We’ve seen other signs of stealth-conflict: a car crash killing two CIA agents in Mexico – who may have been involved in an alleged CIA assassination campaign against cartel operatives; the indictment by US authorities of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, over alleged drug ties. Finally, the State Department revoked visas in June for Morena Govs. Alfonso Durazo and Américo Villarreal, stating that both were under investigation.

All of this has come amid conflicting statements from Trump officials. Last month, Drug Enforcement Administration head, Terry Cole, claimed that the Mexican government and cartel networks were “one and the same.” Days later, the US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, credited Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for an ongoing crackdown against the cartels, including a nearly 70% reduction in fentanyl flows to the US. Washington and Mexico City now exhibit a two-track relationship: one in which the two countries cooperate closely over security and another in which the White House appears hellbent on weakening the Mexican government. In the new paradigm of Trump II’s bellicose foreign policy, the latter is an ominous sign that Mexico could be the next target of US military intervention.  

Narcocorruption in Mexico is endemic and particularly rampant in failed states like Sinaloa and Tamaulipas. Sinaloa Gov. Rocha Moya, recently indicted by the US, was an alleged ally of the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel — so named after loyalists to former kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In the lead-up to the 2021 gubernatorial election, the cartel kidnapped Rocha Moya’s electoral opponents. In return, the governor has allegedly given the Chapitos forewarning of anti-narcotics operations. He resigned in May following his indictment by US authorities, though the Mexican government seems unlikely to extradite him.

But it is hard to make a case that the Morena party is uniquely tainted. For one thing, virtually all of Sinaloa’s governors in recent decades have had alleged links with the state’s eponymous cartel; in the 1980s, Institutional Revolutionary Party Gov. Antonio Toledo Corro reportedly harbored Guadalajara kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in his home after the latter ordered the killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.  

Yet the fact that US authorities have selectively and exclusively targeted Morena politicians suggests that the Trump administration’s chief concern is neither good governance nor the drug trade. In May, the investigative think tank InSight Crime compiled a list of the most notorious Mexican officials accused of organized crime. Of the ten officials listed, six were associated with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), two with the opposition National Action Party (PAN), and only two — including Rocha Moya — with Morena. 

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Sheinbaum, moreover, has rightly noted that Washington has denied all 269 of Mexico’s extradition requests since 2018, including former Tamaulipas governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca. A dual citizen, Cabeza de Vaca is currently at large in Texas, despite embezzling roughly $300 million in concert with the Gulf Cartel. His affiliation with the Right-wing PAN has led many in Morena to accuse the Trump administration of condoning organized crime by perceived allies. 

Indeed, since 2025, the White House has pardoned or granted clemency to dozens of friendly fraudsters and convicted traffickers, including Chicago’s Gangster Disciples kingpin Larry Hoover and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. And the irony is that the first Trump administration arguably viewed AMLO, Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor, as a strategic ally. Officials such as former Organization of American States ambassador Carlos Trujillo lauded Mexican cooperation over trade and immigration, stressing shared interests and ideological pragmatism between both countries.  

Trump I shockingly condoned record-low drug seizures under AMLO, following the dissolution and replacement of Mexico’s Federal Police with the military National Guard in 2019. In his first term, the US president similarly heeded López Obrador’s counsel against designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and dropped trafficking charges against Mexican Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos. And while Trump I also denied all of AMLO’s extradition requests, it nonetheless prosecuted former opposition party PRI and PAN officials such as former Security Minister Genaro García Luna and Nayarit Attorney General Edgar Veytia.

In contrast, it’s clear that the more interventionist — and Miami-influenced — Trump II no longer regards Mexico as an ally; in June, López Obrador went as far as to pen an open letter to his erstwhile friend, writing: “For the good of all, bring back the old Trump.” Even as Sheinbaum has deepened cooperation with Washington on immigration and security, much of the GOP is now virulently hostile to the Leftist president and her party. Many Republicans sincerely believe that Sheinbaum was “installed” by the cartels. Others, such as Miami neocon Carlos Gimenez, believe that Mexico is a “narcocommunist dictatorship” — a view shared by parts of the Mexican opposition.

Trump and MAGA hardliners have repeatedly called for strikes inside Mexico — a prospect that Sheinbaum has rebuffed. In one of many occasions in which Trump has referred to strikes, he gloated: “That [sounds] like a war. Would I do it? I’d be proud to.” And the White House strategy of punishing Leftists and elevating conservatives, deployed in other Latin American countries, appears to now include Mexico as well. Last year, Trump sanctioned and tariffed Brazil over its Supreme Court trial of former Right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. In May, the State Department revoked visas for five board members of Costa Rican newspaper La Nación over its criticisms of the Trump-aligned government.   

