Mexico is increasingly ill at ease with U.S.-Mexico, especially Trump, relations. Our country really needs to understand just how inter-connected we are economically and otherwise. -Angela
Despite pressing
domestic concerns, Mr Ríos Piter now also has a new worry abroad:
President Donald Trump. Some 1m Mexicans from Guerrero live in the
United States, he says; they tell him they “feel frightened” by rumours
of looming immigration raids and deportations.
In a country whose leaders have intermittently resorted to anti-Americanism to prop up autocratic rule or justify protectionist policies, modernisers have long laboured to overcome distrust of the United States. The resentment was learned early, in childhood lessons about gringos con colmillos, or fanged Americans, stealing territory in the 19th century and, more recently, oppressing the 36m Mexicans who live over the border, as many as 6m of them without legal papers.
Thanks to such pacts as the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed 25 years ago, Mexico and the United States have built powerful networks of interdependence. The relationship has remained prickly, and unequal. But since the days of John F. Kennedy, both countries have believed that building an open, prosperous, democratic and stable Mexico was in their mutual interest. NAFTA arguably hastened the end of one-party rule in Mexico, and has anchored everything from electoral reforms to central-bank independence.
All this now seems uncertain. Mexicans are confronted with an American president who gave campaign speeches about Mexican migrants murdering “beautiful” American girls, attacked NAFTA as a job-killing disaster and made fantastical promises to build a border wall that Mexico would pay for. As damagingly, Mr Trump’s attacks on the media and praise for autocratic leaders make it sound quaint for democratic politicians in Mexico to defend a free press and human rights, or to call for the country to open to the world.
Team Trump has proposed revisions to NAFTA that neither Mexico nor Canada could accept, such as a call to review the pact every five years, a move that would wreck investor confidence. These demands challenge the very idea of North American value chains, in which jobs are kept in Mexico, Canada and the United States by sourcing labour and materials in all three countries, allowing firms to compete with rivals in Asia or other emerging markets.
Indeed, Mexican officials worry that Mr Trump is not merely driving a hard bargain, but wants his voters to see his country win and Mexico humiliated in a zero-sum contest. Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, scolded Canada and Mexico for their “resistance” to American demands in the most recent round of NAFTA talks. When told that radical changes might undermine confidence, Mr Lighthizer answered coldly: “Why is it a good policy for the United States government to encourage investment in Mexico?”
Shrewd Mexicans, seeing a crisis that their country cannot solve alone, are recruiting allies north of the border to argue that the United States benefits greatly from co-operation with Mexico. Mr Ríos Piter, for one, thinks hard about public opinion in American farm states like Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska. Earlier this year he wrote a bill proposing a cap on purchases of yellow corn from the United States, and urging the government to replace them with imports from Brazil, Canada or Argentina. Though the bill was more a symbolic warning than the first shot in a trade war, it jangled nerves in Washington and in farm-state capitals. It was meant to.
To Mr Ríos Piter, who supports free trade, Mr Trump was exploiting “a gap filled with ignorance”. American farmers export $2.6bn worth of corn a year to Mexico, mostly as cattle feed (Mexican cuisine relies on largely home-grown white corn). But because farmers sell to intermediaries, Mr Ríos Piter thinks that many Americans living in conservative states that voted for Mr Trump “did not have a clear idea” of the importance of the Mexican market.
In a speech this year in Washington, DC, Ricardo Anaya, the young, ambitious leader of Mexico’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), noted that the value of two-way trade has grown sixfold under NAFTA. A wonkish sort, he spreads out charts at PAN headquarters showing how American manufacturing jobs were stable for years after NAFTA came into force in 1994, only to collapse after China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
Margarita Zavala, the wife of Mexico’s former president, Felipe Calderón, recently broke with the PAN to launch an independent presidential bid ahead of elections in July 2018. She says bluntly that the bilateral relationship is “being poisoned”. Like other opposition leaders, she sharply criticises the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, for welcoming Mr Trump to Mexico with the pomp of a government leader when the New Yorker was still a candidate. Ms Zavala wants Mexico to think “creatively”, lobbying border-state governors to stand up to Mr Trump and city mayors to shield Mexicans from deportation.
For decades Mexico’s government has worked to prevent disputes in one field, such as trade, from contaminating other areas of co-operation, such as security and intelligence-sharing. Now that strategy has been turned on its head. All the talk is of linkage and leverage, to give the transactional Mr Trump a taste of his own medicine. Alas, says Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence officer, such an approach carries risks. Mexican security services have become “dependent” on American drones and signals intelligence in dealing with drug gangs and terrorists. America’s Drug Enforcement Administration controls probably the country’s largest pool of criminal informants. One American veteran of the drug wars recalls how a drug lord was taken down after hiring 50 prostitutes for a Christmas party, not realising that some were in the pay of American spooks.
