The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Third round’s the charm. This time US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) negotiations between Mexico and the US happened in Mexico City. US Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer and his team met with president Claudia Sheinbaum to discuss what a revamped regional trade acceptable to the Trump administration might look like.

These are the main demands so far:

More North American content (if the US gets to keep most of it)

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Initially, coverage of the World Cup in Mexico reverted to the lens of cartels. It was as lazy as it was expected from the global media. Attention then shifted to the similarly awaited angle of the broader issues surrounding World Cup preparations—last minute renovations and the usual exclusion from the festivities of small businesses and the working class neighbourhoods surrounding the stadiums.

So far so predictable. But that didn’t stop Mexico from making the most of the world’s biggest event; especially one peculiarly split up amongst its fellow regional trade partners and neighbours—the US and Canada.

“Sport diplomacy” thus became a fixture of think tank and diplomatic circles over the past months, using football as an excuse to talk up the virtues of a united North America. The usually pro-regionalist discourse came as a welcome palette freshener from the concurrent—and somewhat more sour—negotiations surrounding the US-Mexico- Canada Agreement (USMCA). Just last week the Trump administration (predictably) repudiated the trade treaty in its current form.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration has been taking far more aggressive legal action against the US government and its officials in recent days.

First, Mexico reacted with anger after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents killed a Mexican in their custody. As opposed to the tepid diplomatic notes that have characterised the previous responses to ICE brutality, the promise is now to take “more forceful legal measures,” said Sheinbaum.

These have been speculated to involve direct legal action against ICE in the US or support of class action suits filed by victims and their families.

The Mexican government has also committed to a full investigation—run by the federal attorney general and Sheinbaum ally, Ernestina Godoy—into whether the capture of notorious drug lord, el ‘Mayo’ Zambada, involved meddling by US authorities on Mexican soil.

From the very beginning, Sheinbaum expressed concern about US involvement, but it is only now, two years later, that the government is mobilising legally.

Perfect timing

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Poor behaviour from media who should know better at this stage in the game. Headlines proclaiming: “Trump Refuses to Renew USMCA” set off panicked conversations as if the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) had concluded forever.

The reality is this:

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

It is almost impossible to create a new political party in Mexico. Every six years a small but hectic year-long window is opened for organisations to jump through hoops set by Mexico’s electoral agency (INE). Out of the 86 that started the process in January 2025 just two have made it to the end.

The requirements were grueling. Organisations mobilised thousands of activists to gather millions of signatures (spending millions more pesos) to obtain their registration.

The benefits of being a party, however, are more than worth the strenuous costs.

Source: INE via Integralia

Who’s who in the final two

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Two seemingly linked statistics featured in the Mexican press last week:

The first was one that president Claudia Sheinbaum would like people to keep in mind: The continuing fall in violence across the country. According to official figures (which The Mexico Political Economist has explained are independently verifiable enough to be credible) the country’s murder rate has fallen by 46% since September 2024.

The other stat is one the government isn’t so keen about.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Blithely ignorant of the lessons of previous crashes and blinded by the promise of new technology, US entrepreneurs poured their resources into exponential expansion. When they ran out of money, they borrowed it in ever-growing sums. When the US market became too constraining, the investors turned their eye to Mexico.

The pattern of tech bubbles is so consistent that the playbook of the railway tycoons of the late 19th century sounds strikingly similar today. Railway infrastructure spilled over into northern Mexico as the US robber barons of the Gilded Age ran out of space across the enormity of the continental United States.

As the globe undergoes a new technological boom, Mexico has become a different sort of actor under the aegis of artificial intelligence. It’s no longer just a site for building the new technology’s infrastructure—rail back in the late 19th century, data centres in the early 21st—it is also where funds and asset managers have come looking for fresh capital.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

It would be a mistake to try and declare a definitive souring of US-Mexico relations through one off week.

This bilateral diplomatic relationship is a delicate dance that must be balanced with other considerations. So, when president Claudia Sheinbaum accused the US of trying to meddle in Mexican internal affairs, she was indeed reacting to the actual moves by US law enforcement linking members of her Morena party to cartels. But she was equally trying to keep her left-wing nationalist party united in the face of foreign right-wing pressure.

The US government clearly didn’t see her fiery language as the opening shots in a new US-Mexico conflict. In fact, the Trump administration, instead of shooting back, has recently gone out of its way to talk up bilateral security cooperation.

The following gushing statements that were released over the past week to this effect:

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

It was president Claudia Sheinbaum’s earliest triumphal moment. Just days after Donald Trump had threatened Mexico with sweeping tariffs (for the first time), the US president walked them back, giving the Mexican president an excuse to celebrate with a massive rally at Mexico City’s most important civic centre, the Zocalo.