Of course, unlike other Latin American countries, Mexico shares a border with the US and is the country’s largest trade partner. In the event of military action, the Mexican government could simultaneously close the border to roughly $1 trillion in trade and flood it with migrants by removing visa requirements on Cubans and Venezuelans. Given ongoing catastrophes in both countries, it is likely that millions of migrants would subsequently undo Trump’s signature accomplishment of slashing illegal crossings. Never mind the likely Mexican refugees fleeing US ordnance.  

Unlike the unpopular Trump, moreover, Sheinbaum has her country’s support: her approval rating has hovered around 70%, giving her a better chance of weathering a protracted standoff with Washington. Viewed in this light, US lawfare against Morena politicians can be read as an effort to weaken the Mexican government ahead of an eventual conflict, diplomatic or military or both.

In the case of Sinaloa, the White House’s actions have tragically worsened security — a key reason why previous administrations avoided indicting incumbent governors. Following the arrests of Sinaloa kingpins Ovidio Guzmán, Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the cartel has split between Guzmán and Mayo loyalists. With the Chapitos-and-Guzmán-allied Rocha Moya out, the Mayos have exploited the power vacuum to settle scores. Local journalist Luis Armando Becerra, a native of Culiacán in Sinaloa, told me that while he found the US indictments to be credible, officials “failed to consider its effects on local security.” 

The Trump administration now appears to be taking a subtler approach toward Morena officials. Despite having their visas revoked, Govs. Durazo of Sonora and Villarreal of Tamaulipas, as well as Gov. Marina del Pilar of Baja California, whose visa was revoked in 2025, have traveled to the US under a parole program reserved for informants. In July, a leaked phone call between Del Pilar and a purported FBI intermediary showed the governor offering to cooperate with US authorities.

It’s unclear whether US officials plan on indicting any of the aforementioned governors. Del Pilar is known to have associated with traffickers through her ex-husband; while plausible, Durazo and Villarreal’s alleged links to organized crime have yet to be substantiated. More likely is that the Trump administration aims to gather testimony for a bigger indictment; another possibility is that it is trying to co-opt governors it views as politically or geographically strategic. 

Much of the Mexican opposition believes that Washington aims to indict López Obrador, arguing that his son’s lavish lifestyle is a sign of drug money; the State Department has yet to give a motive for revoking the younger López’s visa. The DEA, however, has long attempted to substantiate alleged links between AMLO and the cartels — to no avail. In 2024, ProPublica revealed that the agency investigated claims that traffickers funneled $2 million into López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign, but couldn’t prove whether the former president “sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations.” Subsequent attempts to incriminate AMLO based on testimony from kingpins have failed to bear fruit.

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Alternatively, the Trump administration has shown a keen geographic interest in the US-Mexico border; Morena Govs. Del Pilar, Durazo and Villarreal control states neighboring Texas, Arizona, and California. The remaining border states of Nuevo León, Coahuila and Chihuahua are run by opposition governors, whom the White House likely sees as allies. Unlike Del Pilar, Nuevo León governor Samuel García has yet to face scrutiny from Washington despite comparable familial ties to traffickers. 

Indeed, the April deaths of two CIA officers were in the PAN-governed border state of Chihuahua. The two officers were found to have entered Mexico illegally with the blessing of embattled Chihuahua Gov. Maru Campos. Despite being nearly suspended from office over the incident, Campos subsequently authorized a joint surveillance hub with US agencies in Ciudad Juárez. US lawfare against Morena governors may ultimately be aimed at safeguarding CIA operations along the border — including its alleged assassinations of cartel members.

And yet, Sheinbaum’s government is arguably the most cooperative and competent Mexican partner that Washington has ever dealt with on security. The president and her security minister Omar García Harfuch have overseen a remarkable crackdown against organized crime, prioritizing mid-level cartel members in tandem with kingpins in addition to a policy of mass incarceration. 

Outside of Sinaloa, Sheinbaum’s strategy has managed to limit infighting within and between cartels following decapitations of kingpins such as Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) head Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera. Authorities quashed subsequent retaliations throughout the country within 72 hours. Just days after DEA head Cole’s comments regarding the Mexican government, Security Minister Harfuch thanked the DEA for its help arresting fugitive Janero Van Demario Garrett for cocaine trafficking.

