Mexico is nearing a breaking point. Joshua Treviño and Ariana Guajardo break down the collision of two deadlines: the USMCA reauthorization review and the fallout from U.S. indictments against senior Mexican politicians, including the governor of Sinaloa.<br>They discuss why President Sheinbaum is refusing extradition and framing U.S. pressure as an attack on sovereignty, even as reports suggest dozens of officials may be quietly cooperating with the DEA and FBI. Joshua also breaks down the three factions splitting the Morena coalition apart, Morena&#x27;s &quot;Fourth Transformation&quot; narrative, AMLO&#x27;s resurfacing letter, the renewed controversy around &quot;El Mayo&quot; Zambada&#x27;s 2024 arrest, and what USMCA&#x27;s new annual review means for U.S.-Mexico trade and security. They close with a recap of Mexico&#x27;s World Cup exit to England.

Mexico's Narco Crisis: USMCA Deadline, Sheinbaum vs. the Cartels, and Morena Fracturing

The Hard Country

This brings us to Mexico, where that long-suffering country arrives at twin straits in short order. By the end of June, it will reckon with the treaty-designated deadline for review of USMCA reauthorization. Simultaneously, it will have been 60 days since the American indictments of a host of Mexican senior politicians. Both concerns are existential.

The Mexican economy, which staggers along at near-zero growth under the perennial mismanagement of its political class, requires both access to the American market and an influx of remittances to avoid contraction and even collapse. The Mexican civic sphere requires a scouring of its prodigious narco-political class if it is to be the liberal democracy envisaged but never actually achieved by its founders and re-founders in the eras of Benito Juarez and the revolution of the early 20th century.

Hardly a decade after Mexican independence, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that, quote, The Mexicans took the federal constitution of their neighbors, the Anglo-Americans, as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy. But although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which gave it life. And therefore, to the present day, Mexico was alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism.

Thus then, as now, one might think that the present Mexican regime of the leftist Morena Party, which conceives of itself as the direct inheritors of Juarez and the revolution both, would be eager to complete that work at last, bringing to Mexico a governance and civics worthy of its own historic aspirations.

Mexico's Narco Crisis: USMCA Deadline, Sheinbaum vs. the Cartels, and Morena Fracturing

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Mexico's Narco Crisis: USMCA Deadline, Sheinbaum vs. the Cartels, and Morena Fracturing

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.