What's going on in Mexico City?

The U.S. media spends a decent amount of time covering and discussing the U.S.–Mexican border, but a much smaller amount of time covering what’s going on in the Mexican government. (There are a few notable exceptions.)

It’s a bizarre, perhaps willful blindness, as if some corners of the U.S. media world are afraid of looking too closely at the Mexican government, lest they reaffirm Americans’ suspicions that the officials running the country from the National Palace in Mexico City are corrupt and incompetent. (Sixty percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Mexico; two-thirds of U.S. adults say the Mexican government is doing a bad job dealing with “the large number of people seeking asylum at the border, including 48 percent who say it is doing a very bad job.”)

In June, Mexico elected a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a leftist. (That’s not a pejorative, it’s how the Associated Press labels her — a term it does not use for Bernie Sanders.) She is the protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “AMLO.”

AMLO wants to ram through sweeping constitutional reforms before he leaves office — his effort is nicknamed “Plan C,” because this is his third attempt to pass them — that will effectively eliminate judicial independence by making all judges elected, expand the list of crimes for which the government can impose mandatory pretrial imprisonment, dismantle independent government commissions, and concentrate much more government power in the presidency.

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summarizes, “Mexico’s checks and balances risk being weakened to the point of practical elimination.”

(The opposition party claims to have enough votes to block the reforms, but AMLO is reportedly just one vote short. A supermajority of two-thirds of the 128-member senate is required to enact the changes — but two-thirds of 128 is 85.3, leaving some dispute in Mexico as to whether a supermajority would require 85 or 86 votes.)

Some isolationists might argue, “Who cares how the Mexican government is structured, or whether there’s too much power in the Mexican presidency? Let the Mexicans decide how their own government should operate.”

Problem one is that the election of judges — which AMLO is pitching as an anti-corruption effort — could well worsen corruption. (And keep in mind, there’s some evidence suggesting AMLO has been cozy with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel for a long time.)

Our current ambassador to Mexico, former U.S. senator Ken Salazar wrote in late August, “Direct elections would also make it easier for cartels and other bad actors to take advantage of politically motivated and inexperienced judges. . . . A strengthened judicial branch in Mexico must have capable judges to manage complex litigation for extraditions, trade disputes, and other issues. Yet the proposal as it stands removes the necessary requirements of having the highest qualifications for judges, including in the reduction of the required years of experience to serve at all levels of the judiciary.”

There are some who argue that Salazar was late to the party, and quick to retreat, in his criticism of the AMLO reforms. In August, Salazar made vague but positive remarks about AMLO’s proposals, and there’s a pattern of the Biden administration backing down when AMLO throws a tantrum:

Unfortunately, the approach taken by the administration of President Joe Biden towards Mexico has failed to defend long-standing U.S. priorities effectively. Over the past three years, his government condoned AMLO’s repeated attacks on Mexico’s judicial and electoral systems, investigative journalism, and even on American companies. Emblematic of this approach is the administration’s decision late last year to remove the mention of “democratic decline” as a root cause of migration from a joint statement between the two countries after objections from Mexico City.

Here’s a stunning New York Times story from July 2022 that deserved way more attention than it got:

Mexico’s election czar delivered a message to the American ambassador: The Mexican president was mounting an all-out assault on the national elections authority, sowing doubt about a pillar of the country’s democracy.

But instead of expressing alarm, America’s top diplomat in Mexico took up one of the president’s lines of attack, entertaining claims that an election long in the past, in 2006, had been stolen from the Mexican leader.

The ambassador, Ken Salazar, said in an interview that he was not convinced that the election was clean, challenging the stance of the United States at a time when democracy is under threat at home and across the hemisphere.

Mr. Salazar, who invited the election overseer to his residence, told The New York Times he wanted to know: “Was there fraud?”

The matter had long been settled — for Mexico’s judicial system, the European Union and the American government — until now.

This ambassador’s willingness to question the election’s legitimacy is the latest example of what several U.S. officials say is a worrying pattern, in which America’s top diplomat in Mexico has appeared to contradict his own government’s policies in the interest of aligning himself with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Whom does Ken Salazar work for? Who signs his paychecks? I’ve never wanted to be George Shultz so much in my life. He would invite U.S. ambassadors into his office and tell them to point to their country on a globe. Every single time, he would have to correct them, pointing to the United States and answering, “That’s your country.”

A second major problem with AMLO’s reforms is that the less effective and more corrupt the Mexican government gets, the more likely it is that greater numbers of Mexican citizens will give up on their homeland and want to move north and illegally cross the border to find a better life in the U.S. And there’s every reason to think that AMLO’s reforms are scaring foreign investors and will hurt the Mexican economy.

