Editor’s note: An uncomfortable week for Sheinbaum’s vision of Mexican sovereignty

President Claudia Sheinbaum at her morning press conference in Mexico City. Image credit: Presidency of Mexico.

by Andrew Law, editor and founder.

This week a video circulated on social media of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón decrying the country’s freshly implemented judicial reform at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

In it, Calderón called MORENA’s reform a “demolition project” that had likely rendered free elections a thing of the past. What seemed to irritate President Claudia Sheinbaum most, however, was Calderón’s suggestion that former US ambassador Ken Salazar should have intervened. Sheinbaum did not hold back at her morning press conference: “It's outrageous, there's no other word for it. He goes to the United States to say that the American ambassador should have intervened to prevent the judicial reform from passing. Aside from being spurious, he's a traitor.”

Sheinbaum rarely misses a chance to stress Mexico’s sovereignty in her dealings with Washington. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited last week to highlight security cooperation, the first line of the joint statement stressed respect for sovereignty, echoing a theme she returns to repeatedly in her pressers.

Given Mexico’s fraught history with the United States, and Donald Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, Sheinbaum’s focus is understandable. But that sovereignty came into question this week on three fronts: trade, security, and intelligence.

On trade, Sheinbaum announced new tariffs on all imports outside formal trade agreements. Though billed as part of her industrialization strategy, Plan México, the measure is effectively a tariff on Chinese goods. Its headline feature is a 50% levy on Chinese auto imports. Announcing the policy, Sheinbaum almost seemed sheepish, saying, “We don’t want conflict,” while rejecting suggestions the move was meant to appease Trump. That reassurance was dismissed in Beijing, where officials criticized the measures as coercive.

Her economy ministry insists the tariffs will safeguard more than 300,000 Mexican jobs. Yet reporting suggests the decision followed heavy lobbying from Washington in the run-up to USMCA renegotiations. Even within her government, the policy looks awkward. Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard has in the past dismissed Trump’s tariffs as “a bad idea” that raise costs in Mexico and dampen output.

On security, events unfolded with suspicious timing. Rubio’s arrival in Mexico almost exactly coincided with a US drone strike that sank a go-fast boat in the Caribbean. What passed behind closed doors remains unclear, but speculation in the Mexican press is that Rubio pressed Sheinbaum to accelerate the removal of officials tied to organized crime.

A few days later, Mexico’s Navy — long one of the country’s most trusted institutions — was engulfed in scandal over fuel smuggling networks operating through ports in Tamaulipas, Colima, and Veracruz. Prosecutors say customs and naval officers facilitated illicit fuel shipments disguised as petrochemical imports. At least 14 people, including active and retired Navy personnel, have been arrested. Senior figures such as Vice Admiral Manuel Roberto Farías Laguna have been charged. Farías Laguna is a nephew of former Navy Secretary Rafael Ojeda Durán, a close ally of former president López Obrador, who in 2020 gave the Navy control of ports and customs. Other family members and associates of Ojeda Durán have also been implicated, though he himself has not been charged and officials have not accused him of any wrongdoing.

That connection makes the scandal’s violent turn more troubling. The deaths this week of two Navy officers — including that of an admiral officially ruled a suicide, as well as a captain who formerly ran a port in Colima killed in what was described as a training accident — have stoked fears among government critics of selective justice and internal power struggles. And those deaths aren’t the only ones linked to the scandal. But Sheinbaum insists the investigation proves impunity is ending. However, when pressed about the suspicious nature of the deaths in her morning press conference this week, Sheinbaum bristled, scolding a reporter for El Universal and telling him the way he asked his question was “not right.”

And hovering over all this were intelligence revelations which tested Sheinbaum’s protests of sovereignty even further. An extensive Reuters investigation this week detailed the CIA’s expansive presence inside Mexico, suggesting deep US involvement in counter-cartel operations. A CIA spokesperson did little to downplay the report, framing Mexico as a central front in Washington’s security priorities. But Sheinbaum dismissed the reporting this morning, insisting that it is not true that Mexico works with the US spy agency.

Taken together, the tariffs widely seen as shaped in Washington, the Navy scandal unfolding in the shadow of Rubio’s visit, and the CIA’s expanding footprint inside Mexico, all cut against Sheinbaum’s sovereignty rhetoric. For all her insistence that Mexico acts independently, and for all her fury at Calderón’s intervention, it is her own administration that appears to be struggling to assert control over both economic and security affairs.

And if it’s tempting to dismiss this as business as usual in US-Mexico relations, history suggests otherwise. Compare Sheinbaum’s accommodating posture with that of Felipe Calderón, the same former president she now brands a traitor. When the US Congress, in a move signed-off on by the Obama White House, ended a pilot program that allowed certain Mexican trucks onto US highways, Calderón’s government retaliated with tariffs on $2.4 billion worth of American goods and secured a new trucking agreement. In 2010, when Arizona passed a controversial, MAGA-like immigration law widely criticized as discriminatory, Calderón condemned it in a speech before the US Congress. And while there is much to critique in Calderón’s security strategy, it was a strategy developed in Mexico City, not one dictated from Washington.

Sheinbaum, by contrast, has yet to meet the US president, let alone speak to Congress condemning any state or federal element of the MAGA program. Until now, she has largely absorbed the cost of Trump’s tariffs without responding in kind, particularly in ways that might impose political pain on Republicans in Washington. And while she has won plaudits from the Trump administration for taking a tougher line against organized crime than AMLO, that stance exists in large part due to immense US pressure.

So, as is so often the case with this government, the gap between rhetoric and reality remains glaring. By week’s end, Mexico looked less the independent actor Sheinbaum insists it is, and more a state adrift, pulled between US pressure and domestic needs, still searching for a way to govern on sovereign terms.