility as testament to “the singular relationship between the two nations, not only as the main trading partners, but as a family (NC: presumably in the mafia sense of the word). It also reflects the importance of our bilateral integration to make North America more prosperous and competitive.”

That word “integration” is, I believe, key. There is no way that Washington would undertake such a grandiose project if it didn’t have larger plans for Mexico, and the broader Latin American region. My guess is that those plans will include further intensifying the integration of the three NAFTA 2.0 members, before possibly extending the USMCA trade deal beyond the immediate confines of North America. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t first destroy it.

Just a couple of days ago, President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated the position of her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), that the USMCA should not be limited to the three current member countries, but should be extended further south to other parts of Latin America. According to Sheinbaum, this expansion would transform the continent into an “economic power”, surpassing even other regions of the world.

Strained Relations

However, diplomatic relations between the US and Mexico are at a low point, even as their bilateral trade reaches record levels. Roughly three months ago, Mexico’s then-outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), took the largely symbolic step of putting his government’s relations with the US and Canadian embassies on ice after their ambassadors publicly criticised his proposed judicial reforms, which AMLO argued are a purely domestic affair. In the end, the concerted efforts to derail the reforms fizzled to nothing.

There have also been clashes over Mexico’s security agenda. When Ken Salazar lambasted AMLO’s security policies just days after the president left office, AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by criticising Salazar’s inconsistent messaging on security matters. Indeed, one of Sheinbaum’s first acts in government was to put a leash on Salazar by insisting that all contact between the ambassador and the Mexican government must go through Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.

“A series of, let’s say, general guidelines have been established because the ambassador often calls one government minister after another. So, now have we told him: ‘If you want to discuss issues pertaining to the Ministry of Energy because US businessmen are interested in investing [in Mexico] and they want to know the minister’s availability, [you must go] through the Foreign Ministry.”

If relations between the two countries are strained today, they appear set to sour a whole lot more in the months to come. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has threatened to close the US-Mexican border, to carry out mass deportations, punish trade with tariffs on Mexican goods of 25% and make cooperation between the two countries conditional on the containment of drug trafficking and the migration crisis.

At the same time, members of the Trump administration have been debating to what extent the US should “invade” Mexico. This is nothing out of the ordinary these days. Throughout the election campaign, droves of Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits, including arch neo-con and regime change-specialist Lindsay Graham, the governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, media pundit Tucker Carlson and former attorney general, Bill Barr, called for direct, overt US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels in order to stem the flow of fentanyl.

Worse still, the Sheinbaum government will soon have to deal with Donald Trump’s picks for US Secretary of State, Marc Rubio, a hardcore neo-con with dripping disdain for progressive governments in Latin America, and US ambassador to Mexico, retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson, a former CIA officer and ex-army special forces officer whose missions included combat in El Salvador’s 12-year civil war (1980-92).

Johnson was also the senior representative for the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA at US Southern Command — in other words, a man who presumably knows a thing or two about regime change operations. As Oaxaca-based US journalist Kurt Hackbarth said on his (excellent) weekly podcast, Soberania, while Salazar is a “metiche” (meddlesome), Johnson is a hired thug.

In the clip below, Hackbarth reads out a brief and rather graphic account (from Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop) of what US special forces got up to in Central America during the 1980s: (Video at link.)

Hackbarth even suggests that Mexico should reject Johnson’s appointment as ambassador — something, he said, the Sheinbaum government is well within its rights to do, but probably won’t:

This is very clearly an ambassador chosen to implement and cover for US covert operations in Mexico, which Trump has promised. It’s unlikely that the US would do something as stupid as to march across the border like they did against Pancho Villa in the punitive expeditions 100 years ago. But to step up covert operations based on the model they used of kidnapping (the Sinaloa cartel capo) Mayo Zambada, absolutely. And remember, the United States’ strategy in Syria, very sadly, has worked. So, I think they are all the more revved up to try these manoeuvres elsewhere.

US Ambassador: A Crucial Role in Mexico

For Mexico, the role of US ambassador is even more important than it is for most other countries — partly due to the sheer number of times it has been invaded by its northern neighbour over the past 200 or so years (at least 10, according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs).

Mexico City even hosts a National Museum of Interventions, which I visited a couple of months ago. Housed in the former Monastery of San Diego Churubusco, which was used as a makeshift fort during the US army’s invasion of Mexico City in 1847, the museum offers a fascinating trip down a dark collective memory lane. Among the exhibits are photos of US soldiers storming into the city of Veracruz in 1914 as well as maps of the Mexico that existed before the US invaded and seized possession of over half its territory between 1846-8.


The Museum of Interventions, in the Mexico City barrio of Coyoacán

The US ambassador is also a vital figurehead in Mexico due to the scale of influence the US wields within Mexico’s political, business and military circles. For example, during June 2022, Salazar visited Mexico’s National Palace 18 times in two weeks, to chaperone AMLO in meetings with US businessmen, sparking caustic rumours that Salazar had his own office in the building.

Johnson’s appointment coincides with an intensification of hostilities between rival gangs in Sinaloa following the DEA’s arrest/kidnapping of cartel kingpin as well as calls from Republican politicians in the US and members of Mexico’s National Action Party to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as “narco-terroristas”. Marco Rubio, for one, has fully embraced Trump’s proposal to label Mexico’s cartels as terrorist groups to justify US military incursions into Mexico.

These hyped-up concerns about narco-terrorism generally are merely intended as pretexts to justify occupation, regime change or lawfare. In an article for the news website Contralinea, Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence School for National Security of Mexico’s Centre for National Intelligence (CNI), describes the ideology of the “war” on drugs and organized crime in the US as an “immense fabrication”:

That does not mean that the problems linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited drugs and the criminal organizations that have specialized in it, and everything that this entails, do not exist. They exist and are very acute, but both phenomena were ideologized for the purposes of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and were imposed through exportable reactive and punitive public policies in matters of intelligence and security, causing social, political-institutional, cultural and economic devastation. By assuming a military dimension, (the War on Drugs) laid the foundations for armed intervention in the Latin American region and converted the territories, as well as national sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic action.

Mexican journalist, Guadalupe Correa, who has written extensively on organized crime, migration and the US-Mexico borderlands, warns that Trump’s recent rhetoric and appointment of Johnson and Rubio will probably signal the end of AMLO’s “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) approach to the drugs war, and the adoption of a more belligerent approach toward Mexico’s drug cartels.

This has been tried before, of course — not just in Mexico but also in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, to name a few countries — and it has invariably led to a sharp rise in violence, bloodshed and political instability while generally failing to stem the flow of drugs. In the case of Afghanistan, the production and exports of opium exploded during the US occupation. Plan Colombia also oversaw a sharp rise in cocaine exports. During the rare periods when supply does fall, the price goes up, propelling the cartels’ profit margins even higher. All the while, the southward flow of US-made weapons — the so-called “iron river” that accounts for roughly 70% of homicides in Mexico — continues unabated.

According to Correa, the pressure on Sheinbaum’s government to intensify its crackdown on the cartels will be unbearable:

In Mexico, given the delicate situation in some regions, there are some who even support such a strategy, as well as the concomitant loss of sovereignty, in a process that seems already well underway. The hugs have ended and the gunshots have returned… President Claudia Sheinbaum and her security team are obliged to deliver results in the face of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs, scupper the USMCA and send troops into Mexican territory. A heavy-handed strategy is expected, perhaps in a similar sense—with all proportion kept—to the one that operated in El Salvador. This strategy augurs a period of extreme violence in Mexico that will further exacerbate the current difficult situation.