Some populist Mexican politicians talk of opening the country’s southern border to migrants from Central America, giving them train tickets northwards to Texas. Not so fast, says Mr Hope. Mexico has faced its own influx of asylum-seekers from Haiti and Africa, and simply opening its frontiers could create new headaches. Mexico might gain some leverage by denying the CIA access to southern border crossings in places like Tapachula, where American officials currently get to question migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in search of terrorists. A breakdown in security ties would also endanger the discreet extradition of high-ranking crime and terrorism suspects to the United States. But Mexico could suffer too, for instance if American-funded training for prosecutors and judges were interrupted.
Perhaps the most potent argument in America is the warning that Mr Trump risks turning Mexico’s election into a contest of anti-Americanism—particularly if he abandons NAFTA. He might empower Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a strident class warrior who will stage his third presidential bid in 2018, and who is compared by critics to Hugo Chávez, the late authoritarian leader of Venezuela. Strikingly, one of Mr López Obrador’s closest allies, Yeidckol Polevnsky, is at pains to reject comparisons with Chávez or Mr Trump, and even the label “populist”. Ms Polevnsky, the secretary-general of the Movement for National Regeneration, insists that her boss, if elected, would be serious and responsible and would not compete with “the Trump show”. The electoral calculation is clear enough: it is popular to be against Mr Trump, but less profitable to be like him.
Enrique Krauze, a leading historian and essayist, is sure that, if elected president, Mr López Obrador would seek to accrue the powers of a strongman. A further risk is that as a proudly parochial man who speaks no English, Mr López Obrador would lack the savvy to navigate domestic American politics, hobbling attempts to go around Mr Trump and rally a cross-border North American coalition. “He has this mystical thing, that he will go to Trump and explain that he is not being reasonable,” says a sorrowful Mr Krauze.
For now, Mexican officials are taking solace in the more collaborative attitude of several members of Team Trump, including Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Optimists say that Mexico’s democratic institutions have grown strong enough to resist backsliding. Mr Krauze notes that Mexico has seen protests against Mr Trump but not broader demonstrations against the United States: “Mexico is a good neighbour, not out of love, but pragmatism, realism and, yes, an undercurrent of respect.”
Still, unease is spreading. Mexican leaders feel abandoned by American politicians who should know better, but are scared of Mr Trump and his voters. Mexicans are not the only allies of the United States who feel that way.
New fences make bad neighbours: Donald Trump could set off a nationalist backlash in Mexico
Mexican reformists fear that populism will beget populism
In a country whose leaders have intermittently resorted to anti-Americanism to prop up autocratic rule or justify protectionist policies, modernisers have long laboured to overcome distrust of the United States. The resentment was learned early, in childhood lessons about gringos con colmillos, or fanged Americans, stealing territory in the 19th century and, more recently, oppressing the 36m Mexicans who live over the border, as many as 6m of them without legal papers.
Thanks to such pacts as the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed 25 years ago, Mexico and the United States have built powerful networks of interdependence. The relationship has remained prickly, and unequal. But since the days of John F. Kennedy, both countries have believed that building an open, prosperous, democratic and stable Mexico was in their mutual interest. NAFTA arguably hastened the end of one-party rule in Mexico, and has anchored everything from electoral reforms to central-bank independence.
All this now seems uncertain. Mexicans are confronted with an American president who gave campaign speeches about Mexican migrants murdering “beautiful” American girls, attacked NAFTA as a job-killing disaster and made fantastical promises to build a border wall that Mexico would pay for. As damagingly, Mr Trump’s attacks on the media and praise for autocratic leaders make it sound quaint for democratic politicians in Mexico to defend a free press and human rights, or to call for the country to open to the world.
Team Trump has proposed revisions to NAFTA that neither Mexico nor Canada could accept, such as a call to review the pact every five years, a move that would wreck investor confidence. These demands challenge the very idea of North American value chains, in which jobs are kept in Mexico, Canada and the United States by sourcing labour and materials in all three countries, allowing firms to compete with rivals in Asia or other emerging markets.
Indeed, Mexican officials worry that Mr Trump is not merely driving a hard bargain, but wants his voters to see his country win and Mexico humiliated in a zero-sum contest. Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, scolded Canada and Mexico for their “resistance” to American demands in the most recent round of NAFTA talks. When told that radical changes might undermine confidence, Mr Lighthizer answered coldly: “Why is it a good policy for the United States government to encourage investment in Mexico?”