Fentanyl seizures south of the border have risen to record highs while seizures north of the border have plummeted to record lows. Mexico has also illegally extradited nearly 200 kingpins to the US. Government figures point to a record 50% reduction in homicides across the country, with independent analyses putting the figure closer to a nonetheless historic 20%. Sheinbaum and Harfuch have even prosecuted more than 60 local officials with ties to organized crime, including from Morena. The charitable reading of White House pressure is that it has given the president cover to make difficult but welcome changes; last year, Sheinbaum reportedly forced the resignation of Mexico’s spectacularly corrupt attorney general, Alejandro Gertz.

Yet the sad reality is that neither Trump nor MAGA care about concrete results on security. And so long as millions of Americans remain addicted to illicit drugs, no amount of bombs will make a difference to the logic of the drug trade. Instead, the Trump administration would do well to continue aiding Mexican efforts at incarcerating violent criminals; it could also explore a program of mandatory institutionalization and rehabilitation for public drug abuse at home.

However, if success is selling televised, performative “wins” to supporters, the picture changes. In Mexico’s case, that could mean dropping missiles on alleged “narcoterrorists,” never mind the roughly 25 million Americans who visit Mexico each year, the 1.6 million US citizens who call the country home, and the likelihood of setting off a costly and indefinite endeavor with untold blowback for civilians in both countries.

The hallmark of a forever war entails a nebulous objective against an irregular actor on an open-ended timeline. In every way, the MAGA pipe dream of cartel wars in Mexico fits this description — and the groundwork is being laid.

To understand Claudia Sheinbaum’s place in Mexican politics, one must first situate her government, party, and movement within the broader landscape of the Mexican Left. Sheinbaum’s party Morena represents the electoral Left and the broader phenomenon of “Obradorismo”, named after Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Obradorismo” is a political movement motivated by state developmentalism and committed to pursuing the interests of the working classes and the poor through democratic means. While a certain sense of class interest animates the project, this does not entail outright confrontation with capital, but a conviction that class interests must be harmonized, and that the state must be re-legitimized as the central social actor capable of carrying out its aims. In essence, Morena represents an effort to construct a post-neoliberal social pact, one predicated on returning class politics to the mainstream political arena, and re-invigorating the state.

But what about other factions of the Mexican Left? One crucial distinction is between the electoral Left and what might be termed the autonomist Left, which operates as an informal social movement rather than organizing under a formal party structure. More fundamentally, it rejects state power outright. The most celebrated example of the autonomist Left is the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas, which has pursued autonomous communal power — a form of local self-government that explicitly refuses incorporation into any broader national project. But the Zapatistas are not the only ones. Similar orientations can be found in movements such as the self-defense units in Cherán in the western state of Michoacán, where residents have for years taken up arms to protect their communities from drug cartels while simultaneously rejecting the state’s role in security provision, seeing it as complicit with organized crime. These communities have famously expelled all political parties from their territory.

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The autonomist Left also has an urban branch, though the term “branch” might overstate the degree of coordination between rural and urban variants. What unites them is a negative view of the state. What separates them is their social composition and the structural basis of their politics. The rural autonomist Left’s skepticism toward the state is materially grounded. They have historically experienced the state as an external intervention. The term “community” in this context carries real meaning: it refers to specific forms of collective land tenure and self-governance, often institutionalized through the legal category of usos y costumbres (“customs and traditions”), which grants certain communities the right to govern according to traditional practices, such as decision-making governing assemblies instead of elected delegates. Even where communities fall outside this formal category, the historical lineage of communal organization provides a material foundation for their political orientation. This structural position explains, for instance, the opposition of certain communities to developmentalist projects like the Tren Maya, where questions arose about who constitutes the relevant political unit for consultation. Individual residents as in a liberal democratic model? Or communal representatives as in a corporatist one?

The urban autonomist Left, by contrast, lacks this structural grounding. Cosmopolitan progressives with small social bases adopt the language of social movements and civil society while remaining numerically marginal and primarily active in intellectual circles. At its best, it draws on anarchist ideals and sophisticated critiques of the bourgeois state as the node organizing capital. More commonly, however, it is characterized by its “Brahmin Left” dispositions: highly educated, credentialed, invested in cultural capital, oriented toward, for lack of a better term, identity politics.

