Trump’s drug cartel accusations roil Mexican government

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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum promised retaliatory tariffs in response to Donald Trump’s decision to hit Mexican imports with 25-per-cent tariffs, further fraying a bilateral relationship focused increasingly on immigration and drug interdiction rather than commerce.

But much of the President’s response on Saturday night rebuked Mr. Trump’s stated rationale for the tariffs: that the Mexican government has sustained an “intolerable alliance” with drug cartels. She called such collusion accusations “slander.”

Ms. Sheinbaum shot back in a lengthy post on the social-media platform X: “If there’s a place that such an alliance exists it’s with U.S. gunmakers, which sell high-power weapons to these criminal groups.” She shone an unflattering light on U.S. society, too, saying, “They can, for example, combat the sale of narcotics on the streets of their main cities,” and, “They could start a massive campaign to avoid the consumption of these drugs and care for their young people as we’ve done in Mexico.”

She ended her post with a call for dialogue, along with instructions to apply “tariff and nontariff measures in defence of Mexico’s interest.”

In a video on Sunday that reiterated much of her post, she said the details of the Mexican response will be released at a Monday morning news conference.

Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement provoked expressions of patriotism and outrage in Mexico. But it also revealed the increasingly complicated bilateral relationship unfolding under Mr. Trump. The U.S. President focused on trade and immigration during his first administration, but he is now broadening the agenda to include Mexico’s internal security and stamping out fentanyl production.

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“The central tenet of shared responsibility, where transnational challenges and opportunities are dealt with transnational solutions and thinking, is dead,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador in Washington.

The U.S. President’s accusation of drug cartel collusion unleashed domestic political spats and unfolds as claims of criminal intervention escalate on the state and local levels. Ruling party supporters highlighted the White House announcement on X featuring news of Genaro García Luna, public security secretary under Felipe Calderón, being convicted in a U.S. court of taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. They insisted “narco-government” was a thing of the past.

However, critics posted images of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador greeting the mother of drug lord Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán in 2020.

Some Mexican newspapers splashed their front pages with the drug cartel accusations, while talk of criminals intervening in politics lit up social media.

“Never in the course of modern U.S.-Mexico ties had a charge like that been levelled at a government in Mexico City,” Mr. Sarukhan said. “This is not only the proverbial shot across the bow; it was done using an ICBM,” he said, referring metaphorically to an intercontinental ballistic missile.

To be sure, the proposed tariffs promise economic pain for Mexico, which sends more than 80 per cent of its exports to the United States. BBVA bank projected GDP to contract 1.5 per cent in 2025. Remittances from Mexicans in the U.S., which totalled more than $60-billion last year, were likely to decline, according to analysts.

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The delay in publicly stating Mexico’s response to U.S. tariffs was less about hesitation than determining “how far do we want to go with this,” said Juan Carlos Baker Pineda, a former senior Mexican official and trade negotiator.

Mexico previously imposed retaliatory tariffs after the U.S. placed levies on Mexican steel in 2018. Mr. Baker Pineda was part of the team that designed those tariffs by “taking out the electoral map” and targeting the products from Republican politicians’ states such as bourbon, cheese and apples. That pattern is unlikely now since “it’s not just about trade any more,” he said.

Mexico has closely co-operated with the United States on immigration over the past year, stopping record numbers of migrants trying to cross its territory. Ms. Sheinbaum reminded Mr. Trump of recent fentanyl seizures and more than 10,000 arrests since she took office on Oct. 1.

But she has steadfastly opposed Mr. Trump’s executive order designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terror organizations.” Analysts say the designation complicates doing business in Mexico and wonder aloud if it could portend unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico.

“Can the DEA now mount high-profile operations at will, as if they were aiming for Osama bin Laden? Will we face border incursions in hot pursuit of the narcos?” said Federico Estévez, a political-science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

With past U.S. and Mexican administrations, “We’d make big concessions in one issue area, say, migration control, and quietly ignore everything else” such as drugs, Mr. Estévez said. “But now we’re stuck with everything on the table at once and from the outset.”