Sheinbaum vs. Trump: How Mexico’s Popular First Woman President Is Navigating Hostile U.S. Policy

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

On Thursday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum will join other leaders from Latin American and Caribbean countries in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for an emergency meeting to respond to President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and more. In one of Trump’s first executive orders, he also designated Mexican cartels “terrorist organizations,” then followed up with the deployment of 1,500 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. This was Mexican President Sheinbaum’s response to a question from a reporter.

REPORTER: [translated] With cartels being considered terrorist organizations, what measures will the Mexican government take regarding future cases like these, President?

PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: [translated] We are fighting these criminal groups, and what we want is collaboration and coordination. Unilateral decisions don’t help. Collaboration does. So we’re conducting a legal analysis of the implications for various organizations not linked to crime which could face economic problems due to this decision. In any case, we aim to make a proposal to the United States, which is what we’re working on, to collaborate together.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, President Sheinbaum mocked President Trump’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” during one of her recent daily news conferences as she stood in front of a large map from 1607 that labeled much of North America “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America.”

PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: [translated] The United Nations recognizes the name Gulf of Mexico. But next, why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds nice, doesn’t it? Since 1607, the Constitution of Apatzingán was Mexican America. So let’s call it Mexican America. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? Gulf of Mexico since 1607, and it is also internationally recognized.

AMY GOODMAN: This week, Google said it will rename the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America” in Google Maps for users in the U.S.

For more on the first 100 days of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, we’re joined by Edwin Ackerman, sociology professor at Syracuse University, the author of Origins of the Mass Parties: Dispossession and the Party-Form in Mexico and Bolivia.

Professor Ackerman, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you respond to what we just laid out? And lay out your response to the first 100 days of the first female president of Mexico.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, these past 100 days, I think, have been defined, on the one hand, by this constant tension in negotiations with the Trump administration, that we can talk a bit more about. But I would also want to emphasize that, you know, on the domestic front within Mexico has also been a very sort of newsworthy 100 days, in which there’s been a series of constitutional reforms that have been passed, about a dozen of them, in this past three months. You have to remember, Claudia Sheinbaum comes in with a very strong hand. She has a two-thirds majority in both chambers and is following the sort of legacy and popularity of AMLO. She herself has maintained very high levels of popularity, and they have been able to push through several important constitutional reforms that range from Indigenous rights to housing rights to, perhaps more polemically, national security matters. So, that’s a very important part of these 100 days, right?

There’s also been an unveiling of a very important six-year economic plan that would return to several elements of what used to be called import substitution industrialization, which was a sort of policy that reigned in many Latin American countries from the ’50s to the ’70s, roughly speaking, that saw significant levels of economic growth by pushing forward national production to replace, in strategic ways, imports.

That said, there’s also been the continuation of violence related to the drug cartels, right? This is obviously a long-standing issue. It certainly hasn’t gone away, by any measure. There is some sense — some signs that there’s some waning of homicide rates, but, that said, there’s significant concentrations of violence, significant pockets in the past three months, in particular in the state of Sinaloa. You know, the city of Culiacán has been paralyzed by violence. So, it’s a continuing, very serious issue.

And then, finally, as I was mentioning, the relationship with Trump — right? — who has threatened tariffs over the question of trafficking of fentanyl or production of fentanyl in Mexico, or allegedly, you know, alleged production of fentanyl in Mexico, and the question of how to deal with deportations — not only deportations of Mexican nationals back to Mexico, but, even trickier, the deportation of non-Mexican nationals back to — sorry — to Mexican soil, which, again, that’s another level of complication to the negotiations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Ackerman, I wanted to ask you if you could hone in a little bit about the reforms that have occurred? You mentioned her popularity. She has an 80% positive rating among the Mexican public. Many of the people who didn’t vote for her now support her. And some of the specific reforms, for instance, reducing the age for which women can have — can qualify for a pension to 60 years of age versus 65 for men, what was her rationale for that?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right, yeah. So, there’s been a series of reforms — right? — that I think partly explain the continuation of her popularity, as you were mentioning. The particular one that you mentioned that targets women, the rationale for that, as she says it explicitly in the morning conferences, is that women, for historical reasons — as she always points out, not that it has to be that way, but that, in practice, it has been that way for historical reasons — have taken a significant amount of work in the household that goes unpaid for. Right? So, that, for her, is a reason to lower the age to access that pension versus men.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And there have also been major changes in terms of the natural resources of Mexico and the social benefit, for instance, that the petroleum industry and other critical industries must pursue. Could you talk about that, as well?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right. I mean, so, there’s, yes, significant changes to the energy sector that basically try and give the state a bigger share or stakehold of the market to recenter the role of the state. And if you go down the list of reforms, this is basically the theme that you see. For example, on a slightly different topic, the question of housing, there’s an important reform now in place that will turn an existing national credit fund, that has existed for several decades, that gives out credit to buy houses at affordable rates, to turn that fund into an actual agency that builds, that constructs houses — right? — with the aim of building a million houses during this six-year period. Right? So, this is the state taking up the direct question of housing.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, President Sheinbaum herself is a climate scientist, the former mayor of Mexico City. Can you talk about the meaning of Trump coming into office, how Sheinbaum has responded? You know, we saw when Trudeau came and had dinner with, Mar-a-Lago, and now Trudeau is out.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Claudia Sheinbaum did not do anything like that — 

