As Mexican ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2013, Arturo Sarukhan has a lot of experience managing demands from Washington, where he still lives and teaches today.
The career diplomat told CBC News that President Claudia Sheinbaum’s handling of Donald Trump’s tariff threat was a deft act of staging.
“I think all of this was a bit of the proverbial kabuki. A lot of movement, a lot of noise, but actually little action,” he said.
Some MAGA followers (not all) are celebrating a win by the U.S. president, who ostensibly succeeded in forcing his neighbours to finally take seriously the issues at the borders by sending troops.
Not so fast, says Sarukhan.
“Since 2019, when Trump first threatened Mexico with punitive tariffs linked to migration, when Trump bragged that he had never seen anyone fold as quickly as the Mexican government did back then, the Mexican government has deployed national guard and army troops to the northern border.”
What’s old is new again
The Mexican military has been involved in the country’s cartel war since 2006.
Mexico’s navy, considered the most incorruptible force the government can call on, has long conducted some of the country’s most sensitive raids and arrests.
In June 2019, when Mexico first agreed to the deployment of 10,000 national guards to the U.S.-Mexican border, Mexico’s military had already been stationed at the Mexican-Guatemalan border for years in an effort to control the migrant caravans that were moving up through Central America.
U.S. President Donald Trump came back from the brink of a trade war by pausing tariffs against Canada and Mexico for 30 days — but what’s his ultimate goal? Andrew Chang breaks down what Trump says he still wants from Canada and what may really be at the heart of the tariff threats.
Photos supplied by The Canadian Press, Getty Images and Reuters.
Those forces remained in place at both borders after Joe Biden entered the White House.
In April 2021, Biden struck a deal with Mexico to extend the deployment.
In fact the Mexican Armed Forces, a more heavily armed force than the paramilitary national guard, has over 32,000 troops currently deployed to border duty, including 14,591 on the northern border.
“There seems to be a commitment to deploy additional troops to what’s already there. But obviously, a lot of this we will see evolve in the coming days,” Sarukhan said.
Sheinbaum was cagey about where the additional national guards would come from when asked about that in her Monday mañanera, or morning briefing, but Mexican media on Tuesday reported a number of flights from the country’s far south, suggesting that some of what is happening may be a reshuffling of troops from the southern Mexican border to the northern one.
Threats of missiles and coercion
Although Trump has threatened Canada’s sovereignty and made remarks about annexation through “economic force,” his and other Republicans’ language toward Mexico has included threats of, and calls for, unilateral military action against cartels inside Mexico.
On Monday, a U.S. spy plane caused an uproar in Mexico after it followed a flightpath up the Sea of Cortes between the Baja California peninsula and the coasts of Sonora and Sinaloa. Mexico’s Defence Ministry announced that the aircraft never entered Mexican airspace. Some Mexicans expressed skepticism about the official account.
The spy plane tracked parallel to the Sinaloa-Sonora coast and the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains behind it, the heartland of Mexican drug cultivation and of its richest drug cartel, the cartel of Sinaloa.
The unease provoked by the flight, and by the presence of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off Mexico’s coast, were an indication that the sensation of threatened sovereignty that some Canadians have been feeling is shared by Mexicans.
Different takes on the same deal
While Republicans and Democrats argue over whether Trump scored a win or a loss in Monday’s tariff reversal, there’s no doubt that the deal he presented to his followers sounded different than the one Sheinbaum described to the people of Mexico.
Sheinbaum claimed to have made progress on Mexico’s longstanding complaint that the U.S. allows arms to flow illegally into the hands of organized crime groups.
In her responses to the tariff threat, Sheinbaum has cited U.S. government statistics that show that most cartel arms come from the U.S., and in her Monday news conference she asked: “How is it possible that in Mexico there are grenade launchers that have been seized from criminal groups when this type of high-powered weapon is exclusively used by the U.S. Army.”
The former ambassador says both sides chose to emphasize the aspects of their agreement most likely to appeal to their supporters.
“Sheinbaum said the U.S. had agreed to work to stop the flow of guns coming into Mexico from the United States, which Trump doesn’t mention in his social media post,” Sarukhan said.