Shrewd Mexicans, seeing a crisis that their country cannot solve alone, are recruiting allies north of the border to argue that the United States benefits greatly from co-operation with Mexico. Mr Ríos Piter, for one, thinks hard about public opinion in American farm states like Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska. Earlier this year he wrote a bill proposing a cap on purchases of yellow corn from the United States, and urging the government to replace them with imports from Brazil, Canada or Argentina. Though the bill was more a symbolic warning than the first shot in a trade war, it jangled nerves in Washington and in farm-state capitals. It was meant to.
To Mr Ríos Piter, who supports free trade, Mr Trump was exploiting “a gap filled with ignorance”. American farmers export $2.6bn worth of corn a year to Mexico, mostly as cattle feed (Mexican cuisine relies on largely home-grown white corn). But because farmers sell to intermediaries, Mr Ríos Piter thinks that many Americans living in conservative states that voted for Mr Trump “did not have a clear idea” of the importance of the Mexican market.
In a speech this year in Washington, DC, Ricardo Anaya, the young, ambitious leader of Mexico’s conservative National Action Party (PAN), noted that the value of two-way trade has grown sixfold under NAFTA. A wonkish sort, he spreads out charts at PAN headquarters showing how American manufacturing jobs were stable for years after NAFTA came into force in 1994, only to collapse after China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
Margarita Zavala, the wife of Mexico’s former president, Felipe Calderón, recently broke with the PAN to launch an independent presidential bid ahead of elections in July 2018. She says bluntly that the bilateral relationship is “being poisoned”. Like other opposition leaders, she sharply criticises the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, for welcoming Mr Trump to Mexico with the pomp of a government leader when the New Yorker was still a candidate. Ms Zavala wants Mexico to think “creatively”, lobbying border-state governors to stand up to Mr Trump and city mayors to shield Mexicans from deportation.
For decades Mexico’s government has worked to prevent disputes in one field, such as trade, from contaminating other areas of co-operation, such as security and intelligence-sharing. Now that strategy has been turned on its head. All the talk is of linkage and leverage, to give the transactional Mr Trump a taste of his own medicine. Alas, says Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence officer, such an approach carries risks. Mexican security services have become “dependent” on American drones and signals intelligence in dealing with drug gangs and terrorists. America’s Drug Enforcement Administration controls probably the country’s largest pool of criminal informants. One American veteran of the drug wars recalls how a drug lord was taken down after hiring 50 prostitutes for a Christmas party, not realising that some were in the pay of American spooks.
Some populist Mexican politicians talk of opening the country’s southern border to migrants from Central America, giving them train tickets northwards to Texas. Not so fast, says Mr Hope. Mexico has faced its own influx of asylum-seekers from Haiti and Africa, and simply opening its frontiers could create new headaches. Mexico might gain some leverage by denying the CIA access to southern border crossings in places like Tapachula, where American officials currently get to question migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in search of terrorists. A breakdown in security ties would also endanger the discreet extradition of high-ranking crime and terrorism suspects to the United States. But Mexico could suffer too, for instance if American-funded training for prosecutors and judges were interrupted.
Perhaps the most potent argument in America is the warning that Mr Trump risks turning Mexico’s election into a contest of anti-Americanism—particularly if he abandons NAFTA. He might empower Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a strident class warrior who will stage his third presidential bid in 2018, and who is compared by critics to Hugo Chávez, the late authoritarian leader of Venezuela. Strikingly, one of Mr López Obrador’s closest allies, Yeidckol Polevnsky, is at pains to reject comparisons with Chávez or Mr Trump, and even the label “populist”. Ms Polevnsky, the secretary-general of the Movement for National Regeneration, insists that her boss, if elected, would be serious and responsible and would not compete with “the Trump show”. The electoral calculation is clear enough: it is popular to be against Mr Trump, but less profitable to be like him.
Enrique Krauze, a leading historian and essayist, is sure that, if elected president, Mr López Obrador would seek to accrue the powers of a strongman. A further risk is that as a proudly parochial man who speaks no English, Mr López Obrador would lack the savvy to navigate domestic American politics, hobbling attempts to go around Mr Trump and rally a cross-border North American coalition. “He has this mystical thing, that he will go to Trump and explain that he is not being reasonable,” says a sorrowful Mr Krauze.
For now, Mexican officials are taking solace in the more collaborative attitude of several members of Team Trump, including Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Optimists say that Mexico’s democratic institutions have grown strong enough to resist backsliding. Mr Krauze notes that Mexico has seen protests against Mr Trump but not broader demonstrations against the United States: “Mexico is a good neighbour, not out of love, but pragmatism, realism and, yes, an undercurrent of respect.”
Still, unease is spreading. Mexican leaders feel abandoned by American politicians who should know better, but are scared of Mr Trump and his voters. Mexicans are not the only allies of the United States who feel that way.
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