Why the U.S.-Mexico Relationship Could Get Even Worse
Next year’s
near-simultaneous elections and a spiral of escalatory rhetoric spell danger,
but there is a way out.
By Ryan C. Berg, the director of the Americas program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2023
The divergence between the Republican Party’s internationalist and more isolationist wings was on full display at the first debate of
the U.S. presidential primary season in August. But though contenders were
divided on how to counter China’s quest for global supremacy as well as on the
U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they seemed to approach consensus on a third foreign-policy issue: the need to
take unilateral, kinetic action against Mexico’s cartels. Mexico occupied such
a sizable portion of the debate’s foreign-policy discussion that willingness to
“take out the cartels” appears to have become something akin to an early litmus
test.
The Republican hopefuls are right to sense something
deeply flawed about the current state of U.S.-Mexico relations, but the dynamic
of both countries holding near-simultaneous presidential elections in
2024—something that occurs only once every 12 years—coupled with the penchant
on both sides of the border to use the other as a cudgel in domestic politics,
presents important and underappreciated risks. A cycle of retaliatory rhetoric
and escalating policy proposals risks damaging a relationship in need of repair.
This tit-for-tat could strengthen Mexican President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador’s hand. Now that his term is almost up, if his chosen successor becomes
president and continues his policies, it will hamstring U.S. efforts to rebuild
security and economic ties.
Much of the Republican Party’s focus on Mexico is
attributable to López Obrador himself. Not only has the United States’ top
trading partner pursued an economic policy that is at odds with the openness of
the preceding 20 years, but several of López Obrador’s policies have violated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement
(USMCA), agreed to in 2018 to replace NAFTA. Meanwhile, the cartels have grown
in lethality and criminal sophistication during his nearly five years in
office, despite his insistence to the contrary.
A consummate nationalist, the Mexican president
has systematically deconstructed what was once robust bilateral security
cooperation. Describing his security policy as “hugs, not bullets”—a nonexistent policy—López Obrador successfully pushed for a “foreign
agent law” to limit the operations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) in the country, destroying much of Mexico’s actionable
intelligence; received the family members of notorious drug traffickers such as Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán; and upheld the preposterous notion that Mexico does not produce fentanyl, even as his own armed forces tout monthly seizures
of the deadly substance.
The results have been all too predictable. It is
estimated that cartels control nearly half of Mexico’s territory—a figure that could be an
undercount. Seven of the 10 most homicidal cities globally on a per capita basis are now in Mexico. With
roughly a year remaining in his term, homicides on López Obrador’s watch have
nearly equaled those during his predecessor’s six years in
office and have far surpassed those under former President Felipe Calderón, who
launched a frontal challenge to cartels that López Obrador derides as a
feckless “war on drugs.” At the border, disorder reigns, with illegal
crossings rising again after a brief period of decline. And farther
north of the border, for several years in a row now, American overdose deaths
have topped 100,000, much of them attributable to illicit drugs produced
in or trafficked through Mexico.
All this has had deleterious effects downstream for
Mexico’s economy, as well as key U.S. foreign-policy objectives. Despite record
interest and financial incentives to nearshore supply chains from East Asia,
Mexico—which represents about one-quarter of Latin America and the Caribbean’s
regional GDP—received just 17 percent of all foreign direct investment to the region
in 2022. In the midst of a full-blown security crisis and policy uncertainty,
Mexico has yet to convince foreign companies that it is sufficiently stable to support large-scale investments in strategic
sectors such as semiconductors.
Given the grim reality, then, Republican impatience
with Mexico is understandable. Yet the prevailing consensus in the Republican
primary on the use of force seems equally misguided. Deploying troops to Mexico, launching precision-guided munitions to blow up fentanyl labs, or initiating a trade war through escalating tariffs: This is a counterproductive set of solutions to all the right questions.
Further, the more these policies consolidate within the candidates’
foreign-policy debates, the more Mexico’s presidential candidates will feel
domestic pressure to respond in kind. That will be a temptation not just for
candidates such as former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, López
Obrador’s preferred successor and ideological
kin, but also Xóchitl
Gálvez, a little-known senator who has come out of nowhere to capture the nomination for the Frente Amplio por México coalition—and
who offers the opposition the best chance to challenge López Obrador’s grip on
Mexican politics.
There is also the question of what the relationship
between the two countries will look like after simultaneous elections. Even a
candidate like Gálvez, whose National Action Party arguably took U.S.-Mexico
cooperation to its apex the last time it held the presidency during the
Calderón years, could be forced to fall back on the defense of sovereignty if
faced with the specter of U.S. action on Mexican soil. For López Obrador’s
leftist Morena party, the defense of sovereignty forms a critical part of its
appeal, and exhortations to send in U.S. forces may well provide further
motivation for Morena’s project of selective strategic uncoupling from the United States. In either case,
presidential candidates should avoid sowing the seeds of a complete breakdown
in bilateral cooperation once the campaign dust settles.
