Cracks Begin to Show in the Mexican Regime

K remlinology used to be a going concern in American statecraft and intelligence. Peering into opaque and autocratic systems with insufficient direct access, the men helming United States policy and forecasting would seek heuristics for understanding. Causation and motive were difficult in this respect, but outcomes became easier. I specifically recall an academic, reputedly with a three-letter agency past, telling me that the secret to discerning Soviet succession lay in the funeral arrangements of the deceased premier. (This was a frequent exercise in the 1980s.) Another veteran of the intelligence community volunteered that Chinese-Communist intra-party affairs were to a remarkable extent explicable by FBI models developed for understanding the Mafia. There is no new thing.

That discipline of reading the signs and signals while seeking esoteric meanings — beloved, perhaps, of a West Coast Straussian but not a forte of American statecraft now — makes itself necessary and compelling in understanding current events within Mexico’s regime. That regime, almost wholly in the grip of the left-autocratic Morena party, has been sending forth multiple signals as its crisis versus the United States continues to worsen, and there are two especially worth noting. The stakes for that regime are existential — and the effects upon an America that suffers directly from Mexican civic dysfunction, even as we benefit from Mexican commerce, are profound.

The origins of the crisis may be found nearly wherever one chooses to look in Mexican history. De Tocqueville located Mexican civic convulsion in its adoption of Anglo-American liberalism absent Anglo-American culture and civics. The Mexican right finds it in the Mexican left’s overthrow of Mexican traditionalism. The Mexican left finds it in the Mexican right’s oppression of Mexican greatness and its perennial enthusiasm for foreign intervention. The Mexican consensus of right and left lays heavy blame upon the United States of America for constituting a standing threat to Mexico across more than 200 years. Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that the proximate roots of the crisis now lie in the late-April indictments, by the U.S. Department of Justice, of an array of alleged Mexican narco-politicians from Morena — and the Mexican president’s refusal to detain, and still less to extradite, the accused.

The indictments, which include both a governor and a senator from Mexico’s Sinaloa state, risk pulling apart the Morena coalition which presently controls that country’s presidency, supermajorities in both houses of the national legislature, and a supermajority of state governments. That coalition is, as with all political coalitions, heterogeneous. There is an opportunist faction, which adheres to Morena simply because it is in charge and would defect to nearly any other ruling party. There is an ideological faction, sincerely dedicated to Morena’s program, a “Fourth Transformation” in Mexican history, that is meant to subordinate the entire state to the party, end independent civil society, and remake Mexico along pre-January 3 Venezuelan lines — Cuban ties and all. There is, finally, what might be described as a narco faction, which has maintained longstanding ties with a variety of cartels. In governance, this last faction has developed a narco estado, a synthesis of the state and cartel, in which the former provides public goods, rents, and protection, and the latter provides money and muscle. The narco estado is nearly everywhere across Mexico, and its existence is one reason that former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (and current Deputy Secretary of State) Christopher Landau has said that perhaps over one-third of Mexican territory is now under de facto cartel governance.

The existential problem for Morena is that the single point of intersection for all three major factions is the party’s founder and singular figure, former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is the champion and visionary for the ideological faction, whose ranks include his successor as president, Claudia Sheinbaum. He is a rallying point and validator for the opportunist faction. (Mexican politics are somewhat like the Elizabethan settlement of late-Tudor England, in that they reward common practice without strictly requiring common belief.) He is also, very plausibly, a godfather of the narco faction — and this is where the American indictments hit directly at the party’s heart. The circumstantial evidence for this is robust: not only was López Obrador openly solicitous of the Sinaloa Cartel while in office, going so far as to visit and pay respects to the mother of the loathsome El Chapo, he was also investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for financial links to that same cartel, until the investigation was terminated for political reasons by the Obama administration. (When the New York Times and ProPublica reported on this over a decade later, López Obrador responded by doxxing the reporter at his daily presidential press conference: a frequent practice of his, which compelled at least one acquaintance of the author’s to purchase a vehicle with bulletproof glass.) Most recently, the former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, who served under President Biden, has publicly stated that López Obrador was afraid of what the United States might learn from the captured cartel leader El Mayo. Whatever is there, it is something that López Obrador, and therefore the regime, dreads.

The regime has therefore responded with the two major signals worth noting.