What most political analysts remembered from that day, though, was an unfortunate moment in which Sheinbaum’s rivals and hangers-on within the ruling Morena party literally turned their backs on the president to take a photo amongst themselves.

It was likely a simple mistake but the symbolism was not lost on observers. The president who had succeeded Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the all-powerful founder of Morena, looked like a political minnow in comparison; unable to control her former political rivals and unable to pass her own legislative agenda.

That was March 2025. Today, all those politicians are no more—or they are at least much diminished from the empowered state they found themselves in just over a year ago. Each one has since been demoted or booted out from a powerful job. Claudia Sheinbaum has imposed her authority after a reshuffle that began in early April and ended last week.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

It has been the most underrated trade news development in Mexico for years—probably because it went to plan and without a hitch.

Last week, European Union officials—including president of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen—arrived in Mexico City to sign an update of the comprehensive EU-Mexico trade treaty, the Modernised Global Agreement.

It looked and felt like a triumph of the free trade partnerships of years past. The updated treaty now allows 99% of products to be tariff free—including Mexican agricultural exports that EU protectionism held back in the original agreement signed in 2000.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Two of the Mexican politicians indicted by the US for allegedly working for the Sinaloa cartel have voluntarily handed themselves over. Former Sinaloa security secretary Gerardo Mérida Sánchez and finance secretary Enrique Díaz surrendered to US authorities to collaborate in their investigations against close to a dozen Mexican politicians including Rubén Rocha Moya—until recently the governor of the state of Sinaloa.

They have been accused of facilitating the criminal enterprise of the family of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán—who is also cooperating with US authorities from his cell in New York. By walking into US custody, both the accused seem to be betting on softer sentences in exchange for information.

The turn of events changes things dramatically for the government of president Claudia Sheinbaum.

The debates around extradition and whether Sheinbaum has the political will to go through with handing over her own party members are moot as the accused willingly crossed the border. The question that now emerges is how the president will react as the evidence against the rest of the accused piles up.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

The Mexican economy is shrinking. Job creation is nowhere near the rates needed to keep unemployment down or underemployment at bay.

Against economic logic, consumption is still up. The argument that a higher minimum wage may be buoying consumption is losing currency as the big increases of the past fade into the distance. Indeed, for a while now higher wages have had the peculiar effect of boosting retail sales while keeping profits low.

Consumption is cooling, just not at the rate expected given the economic slowdown. Beyond the minimum wage, another trend seems to explain this effect.

In the first three months of 2026, consumer credit went up by 7.2%. Car sales were also up—by 3.7%—but it was the car loans that were really booming—they grew by 11.2% in the first quarter of 2026.

Traditionally, financial institutions did not give credit to the average Mexican. Banks seem to be loosening their previous standards—AI and hyper-personalisation of products are given as the reason for which they are taking greater risks. There seems to be another big reason for Mexico’s sudden boost in consumer credit.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Speculation is at a high as the governor of Sinaloa Ruben Rocha Moya, along with the mayor of its capital and a federal senator from the northwestern state, were issued indictments by the US. In total, 10 current and former Mexican officials have been charged with drug trafficking and weapons offenses in league with the Sinaloa cartel.

In a rush to fill up newspapers with content, analysts in Mexico have overthought the political machinations in the US concerning this case. Some predict that Trump is behind the indictment; a step in his plan to “do a Maduro” on Mexican soil. Others say it is a ploy to get the Mexican government to bend the knee lest it justify an excuse for direct US intervention against cartels.

Though one mustn’t discard even the most outlandish options with the Trump administration, in all likelihood the truth is that the Southern District Court of New York has most likely been working on this case since the Biden administration whisked one of the main bosses of the Sinaloa cartel into US custody. It is well known that this kingpin, along with prominent criminal leaders such as El Chapo, have been feeding information to investigators.

Despite the Mexican government’s rejection of the indictment on the ground that it doesn’t present enough evidence against ruling Morena party-affiliated politicians, it is likely that the case is tight enough to warrant going after such high profile foreign figures.

The slow bureaucratic gears of US justice have finally churned out a decisive conclusion. The ball is now in the court of Mexico’s even slower judicial machinery. The possible outcomes depend on a few convoluted but limited paths:

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Tariffs on steel for heavy-duty vehicles from Mexico to the US will be halved from 50% to 25%. The tax has been one of Donald Trump’s biggest trade war blows against his neighbours, so Mexican industry is celebrating. The joy might be short-lived.

