From March 15-20, 2025, I led an expedition to Mexico City on behalf of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and America First Policy Institute to get the perspectives of local partners living under Mexico’s MORENA regime.

Since December 2019, TPPF has consistently argued that Mexico’s MORENA regime, a left-populist movement closely allied with that nation’s major criminal cartels, is an untrustworthy partner to the United States, and a dangerous neighbor to Texas. We have argued that any accommodation or arrangement reached with that regime is, by reason of that regime’s nature, temporary and transactional; and that therefore policy for the United States and Texas vis a vis Mexico must be informed by a combination of aggressive verification of any Mexican undertaking or promise, a recognition that the political-criminal alliance is at the core of Mexican civics, and an understanding that the credible threat of unilateral American hard power is the indispensable prerequisite to any relationship with the Mexican regime.

The Foundation has a robust record of research and media publications across the past several years on these topics, the most-recent examples of the latter being these two:

To put the toplines up front, our major policy recommendations are:

For the United States, to leverage the forthcoming review of USMCA, due no later than July 1, 2026, as its moment of maximum leverage versus Mexico, expanding it from a renegotiation of trade and commerce to an all-topics and wide-ranging redefinition of the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico relationship. The major points sought by the United States, all in the direct American interest, ought to include:

  • Breaking of the Mexican regime’s alliance with its criminal cartels, to include both political and military ties.
  • Accountability, administered by the United States, for major political and military figures involved in that alliance.
  • Denial of Mexican strategic autonomy with respect to its criminal cartels, leftist autocracies within the hemisphere, and extra-hemispheric powers.
  • Mexican adherence to treaty obligations toward the United States presently unfulfilled, especially the 1944 treaty on Rio Grande-basin water, and the agricultural provisions of USMCA itself.
  • Fair trade between Mexico and the United States.
  • Mexican-regime abandonment of its program to remake Mexican society along Venezuelan lines.

For Texas, to seize the opportunity afforded by a Constitutionally oriented Presidential Administration in Washington, D.C., to continue and accelerate the creation of its own apparatus and force for the protection of its border with Mexico.

 

Rather than a narrative readout of each conversation, major points aggregated and synthesized from the entire week of exchanges are broken into four themes below:

President Claudia Sheinbaum’s strategy and goal versus the United States

Those who believed that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum would prove an uncharismatic nonentity in power, having ascended to office mostly because of her predecessor’s popularity — a number including this author — have been proven wrong. Sheinbaum’s approach to governance, especially with respect to the Mexican relationship with the United States, has been measured and canny, yielding success in the short term unmatched by any other foreign power.

Sheinbaum’s operating theory of action versus the Americans is simple: delivering us wins on matters of purely tactical and operational concern for her — specifically the temporary shutdown of human trafficking, elevated interceptions of fentanyl, and the handover of organized-crime leadership in custody — will safeguard the strategic items of concern for her, which are the MORENA officeholders and leadership who liaise with, collaborate with, and profit from organized crime. Sheinbaum believes that Americans sufficiently appreciative of progress to date will refrain from requesting the full breaking of the MORENA-cartel alliance, which she has implicitly communicated is a red line in the relationship.

This implicit communication has yielded results: the constituency arguing that we should take what is on offer from Sheinbaum now, accepting tactical and operational victories without pressing for a strategic win, include Mexican business groups, American business groups, USG personnel in Washington, D.C., and USG personnel in Mexico City on both the security and political sides. This is a highly effective approach on the part of the MORENA regime, and the political leadership in the United States ought to understand it for what it is. That American leadership ought also understand that the reason the MORENA regime is able to abruptly shut down human trafficking, seize fentanyl, and hand over criminal personnel is because it plays a central role in originating and controlling all of it.

Concurrent with safeguarding its political leadership in liaison with the cartels, Sheinbaum also has as a strategic goal the limitation of the forthcoming USMCA reauthorization negotiations to strict trade and commerce. Any expansion beyond those topics will be understood as a strategic failure on the part of the MORENA regime, risking a scenario in which the United States demands full accountability from its Mexican partner.

