Patrick Lawrence: Speak, Claudia!

“Mexico for Mexicans” — the country’s new president displays the dynamism and determination of an emergent generation of non–Western leaders.

By Patrick Lawrence 
in Lago de Chapala, Mexico
ScheerPost 

Watching that procession of hapless European supplicants passing through the Oval Office last week, my mind wandered briefly and came back with an imaginary scene I found pleasurable and instructive all at once:

What if Claudia Sheinbaum went to see President Donald Trump right after Andrzej Duda, the ineffectual Polish president, Emmanuel Macron, the ineffectual French president, and Keir Starmer, the hopelessly ineffectual British prime minister?

What a kick. The spirited, self-possessed Mexican president, who took office but five months ago, would have put on full display — I am sure of this — the dynamism of an emergent generation of non–Western leaders right next to three exemplars of the wilting, wandering West.

The effect would have been high relief of the kind the Greeks and Romans invented and perfected. 

Sheinbaum, a 62–year-old intellectual with a doctorate in environmental sciences, proved her mettle as mayor of Mexico City before she won the presidency in last year’s elections. And she has proved it all over again by way of her first encounters with the just-elected Trump.

You had to love her riposte when Trump, in that first spurt of assertions just after his inauguration, proposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Remember? Sheinbaum stood before a map older than the U.S. and said with evident amusement, “Why don’t we call it America Mexicana. It sounds pretty, no?”

O.K., fun with nomenclature. More substantive matters soon arose between Mexico City and Washington. Within days of resuming residence in the White House, Trump threatened Mexico and Canada with a tariff regime of 25 percent on most U.S. imports from both.

Then came Trump’s new plan — a revived plan, actually— to repatriate Mexican, Central American, and other Latin American immigrants, dispensing, even, with many standing distinctions between legal and undocumented migrants.  

To complete the list of Trumpian offensives — for now, at least — Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, among his first, declaring Mexico’s criminal cartels a national security threat.

The State Department subsequently designated two of the most violent cartels FTOs, Foreign Terrorist Organizations. By affixing this label, the U.S. gives itself the right — as it so often awards itself legal rights — to attack the Sinaloa and New Generation cartels. 

How will this happen was instantly the question among Mexicans. Elon Musk made it clear on “X” that the FTO designation “means they [the cartels] are eligible for drone strikes.”

The concern among Mexican officials now is there is another shoe yet to drop, and when it does, Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will plan on-the-ground military operations that will amount to something close to an invasion. 

Good Statecraft

Heavy going for Claudia, as Mexicans commonly refer to their president. But I have detected no hint of a flinch as Sheinbaum fields these unilateral, borderline-abusive initiatives.

Trump suspended his threatened tariff regime two days after announcing it — this in response to Sheinbaum’s promise, along with the Canadians, of retaliation. There are more talks and probably more threats to come, but for the moment the Mexican leader, having made common cause with Ottawa, forced Washington to back down — or at least back off [until Monday when Trump slapped tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China.]. 

[ABC reported: “Sheinbaum said her country would immediately deploy 10,000 members of its National Guard to their shared border to battle drug trafficking, especially fentanyl…[Canada] will also establish a new position for a fentanyl czar and redouble its efforts to tackle the opioid crisis by listing cartels and gangs as terrorist entities.”]

Sheinbaum managed something of the same on the immigrants question. She committed to stationing 10,000 Mexican troops at the Mexican–U.S. border, but as various commentators have noted, Mexico already has roughly that number along the Rio Grande.

It looks to me like a concession that isn’t much of one in practice, but Sheinbaum appears to have parried Trump once again — for now, that qualifier one must always add when considering America’s erratic new president.

Interim solutions to the tariffs and immigrant problems: This looks like good statecraft to me. It is in the cartels-as-terrorists matter that Sheinbaum came on strong. “Both countries want to combat organized crime,” she said after State declared the two cartels terrorists, “but we must ensure that it is done through collaboration and coordination.”

On Thursday Mexico offered a dramatic demonstration of what Sheinbaum means: It turned over to the U.S. 29 ranking cartel members already in Mexican prisons, including a cofounder of the Sinaloa cartel U.S. authorities have sought for four decades. Collaboration and coordination at work. 

But note what else Sheinbaum had to say about the FTO designation: “This cannot be used as an opportunity for the United States to invade our sovereignty.”

Read that carefully. “Cannot” is a strong word in the parlance of statecraft as it has no suggestion of flexibility in it, and casting the question as one of sovereignty is unmistakably a kind of escalation. 

The Guadalajara Reporter, the English-language weekly in Mexico’s second-largest city, called Sheinbaum’s remarks “a red line.”

With her other displays of determination in view, that seems to me exactly how the Mexican leader meant it. To be noted: Sheinbaum simultaneously announced that her Foreign Ministry would fortify its pending lawsuit against north-of-the-border weapons makers, accusing them now of knowingly selling arms to Mexican cartels. 

Take that, gringos. 

