Daniel DePetris
If there is one thing you can say about Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, it’s that she’s handled President Donald Trump quite well so far. This was by no means a given; as Colombian President Gustavo Petro is learning the hard way, Trump’s personal relationships with foreign leaders can run hot and cold depending on the day and the issue at hand.
Trump used Mexico as a punching bag during his 2024 campaign, blasting the inadequacies of its politicians and threatening to deploy U.S. special forces into the country to destroy the drug labs churning out fentanyl at a feverish pace.
Fortunately for Sheinbaum, none of this has come to pass. While Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Mexican imports in February and often comes back to the theme of taking unilateral U.S. action against the cartels, he has been more willing to give the Mexican government time to prove its worth than many originally thought.
Trump called Sheinbaum “a lovely woman,” signed a security deal with Mexico in September that increased coordination on anti-drug trafficking initiatives and seems to grasp the basic conclusion that the only winner of a turbulent U.S.-Mexico relationship is the cartels both nations seek to fight.
Trump’s relatively cooperative stance didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a reflection of the Mexican government helping itself. Sheinbaum’s administration is far more aggressive on criminal organizations than its immediate predecessor, that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who was never particularly enthralled with the “war on drugs” mentality and treated the problem of cartel violence as a socioeconomic one.
Even so, the so-called “hugs, not bullets” approach did nothing to stem the tide of violence. By the latter half of his six-year term, even AMLO started leaning more heavily on the Mexican army, just as previous Mexican presidents have done since the turn of the century.
In contrast, Sheinbaum didn’t need much convincing to use the stick, which is probably why Trump is so supportive of her — at least for now. According to Mexican government statistics, homicides declined by more than 24% in the first nine months of her tenure. More than 32,000 criminal suspects have been arrested, thousands of drug labs have been decommissioned and more than 245 tons of drugs have been seized.
Unlike AMLO, who was highly skeptical of U.S. motivations, Sheinbaum’s administration has allowed the CIA to increase surveillance flights over cartel hot spots in Mexico, where the information is turned over to Mexican security services on the ground. Mexico has also sent dozens of cartel operatives to the United States for prosecution, which is something Washington could only dream of in the years when AMLO occupied the presidential palace.
Yet all of this needs to be put into perspective. Despite the arrests, extraditions, and drug seizures that make the front pages, Mexico remains an extremely violent country, where local-level leaders are often co-opted — either through threats or bribes — into working with the very criminal outfits they are supposed to be combating. As the years have gone by, the cartels have branched out to alternative income streams, including by muscling their way into Mexico’s formal agricultural economy. Those who refuse to cooperate risk death.
Carlos Manzo, mayor of the Mexican town of Uruapan, located in the middle of Mexico’s avocado industry, was one of those who didn’t submit to the cartels’ whims. The loud, brash, cowboy hat-wearing mayor used to be a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, which has come to dominate Mexican politics and controls all three branches of Mexico’s federal government.
Manzo, however, became an independent last year, partly in response to what he regarded as Morena’s lackluster anti-crime strategy. His frustration boiled over this year, and he spent a considerable portion of his time pressing the Sheinbaum administration into adopting a more proactive stance against criminal organizations that have run rampant across the state of Michoacán. His solution was simple: Wage war on them.
Yet Manzo’s noble stance got him killed. As he presided over a public Day of the Dead celebration, a gunman assassinated him in Uruapan’s central square. Large-scale protests have proliferated since Manzo’s killing, piling public pressure on Sheinbaum that she hadn’t yet experienced. Her government has responded with a new security plan for Michoacán, which looks awfully similar to the old security plans of her predecessors: Send 1,000 more Mexican troops to the state in an attempt to contain the violence. More investigative resources will be deployed as well, both to track down those involved in Manzo’s killing and to improve the federal government’s presence there.
For some, this response is simply inadequate. Critics contend that the only way to truly defeat the cartels is to do what Manzo recommended: Label them an enemy of the state and eradicate them. On a moral level, it’s hard to disagree.
But it’s important to note that Mexico tried this strategy in the not-so-distant past. The result was a rising death toll, a more complicated cartel landscape that the Mexican security forces couldn’t keep up with and more ruthless criminal leaders who now have no problem expanding the war to civilians and public officials.
The proof is in the statistics. When Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels in 2006, Mexico’s murder rate hovered around 10,000 per year. By the time he left office in 2012, the number went up to 25,000. In 2018, the figure increased to 36,000. The numbers have been north of 30,000 per year ever since.
Sheinbaum is caught between a rock and a hard place. The pressing question of how to make Mexico a more peaceful place will haunt her presidency just as it did her predecessors.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs
columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