While AMLO may have achieved quite a lot during his sexenio (six-year term), especially on the economic front (more than tripling the minimum wage while more or less keeping a lid on inflation, bringing unemployment to its lowest level in decades, getting many corporations to finally settle their tax bills, and levelling up Mexico by significantly increasing investments in the poorer regions of the south), he has failed in other areas — most notably, security.

More people died during AMLO’s sexenio (199,619) than any other this century — though, to be fair, the death count has risen sharply during each sexenio since Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2007, at US insistence. As the malign influence of the cartels has grown, so too has the number of forced displacements. According to Correa, migrant shelters in Mexico were primarily catering to foreigners a few years ago. Today, their main occupants are Mexicans displaced by violence and organized crime.

Diverging Interests

Of course, deep down the US government’s real motivations in the War on Drugs have little, if anything, to do with stopping the drugs trade. Most places the US army and the CIA go, the drugs trade tends to flourish (e.g. Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam…). Indeed, the US shares a large chunk of the responsibility for the thriving global drugs trade by supporting drug lords and cartel bosses around the world, by refusing to address the root causes of drug addiction within its own borders, as AMLO repeatedly argued, and failing to properly crack down on drug money laundered through Western banks.

As the US prepares to open its biggest embassy in Mexico City, the US and Mexico face a clash of goals and interests. The incoming Trump administration wants to strike back against Mexico’s so-called “invasion” — or as some Mexicans call it, “reconquest” — of the US through mass migration. It also seeks to stifle Mexico’s growing trade and diplomatic relations with the US’ peer competitor, China. As we recently reported, Washington’s increasingly aggressive tone regarding Mexico-China relations has elicited rare criticism in the Mexican business press:

The online financial newspaper Expansión.mx featured a fiery op-ed from Jonathan Torres, a former editorial director for Forbes Media LatAm, titled “US to Mexico: You’re Against China or Against Me”:

Since 2022, US officials Janet Yellen (Treasury Secretary), Jake Sullivan (National Security Advisor) and Katherine Tai (Trade Representative) have repeatedly reiterated that the China threat is one of the most delicate risks in their national security strategy, so much so that they have deployed a range of measures to prevent Chinese investments from entering their territory, including through their trading partners. Reading between the lines, the message is blunt: “you are with me in my strategy against China or, otherwise, you will suffer consequences in terms of trade, investment, etc.”

The United States, given these circumstances, is not necessarily looking at the nearshoring phenomenon in the same way as the rest of the world… For the Biden administration, global supply chains are strategic but only under certain conditions; that is, as long as they do not threaten US national security. In other words, what the US is really interested is “security shoring,” not nearshoring.

The irony is stark: the superpower famed for its promotion of the (NC: so called) free market is attempting to impose its own legislation on trading with China on third countries. In Mexico, for example, the Chinese automotive industry is rapidly accumulating market share and therefore finds itself in the crosshairs of the US government.

There is no dispute, says Torres: “We are facing an illegal act.”

This is just one area in which relations between the US and Mexico could further sour. Other potential flashpoints include Mexico’s ban on GM corn (which the trade dispute panel it still to rule on), its proposed mining reforms, and its close ties with countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, China and Russia. Then there’s the possibility of the Trump administration delivering on its threats to deport millions of immigrants, impose ratcheting tariffs on Mexican goods, or even launch covert military attacks against Mexican cartels.

Mexico’s government has so far shown willingness to meet the US halfway on some issues. It has imposed tariffs on hundreds of Chinese goods, including some that pose a threat to Mexico’s domestic industries. Just today, the Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard announced a 15% tariff on textiles and 35% on finished garments entering the country. However, there are limits to how far it is willing to go to appease the US’ growing demands, even as its trade ties with the US continue to deepen.

One word that Sheinbaum, like AMLO, keeps using is “sovereignty”. Since taking office at the beginning of October, she has repeatedly stated that Mexico “must be respected” — in response not only to the incoming Trump administration’s tariff threats but also the Trudeau government’s recent attempts to throw Mexico under the bus, which appear to have backfired horribly. Public support for Sheinbaum is strengthening (76%) while even Trudeau’s vice president and economy minister, Chrystia Freeland, has abandoned ship.

Sheinbaum also likes to say that “Mexico is a free, sovereign, independent nation.” It’s a nice slogan. The problem for Sheinbaum, as well as Mexico as a whole, is that the US government has scant regard for other nations’ freedom, sovereignty and independence.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... exico.html

[blindpig]

Claudia Sheinbaum debunks NY Times report on fentanyl production

The report comes just days after president-elect Donald Trump said he would impose a 25% tariff on Mexican products if the country did not stop fentanyl from entering the US from Mexico.

January 03, 2025 by Pablo Meriguet


Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum speaking in the January 2 press conference. Photo: Presidencia MX

On December 29, the New York Times published a story titled “This Is What Makes Us Rich’: Inside a Sinaloa Cartel Fentanyl Lab” which recounts how two NYT reporters witnessed the alleged handmade manufacture of fentanyl in a kitchen in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state.

“We wore gas masks and hazmat suits, but the cook had on only a surgical mask. He and his partner had rushed here to fulfill an order for 10 kilograms of fentanyl. While one sniff of the toxic chemicals could kill us, they explained, they had built up a tolerance to the lethal drug,” states the report.

In the president’s daily morning press conference on January 2, several Mexican authorities, including the President, debunked some of the assertions in the report. Alejandro Svarch Pérez, medical doctor and the director of IMSS- Welfare, explained that it is impossible to manufacture fentanyl in a regular kitchen, as the report shows, without dying or having one’s health seriously affected: “This means that, when a person is exposed to a potent synthetic opioid by inhalation or mucosal contact, even in an amount as small as 4 or 5 small grains of salt, it can produce a degree of toxicity that compromises the life of the operator.”

In addition, Svarch clarified that, despite what one of the drug manufacturers claims in the report, “There is also no scientifically described physiological phenomenon known as ‘lethal tolerance to toxicity.’ This explains why a laboratory where exposure conditions can be controlled, where there is specialized equipment to perform the chemical synthesis and with professional ventilation systems is inexorably needed; not a domestic kitchen, as the report shows. It is not possible to make fentanyl as referred to in the note.”

For her part, Juana Peñaloza Ibarra, a precursor chemical analyst at the Navy Department, analyzed each of the images and videos published by The New York Times to conclude that the report does not show a series of chemical precursors essential for the manufacture of fentanyl, nor the necessary machinery, much less the minimum personal protective equipment, without which it is impossible to avoid intoxication from toxic gases during the manufacturing of the drug. “Therefore, it is concluded that there are insufficient elements to demonstrate that the information presented in the article of The New York Times documents a laboratory for the synthesis of fentanyl hydrochloride,” concludes Peñaloza.

Sheinbaum responds
Regarding The New York Times report, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum stated that the information provided in the article “does not contain credible information.” “Of course, we mainly combat the commercialization of these drugs, particularly fentanyl, and we are going to collaborate for humanitarian reasons always, to prevent possible trafficking of fentanyl to the United States from Mexico and the sale in our own country, which is combated in various ways. Next week we are already presenting the new campaign to prevent the consumption of drugs, particularly fentanyl, and from the perspective of public security and the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic. But here we are defending the right to information and whether or not it is feasible for a non-Mexican or non-Mexican media to publish notes that are not credible from a scientific perspective, as has been mentioned here.”

