By Jim Geraghty
Friday, August 01, 2025
One of the recurring observations of this newsletter is
that the U.S. media covers issues about the U.S.-Mexico border on a regular
basis but pays much less attention to what is actually going on in Mexico. I
suspect this is because the preferred narratives in most of the mainstream
media are that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border
Patrol are mean and scary, those coming across the border are sympathetic poor
people who just want a better life, and those who want U.S. immigration laws
enforced are deplorable xenophobes. Looking too closely at the Mexican
government, and its policy choices, are an impediment to those narratives.
Minimizing U.S. news coverage of the Mexican government
has not succeeded in making Americans think better of it. Many Americans
believe that the officials running the country from
the National Palace in Mexico City are corrupt and incompetent. A poll in
August 2024 found that 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Mexico;
two-thirds of U.S. adults said the Mexican government is doing a bad job
dealing with “the large number of people seeking asylum at the border,
including 48 percent who say it is doing a very bad job.”
In June 2024, Mexico elected a new president, Claudia
Sheinbaum, a leftist. (That’s not a pejorative, it’s how the Associated Press labels her — a term it does not use for Bernie Sanders.) She is the protégé of
outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or “AMLO.”
In September, AMLO rammed through sweeping constitutional
reforms before he left office effectively eliminating judicial independence by
making all judges elected. In June, Mexico had those judicial elections, with
13 percent turnout. Sheinbaum called the election “a complete success.”
(Did you hear any American progressive objecting to these
elections? I don’t ever want to hear another complaint about low turnout in
American elections again.)
This morning, the New York Times ran a fairly in-depth article under the headline, “Corruption
Scandal Puts Mexico’s President on Defense Against Trump” (remember, it’s not
merely that the corruption scandal is bad in and of itself; it is bad because
it is weakening Sheinbaum in her disputes with the Trump administration):
At the scandal’s center is the
senator, Adán Augusto López Hernández, a former interior minister and governor
of Tabasco State, and a close confidante of former President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador. Two men Mr. López appointed in Tabasco, a secretary of security
and state police chief, are now wanted by the Mexican government and Interpol,
facing charges of leading a criminal group involved in drug trafficking.
Actually, the Interpol red notice against Hernán Bermúdez
Requena, the former Secretary of Security of Tabasco, says that he allegedly founded a criminal group. Hey, who says
government officials never demonstrate initiative or want to get a better
understanding of the business world?
Mr. López has not been accused of
any crimes, and President Claudia Sheinbaum and her ruling party, Morena, have
closed ranks behind him.
But the case strikes at the heart
of one of Mr. Trump’s most sensitive accusations: that Mexico’s political elite
is unwilling to purge itself of the corruption that has long provided the
cartels cover and impunity. The Mexican government has denied those
allegations.
In January 2024, ProPublica published a report that
should have been a bombshell — the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had collected
evidence that major cocaine traffickers had funneled some $2 million to AMLO’s
first presidential campaign, in exchange for promises that AMLO would
facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations. In other words, the Mexican president had been in the pocket of the cartels the
whole time.
(Keep that in mind when you read that in June 2024, President Joe Biden “thanked President López
Obrador for the strong and constructive partnership they have built to enhance
our bilateral economic cooperation, manage migration at our shared border, and
advance regional security and prosperity.” All of this was after President
Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, former Senator Ken Salazar, had demonstrated a “worrying pattern” of “contradict[ing] his own
government’s policies in the interest of aligning himself with President Andrés
Manuel López Obrador.”)
The Times continues:
The case may demonstrate a break
between Ms. Sheinbaum and her mentor, Mr. López Obrador. During his six-year
term, violence skyrocketed across Mexico and cartels expanded their territory
as he pursued a “hugs not bullets” strategy, directing less government
confrontation of criminal groups and more social spending.
As the Washington Post wrote back 2018, “‘Abrazos,
no balazos’ — or ‘hugs, not gunfire’ was one of AMLO’s campaign slogans.”
A Mexican presidential candidate running on a slogan
offering “hugs for drug cartels” sounds like something out of a Christopher
Buckley novel.
