Her government is now on a collision course with both the United States and with basic Mexican democratic civics.
It’s easy to feel sorry for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has the misfortune of presiding over the worst crisis in U.S.–Mexican relations in a century. The crisis has been building since the April 19 deaths of two CIA officers in Chihuahua, followed by the April 29 U.S. indictments of an array of Mexican officeholders, including a governor and a senator. The ruling Morena party, shot through with narco-corruption to the top levels and aware that the American indictments can go much further, is now in disarray over events. Sheinbaum, who is not known to be in her party’s narco faction, is saddled with a crisis she arguably did not create.
It is therefore perplexing that the Mexican president seems determined to worsen that crisis — and to do so in ways that place her and her regime in a no-win scenario. In the face of the American exposure of Morena’s long-standing partnerships with cartels, she has chosen confrontation with the United States rather than to adhere to her established doctrine of cooperación sin subordinación.
For Sheinbaum, it’s one thing to deliver cartel men to the Americans, but it’s another entirely to deliver Morena politicians who have directly aided those cartels for years. The latter risks fatally splintering Morena, and the welfare of her party — not her country — is Sheinbaum’s first priority. She’s an ideologue, not a narco, and she knows that her program of “transformation” of Mexican civics — to which she is genuinely committed — is impossible without the Morena edifice of governance. That protection of the party above all else, narco ties and all, explains Sheinbaum’s two extraordinary moves over the past week. Morena, facing for the first time a real threat to its rule, is preparing for an extended confrontation against enemies foreign and domestic. In doing so, it risks both the relationship with the United States and the integrity of Mexican democratic civics.
The worldview of Morena, inherited from a long tradition on the Mexican left, is essentially conspiratorial and exclusionary. In the Morena mindset, the Mexican nation is wholly identified with the party, and the opponents of the party are therefore the enemies of the nation. Those opponents constitute a coordinated unity, with foreign critics working directly with domestic opposition, each laboring to overthrow not Morena, but Mexico itself. There is in this framework no such thing as a legitimate domestic opposition, as it is alternately traitorous in advancing foreign interests or traitorous in attacking the sole party of the people.
President Sheinbaum, in a rally Sunday marking the second anniversary of her election, articulated the mindset in denouncing “a subservient [Mexican] right, willing to celebrate and even promote the pressures of foreign politicians.” Her reference was to opposition figures, mostly from the PAN party, who have pointed toward the U.S. indictments as evidence of Morena corruption. They are complicit in what she describes as an American agenda to assume de facto governance of Mexico. “It is legitimate to doubt the true interest in extradition proceedings against elected officials,” she said. “They come for some, then for others, until the United States Department of Justice becomes the main power broker in Mexico.” Mexico, said Sheinbaum, “does not accept interference! We are a free, independent, and sovereign country!” This is true except to the extent that the practical sovereign across much of Mexico is one of Morena’s cartel partners.
The Mexican president amended her comments slightly the next day, perhaps having been reminded that the renegotiations of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement are still unfinished, to exempt President Trump from her own condemnation of his government. “I do not believe it is President Trump who is leading this offensive on issues concerning Mexico,” she said at her morning press conference, instead blaming a union of “far right” figures in the U.S. and Mexico. Nevertheless, the underlying critique remained intact: Mexico is under attack, and there is no room for cooperation in extraditions of indicted Morena politicians. The narco-political core of Morena will be defended.
Yet even as the Americans received a minor rhetorical reprieve from the Mexican president, the Mexican opposition that stands between Morena and total control received a hammer blow when the Mexican senate advanced a constitutional amendment allowing the nullification of elections subjected to foreign interference. The state interest in preventing direct foreign engagement in Mexican elections is obvious and legitimate. The breadth and imprecision of the language in this amendment, however, is widely understood to facilitate the Morena leadership’s application of its theory of united action by the American and Mexican right. An American opinion column in an American publication on a Mexican election, for example, could constitute foreign interference. (The Morena regime itself is in a glass house on this front. Its founder and central figure, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has a long history of “interference” in U.S. elections, not least through exhorting Mexican-American citizens to vote for specific candidates.) A Mexican judiciary already “reformed” to all-elected status under Morena rule is likely to apply the provision exactly as the regime hopes.
Mexican civics, already in a parlous state, will advance a bit closer to party autocracy when, as expected, the Morena-controlled Mexican states enshrine the amendment in the national constitution.
It’s easy to feel sorry for Claudia Sheinbaum. But it would be a mistake to do so, because even if she did not incept the crisis, she has made it worse by every measure. Her government is now on a collision course with both the United States and with basic Mexican democratic civics, and she has chosen both ends. The resolution of the conflict is difficult to discern in its particulars, but at least one of the outcomes is already clear.
Mexico’s regime is dragging it toward the abyss — and the damage done will take a generation to repair.