TRUMP IMPOSES TARIFFS ON MEXICO AND CANADA FOR NOT STOPPING FENTANYL CRISIS

Yesterday, the Donald Trump administration imposed a generalized tariff of 25% on all imports from Mexico (its first commercial partner) and Canada (its second commercial partner), accusing them of not doing enough to stop illegal shipments of fentanyl to the United States, which causes tens of thousands of deaths per year from overdoses.

In an additional fact sheet to the decree, Trump directly accused the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum of:

Mexican drug trafficking organizations, the world’s leading fentanyl traffickers, operate unhindered due to an intolerable relationship with the government of Mexico.

• The government of Mexico has afforded safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims…
• This alliance with the Mexican government endangers the national security of the United States, and we must eradicate the influence of these dangerous cartels.

Thus, for the Donald Trump administration, in addition to considering Mexican drug cartels as threats to national security (on February 19, it designated six of them as international terrorist organizations), the Mexican government, which protects them, is now also considered a threat to the national security of the United States.

Let us remember that the neoliberal Mexican governments that accepted the proposal of the George H.W. Bush administration to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada in the early 1990s - which was finalized with the Bill Clinton administration and entered into force on January 1, 1994 (NAFTA) - tried to permanently link the Mexican economy to that of the United States, in order to turn Mexico into an indispensable and secure partner of Washington, and thus avoid being considered as a possible threat to the United States.

That bet worked, because even with the changes of government in Mexico, the decision to increasingly unite the Mexican economy and society with those of the United States was maintained; even when a “leftist” government like that of López Obrador came to power in 2018, who accepted the negotiation of a new trade agreement with the United States and Canada carried out by the previous government of Peña Nieto with that of Donald Trump (USMCA that came into force on July 1, 2020).

Now, it turns out that Trump no longer considers his own treaty as a solution to the permanent trade deficits that the United States has with Mexico and Canada and believes that both neighbors and commercial partners are a fundamental part of the problem of opioid addiction in the United States and undocumented migration. Trump also wants to reindustrialize the United States to be able to compete with China, so the USMCA is turning out to be an obstacle to this reindustrialization to the extent that supply chains are located outside the United States. Therefore, Trump is using tariffs as a tool to discourage companies from leaving the United States, and in turn force them to establish their factories within the country, so as not to have to pay tariffs.

It is a very risky bet since these global supply chains were promoted by the United States' transnational corporations and have been strengthened over 45 years throughout the world. Wanting to break them with tariffs from one day to the next seems unrealistic, and what will result is a global trade war.

As for Mexico, Trump's accusation that the Mexican government is allied with drug cartels has been proven in many ways over the last three decades, so President Claudia Sheinbaum can deny it all she wants, but the reality is that a good part of the Mexican political class (especially the ruling party, Morena), is related, allied or whatever you want to call it, with organized crime.

Breaking these decades-old ties will be nearly impossible, so Trump will continue to have the justification he needs to increasingly disengage the United States from Mexico, and so the dream of the Mexican elites of becoming permanent partners, allies, and friends of the United States will have vanished, perhaps for many decades.