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — even when he threatened tariffs against her — 

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — but is accepting Mexican migrants back —

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — being deported by plane.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right. That’s right. Right. So, I think the strategy that the Mexican government has opted for is partly based on the previous experience of Trump’s first term, right? You have to remember, AMLO was in power when — they overlap for a bit, so there’s some record, some history there of how to deal with Trump. And it seems that they’ve calculated — the Mexican government has calculated that, let’s say, diplomacy or sort of diplomatic strategic thinking, over public confrontations, get the results. Right? There are several examples of this happening, again, during Trump’s first term in its interaction with AMLO. There was tariffs also threatened back then. Several of these issues were placed on the table and eventually neutralized. And I think Sheinbaum has been able to, up to this point, do so.

I think this has to do with a couple of things. One is that if we step back from the Trump years, it’s not an exaggeration to say that from the point of view of Mexico on many of these issues, there’s no significant difference in practice between a Democratic administration or a Republican administration. If you think about things like the building of the wall, it began during a Democratic administration — right? — ’94, during Clinton, continued through the Obama period. That is, the wall itself is not specific to Trump. Mass deportations, as I’m sure your audience is well aware of, Obama and Biden, for that matter, have significant numbers of deportations, that even overcome Trump’s first term. And even the pressure for Mexico to secure its southern border against Central American migrants also precedes Trump. So there is a long-standing record of negotiation or conversation, obviously very difficult and under asymmetrical conditions, right?

Now, the second thing to say is that I think the Mexican administration is betting on the tariffs being — the tariff, that it’s being a bluff — right? — not only because those threats already had existed in the past and they ended up going nowhere, but because there’s, let’s say, structural reasons for why imposing — the U.S. imposing tariffs on Mexico would be shooting itself on the leg. Not only would it have the effect of raising prices for U.S. consumers, which we know can have significant political consequences, but also, in a broader sense, tariffs and tariff threats respond to a stage of global capitalism in which we’re not anymore. Trump is operating from the point of view that you can sort of prop up, in a sense, national capitalists in an age of globalized capital, in which it’s unclear, for example, if you’re placing tariffs on Mexican imports, to what degree are those imports being produced by Mexican capital as opposed to U.S. capital or international capital. So, that sets — 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: — some limits on tariffs. Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor Ackerman, I want to follow up on this tariff issue, because, yeah, clearly, since Mexico is the largest trading partner of the United States right now, it would be counterproductive in terms of Mexico, but some of the smaller Latin American states.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: That’s true.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I mean, the threats of tariffs against Colombia or against Panama, because Trump claims he wants to retake Panama. A lot of people are not aware that all of these — even the threats by Trump are violations of the Organization of American States Charter, which the United States helped found. Article 20 says, “No State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind.” Do you sense that this Trump policy is going to end up uniting Latin America more in opposition to the United States?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: I think so. And there are some inklings that that’s already happening, right? There’s ongoing conversations, the possibility of meetings, of renewing certain sort of efforts at collaboration that already existed in some institutional way, particularly formed in the sort of first wave of what’s referred to as the pink tide, you know, the beginning of the 2000s, when a series of progressive governments take office throughout the southern continent, right? Some of those efforts that were put in place, again, in the early 2000s were later abandoned or put to the wayside as some of these countries elected right-wing formations. But we can see, again, a renewed pink tide, if you will, that partly is interested in — this is also even before Trump taking office — partly is interested in creating stronger links, both at the political level, in terms of coordinating responses, and at the economic level, in terms of integrating, to some degree, the economies. And you hear a lot of buzz about this happening in the past three months, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Edwin Ackerman, sociology professor at Syracuse University. And this update: Honduras President Xiomara Castro says she’s canceled Thursday’s meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC, citing lack of consensus.

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