It is inevitable that the role of each country in the
other’s domestic politics will contribute to heightened tensions. After all,
Mexico has featured prominently in modern U.S. elections since before the
passage of NAFTA. Throughout Mexico’s democratic history, candidates
positioning themselves as anti-American, anti-imperial sovereignty hawks have always reaped electoral benefits. Although
the two countries share much in common through decades of integration, there is
also a long history of pillorying each other for electoral gain. The
U.S.-Mexico relationship has survived an extreme form of campaign politics in
the past. The goal should thus be to maintain a bilateral relationship that can
endure the mutual recriminations and set out to aggressively pursue strategic
interests once Mexico City has held its inauguration in late 2024 and Washington
has followed suit in early 2025.
Although the erstwhile Mérida Initiative, a bilateral,
bipartisan approach to security cooperation that embraced “shared
responsibility,” may be dead, it is imperative for the next administration to get
U.S.-Mexico security cooperation back on track with a comprehensive plan of action. In order to
meet López Obrador’s demands, the Biden administration negotiated the so-called
Bicentennial Framework, which replaced Mérida, slimmed cooperation, and
shuffled the pillars to deprioritize security and
interdiction to
focus instead on development initiatives. Yet López Obrador’s abject neglect of
public security has featured the proliferation of hundreds of criminal organizations as well as
the consolidation of Mexico’s two largest groups, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Further, the DEA says it seized enough lethal doses
of fentanyl in 2022 to kill every American, while an “iron river” of weapons flows south to the cartels.
The Republican presidential candidates would do well
to study the early stages of the successful (and bipartisan) Plan
Colombia, which focused on territorial contestation and training Colombia’s
armed forces. Like every modern, functioning state, Mexico must regain the
monopoly on the use of force and control its territory. This should be a
relatively easy sell to Republican voters looking for U.S. partners to shoulder
more of their own burdens. The United States should establish programs to train
and professionalize Mexico’s armed forces, weed out corruption within its ranks, and cultivate and vet elite special forces units capable of tracking and hunting down the
highest-level targets, leveraging joint intelligence operations.
With Mexico’s armed forces taking the lead on the
interdiction and dismantling of criminal cartels, the United States should
proceed concurrently by beefing up border security and dismantling the cartels’
financial operations. As Kimberly Breier, a former U.S. assistant secretary of
state for Western Hemisphere affairs, put it: “Mexico is a target-rich environment, not for U.S.
missiles, but for [financial] sanctions.” Perhaps one of the most sensitive
areas the two countries will have to untangle is the increasing use of
unprecedented levels of remittances from the United States to Mexico to launder
cartel proceeds. A recent report estimated that of the nearly $60 billion sent to
Mexico last year, at least $4.4 billion—and possibly much more—could have
derived from illegal activity.
Insecurity lies at the root of irregular migration and
Mexico’s sluggish economic growth. It stands to reason, then, that achieving
greater security in Mexico will have salutary effects on other U.S. strategic
interests. Without resolving trade tensions, Mexico cannot hope to attract the
levels of foreign direct investment required to advance its economy and prevent
further emigration. Currently, the USMCA lacks full compliance, mostly owing to López Obrador’s statist policies in sectors such as energy. This is robbing
Mexico of the regulatory stability and investor guarantees necessary to reap
the rewards of supply chain reorientation following renewed interest in
Mexico’s manufacturing sector.
Strengthening trade enforcement will also permit the
United States to more easily pursue nearshoring from East Asia in vulnerable economic sectors. Yet, despite bipartisan calls to action, the Biden administration,
inexplicably, has refrained from pursuing arbitration alongside Canada under the USMCA—an option it
could have availed itself of nearly a year ago. Republicans should remember the
binational institutions and trade dispute resolution mechanisms contained in
the USMCA and campaign for the dogged pursuit of arbitration. Reducing U.S.
supply chain vulnerabilities through nearshoring cannot happen as long as
Mexico is out of compliance with the USMCA. While modest amounts of nearshoring to Mexico have occurred
organically, this is in spite of López Obrador’s policies, not because of them. The fact remains: The drive to
nearshore supply chains is the opportunity of a generation for Mexico’s economy to leapfrog into
upper-income status and serve as a bulwark on the southern U.S. border.
In 2024, the bilateral relationship will need to
weather the storm of concurrent elections while ensuring a relationship robust
enough to last long after the campaign rallies have faded from the headlines.
Ryan C. Berg is the director of the Americas program at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he also heads the Future
of Venezuela Initiative. Twitter: @RyanBergPhD
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