About the collaboration with US authorities in the fight against drug trafficking, Sheinbaum said, “We are going to collaborate with the United States, as we are collaborating now, for humanitarian reasons. There are more than 100,000 or close to 100,000 young people or people who die from fentanyl overdoses in the United States, something that does not happen in Mexico…Now, in Mexico, we do not accept interference, and we collaborate, but we do not subordinate ourselves, and that is how it will be.”

Finally, Sheinbaum launched several questions that challenge the burden of blame that several US media and politicians want to place solely on Mexico: “Do you believe that fentanyl is not manufactured in the United States? … Where are the drug cartels in the United States that distribute fentanyl in US cities? Where does the money from the sale of that fentanyl go in the United States?”

Following Sheinbaum’s press conference, The New York Times released a statement in response to “continued criticism” of their report affirming that it “stands behind every aspect of our reporting on fentanyl production and testing in Mexico.” In direct response to Mexico’s allegations that fentanyl could not be produced in the conditions depicted in the report, the NYT statement said, “As hazardous as it is, the synthesis of illegal fentanyl in Mexico under makeshift conditions like those seen by The Times is well established.”

Trump’s new war on drugs
The timing of the NYT report is worth noting as it comes just weeks before Donald Trump is set to be sworn in as president of the United States. Trump in his campaign and in the period since his victory, has sworn that halting fentanyl trafficking from Mexico is his top priority.

On November 25, 2024, Trump threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all products coming from Mexico and Canada to the United States “until Drugs, in particular, Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

However, threats against Mexico to stop fentanyl trafficking into the United States have gone beyond tariffs, with both Trump and incoming “border czar” Tom Homan mentioning on multiple occasions that they are considering classifying drug cartels as terrorist organizations and using the US military to “wage war” on them.

Writer and analyst José Luis Granados Ceja commented on December 22 that, “We may ultimately look back at the designation of organized crime groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations as a prelude to unilateral military action inside Mexico by the US. US agencies have already crossed this line under Biden, it solves nothing and generates more violence.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/03/ ... roduction/

[blindpig]

Is Washington Setting Its Sights on Mexico’s Former President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador?
Posted on February 11, 2025 by Nick Corbishley

“There is a legal and judicial offensive under way in Washington to accuse the former president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of having made pacts with drug traffickers.”

Since coming to office on October 1, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has gained a reputation both inside and outside Mexico for being cool, calm and collected, especially in her responses to Donald J Trump’s constant threats of tariffs, military invasions and the like. However, in her daily press conference on Monday morning, her voice wavered just a little when she was asked about the “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) security policy of her presidential predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO).

Sheinbaum responded by saying that no one should harbour any doubts that her government will stand by AMLO as well as his security policies.

“We are always going to defend President López Obrador, let no one have the slightest doubt. He was a great president and we are part of the same movement.” Sheinbaum said. “Of course, this is what the opposition wants: to divide us. That is not going to happen.”

Sheinbaum also said her government will further deepen the public strategy implemented by AMLO, which is based on four main pillars: attacking the causes of violence (poverty, lack of job or educational opportunities for teenagers and young adults, paucity of social and sports activities for youngsters…), strengthening the National Guard, intelligence and investigation, and coordination with (but not subordination to) Washington.

That said, Sheinbaum’s government has, under strong prodding from the US, waged a months-long campaign against drug cartels in Sinaloa after the US’ ambushing and kidnapping of veteran drug kingpin Ismael Zambada García, aka “el Mayo”, in July escalated tensions between rival gangs.

“There is the idea that ‘hugs, not bullets’ essentially gave free rein to organised crime, which is absolutely false,” Sheinbaum said.

What AMLO apparently wanted to do was distance himself from the disastrous war on the drug cartels initiated by former president (and AMLO’s bitter political rival) Felipe Calderón, as well as search for alternative means of pacifying the country. His “hugs not bullets” strategy was also about reclaiming a certain degree of national autonomy over Mexico’s public security and defence policies. The United States has always led the way on security matters, says the Mexican journalist Jesús Escobar Tobar:

The presidents in Mexico have precious little room for manoeuvre. The question is: what do they do with that?

AMLO, realising that the war was in the general interest of the elites and against the interest of lower classes, allowing for the constant abuse and maltreatment of those who have the least, and that the US was never going to fulfil its side of the bargain (i.e. by tackling the underlying causes of the insatiable demand for narcotics in the US as well as the constant flow of US weapons into Mexico), decided to go after the causes of Mexico’s drug war.

He decided to invest in the youth, to find ways to ensure that they stay in school (instead of becoming cannon fodder for the cartels).

Looking at Supply and Demand

Sheinbaum also stressed that the problem of drug trafficking should not be viewed purely through a supply-side lens. This is what many US governments have done, with the Trump administration threatening to take it to a whole new level. That way, all of the blame for the US’ opioid crisis can be shifted overseas, diverting attention away from the role played by US pharmaceutical companies such as the Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma in starting and fuelling the opioid epidemic.

Instead, Sheinbaum says, the role of demand must also be taken into account:

“Drug trafficking has to do with demand. There are those who consume and there are those who supply. That is why the United States must do its part to address drug consumption and distribution in its own territory.”

The president’s comments came just hours after US President Donald J Trump officially renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” on Sunday, declaring February 9 as “Gulf of America Day”, and just days after revelations that US aircraft, military and naval vessels were “circling” the Mexican coasts and skies, as well as the border between the two countries.

Buried within the official statement on US tariffs on Mexico’s goods was the following sentence: “the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico.”

To back up that claim, the White House press office cited a link to an Associated Press article on the sentencing of Mexico’s ex-public security chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, to 38-plus years in US for taking cartel bribes. As the AP piece notes, Garcia Luna was once heralded as the architect of Mexico’s war on drug cartels but was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel that he was supposedly combating.

Of course, it takes some serious, industrial-strength chutzpah to criticise another national government for its ties with drug cartels when for the past 80 years or so the US’ Central Intelligence Agency has wielded more influence over the international drugs trade than any other institution on the planet.

Since the end of the Second World War, the CIA has, among countless other things, used the sales of opium grown in Burma to finance its covert war against Mao’s communist revolution in China; it has helped introduce wave after wave of illicit substances into the US, with hugely destructive consequences for the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, from Air America’s heroin in the 1960s and 70s to Pablo Escobar’s cocaine in the 1980s and 90s, which ultimately sparked the crack epidemic.

The agency has also used the proceeds of its drug trafficking and gun running activities to help fund right-wing paramilitary groups throughout Latin America, again with devastating consequences. Barry Seal, a CIA-affiliated pilot, transported cocaine to the US in CIA planes to help finance counterinsurgency operations in Nicaragua and other parts of Central America. Pablo Escobar’s son openly admits that his father worked for the CIA.

In Mexico, the drug cartels flourished and grew under the protection of the Federal Security Directorate, which in turn was answerable to the CIA. In fact, according to the former DEA agent Hector Berrellez, the CIA filmed the torture of the DEA agent Enrique Kiki Camarena at the hands of the Guadalajara cartel. Camarena had been part of Operation Godfather, which sought to uncover the links between Mexican drug money and Nicaragua, and the CIA wanted to know just how much the investigation had uncovered.

