To a large relief across her country, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico announced on Monday that she had drawn up a plan of the Trump administration to impose prices of 25% on Mexican products. Initially to enter into force at midnight, the prices were delayed by one month, she said.
“We have this month to work this month to convince ourselves that this is the best way to follow,” said Sheinbaum at her regular morning press conference after talking to President Trump. By suggesting that she could be able to fully retain the penalties, she said that she had said to her American counterpart: “We will provide results. Good results for your people, good results for the Mexican people. »»
The announcement was considered a victory for the Mexican government by dealing with Mr. Trump, who gave a new tone of assault during the first weeks of his presidency. He demanded that even some of the closest allies in the United States acquire his requests or face consequences in prices or perhaps even military force.
The agreement, however, will force Mexico to a 30 -day critical test in which it must not only continue its recent progress, but also make even more progress in two of the most sustainable challenges in the country: drug trafficking and migration.
Under the terms of the agreement, Mexico will display 10,000 additional Mexican guards at the border. In return, said Sheinbaum, the US government will work to stop the flow of arms in Mexico.
In his own statement, Mr. Trump made no mention of a promise to help brake on fire arms trafficking, but he celebrated the deployment of Mexican troops.
While Mexico spent last year intensifying its application of immigration, which has already contributed to a drastic reduction in American border crossings, the issue of drug trafficking is much more complicated. This will force Mexico to have “a very clear and well -defined plan,” said Ildefonso Guajardo, a former Minister of the Economy who negotiated with the first Trump administration.
Mr. Trump and Thomas Homan, the Tsar Frontier of the Administration, have been responsible several times for the fentanyl overdose crisis in the United States on Mexican cartels as well as on migrants, they say they move the medication through the border. Homan falsely told Fox News that Mexican cartels had “killed a quarter of a million Americans with fentanyl”.
Since 2019, Mexico has moved China as Fentanyl’s largest supplier in the United States. In addition to being extraordinarily powerful, the drug is very easy to make – and even easier to pass the border, hidden under clothing or in glove compartments. According to American prosecutors, the Sinaloa cartel spends only $ 800 in chemicals to produce a kilo which can bring a profit of up to $ 640,000 in the United States.
Mexico has been at the origin of almost all the fentanyl seized by the American police in recent years, and the amount of crossing of the border has increased tenfold in the last five years. But federal data show that it is not brought by migrants but by American citizens recruited by cartel organizations. More than 80% of people who have been sentenced to fentanyl traffic at the southern border are American citizens.
“Anything that makes it incredibly more difficult to prosecute and control the market,” said Jaime López-Aranda, security analyst based in Mexico City.
The administration of Ms. Sheinbaum has already intensified efforts to combat fentanyl since it took office in October, including the greatest seizure of the drug – around 20 million doses – never recorded in Mexico. The security forces regularly report advances on arrests and laboratories for the production of dismantled drugs.
But the experts wonder how really these efforts represent. “Mexico can continue to carry out symbolic actions as it has done lately,” said López-Aranda, “but there is little more than it can do.”
According to analysts, a complete war against cartels would prolong me and trigger more waves of violence across Mexico, according to analysts. The country has already known these consequences.
After taking office in 2006, President Felipe Calderón said a war against criminal groups. The idea was to eradicate them and loosen their grip on the country. But targeting the leaders of the cartel and engaging in direct confrontations led to these groups only in more violent and brutal cells, leading to one of the bloodiest periods in Mexico.
“What will happen even after destroying all the laboratories?” said Mr. Guajardo. “These guys will just focus more on extortion, theft and murders. Mexico will be left to deal with the problem alone. »»
Under the agreement announced on Monday, Mexico will also strengthen the security forces on the border. Unlike the United States, Mexico does not have a specific security force dedicated to patrolling the border, based rather on a combination of the army and the National Guard.
Experts have asked for what an extent of 10,000 additional soldiers would be effective to provide results promised in Mexico with regard to fentanyl.
“Ten thousand members may seem a lot, but everything is in detail,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, drug researcher at the Institute on World Conflicts and Cooperation at UC San Diego. “If you will only have them at the border, this does not deal with the entire fentanyl production chain.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, principal researcher of the American Immigration Council, noted that it was the third time in six years that Mexico has determined to send a large deployment of the National Guard to the American border.
While the forces of Mexico “will try to obtain results at all costs”, a more effective strategy would be that the managers of the two countries share more intelligence and information to stop the flow of drugs, said Jonathan Maza, Mexican security analyst.
The lack of cooperation was something of which US officials complained during the administration of the predecessor of Ms. Sheinbaum, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Given the importance for Mexico to avoid prices, Mr. Maza said that the National Guard could achieve results in the short and medium term. But, he warned, criminal groups are likely to adapt.
By limiting migration and illegal passages to the border, Mexico can have a simpler way to success, after adopting several effective measures in the past year.
The national guard troops are deployed on the immigration control points from north to south, and migration officials have also established a “decompression” policy in which migrants are carried out from concentrated areas in the North further south to maintain pressure outside the border. Mexican authorities used buses for years, but its expansion in 2024 underlined the country’s hardening policies on migration.
The rupture of migrant caravans directed to the United States is another step that Mexican officials have made in recent years. When many emerged in the weeks preceding Mr. Trump, they were all dissolved.
The more difficult position of Mexico, associated with the executive decree of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., last summer, essentially to prevent undocumented migrants from receiving asylum on the border, contributed to a spectacular reduction in the illegal immigration to the border in 2024. In December, US American border the patrol officials recorded only 47,326 illegal passages – a net drop in the record of 249,740 documented a year earlier.
Mexican authorities have also introduced bureaucratic obstacles for migrants and asylum seekers.
“Mexico’s strategy has exhausted and used migrants,” said Mauro Pérez Bravo, the former head of the Citizen Council of the National Migration Institute, who assesses the country’s migration policies. “What he did is to empty people emotionally and physically to prevent them from going to the United States.”
In exchange for the deployment of troops on the border and stemming the flow of fentanyl and migrants in the United States, Ms. Sheinbaum said that she had obtained Mr. Trump’s agreement to do more to prevent weapons over fire made in the United States to enter Mexico.
“These high-power weapons that will illegally arm the criminal groups and give them fire power,” she said.
This is not the first time that Mexico has made this argument.
In 2021, the country continued several manufacturers of firearms and a distributor, blaming them for devastating blood effusions and several decades from which Mexico had trouble recovering. The United States Supreme Court will decide this year if Mexico could pursue manufacturers of firearms in the United States. A recent analysis have shown that nearly 9,000 firearms merchants operate in cities in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.
But in his own remarks, Mr. Trump made no mention of Ms. Sheinbaum’s request. We do not know how his administration could really make such a commitment and what Mexico would do, if anything, if he would not.
James Wagner,, Paulina Villegas And Simon Romero Contributed reports.