Problem three is that in at least five ways, AMLO’s proposed reforms violate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that came into effect in 2020.

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced NAFTA. NR found the changes underwhelming, with the deal seeming to be mostly the same thing as NAFTA. That applied both to our more free-trade-supporting writers and our more protectionist writers. (Our Michael Brendan Dougherty concluded that the USMCA “did not alter the status quo in a way that would meaningfully advance any nationalist-conservative ends.”) Since the new trade treaty went into effect in July 2020, U.S. automobile production and overall trade flows are “basically the same now” as they were before the USMCA.

(Note that then-senator Kamala Harris voted against the USMCA, declaring, “The USMCA’s environmental provisions are insufficient — and by not addressing climate change, the USMCA fails to meet the crises of this moment.”)

But regardless of what you think of USMCA, if you’re going to have a trade agreement, you ought to abide by the agreed-upon rules.

In a detailed report, Diego Marroquín Bitar of the Wilson Center lays out how AMLO’s proposed reforms violate the USMCA in five areas:

AMLO wants to “gradually remove all Supreme Court justices and federal judges, replacing them through popular elections without clear professional qualifications. As presented, this reform would severely weaken the judiciary’s role as an independent check on presidential power, leaving judicial decisions vulnerable to political influence and donor interests.” This is a serious problem for any U.S. or Canadian firms and investors when it comes to resolving legal disputes in Mexico.

AMLO’s reforms “would dismantle Mexico’s antitrust agency, along with the Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE), the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), and the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), transferring their functions to Executive Branch agencies like the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Energy. These changes would remove critical checks on presidential power and directly conflict with Mexico’s commitments under USMCA regarding market access, competition policy, and state-owned Enterprises.”

Another reform pushed by AMLO “seeks to limit water concessions to firms in regions with scarce water resources, reserving allocations to public entities exclusively for personal and domestic use. By favoring Mexican entities over US and Canadian firms, this proposal would appear to violate USMCA’s National Treatment and Most-Favored Nation provisions.”

One “proposed reform aims to ban genetically modified (GM) corn for both harvest and human consumption. By introducing trade restrictions without scientific evidence, this reform conflicts with USMCA market access and sanitary and phytosanitary provisions.”

Other proposals “to end concessions for open-pit mining and permanently ban oil extraction through fracking conflicts with Mexico’s commitment under USMCA to maintain agreed-upon market openness in these sectors, potentially affecting the operations and ownership of US and Canadian firms.”

The USMCA includes a review clause stating that on July 1, 2026, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will confirm in writing whether to continue the agreement.

Berg wonders if two years from now, the U.S. and Canada will find Mexico too difficult a partner and decide against maintaining the agreement: “In the worst-case scenario, it could prompt a reconsideration of Mexico’s role in the North American bloc, forcing U.S. policymakers to consider Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Panama as geographically proximate alternatives in Latin America with greater democratic bona fides.”

AMLO’s reforms are a massive problem with huge repercussions for the U.S. economy, the border, the fight against drug cartels, and relations with our second-largest trade partner — and unless you seek out news coverage of events in Mexico, I’ll bet you’ve heard almost nothing about them.

You’re not going to hear much about this from President Joe Biden, because we rarely hear anything from Biden these days.

You’re not going to hear about any of this from Kamala Harris, because she’s a malfunctioning WestWorld robot endlessly repeating, “It’s time to turn the page,” and “Chart a new way forward.” We know more about Harris’s recipe for greens than how she would handle this move by AMLO. (Recall that the words “Mexico,” “trade,” “fentanyl,” and “migrant” did not appear in her convention address.)

You might, someday, hear something about this from Donald Trump. But if you do, it will likely be in the vein of his usual, “We’re getting screwed on trade deals,” and “Nobody negotiates better deals than I do,” braggadocio, with few specifics and quick digressions to whatever else is on his mind. (As Trump declared in his convention address, “Green Bay’s going to have a good team this year, right? They’re going to have a good team. They’re going to have a good team. Most of the audience doesn’t like it, but it’s true. You’re going to have a very good team this year.” In other news, Packers quarterback Jordan Love has a sprained medial collateral ligament and is expected to miss three to six weeks.)

Back in June, after Sheinbaum was elected, I wrote: “But there’s good reason to worry about the future of Mexican democracy and separation of powers, the Mexican economy, and the fight against the brutal, ruthless cartels.”

But nobody worried all that much over the summer . . . and here we are.