“Conversely, Trump says that the Mexican army or the national guard will actually be detaining Mexican and third-country national migrants inside of Mexico and on the border. That’s something Sheinbaum simply did not mention.”
Although unpopular in Mexico, that policy — like the other known parts of the agreement — is not really new. Mexico’s military has been carrying out law-enforcement duties for nearly 20 years and was empowered to do so until 2028 by a recent constitutional reform.
‘Slander’ from Trump
The most shocking aspect of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Mexico, says Sarukhan, is the direct allegation that the Mexican government is in an “intolerable alliance” with cartels.
“The government of Mexico has afforded safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics,” says the White House fact sheet, “which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”
“There’s an explicit linkage between the Mexican government and organized crime,” said Sarukhan, “something that had never happened in the U.S.-Mexico relationship.”
Sheinbaum called the claim “slander” and responded on X: “If there is anywhere that such an alliance in fact exists, it is in the gun stores of the United States that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups.”
She received strong support for her statement, including letters signed by all 31 Mexican state governors.
A ‘poisoned chalice’
Sheinbaum has pointed to several high-profile wins in Mexico’s war on the cartels, an increase in drug seizures and a decline in homicides since she assumed office on Oct. 1.
All that is true, says Sarukhan, but Sheinbaum’s burst of activity follows six years in which her predecessor and mentor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, showed lethargy in the fight against cartels.
“There is a tactical shift in the way the Sheinbaum government is taking on organized crime, particularly in Sinaloa, in part because of the internal food fight that erupted after ‘El Mayo’ Zambada’s rendition or surrender to U.S. authorities in July.”
“But the big problem here is that in many ways I think Lopez Obrador’s famous “hugs not bullets” strategy — what I would actually call hugs-for-thugs — has finally come home to roost. And it’s Sheinbaum who’ll be paying the bill even though this was not her policy. It’s the impact that those six years had on perceptions, real or not, of a ‘Pax Narco’ implemented by the Lopez Obrador administration, a sort of ‘if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you’ type of arrangement.”
Friendly visits to narco heartland
Lopez Obrador annoyed U.S. officials by making at least five visits to the small Sinaloan town of Badiraguato, where he met with the mother of Mexico’s most infamous cartel boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
On another occasion he ordered Mexican soldiers to release El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzman after they captured him in Culiacan, Sinaloa. (Ovidio Guzman was recaptured and extradited to the U.S. in 2023). El Chapo’s sons, known as “los Chapitos,” were instrumental in the switch to synthetic fentanyl by Mexican traffickers who had previously dealt in black-tar heroin refined from local poppies, and their faction of the Sinaloa cartel still trafficks the deadly drug into the U.S. today.
Lopez Obrador’s legacy of leniency, and the anger it caused in Washington, is the “poisoned chalice” that he bequeathed to his successor Sheinbaum, said Sarukhan.
The threat of American unilateral use of force, said Sarukhan, “really changes the potential dynamics of the U.S. Mexico relationship going forward.”
Stronger together
Convinced that the tariff threat will continue to hang over both Canada and Mexico, Sarukhan said that, so far, Canadian officials have been more active than their Mexican counterparts. Several Canadian cabinet ministers have been meeting with U.S. officials in Washington in recent weeks.
“I think Canada did extremely well to the detriment of Mexico,” he said. “Not a single Mexican cabinet secretary has come to Washington, D.C., since Claudia Sheinbaum’s government was inaugurated.”
Sarukhan said he remains concerned that continental trade could unravel, and the two governments need to recognize they are stronger in tandem.
“You’ve seen instances of both Conservative and Liberal Canadian governments in the past tempted to throw Mexico under the bus when they feel that their bilateral relationship with the United States is at risk. I do believe that it always strengthens Canada and Mexico’s hand when we work together to deter policies that impact us both negatively.
“I think it’s going to be bumpy,” he told CBC News. “Trump will continue to talk loudly and carry a big stick. But I think that if both governments can mobilize their alliances and their constituencies in the United States, governors and mayors and trade associations of states that depend on trade with Mexico and with Canada, if we can adequately mobilize that to create pressure on the administration and if Canada and Mexico stick together, I think we can bulletproof USMCA.”
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