A 60 Minutes segment dedicated to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador last month started with a bang: Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, who flew to Mexico City to interview the president known as AMLO, called him “the person who could tip the scales” in the US general election.
Wow.
The US-Mexico relationship has been asymmetrical for ages, with Washington typically getting what it wanted from its neighbor. To say that Mexico’s 70-year-old nationalist leader could determine the next president of the most powerful country on Earth is quite something.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, there is some truth to Alfonsi’s point: Migration, the state of the US border and the fentanyl crisis — together with the economy — top US voters’ worries. Mexico looms large in all these areas; in a too-close-to-call scenario, its actions in any one of them could be decisive in November.
More broadly, Mexico is becoming more important in geopolitical terms for the US and the fates of both countries are increasingly intertwined. Officials, politicians and business leaders on both sides of the border need to build mutual understanding instead of animosity and develop new common institutional frameworks if they want to turn this growing interdependence to their advantage.
Consider this: Mexico last year surpassed China as the main supplier of goods to the US, shipping more than 83 percent of all its non-oil exports (or close to US$470 billion). The approximately 3,220km of border they share is the world’s busiest international land crossing, with millions of cars, trains and cargo trucks going over it every year. Mexico is one of the top destinations for US expats and more than 13 million Americans flew there to enjoy the nation’s beaches and other tourist attractions last year, an increase of almost 30 percent compared with 2019.
In a world where supply chains are quickly shifting away from China, the business potential of the USMCA (the North American trade agreement that in 2020 replaced NAFTA) is huge.
However, so are the challenges, including uncontrolled migration inflows, drugs and guns trafficking, and flourishing organized crime, all problems that promise to get worse if current trends continue.
Against this backdrop, AMLO has smartly used his leverage, first with then-US president Donald Trump and later with US President Joe Biden, to deflect scrutiny of his democratic shortcomings in return for keeping the border situation in check and averting a politically disastrous crisis for the White House. Gone are the days when the US president could lecture his Mexican peer about democracy and free markets.
This shift has led to what Javier Tello, a Mexico City-based political commentator, calls a “very particular juncture” where the Mexican president seems empowered compared with a weakened US counterpart — to the growing frustration of many in the ranks of both governments, who see the relationship suffering from a lack of political engagement.
“The US-Mexico relationship is very complex and if leaders don’t pay enough attention, it will deteriorate,” Tello told me. “We have a very functional day-to-day relationship, but with enormous problems to tackle and even bigger challenges if we don’t.”
The list of underlying tensions is long:
AMLO’s nationalist energy policies and Biden’s seeming lack of support to those US companies hurt by it; unconfirmed press allegations from US Drug Enforcement Administration sources about narco contacts in AMLO’s past campaigns; AMLO’s own frustrations with lax US gun control laws that flooded Mexico with weapons, fueling violence; the perception in US circles that Mexico is not doing enough to tackle common threats; and Mexico’s irritation with the lack of serious US investment in addressing the root causes of migration.
The latest of these has been the legal mess over a Texas law known as SB4 that would allow the state to arrest and deport unauthorized migrants, a provision that AMLO vehemently rejected with the support of his political opponents — a rare sign of consensus.
As Mexico also prepares to pick a president on June 2, a noisier political environment seems unavoidable given how vital the migration issue is for Trump’s Republican base — just consider US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson’s rebuke of AMLO’s interview.
Both sides have much to gain from taking these unattended bilateral issues more seriously. After giving only a handful of interviews while in power, AMLO clearly signaled his desire to be heard by an American audience in the twilight of his presidency by talking to 60 Minutes. For all of AMLO’s controversies and shortfalls, his biggest foreign-policy success has been understanding that Mexico’s prosperity and stability depend on closer integration with the US and Canada, and that the region as a whole is better off competing in the global market together.
During the interview, AMLO also made a good point about the futility of shutting down the border, arguing that American consumers would suffer from paying more for their imported goods. Yet as he knows firsthand from spending billions on projects with scarce financial logic, governments do not always make rational economic decisions. Shutting the border to prevent migration and drug trafficking was a threat wielded not only by Trump and radical lawmakers, but by Biden during the January debate over a new bipartisan migration bill.
The risk for Mexico’s next president is that, due to the country’s perceived inaction or just the need to score cheap political wins, the US government takes damaging decisions regardless of their economic logic.
Even given AMLO’s enhanced leverage, the bilateral relationship will continue to dance to the tune of US public opinion. It might be reassuring that a recent Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed that 76 percent of Americans find working with Mexico and Canada to combat drug trafficking would be “very” or “somewhat” effective in reducing fentanyl misuse in the US, but 46 percent said that sending US troops to combat cartels in Mexico would be a good idea. As implausible as that path might sound today, could we totally rule it out if the fentanyl crisis is not solved? Would Trump be tempted by this strategy if he returns to the White House?
The chances of such a catastrophic decision are likely higher than what we are ready to admit today. The antidote is more economic and political integration, not less, and a more honest discussion about what each country can do for the other. If US authorities think Mexico has the secret formula to solve the weaponized migration problem, they should just visit the camps in Mexico City where thousands of Haitians barely survive, some of them not too far from where AMLO lives. Using Mexico as border cop is no substitute for a long-overdue overhaul of US immigration law. At the same time, Mexico needs to start producing results in the fight against narcotrafficking and invest more in solving its own problem with irregular migrants.
Admitting that fentanyl is produced in Mexico, as AMLO did on 60 Minutes, is a positive step, but much more is needed.
Disputes and controversies are unavoidable given the complexity and stakes of US-Mexico relations. The trick is to try to solve them instead of passing the buck or the peso to the next government.
J.P. Spinetto is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin American business, economic affairs and politics. He was previously Bloomberg News’ managing editor for economics and government in the region.
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