The implied threat to the United States, should it go beyond what the MORENA regime has on offer now, in terms of demands on security and accountability, is that Mexico will abandon the relationship entirely, and withhold all cooperation with the United States. This threat succeeded in cowing the Biden regime: it ought not succeed in deterring the Trump Administration. The obvious reality is that the United States possesses every advantage in this relationship except, prior to 20 January 2025, the psychological: greater economic power, greater cultural power, greater financial power, and greater military power than the Mexican state could ever muster. If the MORENA regime wishes to threaten an end to cooperation with the U.S. because it will not — to pick a real-world example — end its army’s participation in the drug trade from Guerrero northward, then the United States should accept those terms. The United States can prosper without access to Mexican markets and manufacturing, and has done so. Mexico, by contrast, has never prospered without access to the United States.

The nature of Mexican civics and its reaction to pluralism

One theme we returned to often in our conversations was the nature of Mexican civics across time, with unstable and violent federalism exchanging places somewhat stable and comparatively peaceful centralism, and vice versa. This alternation of models, predicted by Alexis De Tocqueville — who assessed that the models of Anglo-American republicanism were poorly suited to the Spanish-American republics — to be a source of perennial discord, is again coming to the fore. More than one interlocutor noted that a major source of Mexican violence now was the breaking of the direct line from the center to the criminal peripheries with the election of two PAN presidents in 2000-2012: this spurred a competition of local powerholders for criminal alliances, and vice versa. In that respect, MORENA-supermajoritarian rule following the 2 June 2024 elections can be interpreted as the beginning of a restoration of the status quo ante, with MORENA rather than the old PRI as the national party sponsor of Mexican organized crime.

Mexico can also be understood, in this framework, as a victim of globalization, with NAFTA / USMCA having driven or accelerated the internal multipolarity that is a major driver of its violence and instability. One interlocutor further noted that the MORENA thesis of poverty driving violence was inverted from reality: in Mexico, it is increased prosperity that spurs violence, as incentive to cooperate paradoxically (from an American perspective) diminishes with increased resources. (For an in-depth look at the societal factors underlying this phenomenon, see Jorge Castañeda’s 2011 Mañana Forever.) This raises uncomfortable questions for American policymakers accustomed to assuming direct causation between wealth and liberality. In Mexico, it may be a choice of one of two.

MORENA, in this latest iteration of the restoration of Mexican centralism, has been aggressively eradicating the independent bureaucracies, agencies, and alternate centers of power that might curb its rule: for example the national electoral institute, which was arguably superior to any U.S. counterpart; the national statistical and information institute; and most famously, the independent judiciary. The last is now wholly replaced by elected officeholders who will largely be MORENA functionaries, given the habit of MORENA’s cartel allies of killing well-performing candidates of other parties. In this context, MORENA protests that it cannot be held responsible for criminality within Mexico wear thin: having amassed control, it amasses responsibility as well.

Opposition personnel with whom we met repeatedly exhorted us, as Americans, to compel MORENA to abandon its program of centralization and revolutionary reform of Mexican society — especially the judicial reform. Having failed to persuade its fellow citizens, or to show themselves effective leaders, they now resort to a plea for what a colleague correctly noted is 外圧, gaiatsu, the Japanese term for foreign pressure in lieu of domestic action. The gaiatsu mechanism has a robust history of efficacy in Mexico, and it is not irrational for opposition lawmakers to seek it. Nevertheless the American policymaker ought to be aware of this desire and agenda, and understand that it exists because the opposition is essentially irrelevant. This in turn leads to another uncomfortable realization for the United States: though MORENA as it exists is intolerable in its ambition and activity, there is no meaningful alternative to it in 2025. If there is not one by 2030, we will be confronted with difficult choices.

MORENA is centralizing, but it is not the only powerholder in Mexico. Its allied criminal cartels — and the cartels with whom it is not allied — possess substantive power on their own, including popular adherence that is a long-term danger to the state. The citizenry of the highland town of Jesús María, Sinaloa, having been subjected to weeks of effective blockade and services cutoff prior to a Mexican-army assault in pursuit of Sinaloa-cartel leadership in early 2023, turned on their own national army when it appeared. One interlocutor told us that the army left townspeople’s corpses to rot in the open: they were sucios, said the soldiers, dirty. This is of course a classic scenario for the inception of insurgency.

Mexican organized crime’s alliance with the left

Multiple interlocutors exhorted us to understand that the organized-crime relationship with the political left is not just a Mexican phenomenon, but one repeated across Latin America. It is indisputably true that cartels have close strategic relationships with leftist regimes in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and beyond: by contrast, there are few examples of more than opportunistic liaisons between right-of-center regimes and cartels anywhere in the hemisphere. The thesis is that leftist regimes and cartels engage in a circular exchange: the cartels provide the leftist regimes with funds and (coerced) votes they would otherwise lack; and the leftist regimes provide the cartels with political cover and access to state goods. What this means is that fighting cartels means fighting the leftist state, and vice versa.