The first signal was delivered emphatically by Claudia Sheinbaum herself, at a public rally on May 31 in which she denounced what she characterized as American “intervention” in Mexican internal affairs. “They come for some,” she said, “then for others, until the United States Department of Justice becomes the main power broker in Mexico.” In this telling, the Americans are not sincerely interested in fighting narcos but are interested in exploiting those fights to assert control over the Mexican state. López Obrador himself followed up three days later with an extraordinary public letter — again violating the near-century-old tradition of Mexican ex-presidents wholly exiting public life — accusing the president of the United States of conducting an “assault on Mexico . . . under the pretext of combating migration and narcoterrorism.” The former president continued: “certain United States officials are scheming to weaken Morena and strengthen the right-wing opposition in Mexico,” with “Hitlerian propaganda.” Inflammatory and grotesque to be sure — but also revelatory.

Those signals, anti-American and defiant — and not coincidentally protective of the probable narco-politicians in Morena ranks — were amplified in a portentous June 20 interview in the Spanish newspaper El Pais with Pedro Miguel, a longtime ideological companion, adviser, and counselor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Miguel, a columnist at the far-left La Jornada, widely regarded as a de facto Morena press organ, “is also part of the inner circle of the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum,” according to the interviewer. The interviewed columnist expanded upon the Morenista strategic worldview in averring that “the United States was, is and will continue to be the main threat to the independence, sovereignty and national security of Mexico.” Furthermore, the Americans are, in the view of this ideological hothouse, aided and abetted by the remnants of non-Morena dissent within Mexican civics: “I now consider,” said Miguel, “the Mexican right wing to be more of a tool of the United States than a part of the country.” This is extraordinary rhetoric, eliminationist and verging upon the totalitarian, but also drearily familiar in the context of Latin American leftism: all dissent is traitorous. (Somewhat amusingly, when the interviewer asks Miguel if he will “vouch for the [indicted] governors from Morena,” Miguel sidesteps the question.)

What Americans, and especially the American government, ought to take from it is the understanding that the Mexican regime is at its heart inimical to the United States as such, and that the enmity is grounded in both leftist ideology and pragmatic self-protection. The Mexican president accuses the U.S. of seeking to rule Mexico, the Mexican ex-president accuses the U.S. of acting like Adolf Hitler, and a close adviser to both all state plainly that the U.S. is the major threat to the Mexican nation. The putative American aspiration to rule Mexico has no grounding in reality — anyone involved in U.S.-Mexico policymaking from the American side knows quite well that the major American goal vis-a-vis Mexico is to not have to think about Mexico — but there is one element of the antagonism that is empirically legitimate, in that we are against the cartels and their political friends.

One must pause here to acknowledge the men and women of Mexico’s Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and Secretaría de Economía — no few of them genuinely fine and intelligent patriots seeking to serve their country — who must represent the regime as it seeks to persuade the Americans that it deserves the economic lifeline of USMCA, and forbearance on nearly every other front.

All this brings us to the second signal worth noting. If Morena’s coalition is a tripartite alliance of ideologues, narcos, and opportunists — which is not to say that the categories are mutually exclusive — then the last of the three is doing that which Miguel accuses the Mexican right of doing. According to a June 27 report in the New York Times, “as the Trump administration ramps up its investigations into Mexico’s government, elected officials in the country’s governing party have been quietly offering themselves to U.S. authorities as informants against fellow party members.” It’s a bombshell within that sphere, with “at least a dozen elected officials . . . [having] begun talks with the United States.” The officials are unnamed, which gives the reportage the air of messaging and warning as much as straight news. A “Drug Enforcement Administration initiative to privately contact Mexican officials in hopes of persuading them to talk” is responsible for the conversations. The DEA does in fact conduct this sort of direct outreach fairly often, in various scenarios, and so the report comports with known methods and motivations. Now the moment comes for the opportunist faction within the Morena coalition to preserve themselves — and for the narco faction to protect itself. Given sufficient time and American inquiry, it is a coalition that may be stripped to its ideological core.

Put differently, whatever the proclaimed preferences and interpretations of party leadership, the revealed preference of a critical mass of the senior party ranks is something else altogether. An America that is supposedly Mexico’s enemy is a more-desired friend, to a significant section of the Mexican regime, than that regime itself. If we’re looking for a Kremlinology of Mexican governance, that revealed preference is our heuristic of understanding. The first signal says that the Mexican regime will resist the Americans to the utmost. The second signal says it will succumb, inexorably, as it emerges that patriotism just might be compatible with self-preservation after all.

In the second episode of the first season of the 2018 Netflix series Narcos Mexico, Diego Luna’s Félix Gallardo speaks with a plaza boss whom he is recruiting to his syndicate. “I hope you won’t be offended if I offer you some insight,” says the boss to Gallardo, “but the idea of Mexicans, let alone Sinaloans, getting organized seems unlikely.” In the long run, it is exactly this fractious tendency, extending past crime into civics, that brings down Gallardo’s cartel empire — both in the show and in history. And as the Americans well understand, it’s what just might bring Morena’s narco politicians down now.