The Mexico Political Economist predicted that steel tariffs would hurt the very industry that Trump was trying to protect—the US auto industry. A year later, reports began to emerge that higher duties were putting the sector, and particularly heavy-duty truck makers, at a competitive disadvantage… with Mexican truck manufacturers.

Tariffs on trucks followed, which in turn saw the devastation of the Mexican heavy-vehicle manufacturing sector.

So, while the tariff relief on steel may seem like good news for Mexico, the conditions set by the US to qualify send worrying signals. It is a new policy that is both a recognition of how the US auto industry is inextricably linked with Mexico’s and one which seeks to remedy and reverse this dependence.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

The ascent of Roberto Velasco to Foreign Minister dominated the conversation two weeks ago. And rightly so: His arrival at the Foreign Office marked a generational shift and showed what sort of figure president Claudia Sheinbaum wants in her government, particularly when facing the Trump administration.

A departure from a relatively more minor office of State to an undefined role understandably got far less coverage. But perhaps it shouldn’t have, given that it may define the future of Mexican politics for years to come even more than the current Foreign Secretary.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Mexico had placed the noose of natural gas dependency around its neck long before conflict with Iran strangled global hydrocarbon supplies. The country generates most of its electricity by burning natural gas, of which 75% is imported from the United States. The age of economic warfare must have had an effect on Claudia Sheinbaum’s government because last week the president announced that Mexico would now allow fracking.

It is a substantial—and rare—U-turn from her own and her predecessor’s policy.

Sheinbaum officials had been mulling the move for some time now, so the green light wasn’t all too surprising. What did raise eyebrows was how the Mexican government will try to square all of its aims.

When it comes to fracking, Sheinbaum said she intends to:

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

It’s a song and dance as old as time: When a President names a trusted figure who is not a career diplomat to high office, the procession of disapproving sounds from critics who bemoan the hollowing out of the foreign service follows inevitably.

Thus it was last week, when Roberto Velasco was named Mexico’s newest Foreign Minister. His youth, coupled with his meteoric rise baited critics who were already displeased by the fact that 38-year-old Velasco is not a career diplomat.

“A course isn’t enough,” decried one op-ed, referring to the course political appointees to top diplomatic positions get at Mexico’s prestigious foreign affairs academy, the Matías Romero Institute. Its mere existence suggests that this isn’t the first time this course has been needed to polish up the skills of amateur ambassadors-to-be.

Something is actually different this time though. Luckily for Velasco, in the age of Trump, previous handicaps may well now be advantages.

Read more

Holy Week is slightly after Spring Break in the United States, making these weeks the first big travel spike of the year after the January and February slowdown. Yet, just as Semana Santa shifts depending on the liturgical calendar from late March to late April, who goes where is also affected by tidal economic and social forces.

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

The yearly gathering of Mexico’s bankers has always hosted Mexican government officials. This time the feeling was different—and not in the way described last year with the arrival of a freshly-minted president Claudia Sheinbaum, whose administration has been seen as more pro-business than her predecessor’s.

The difference is one of tension—but in a good way, Fernando Gamez Carrillo, a compliance and risk manager in the Mexican banking sector, told The Mexico Political Economist.

“Both sides are challenging each other—in a good way. There is a sense of mutual responsibility,“ he said.

For first time it feels like both sides actually want to talk to each other. The resulting conversations consequently feel more like negotiations. Both sides agree the direction they want the country to go in—towards more investment and economic growth. It is the way each wants to get there that they are currently working out.

To get there, the Mexican banking sector had to wrestle with three fundamental questions at this year’s Banking Convention in Cancún:

Read more

The Big News Breakdown. Unpacking this week’s most important news.

Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) is the most powerful Mexican politician in living memory. He also has kept relatively quiet since he left office, promising to reemerge only when it mattered. This has only happened thrice: To support Mexico’s unprecedented judicial election, to shill for his recently published book, and to raise funds for Cuba.

“I’ve retired, but it hurts me to see how they’re seeking to exterminate our Cuban brothers for their ideals of freedom and the defense of their sovereignty,” tweeted out López Obrador before sharing a set of bank details.

This was so surprising that many thought López Obrador’s Twitter account may have been hacked. The format of the plea certainly seemed like a scam: An exhortation to donate money on behalf of the Cuban people to a private Mexican bank account.

The account was later found to be legitimate—allegedly linked to an organisation run by a close political ally. But the question as to why this powerful former president had emerged from his political slumber, after far more dramatic moments on the domestic front, remained.

Read more