Plain, Old Geopolitics

“This is not about good guys and bad guys,” says Ecobar Tovar. “This is about plain old geopolitics.”

A recent Spectator piece by Joshua Treviño, a former Bush Jr speechwriter and a one-time consultant at notorious Virginia-based spook firm Booz Allen Hamilton, lays this out in black and white:

It is necessary to understand that the Mexican state is now essentially a single-party, left-populist regime, aligned ideologically and operationally with comparable regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. Like those regimes, it regards its nation’s trafficking cartels as vehicles for profit and control and also agents of national policy abroad — especially but not only in the United States.

Treviño does not provide any evidence to back up this claim while resorting to innuendo to argue that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “in addition to being an inveterate anti-American in his demagogic politics, is widely understood to have been in the pay of the Sinaloa Cartel for most of the past twenty years.”

But Treviño’s arguments will presumably find receptive ears in the Trump administration. In the recent past, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) an unreliable partner of the United States, accusing him of “handing over parts of the territory to drug cartels, of praising dictators, like those in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.” Rubio has even called for an investigation into the hiring of Cuban doctors with money from the Mexican government.

On repeated occasions in recent weeks Trump admin officials, including Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, have refused to rule out invading Mexico to take on the country’s drug cartels.

This is part of a process that began decades ago but which reached a new level of intensity last February when the US Drug Enforcement Agency unearthed 18-year old allegations against AMLO that his 2006 electoral campaign had been part-financed by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Those allegations were aired by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the InSight Crime portal and ProPublica in what was clearly a coordinated hit job timed to coincide with Mexico’s general elections.

Most of Mexico’s corporate press happily lapped up and amplified the allegations against AMLO while other US and European media joined the scrum over the following weeks. As we noted at the time, the DEA had already lost most of its credibility in Mexico and was clearly not a disinterested party given that the AMLO government had essentially clipped its wings in Mexico.

Since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in the early 1970s, the agency had been a constant presence in Mexico. However, in 2020 the AMLO government passed a national security reform aimed at reaffirming Mexico’s national sovereignty in matters of security vis-à-vis the United States. In the bill, the Senate of the Republic established provisions and added articles to the chapter on International Cooperation that substantially limit the actions of foreign agencies on Mexican soil.

For the first time in roughly half a century, the DEA agents had less freedom of action in neighbouring Mexico. But that didn’t stop them from running a covert, 18-month incursion into Mexican territory, in direct contravention of the new security law. Just a year later, as Mexico was gearing up for general elections, the agency unearthed decades-old allegations against AMLO in the apparent hope of tipping the electoral scales in favour of a more malleable political party.

Given the sorry state of political opposition in Mexico, that was never going to happen.

That is not to say that AMLO himself or his government do not have links with one or more of Mexico’s drug cartels. As the well respected journalist Denise Maerker recently wrote in Milenio, criminal groups have supplanted entire governments in parts of Mexico:

No Mexican needs to hear it from anyone else, it is obvious and public: there are entire regions in which a criminal group controls and governs the territory.

However, the articles published during the election campaign did not present conclusive proof showing AMLO’s complicity; instead, what they appeared to prove is that the DEA, locked in a power struggle with Mexico’s AMLO government, is willing to use US and European media outlets to pursue its own political or institutional interests, just as USAID has used billions of dollars of funds to pollute the media landscape across the globe.

“DEA agents are trying to accomplish in one news cycle what they could not prove before a prosecutor or their superiors,” wrote Carlos A. Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and author of the book, Cien Años de Espias y Drogas: La Historia de los Agentes Anti-Narcóticos de los Estados Unidos en Mexico (100 Years of Spies and Drugs: The History of US Anti-Narcotic Agents in Mexico).

Here is AMLO himself explaining his version of events to the Russian journalist Inna Afinogenova (English subtitles included):

Mexico President AMLO calmly speaks on how the US government meddles in Mexican politics via USAID and how even Pulitzer-prize winning journalists become smear merchants for the oligarchy

"The New York Times remains a rag for special interest groups" pic.twitter.com/oSEWZ4xAh6

— COMBATE | (@upholdreality) February 21, 2024

If the airing of the DEA’s allegations were meant to influence Mexico’s general elections, they had the opposite of the intended effect. Weeks later, AMLO’s approval numbers had increased to 73%, their highest level since 2019, according to an opinion poll carried out for Reforma. On July 4, AMLO’s handpicked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, wiped the floor in the general elections, garnering close to 60% of the votes and taking de facto control of both legislative houses in what El País described as the highest vote count of any candidate in recent history.

As we noted at the time, Sheinbaum’s crushing victory would not have been possible without López Obrador’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity.

As the US pollster Gallup reported just days before the election, López Obrador (aka AMLO) is ending his six-year term with record high approval ratings of 80%, making him one of the world’s most popular national leaders. It puts to shame his presidential counterparts in North America. After less than four years in office, Joe Biden is the least popular US president in 75 years, according to Newsweek, while Trudeau’s approval ratings consistently hover at or below 40%.

In 2023, confidence in the national government was twice as high in Mexico as it was in the U.S. (30%). What’s more, public approval of, and confidence in, the government actually grew over time, as opposed to steadily or rapidly declining.

“Building a Case”

In recent months rumours have also been circulating in certain corners of social media that the US government will soon set its sights on Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, for his alleged ties to Mexico’s drug cartels. Just under a month ago, the journalist Salvador García Soto published an article in El Universal titled “They Are Building a Case Against AMLO in Washington”:

Behind the message of former President Ernesto Zedillo, where he recommended to President Claudia Sheinbaum to distance herself from her predecessor and not allow “a caudillo hidden in the office attached to the Presidency” to continue deciding the fate of the country, there is a legal and judicial offensive that is taking shape in Washington to accuse the former president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of having made pacts with drug traffickers, and seeking that the Tabasco native appear before the US authorities.

Headed by the imminent Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, and based on the statements that have already been made to the Department of Justice, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the two sons of Chapo Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother Joaquín Guzmán López, the legal offensive against the former Mexican president would also have the collaboration of Mexican politicians who are collaborating with Rubio’s office, including a former PAN governor, a former foreign minister of the Republic and a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, who are bringing “information and witnesses” to the U.S. authorities.

Sources close to the next secretary of state confirm that work is being done to build a case against López Obrador, whom Marco Rubio accused several times and publicly of having “agreements with Mexican drug cartels” and of ceding authority and territory to criminal drug trafficking organizations. “Elements are being gathered, based on the statements of Mexican drug lords held by the Department of Justice and we are seeking to integrate a solid case that documents the illegal agreements that empowered the Mexican cartels that produce and export lethal drugs such as fentanyl that are killing U.S. citizens,” said one of the sources consulted.

Then we recently had a Fox News reporter urging viewers to read Anabel Hernández’s latest books and articles. As readers may recall, Hernández was one of the reporters who covered the DEA’s accusations against AMLO in February last year. In her article for Deutsche Welle, she opted for a much clearer cut title (“The Sinaloa Cartel Financed AMLO’s 2006 Campaign”) than Tim Golden’s piece in ProPublica. As the reporter notes, her latest book, La Historia Secreta, is allegedly an exposé of Mexico’s governing party Morena’s financial ties to the Sinaloa cartel.