This competition for public goods is a major driver of the state-cartel alliance in Mexico and elsewhere. Multiple interlocutors derided the American conceit that mere legalization of drugs, or labor flows, would disempower the cartels and their state allies. What the White House called the “intolerable alliance” flourishes in the absence of formal illegality of goods, because the goods themselves — of any kind — are the sources of profit. This is clearly seen in cartel operations in, for example, the agricultural regions of Michoacan and Guerrero, in which limes and avocados are among the major profit centers for cartel operations.

Guerrero is a useful case study, as the major cartel controlling poppy and other agricultural production there is (we were informed multiple times) none other than SEDENA, the Mexican Army. SEDENA has always been engaged in cartel operations, but the MORENA regime has deliberately drawn it in further by offering profitable concessions in the operations of major public works, and major criminal enterprises. This cooperative partnership of the left, criminal enterprise, and the armed forces is also seen throughout Latin America — and in places like the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. As a major criminal enterprise in its own right, SEDENA opens its armories to associated groups, for example local autodefensas fighting the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación. SEDENA armories are likely also responsible for the emerging problem of land-mine belts along the border between Jalisco and Michoacán.

One person in a position of authority informed us that the Mexico Te Abraza program, operated under the auspices of Mexico’s Guardia Nacional — itself subordinated to SEDENA — and responsible for taking in deportees from the United States, was merely remanding the deportees directly to human-trafficking cartels, which now hold them in reserve for the future reopening of northward movement across the U.S. border.

The circular exchange between cartels and the left means that state-sponsored killing has emerged as a uniquely predatory phenomenon, even in the already accentuated context of Mexican civic violence. More than one interlocutor told us that he feared the state ordering the local cartel to kill him much more than he feared the local cartel electing to do so on its own. There is a perception that the cartels, vicious as they are, operate by some sorts of rules: for example, the cartels are perceived to tolerate public opposition to (though not interference with) their activities. (This author is not fully persuaded of this case.) The state, on the other hand, will kill for mere opposition.

The near-term future

American policymakers should be alert to the possibility of President Claudia Sheinbaum leveraging the aforementioned 外圧, gaiatsu, against intra-party rivals — especially if, as is rumored, she allows the arrest and extradition of cartel-linked politicians. (It was suggested to us by multiple sources that this may be Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya.) This could be interpreted as a cleanout of the party apparatus by one faction versus another, but it is a near-certainty that it will be publicly presented as a sincere break with the “corrupt” MORENA in favor of the “clean” party. (Targets of a Sheinbaum faction here, likely in partnership with Ebrard, might include Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, Ricardo Monreal Ávila, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, Adán Augusto López, et al.) Though this author rates this possibility as low, it is not nonzero, and therefore U.S. leadership should be aware and have a framework for ensuring that any break with corruption is real rather than merely presentational. This outcome of course also raises the question, mentioned above, of whether the best-case outcome for the United States in Mexico is a reinforced autocracy.

The news, across the past several days, of the extermination facilities at Teuchitlán suggest that the more-probable course for Sheinbaum is exactly as predicted at the outset of this memorandum: aggressive protection of even the worst elements of MORENA’s cartel politicians, even in the most horrific of circumstances. The cartel-run ranch at Teuchitlán was discovered to have multiple crematoria for the incineration of over one thousand human corpses, Santa-Muerte rite altars, personal effects collected and sorted in a manner reminiscent of Auschwitz, torture facilities, and more. The reaction of the President of Mexico has been to denounce it as, essentially, fake news; and MORENA authorities have been scrubbing the site of evidence. This, more than any cooperation with U.S. authorities, is in this author’s opinion the real face of the MORENA regime.

Finally, we wish to call attention to the reality that neither the American nor the Mexican side in this relationship seem to know the other’s true red lines, nor the consequences of crossing them. That communication must be established — and to the extent that the American ones remain unformed, we urge them to be aggressive and comprehensive, as proposed above.

 

Joshua Treviño is the Chief Transformation Officer at TPPF and Senior Fellow for the Western Hemisphere Initiative at AFPI.