In
February, “Mexico recorded its worst score ever on Transparency
International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and in so doing fell
14 spots to a ranking of 140 out of 180 nations surveyed.” All of that
corruption makes Mexico look like a bad place to do business; in
May, “Norway’s wealth fund, the world’s largest, has sold all its fixed
income investments in Mexican state oil firm Pemex, it said on Sunday, citing
what it called an unacceptable risk that the company is involved in
corruption.”
Juan Pablo Spinetto, writing for Bloomberg:
At home, the economy is faltering.
Formal job creation contracted for three consecutive months through June; investment is drying
up as business confidence erodes. Growth is expected to be a meager 0.2% this year and 1.2% in 2026.
Yes, the peso has been one of the winners of the dollar’s
depreciation, but that has hurt the competitiveness of Mexican companies,
including those in the key tourism industry. On the external front, the US is
ramping up tariffs and sanctions, forcing Sheinbaum’s administration into
defensive, crisis-management mode.
Sheinbaum’s attempts to blame the
“neoliberal” governments between 1994-2018 for every failure that Mexico faces
doesn’t resonate as it once did. Without obvious enemies and with control over
most of the country’s institutions, the president still needs to achieve a
balance between defending the record of her political boss and tackling the
many problems he left, from an unsustainable fiscal situation and a collapsing
Pemex to a decaying health system and grandiose statist projects that burn more and more money.
Blaming previous officeholders who left office in 2018? What
year is this?
How you feel about Donald Trump denouncing corruption in
Mexico does not change the level of corruption in Mexico, nor the consequences
of that corruption. The Mexican government has serious, far-reaching problems
with cartel-driven corruption, and U.S. policies must reflect and address that
unpleasant fact.
Speaking of corruption . . .
Ukraine: Hey, Never Mind About Those Anti-Corruption
Changes
Some good news out of Ukraine: The country’s parliament
and President Volodymyr Zelensky approved new legislation that restores the independence of
anti-corruption agencies.
When you write about Ukraine regularly and think we ought
to help those folks fight off the Russian effort to conquer their country,
there’s always some ninny in the comments or on social media who claims,
without any proof, that you’re doing so because you’re getting paid by the
Ukrainian government.
If the “let’s help Ukraine” contingent in the public
discourse is all being secretly funded by the Ukrainian government, you would
think these people would have tried to defend the Ukrainian government’s
boneheaded decision to weaken the independence of the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. At
minimum, they would have averted their eyes and tried to ignore the topic.
But in fact, we saw the opposite. As far as I can tell,
not a single Western supporter of the Ukrainian cause publicly argued that the
change was a good idea, and the Ukrainian government got ripped a new one all
over the Western media world. (On various pro-Ukraine text chains and Signal
chats I’m on, the response was entirely variations of, “What the hell are they
thinking?”)
Besides Noah
and myself, Zelensky and the parliament got told off by Max Boot of the Washington Post, Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, the editorial board
of The Economist, the editorial board of the Financial Times, Owen Matthews of the Daily Telegraph, Svitlana Morenets of The Spectator, and I’m sure
I’ve missed others.
You can agree with those folk, or disagree with them, but
one thing that is clear is that they’re not reflexive cheerleaders of the
Ukrainian government. We support Ukrainian independence and the Ukrainian
people as a whole, and some days that aligns with supporting what the Ukrainian
government is doing. But not every day.
ADDENDUM: Axios says, “Former President Biden’s top
political aide Mike Donilon told congressional investigators Thursday that he
was paid $4 million for his work on Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and would
have made an additional $4 million if Biden had won, according to a person
familiar with his testimony.”
For perspective, in 2024, Seattle Seahawks wide receiver
Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught 100 passes, 1,130 yards, and six touchdowns, and was
selected to play in the Pro Bowl. He
made $3.2 million. And he gets tackled a lot by 200-some pound cornerbacks,
safeties, and linebackers. Last year, Mike Donilon wasn’t even tackled once.
Now, when you have a financial incentive of $4 million
for the president’s reelection, how likely are you to tell your boss, “Joe, I
love you, but you’re getting too old for the job and it’s time to pass the
baton to someone else”? Some would argue that Donilon had 4 million reasons to
roll the dice on Biden’s reelection bid, no matter the consequences for his
party or the country.
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