Fuertes declaraciones
La única salida que tiene la PresirvientA es ir a ponerse de acuerdo con el Licenciado Trump y Marco Rubio para entregar a López Obrador y a otros miembros de Morena por lazos con el Narco
¿Qué opinan? pic.twitter.com/lWsuGEVqEi

— FERMOR (@FERMOR_23) February 9, 2025


The closing words from the lady interviewer offers a hint of how the Trump administration may be viewing this situation: “a narco state, the puppet of a communist nation,” presumably in reference to China.

As the US ratchets up its pressure on Sheinbaum, the temptation to offer scalps from within her own Morena party could become unbearable. As Maerker notes, it will no longer be enough to arrest criminals with colourful nicknames: “What is necessary, and hence the difficulty, is that now acquaintances, perhaps even friends, with whom she have crossed paths in meetings and policy circles will have to be arrested.”

The first on the list will probably be Rubén Rocha Moya, the current governor of Sinaloa, who is already under investigation in Mexico for his ties to the Sinaloan cartel. According to La Politica Online, “even in circles close to President Claudia Sheinbaum it is said that a change in Sinaloa would be seen as an action of great relevance by the Trump administration within the month of negotiations on trade tariffs.”

Perhaps cleaning house could be of benefit to both nations, but it could also begin to shake the very foundations upon which the Morena party has been built, especially if the Trump administration is, as the article by Garcia Sota suggests, determined to get its hand on AMLO himself.

In recent months, Garcia Luna has written a letter accusing AMLO of collaborating with the Sinaloa cartel in a desperate attempt to reduce his sentence. As Mike Vigil, a former head of International Operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), pointed out in an interview last year, in the trials of both Chapo Guzman and Garcia Luna, many members of the Sinaloa cartel made statements about all the people who were on the take, including former President Enrique Peña Nieto, but they never once mentioned AMLO.

Over the past decade or so, the US may have succeeded in getting the former presidents of Honduras and Guatemala, Juan Orlando Hernández and Alfonso Portillo respectively, extradited on drug charges, but these were hugely unpopular political figures of relatively small central American nations.

AMLO, by contrast, is arguably Mexico’s most popular president since Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40). Given Sheinbaum and Moreno’s loyalty to AMLO, any attempt by the US to have him extradited is likely to result in a similar outcome to what happened a few months ago in Honduras when rumours began circulating of a US-backed coup against sitting President Xiomara Castro: the scrapping of the country’s decades-old extradition treaty with the US.

That would represent a significant blow to US-Mexico relations, as well as the ability of the US to wage its war on drugs across its southern border. Would US forces kidnap AMLO instead, like they did with el Mayo? It’s possible. This Trump administration seems to believe it can do anything it wants.

Ultimately, this is not just about building a criminal case against AMLO; it is about building a case for yet more war in Mexico — ideally, a war in which Mexicans will do most, if not all, of the fighting, killing and dying while US arms manufacturers provide the weapons for both sides. The last time Mexico ramped up its fight against the drug cartels, the murder rate in the country tripled in the space of just three years.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02 ... rador.html

******

President Sheinbaum: No One Should Dare Violate Mexico’s Sovereignty
February 10, 2025


Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum at her morning press conference. Photo: Mexican Presidential Office.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during an official tour that her government is attentive to the situation of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States, in the context of the mass deportations announced by US President Donald Trump. In this regard, Sheinbaum also stated that no one should dare violate the sovereignty of Mexico.

“Mexico is strong because we have history and culture that comes from the indigenous peoples and the heroes of our country, who created this great nation to which we belong,” said the president during an event in the state of Michoacán in south-east Mexico.

“Here we are united, no one should dare violate our sovereignty, because Mexico is a free, sovereign and independent country. We Mexicans are always here to defend our country,” she stressed.

After US President Donald Trump declared a “national emergency” on the border with Mexico and sent military personnel there to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants, the Mexican president said that her government is strengthening consulates in the United States to provide legal support.

She called the Mexican migrants “heroes and heroines of our country,” and pointed out that Mexico received $65 billion in remittances in 2024, although “that represents only 20% of the income of our connationals in the US.”



“Mexican migrants pay taxes and bolster the US economy. The US would not be what it is without the Mexicans who work on the other side of the border,” she said.

The Mexican head of state also highlighted that her government has set up 10 centers to assist Mexican nationals deported by the Trump administration, and all Mexicans in the US are welcome to return to their own country.

President Sheinbaum condemned foreign interference and reaffirmed the defense of sovereignty, amid the recent and upcoming negotiations with Washington on security, migration, and trade.

“Cooperation, yes; subordination, no. Collaboration, yes; submission, no. No interference, no interventionism, no racism, no classism,” proclaimed the president in her speech commemorating the anniversary of the Mexican Constitution of 1917.

https://orinocotribune.com/president-sh ... vereignty/

[blindpig]

This Time It’s Official: Mexico Is Going to the BRICS Summit
Posted on July 4, 2025 by Nick Corbishley

It’s not just Mexico’s government that is calling for economic diversification away from the US; so, too, is its biggest business lobby.

It was not my plan to write about Mexico again — this is my third consecutive Mexico-themed article in just the past week. I even started a post yesterday on the UK’s burgeoning local government debt crisis, which I have had to shelve for another day. For the fact of the matter is that when the US’ largest trade partner and most dependent economy, Mexico, decides to finally accept an invite to the BRICS summit, it’s probably worth paying attention.

For years rumours have abounded, sometimes even from credible sources, that Mexico was on the brink of joining the BRICS. As readers may recall, Mexico’s flag was even among the 14 featured on the purely symbolic BRICS banknote Vladymir Putin flashed for the cameras at the 16th BRICS summit in Kazan last year (it’s the one in the middle of the far-right column). As we noted at the time, the stunt probably amounted to little more than expert trolling from Putin.



Russian Embassy spokesman Andrei Zemskiy recently acknowledged that the USMCA makes it much more difficult for Mexico to join the BRICS — a goal that Russia is openly pursuing. According to the renowned Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife, Mexico’s membership of the BRICS would be a net-positive for the country, but the US will never let it happen.

North America First (Until Now)

In the lead-up to the 15th meeting of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August 2023, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor claimed that Mexico was among more than a dozen countries that had applied to join the alliance.



But each time the rumours reached fever pitch, the Mexican government batted them down. Here’s what former President Andres Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) had to say in response to Pandor’s claims (translation by yours truly):

“Our proposal is to strengthen the treaty with the United States and Canada, consolidate ourselves as a region, strengthen us, help each other, complement each other, share investment, technology, labour forces, the skills of the workers of the three countries, improve wages, and consolidate North America.”

On another occasion, AMLO conceded that Mexico’s geographic reality left it little choice but to pursue further economic integration with the US and Canada:

We cannot shut ourselves off, we cannot break up, we cannot isolate ourselves. It is a fact that we have 3,800 kilometres of border, for reasons of geopolitics (presumably in reference to the US’ invasion, occupation and appropriation of more than half of Mexico’s territory in the mid-19th century). With all due respect, we are not a European country, nor are we Brazil. We have this neighbourhood and, furthermore, if we agree on things, as we have done, we can help each other out… Our economic integration is already well advanced.