Morena and the electoral Left emerge from an entirely different historical trajectory. The party can be credibly traced to a split from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the Eighties. The PRI had governed Mexico for over 70 years, institutionalizing the Mexican Revolution and carrying out Keynesian welfare-state projects from the Thirties through to the Seventies. While the party contained a broad ideological spectrum, it was sometimes a contradictory mix of Mexican Cold War anti-communist and national state developmentalism. This began to change in the Seventies and accelerated in the Eighties, as a neoliberal wing became dominant within the party. In reaction, the nationalist wing broke away in the mid-Eighties, forming the party that would contest the 1988 elections and eventually consolidate into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

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The political career of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, otherwise known as AMLO, traverses this history. He began in the PRI in Tabasco, joined the Eighties splinter-faction, and became a founding member of the PRD, with which he won the mayoralty of Mexico City in 2000. What makes AMLO difficult to categorize for both domestic and international observers is precisely this trajectory: he does not come from the socialist or social democratic Left as his European counterparts might; he does not emerge from militant union leadership like Lula in Brazil or Evo Morales in Bolivia; he was not formed in the rural or urban guerrilla movements of the Seventies like Mujica in Uruguay, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, or Petro in Colombia. Instead, he comes from the nationalist, developmentalist wing of the PRI — a Left that operated within the paradigm of the Keynesian welfare state and never let go.

Sheinbaum’s own trajectory intersects with this lineage while adding distinctive elements. An academic by training, with a career in energy engineering and climate studies, her first entry into high-level politics came when AMLO appointed her Minister of Environment during his tenure as Mexico City mayor. Earlier, she had been involved in student movements focused on resisting the privatization of higher education — movements with significant ties to the emerging PRD. Sheinbaum thus shares certain affinities with the urban progressive Left in her background, yet she was politically formed within “Obradorismo”. This duality has proven advantageous in her first year in office, allowing her to retain AMLO’s base while recapturing sectors of the professional classes that had drifted from the Left coalition.

Situating Morena within the broader Latin American context requires attention to Mexico’s peculiar timing. The Pink Tide of progressive governments that swept Latin America beginning in the late Nineties never reached Mexico during its height. The conventional explanation for the Pink Tide emphasizes the conjuncture of democratization — the famous third wave — with the growing inequality and lackluster growth produced by neoliberalism. Mexico possessed these same conditions: democratization following PRI rule, poverty and inequality caused by neoliberalism. Yet the electoral Left repeatedly failed, with three consecutive center-right governments taking power after 2000.

This anomaly can be explained, ironically, by the PRI’s own legacy. The electoral Left in Mexico developed without a social base of its own because the PRI had already organized and neutralized what would theoretically constitute the Left’s natural constituency. Through patronage, clientelism, and a combination of carrots and sticks, the PRI had captured the working classes within its own corporatist structures. The PRD therefore faced the more difficult task of contesting an already-organized social base against an established hegemon, rather than simply mobilizing an available constituency. Only as neoliberalism eroded the material basis for the PRI’s clientelist networks did these social blocs become available for rearticulation.

There are also important structural differences between Morena and the earlier Pink Tide governments. The first wave governed during a period of extraordinary economic growth, particularly tied to the commodity boom in Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Sheinbaum, by contrast, comes to power after years of lackluster growth that estimates indicate is likely to continue. This means that the basis of legitimacy of the project must rest on a continued redistributive management of the existing “pie”. It is therefore all the more remarkable that despite these disarticulated working classes, a dilapidated state, the Covid pandemic, and subsequent inflationary pressures, the Obrador administration managed to increase real wages by 30%, lower poverty by 13%, and shift the balance between labor and capital’s share of income by 8% in favor of workers.

Moreover, Mexico’s integration into the global economy differs fundamentally: 20-plus years of NAFTA have restructured the economy entirely, dilapidating the countryside and national industry, and converting the country into a cheap foreign manufacturing center and import economy. Between 40 and 60% of Mexicans work in the informal sector, primarily in services and retail rather than production. The government’s relationship with NAFTA has been ambivalent — defending and legitimizing it while using it as leverage to advance pro-worker positions, as when the 2018 renegotiation was used to secure major labor reforms that previous Mexican delegations had rejected.

Sheinbaum’s handling of the Trump administration’s tariff threats reveals both the continuities and distinctive elements of her approach. Her negotiation tactics have been simultaneously overrated and underrated. They are overrated insofar as her approach largely follows AMLO’s playbook, yet the international press has treated her more favorably, perhaps because her technocratic background makes her more legible to the journalist class. They are underrated because, unlike many world leaders who responded to Trump’s protectionism by doubling down on free trade orthodoxy, Sheinbaum has used the moment — without knee-jerk anti-Trump posturing — to advance a post-neoliberal economic order, including tariffs against Asian imports accompanied by actual industrial policy, in the form of a return to a mild import substitution industrialization. In this sense, Sheinbaum represents both the inheritance of Mexico’s national developmentalist tradition and its adaptation to contemporary conditions. A year into her administration, Sheinbaum’s project is still finding its footing, and while the prospects of economic growth remain low, the strategy of strengthening its autonomy in its interactions with global markets will prove invaluable.