Avocados at the Central de Abastos market in Guadalajara, Jalisco state, Mexico in January, 2025.ULISES RUIZ/AFP/Getty Images
David Agren is a freelance journalist covering Latin America.
On the same day in January that Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a much-discussed speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos, urging middle powers to co-operate rather than compete with each other for U.S. favour, his Mexican counterpart, President Claudia Sheinbaum, was busy handing over 37 drug-cartel suspects to the United States.
Ms. Sheinbaum subsequently praised Mr. Carney’s speech as “very much in tune with the times.” But that day showed where her priorities lie. For months, she has competed for U.S. favour with a series of concessions and actions, all culminating with Mexican special forces dramatically killing the drug-cartel kingpin Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera on Feb. 22.
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Mexico’s military praised the bravery of its soldiers in the raid on Mr. Oseguera’s mountainous lair in western Jalisco state. But it also broke from tradition in one notable way: it acknowledged the role of U.S. intelligence in taking out Mr. Oseguera, whose Jalisco New Generation Cartel unleashed chaos across the country after his slaying.
Eliminating Mr. Oseguera underscored the deepening security co-operation between the United States and Mexico under Ms. Sheinbaum. But it also gave her administration another trophy to show off to U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened military intervention if Mexico doesn’t crack down on drug cartels, stop migration and stamp out fentanyl production – all as Mexico prepares for the July review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
“Ms. Sheinbaum has played exactly the opposite game that Mr. Carney is suggesting,” said Manuel Molano, an economist at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla. “Her strategy is not to confront Trump.”
Soldiers patrol where federal forces carried out an operation to capture cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera in Tapalpa, Mexico in late February.Liberto Urena/Reuters
The USMCA review is increasingly likely to be decided by non-commercial factors such as security co-operation, as Mexico tries to avoid a worst-case scenario of U.S. boots on the ground or Mr. Trump ordering airstrikes on drug-cartel assets. Its strategy of quiet concessions contrasts sharply with Canada’s more confrontational elbows-up approach.
“Mexico seems to be advancing co-operation on security, migration and other agenda items, including trade, in the hope that when [USMCA] working groups formally convene, the list of irritants will be shorter and more political capital can be devoted to securing an extension,” said Diego Marroquín Bitar, a Mexican trade expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Canada’s apparent negotiating strategy is to avoid making concessions before formal discussions begin.”
Since Mr. Carney’s oft-lauded speech, Mexico has facilitated the capture and extradition of Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympian accused of drug trafficking. The country also repaid a pending water debt with the United States, despite drought conditions in some northern states, and stopped oil shipments to Cuba under U.S. pressure.
While Canada has sought to diversify export markets, Mexico has doubled down on the United States, where it sends more than 80 per cent of its exports. In fact, Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration has increased tariffs on countries with which it doesn’t have free-trade deals, including China, which made a strategic partnership with Canada to ease tariffs on various industries.
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Mr. Marroquín Bitar attributes the differing strategies, in part, to the deep integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies. Mexico has become the top U.S. export destination and, for the first time in 2025, its top supplier, “making blunt coercive tools harder to deploy without self-inflicted damage,” he said.
As part of its diversification strategy, Canada sent a trade mission to Mexico in February, drumming up business opportunities while hoping to deepen an alliance with its USMCA partner ahead of the review. The team, led by Dominic LeBlanc, the federal minister responsible for North American trade, met Ms. Sheinbaum at the National Palace, and later said both countries “remain absolutely committed to the trilateral free-trade agreement.”
But Mexico’s recent willingness to concede on everything from security co-operation to water allocation to its foreign policy shows its desire to maintain duty-free access to the U.S. market at all costs – even if it means forgoing Mr. Carney’s call for middle-power unity. It may even have to cut Canada out from the trade deal altogether, as the U.S. proposed in 2018 negotiations, though analysts say Mexico prefers a three-party deal. While Canada’s approach to the trade chaos has been to look to other avenues, “Mexico’s take on the current geopolitical turmoil is focused on Washington, Washington and Washington,” said Brenda Estefan, geopolitics professor at the IPADE business school in Mexico City,
It remains to be seen if killing “El Mencho” is enough to satisfy Mr. Trump. But it shows how Mexico is prioritizing security co-operation to save a version of the USMCA – even if it doesn’t include Canada.