Mexico landed another big one last week, when the lower house of the federal legislature, wherein Sheinbaum enjoys a comfortable proportion of support, voted to ban the use of genetically modified corn.

The Mexicans and Americans have been arguing about GM corn imports for years, and in December a dispute panel ruled that such a ban was illegal under the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement, which replaced the Clinton-era NAFTA during Trump’s first term. The vote Tuesday reversed that judgment in full-frontal fashion. I count it one of the Sheinbaum government’s loudest “No’s” to date and a big blow to Big Ag north of the border. 

[See: US ‘Exports Obesity’]

Big Ag deserves it. I grow heartily sick of corporate America’s neoliberal insensitivities and coercions on these kinds of questions. Trying to force Mexico to accept GM corn from the U.S. is akin to Washington’s disgraceful efforts to make the Japanese accept imports of California rice back in the 1990s — tactlessly dismissive of who knows how many centuries of farming culture, rural culture, village culture, however it is best to think of it. 

Focus on Sovereignty

Sheinbaum is active on many fronts as she faces northward, then, and it is impossible to say at this early moment how these sorts of questions will shape up during her six–year term. But she brings a consciousness of larger matters to her presidency, as she makes repeatedly plain.

Her fundamental cause is Mexican sovereignty, Mexican equality among nations, and the dignity of the Mexican people. Whatever red lines she may draw, one way or another, they will mark out these priorities.

Sheinbaum’s economic and social policies read straight out of her predecessor’s. Andrés Manuel López Obrador was noted for his commitments to poverty eradication, rural development and other such programs. They made AMLO hugely popular here: Mexico’s business class and The New York Times were among his only detractors.

And so it already is for Sheinbaum. Mexico for Mexicans was the anthem AMLO may as well have sung — audible in everything he did on the ground. It is Sheinbaum’s, too.

There are verses in it all about prosperity and economic development, but the refrain is all about identity and self-respect. Development, as I discovered after many years abroad, is a psychological project as much as it is a matter of material advance.    

I greatly appreciated, in this connection, how the Sheinbaum government managed the first wave of immigrants to the north as they returned south on airplanes.

Mexico City reported that, as of Feb. 20, there were roughly 13,000 returning migrants, including 3,000 Venezuelans and Cubans that Mexico has agreed to accept. And how is it as they arrive?

No shackles, no zip-ties, no armed soldiers with black automatic rifles. They receive an official greeting from the Mexican government and then are given whatever help they need to resettle. As many as possible are returned to the towns and villages from whence they set out for the north however many years ago. 

Read the Sheinbaum government’s message with me. Isn’t it, “Come home. You are Mexicans and you are welcome and you are respected. Be Mexican. This is your country as much as ours”?  Isn’t she showing Mexicans by example that it is time to recenter the national consciousness — that the nation and its people are no longer to act as the appendage of anyone else but simply to be themselves? 

I dwell briefly on this because of things one comes upon frequently in the Global South. During my years as a correspondent in Asia, among the saddest of sites I recall now was in Hong Kong’s Central District on Sunday mornings.

There, one saw thousands of Filipinos gathered for their half-day off a week. And when you got to know them, you found they were trained as nurses, doctors, professors, accountants, engineers, pharmacists, what have you, and they were in Hong Kong working as amahs (housekeepers), waiters, cleaners and barbacks because their own country, an hour and some away by air, was too underdeveloped to give them dignified work. 

In my read, Sheinbaum’s aspiration, stated most broadly, is finally to break Mexico out of the cycle of underdevelopment identified back in the 1960s and 1970s by Andre Gunder Frank and other such adherents to dependency theory.

Dependency theorists held that developing nations were forever to be “developing” — a permanent periphery whose place in the global order was to provide cheap labor and resources to the wealthy of the world — the metropoles, in the language of the time.

I doubt — could be wrong — Sheinbaum’s intellectual references include Gunder Frank and his kind: Dependency theory fell out of fashion long ago. (And I have always wondered why, now I mention it.) But her project seems to me to derive across the years from it. And could such an undertaking be any more dramatic than in Mexico’s case, given the long, unequal history of its ties to its northern neighbor? 

Mexico for Mexicans: Stay with this thought and pose a question along with me. Does this not suggest the commander-in-chief of the MAGA movement ought to be in full, exuberant sympathy with Claudia Sheinbaum and the Mexico she proposes to work toward?

It is fair to ask this, but the thought seems ridiculous given the tenor of U.S.–Mexican relations so far in Trump’s second term. We will see over time whether Trump’s grand project means in practice that Mexico and the rest of the world must dedicate to making only America great.

One can always count on hypocrisy to explain the doings of any American president, after all. 

Dignity, equality, sovereignty, identity — the drawing of red lines Trump will not be permitted to cross but at cost. Think of these words and think of Claudia Sheinbaum.

Then think of these words again and think of Keir Starmer, or Emmanuel Macron, or Andrzej Duda, or for that matter Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor-to-be. And then think about where lies humanity’s dynamism, its promise, in the 21^st century.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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This article is from ScheerPost.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.