It initially seemed that AMLO’s presidential successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, would follow the same course. But since Donald J Trump’s return to the White House, Mexico’s already strained relations with the US have soured to the point of curdling.

How can one possibly talk about consolidating North America as an integrated economic bloc when the US is constantly threatening to impose tariffs on both of its North American trade partners, in direct violation of the USMCA trade agreement, while openly talking about invading Mexico and turning Canada into the 51st state?

Over the past week, Washington has declared Mexico a foreign “adversary” together with the likes of Iran, Russia and China. It has also imposed potentially ruinous sanctions against two Mexican banks and a brokerage house for allegedly laundering money for drug cartels without presenting any clear evidence. As is becoming increasingly clear, the move was essentially a shakedown by the Trump admin aimed at getting greater control over Mexico’s banking system as well as its relationship with China.

Until recently, the accepted wisdom in Mexico was that Mexico’s economy is simply too integrated with the US and Canada’s and too dependent on the US for it to be able to join the BRICS. Economically speaking, it seemed to make little sense: Mexico shares with the US the world’s largest trade partnership as well as a significant trade surplus whereas with China it has a significant — and growing — deficit.

Trump 2.0: The Great Global Unifier

But as we previously noted, if anyone is able to change this dynamic, it is Trump 2.0, the great global unifier:

…either through its constant bullying or its wilful destruction of the USMCA, a trade deal that Trump himself brokered and which Trump himself called the “best trade deal ever” just five years ago. Simply by calling Mexico an adversary and comparing the country with the likes of Russia, China and Iran, Trump’s attorney general has helped further alienate the US’ most important trade partner while further arousing anti-US sentiment among the Mexican public.

Lo behold, one week later President Sheinbaum just announced that her government will be participating as an observer in the 17th annual meeting of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro on July 6-7. Sheinbaum herself will not be part of the delegation since her government, she says, has enough on its plate at home. Instead, Mexico will be represented by its Foreign Minister Ramon de la Fuente.

It could be argued that this is part of a process that already began with AMLO’s election in 2018. Unlike many of his direct predecessors, AMLO was keen to reengage with Latin America and the Global South as a whole, even going so far as to rejoin the G77+China in 2023.



The BRICS association currently comprises ten countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. In October 2024, an additional 13 countries (Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam) were invited to participate as “partner countries”, allowing them to engage with and benefit from BRICS initiatives.

It’s worth stressing that Mexico is going as an observer country, which is the first of many steps towards becoming a member. It is not officially a member of the group and cannot participate in any of the internal decisions taken at the Summit. But it can give its opinion and collaborate in joint projects, especially in areas of economics and development. More importantly, it will be able to put out feelers to see what kinds of models of future collaboration may be on offer.

At the same time, the Sheinbaum government is intensifying efforts to diversify Mexico’s economic and trade relations away from the US. That includes a possible deepening of its trade ties with Brazil. In August, a key meeting is scheduled to take place between the two countries’ secretaries of Commerce and Foreign Affairs to discuss ways of expanding trade. Brazilian companies will also be in attendance and meeting with Mexican businessmen to see how the economies can complement each other.

“We can supply what Brazil doesn’t have and they can supply what Brazil has that we don’t, not only in terms of the trade agreement but also in terms of investments,” Sheinbaum said.

Together, Brazil and Mexico represent 65% of the GDP of Latin America and the Caribbean. Trade between the two countries has already grown by over a third in the past six years, from $10 billion in 2019, to more than $13.5 billion in 2024, according to Rodrigo Almeida, head of the Commercial Sector of the Brazilian Embassy in Mexico. That is despite the very limited trade agreement currently in place between the two countries.

As the FT points out, $13.5 billion is still a tiny fraction of the $840bn of goods traded between the US and Mexico last year — and the $161.8bn in 2024 exchanged between Brazil and China in 2024. But there is also room for continued growth:

For Mexico, which is gearing up for a tense renegotiation of its USMCA deal with the US and Canada, Brazil could offer investment opportunities in sectors such as aerospace and pharmaceuticals, while helping ease its dependence on the US for imports of grains including yellow corn. Brazilian officials say its industrial and agribusiness sectors are interested in increasing exports to Mexico.

A major milestone came just over a year ago when the Mexican Mexicana de Aviación purchased 20 aircraft from the Brazilian company Embraer.

At the same time, Mexico is also looking to expand its bilateral trade with India, the EU and the United Arab Emirates. In her meeting last week with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the side lines of the G7, Sheinbaum discussed areas of opportunity, particularly regarding critical materials.

“We are very interested in the link with the pharmaceutical industry in India, but that it is invested in Mexico,” Sheinbaum said. “This year we are going to have a very important meeting about it.”

Even Mexican Businesses Are Looking Elsewhere

It’s not just Mexico’s government that is talking in earnest about diversifying Mexico’s economic and trade relations away from the US; so, too, is its biggest business lobby. The Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic, or Coparmex, warned that the fallout from the US’ dramatic shift towards protectionism leaves Mexico little choice but to shift its trade policy towards closer ties with Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Edmundo Enciso, president of the Nearshoring and Foreign Trade Commission of Coparmex Mexico City, told El Economista that the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on steel, the automotive sector and agricultural products are already generating devastating effects on value chains throughout North America. This, together with Trump’s crackdown on migration, the mass deportation of Mexican workers and his new tax on remittance payments, is destabilising entire communities in Mexico and destroying local employment.

“Mexico has a historic opportunity to diversify its alliances, and that does not mean breaking with the United States but rather rebalancing our relationship and developing an autonomous foreign policy, which puts Mexico’s interests at the centre,” said Enciso.

The fact that big business lobbies like Coparmex, which represent the interests of arguably the biggest beneficiaries of Mexico’s decades-long trade liberalisation with the US, are now calling for greater trade diversification hint at the scale of the damage Trump 2.0 has already inflicted on US-Mexico relations in its first five months in power.

As the economist Mario Campa notes, Mexico has few cards up its sleeve in its historically unbalanced relationship with the United States. But one of them is to pursue alternative trade partnerships and allegiances in this emerging era of multipolarity. Mexico’s gateway to the BRICS may end up being Brazil, Campa adds, which would be ironic given it was Brazil that slammed the door shut on Venezuela last year (machine translated):

According to figures from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (up to and including 2023), Brazil was the seventh biggest destination for Mexican exports and Mexico the sixth for Brazilian sales abroad. If a treaty is signed, the likely moderate expansion of the trade deficit of Mexican agriculture could be justified with the diversification of markets and the strategic fight against inflation. Strengthening ties with the South American giant would be a geo-economic key into the Mercosur trade bloc.

It would also be an indirect way of strengthening Mexico’s ties with the BRICS without going all in, with all the risks that would entail. But as Campa says, there is a certain sense of urgency:

Building bridges with the BRICS hand in hand with Brazil is today a complementary negotiation card and tomorrow a diversifying and solidarity commitment with the Global South. Mexico must take advantage of it today. Tomorrow, it could wake up and Lula will no longer be there.

The Ukrainization of Mexico?

The renowned Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife says that membership of BRICS would clearly be beneficial for Mexico, though its economy and development are currently chained to the US. He pointed out that there are more than 30 countries, some of them from Latin America, seeking to join the club, and that Mexico would almost certainly be granted membership, given its economic and geopolitical importance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russia’s ambassador to Mexico, Nikolay Sofinskiy, has already stated that Russia would welcome Mexico into the fold. But there’s one problem, says Jalife — the West, in particular the US, “won’t allow it”:

“It is optimal for Mexico to join the BRICS, but they are not going to let it happen. I am being realistic here; on paper I think it would be great.”

The USMCA deal includes an article, 32.10, that lays out the potential consequences of negotiating an FTA with “nonmarket economies” – which is basically a code word for China. Put simply, if either Canada or Mexico were to negotiate a trade agreement with China, they would have to inform the US three months prior. If a bilateral FTA gets signed with China, any of the three trade partners could walk away from the USMCA with just six months’ notice.

An even greater risk highlighted by Jalife is what he calls the “Ukrainization of Mexico”. In short, Mexico is as strategically valuable to the US as Ukraine is to Russia. And just like Russia will never let the Ukraine join NATO, the US will never let Mexico join BRICS.

Asked in a televised interview whether the US would go so far as to intervene militarily in Mexico, Jalife said:

Why not? It’s already happened 13 times. Go visit the Museum of Interventions in Churubusco, Mexico City, to see how many times they have invaded us… Republican party figures like Trump and Raymond Barr have already talked about intervening in Mexico in a similar way to Pakistan-Afghanistan.

It is precisely for this reason that Mexico’s Sheinbaum government will have to tread very carefully in its attempts to diversify Mexico’s economy away from the US, especially with regard to its ties to China. But whether this is ultimately a bluff or not, the mere fact that Mexico is willing to participate in a BRICS forum for the first time ever reflects just how high the stakes have grown in its relations with the US.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07 ... ummit.html

[blindpig]

PRI leader throws punches in Mexican Congress as opposition clamors for US military presence

The congressional brawl highlights the deepening crisis of the opposition as Mexico’s political landscape shifts.

August 29, 2025 by Devin B. Martinez


PRI Senator Alejandro “Alito” Moreno attacked Senate President Fernández Noroña and attempted to manipulate the story. Photo: Fernández Noroña / X

A Congress session in Mexico on Wednesday ended in violence when an opposition leader attacked the president of the Senate, Gerardo Fernández Noroña, pushing and pulling him and throwing punches.

Alejandro “Alito” Moreno, president of the right-wing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and member of the Senate, rushed to Noroña at the end of a “tense” debate about the possibility of allowing US troops in Mexico.

In a video widely circulated online, Alito can be seen forcefully interrupting the Senate president during the singing of the national anthem, which closed the meeting on August 27.

“I’m asking you for the floor!” Moreno shouts at the Senate leader, pulling on his arm.

“Don’t touch me,” responds Noroña. But Moreno continues while yelling in his face.

“He hit me on the arms and said: ‘I’m going to beat the shit out of you, I’m going to kill you,’” the Senate president recounted to the press after the incident.

Ofrezco al compañero fotógrafo del senado una disculpa. No condene enérgicamente la agresión de la que fue víctima esta tarde. ¿Se pronunciarán las y los más influyentes líderes de opinión en contra de Alito por este violento ataque a un colega? No lo creo. pic.twitter.com/EoD74O2HH9

— epigmenio ibarra (@epigmenioibarra) August 28, 2025

The video shows Noroña, a prominent left figure of the ruling Morena party, pushing his arms back. Dozens of legislatures attempt to intervene as the scuffle escalates. Alito knocks a cameraman onto the floor and starts throwing blows. Another PRI congressman can be seen yanking Noroña by his jacket and punching him, as the Senate chief exits amidst a swarm of bodies.

“Let it be clear: the first physical aggression came from Noroña,” the PRI president claimed in a post on X after the scuffle.

On the other hand, 23 state leaders released a joint statement denouncing Alito’s actions: “We, the governors of the Fourth Transformation, firmly condemn the physical and verbal aggression committed by Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas.”

After the incident, Senate President Noroña announced that he would call an extraordinary session to propose the expulsion of Moreno and the other PRI leaders involved in the aggression.

The session debate: US troops on Mexican soil?
On the agenda of that day’s meeting of Mexico’s Permanent Commission, a body that represents the entire Congress of the Union when it’s not in session, was an item raised by the PRI and the National Action Party (PAN) themselves: the possibility of US military presence in Mexico.

The discussion heated up quickly. Senator Lilly Téllez (PAN), who had recently made statements on Fox News openly calling for US “assistance” in fighting drug cartels in Mexico, doubled-down on her comments. She also derided the ruling party as “Morenarcos”, claiming that their opposition to US military involvement amounts to defending drug cartels.

Her comments have been widely denounced as “traitorous” by officials and the Mexican public. Yet, several other opposition senators backed her arguments in Congress.

Both the PRI and PAN denied supporting US boots on the ground directly. They claimed that security partnership, US training of Mexican forces, and support from a limited number of US soldiers constitutes cooperation, not invasion. However, the mere mention of US military involvement in Mexico – especially as US President Trump threatens an incursion in the Caribbean under the pretext of targeting cartels – is widely seen as a violation of national sovereignty. Mexico’s history is painfully marked by repeated US invasions and incursions.

In early August, The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a directive for military action to be used against drug cartels. Simultaneously, the US embassy in Mexico released a statement claiming that the US will work with Sheinbaum’s government, using “every tool at our disposal” to confront cartels, treating them like “armed terrorist organizations”.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum firmly rejected these statements during a regular press conference, “There will be no invasion. It’s off the table.” The Foreign Ministry also said they will never “accept the participation of US military forces on our territory.”

During the Wednesday session about US troops, Senate President Noroña suggested a way to end the debate quickly. Based on the apparent unanimity against US boots on the ground, he proposed that the Permanent Commission issue a unanimous statement categorically rejecting any military intervention by a foreign country in the Mexican homeland.

The agreement was unanimous, until the PAN backed out on signing the statement. They demanded a full political debate over the issue at a later time, rather than lock themselves into a rejection of foreign military intervention outright.

Alito attacked the Senate leader as the session ended, apparently frustrated by the course of the discussion and the position it left the opposition in.

“I believe they have made the most serious mistake,” Noroña said to the press in the aftermath of the aggression.

“They want a debate, they will get it, and they will be exposed for what they are: traitors to the country.”

Brawl highlights growing crisis for the opposition
The timing of the dramatic incident in Congress is no coincidence. Political tensions in Mexico have been building for months and a pivotal moment for the country is days away.

On September 1, the 2,681 judges (881 federal judicial positions and 1,800 local judges) chosen by popular vote in Mexico’s historic judiciary elections on June 1 will be sworn into office. This includes the renewal of the full bench of the Supreme Court, which will now be composed of a majority of five women and four men.

The constitutionally-enshrined Judicial Reform – the driver of the sweeping restructure – is one of the most significant achievements of the Morena party and the people of Mexico in the last two years.

Mexico’s opposition, who failed to stop the Judicial Reform from passing, is facing serious challenges as September 1 approaches. Pressure is mounting as they struggle to effectively mobilize against these changes.

“It happened because of their intransigence, their cowardice, for not letting us speak,” Alito proclaimed to the press about his aggression on Wednesday.

“But even more so because, what do we do? If they don’t want us to speak, they don’t give us any space, any participation.”

The PRI and PAN seem to have positioned themselves on the unpopular side of the upcoming debate over US troops in Mexico. If Noroña is correct, their biggest mistake was forcing the debate at all – let alone their violence in Congress, which could lead to expulsions. With the new judicial appointments soon to be sworn in and more accountable to the public than ever, the opposition may find themselves increasingly isolated and desperate in Mexico’s evolving political landscape.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/08/29/ ... -presence/

[blindpig]

It Would Be Fine to Help Make Mexico a Happy Place: The Thirty-Seventh Newsletter (2025)

With the promise of the Mexican revolution and the sweeping reforms of cardenismo long erased by decades of neoliberalism and dependency, can Morena’s Fourth Transformation restore dignity and sovereignty to the country?

11 September 2025



Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

When I was in graduate school, I audited a class taught by Friedrich Katz (1927–2010), one of the great historians of Mexico of his generation. During the Second World War, Katz’s father Leo was a journalist who was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Berlin and later smuggled weapons from France to the Spanish Republic in its time of dire need. When the Nazis invaded France, Leo and his wife Bronia Rein – both Jewish communists – fled to Mexico, where President Lázaro Cárdenas’s government had opened its doors to anyone fleeing from fascism or who had fought for the Spanish Republic.

Friedrich Katz grew up in Mexico and remained grateful to the country for the rest of his life. In his seminar on the Mexican Revolution, he would regale us with remarkable tales about the ordinary people who overthrew the Porfiriato, the military dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). One of my favourite anecdotes was of the day Emiliano Zapata’s Ejército Libertador del Sur (Liberation Army of the South) rode into Mexico City with Pancho Villa’s División del Norte (Division of the North). Both men went into the National Palace on the Zócalo, found it uncomfortable, and wanted to return home to their rural Morelos (for Zapata) and Durango (for Villa) to continue the agrarian revolution. Katz would laugh and say, ‘I too would have followed them back to the countryside’.

It was Professor Katz who first gave me a copy of John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico (1914), one of the great feats of revolutionary reportage, bested only by Reed himself five years later with Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), about the Bolshevik Revolution. Reed, who spent time with both Villa and Zapata, included a beautiful chapter on Pancho Villa’s dream for Mexico:

We will put the army to work. In all parts of the Republic, we will establish military colonies composed of the veterans of the Revolution. The State will give them grants of agricultural lands and establish big industrial enterprises to give them work. Three days a week they will work and work hard, because honest work is more important than fighting, and only honest work makes good citizens. And the other three days they will receive military instruction and go out and teach all the people how to fight. Then, when the Patria is invaded, we will just have to telephone from the palace at Mexico City, and in half a day all the Mexican people will rise from their fields and factories, fully armed, equipped and organised to defend their children and their homes.

My ambition is to live my life in one of those military colonies among my compañeros whom I love, who have suffered so long and so deeply with me. I think I would like the government to establish a leather factory there where we could make good saddles and bridles, because I know how to do that; and the rest of the time I would like to work on my little farm, raising cattle and corn. It would be fine, I think, to help make Mexico a happy place.

What a wonderful dream.



Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Since then it has struggled to break first from the Spanish post-colonial system, which kept it as an exporter of cheap raw materials, and then the US-driven imperial system, in whose neo-colonial clutches it remains through its subordinate role in the international division of labour. In 2017, the former Head of Government of Mexico City and two-time presidential candidate (2006 and 2012) Andrés Manuel López Obrador – or AMLO – published 2018 La salida: Decadencia y renacimiento de México (2018 The Exit: Mexico’s Decline and Rebirth). The book, which became a kind of campaign text for AMLO’s successful 2018 presidential run, set out the claim that his National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Morena) would lead Mexico’s Fourth Transformation (the ‘4T’). The first three transformations, AMLO wrote, were the War of Independence (1810–1821), the War of Reform (1858–1861), and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). He maintained that it would be useless for Mexico to undergo a reform presidency that was merely going to enact cosmetic alterations when what the country needed was a deeper, more fundamental correction.

AMLO rooted his agenda in the most dramatic periods of Mexican history and suggested that the promise of the Mexican Revolution had been almost entirely erased by the decades of subordination to the United States, the corruption of Mexico’s plutocracy, and a state bureaucracy that had lost the political will to defend the Constitution of 1917.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes dossier no. 92, Mexico and the Fourth Transformation (September 2025), researched and written by Stephanie Weatherbee Brito (of the International Peoples’ Assembly) and Alina Duarte (of Morena’s National Institute for Political Education). To my mind, this is the first text of its kind to properly set the Morena movement in historical context and explain the social process of the 4T. It shows how the protagonists of the Morena movement took thirty years to build a political project out of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s long journey to reform Mexican politics and return to the policies and promises of the presidency of his father, Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) – the most left-wing of Mexico’s sixty-four presidents before AMLO and now Claudia Sheinbaum. These policies – known as cardenismo – included independence from US interference, control of Mexico’s resources (including the 1938 nationalisation of oil), agrarian reform (including the creation of rural schools to dent landlord power and introducing collective units of family agricultural production known as ejidos), and social advancement (through expanded access to education, support for trade unions, and respect for Mexico’s rich indigenous cultures). Morena’s 4T is built on cardenismo’s principles of sovereignty and dignity, now renewed for the twenty-first century. The dossier provides a readable and teachable text for people interested in Mexico’s journey: so far from God and so close to the United States (¡Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos) – the phrase uttered by Porfirio Díaz before he was overthrown by the Mexican Revolution.



Each of Mexico’s periods of transformation also produced remarkable art and culture, and the 4T is no different. The artworks in this dossier are from the mural series Los Nadies, created by Colectivo Subterráneos in Oaxaca, Mexico. Founded in 2021 to democratise art as a tool for social transformation, the collective draws on Mexico’s graphic tradition – from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop) to Mexican muralism – as well as the 2006 Popular Teachers’ Movement of Oaxaca. Inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s poem of the same name, the series includes prints and murals that highlight indigenous and mestizo peoples forgotten under colonial rule and modern capitalism, confronting the historical debt to the marginalised and amplifying voices that demand justice in a Mexico under transformation.

While new movements produce new kinds of art, there are also artists whose work gives voice to those movements. The poet Enrique Márquez Jaramillo (born in 1950) developed an acerbic, surrealistic style that mirrored the uprisings that shook Mexico during his lifetime and the entrenched bureaucratic corruption of successive governments. In 1996, he wrote Breve diccionario para mexicanos furiosos (Brief Dictionary for Furious Mexicans), which carried the pulse of a population that was living under the misery of the neoliberal onslaught. This mischievous spirit returned in 2012, when Márquez Jaramillo organised the Cumbre Mundial de Indignados, Disidentes e Insurgentes (Summit of the Indignant, Dissidents, and Insurgents) in Mexico City. That coalition of dissident and indignant currents came together to elect AMLO in 2018. It is therefore worth going back to one of Márquez Jaramillo’s most hopeful poems – ‘Barco a la deriva’ (Boat Adrift), part of his 1982 collection En el caño del mundo que recaña uyuyuy (roughly translated as, In the Gutter of the World That Goes Uyuyuy):

We must save the ship,
its crew,
its cargo.
Save it, you who know the craft,
who can calm the disorder
of the engines and the roar of the waves
with the simple touch of your fingers,
with the balm of a smile.
Do not allow this stubborn boat adrift
to sink.
Offer it your harbour at last,
guide it
to its damp pier,
and you will see how it quiets
this voracious fire
that consumes me.

Warmly,

Vijay

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