On December 21, the situation on the 2,000-mile US border with Mexico was critical. Every day that month, thousands of migrants were sneaking across the frontier, overwhelming border officials and forcing the closure of legal crossing points. Republicans were weaponising the crisis and President Joe Biden needed a quick solution.
Biden called the one person who could help him quickly, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and demanded action, dispatching a team headed by Antony Blinken, secretary of state, to Mexico City.
López Obrador’s government quickly restarted deporting and busing thousands of migrants from northern Mexico to the south, measures it had previously halted for lack of money. Unauthorised border crossings fell sharply in the following months from December’s record level of more than 300,000 and last week Biden was able to boast that they were now lower than when Donald Trump left office, although this claim has been disputed.
The episode showed how heavily the administration has depended on López Obrador for help with stemming migration, an issue on which Republicans have constantly attacked Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
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The Mexican leader, a canny and experienced politician, has in turn maximised his leverage over the Democratic administration to push through leftwing nationalist reforms that opponents say have weakened democracy, allowed organised crime to expand, crimped economic growth and prejudiced foreign investment — all without criticism from Washington.
López Obrador “understood very clearly that if he did as much of the dirty work on immigration for the US as he could . . . he would get from the Americans basically an attitude of leaving him alone,” says Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister and expert on US-Mexico relations. “He could pretty much get away with whatever he wanted.”
This raises questions about the nature of the tacit bargain between the two presidents and about whether it will survive after their respective terms end. López Obrador will be succeeded in October by Claudia Sheinbaum.
“The US has given up a lot and has worked against its own interests,” says Duncan Wood, president of the Pacific Council on International Policy and former head of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center.
The US relationship with its southern neighbour is closer than almost any other. Over more than 200 years, the two nations have evolved from fighting wars with each other to knitting a close web of trading, investment and cultural links.
Mexico is the US’s biggest trading partner and the US is the largest foreign investor in Mexico. More than 37mn people of Mexican descent live in the US, an estimated 1.6mn Americans dwell in Mexico and the US embassy in Mexico City is among Washington’s biggest missions.
At the start of his term in 2018, López Obrador, a charismatic populist, established a surprisingly good relationship with Donald Trump.
When campaigning for the White House, Trump had called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, and as president vowed to impose tariffs if Mexico did not stem migration but the two men quickly cut a deal. Trump needed illegal migration cut, while López Obrador wanted the economic benefits from the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA).
Some Democrats in Washington and the opposition in Mexico City had hoped that the Biden administration would break with Trump’s transactional approach towards Mexico, stand up for democracy and human rights and ease harsh migration rules.
The Biden administration did initially ease some of the most draconian Trump-era restrictions on migrants. But it soon became clear that, as American voters grew more concerned about illegal migration, foreign policy principles would again take a back seat.
“There was always going to be a desire to be pragmatic about the relationship,” says Ricardo Zúniga, who served in Biden’s Latin America team as principal deputy assistant secretary of state. “The Biden team . . . understood they needed Mexico’s help on migration. There wasn’t a sense of coming in to try to lecture or . . . totally reset a relationship where López Obrador was understood to be quite powerful domestically”.
López Obrador had a reputation as a prickly nationalist, with an instinctive anti-Americanism that is common on the Latin American left. To deal with him, Biden picked an old friend and former Senate colleague, Ken Salazar, as ambassador to Mexico.
He also tasked Harris to deal with the root causes of migration to the US by working with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, three Central American nations that were historically sources of many of the migrants, to improve their economies, tackle crime and reduce violence.
Salazar arrived in Mexico City with a clear objective. “His instruction from Biden was to get up close and friendly with Amlo,” another ambassador in Mexico says, referring to the Mexican leader by his initials. “The Americans were almost intimidated by Amlo.”
Salazar quickly established a close rapport with López Obrador — so close that it disturbed some senior diplomats at the US embassy, who felt he went too far to please his hosts. “He handles the bilateral relationship himself and has been very effective in sidelining the entire state department,” says one US diplomat, speaking off the record. “He is always reminding people he is a personal friend of Biden’s. But Mexican officials call him a ‘useful idiot’.”
A US state department official says that “Ambassador Salazar and his team in Mission Mexico work side by side with our Department of State colleagues in Washington and our Mexican partners to advance US interests”.
For his part López Obrador has been quick to understand how to use the leverage that migration has given him over the US.
“You had someone who was the ultimate politician,” says Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “He is an incredibly skilled negotiator and it came naturally to him to find the trade-offs he wants”.
When Biden entered office in January 2021, he immediately faced a diplomatic dilemma on Mexico involving a former defence minister and top military commander accused of drug trafficking. Drug Enforcement Agency officials had arrested General Salvador Cienfuegos in October as he travelled through Los Angeles airport with his family for a holiday, accusing him of conspiracy to traffic cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines and laundering the proceeds.
Despite the general’s seniority — he had been defence minister for six years until 2018 — López Obrador initially appeared to accept his guilt. But, under pressure from Mexico’s military, he quickly switched to suggesting that the charges were false and demanding Cienfuegos’s release.
He threatened to expel all DEA agents from Mexico and to end co-operation on fighting the drug trade, a crucial area of concern for the US because of the flood of illegal cocaine and fentanyl across the border.
Two weeks later, the Trump administration capitulated. Cienfuegos was released and sent back to Mexico on the understanding that charges would be pursued there.
But days before Biden took office, Mexican prosecutors announced they had no grounds to charge Cienfuegos. López Obrador then ordered the release of the hundreds of pages of confidential evidence which the US had shared with Mexico, and denounced the case as fabricated.
A US justice department spokesperson said at the time it was “deeply disappointed” by the case’s closure. Last year López Obrador decorated the general for his service. “Neither Trump nor Biden was going to do anything to [López Obrador] that he would get upset about, if it meant the threat of limited co-operation on migration,” says Castañeda.
At the start of his term in 2018, López Obrador has relied increasingly on the military to execute his top priority projects. The armed forces were put in charge of everything from big construction projects to a new federal police force, violating a constitutional rule that police should be under civilian command. During his term, López Obrador has also given them control of airports, ports, the customs service and even an airline.
But while the US criticised authoritarianism in other countries in the region such as El Salvador and sent strong messages to Brazil’s military about the need to respect the constitution under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, there has been no similar effort in Mexico.
The Biden administration also failed to speak out against López Obrador’s attacks on key democratic institutions in Mexico, such as the Supreme Court, when it came under siege from government supporters last year.
López Obrador had vilified the institution constantly in his daily news conferences after it ruled against some of his most cherished initiatives. Pro-government demonstrators set up an encampment outside the court building in the centre of Mexico City last summer, plastering it with slogans such as “Corrupt traitor justices, you are fired”. Norma Piña, the court’s president, was portrayed on a large poster stuck to the building’s walls as a “narco-pig” and protesters burnt her effigy.
When the Bolsonaro government in Brazil attacked the Supreme Court, cozied up to the military and questioned the electoral system, the Biden administration responded with a strong and co-ordinated effort to shore up Brazilian democracy, yet in Mexico, attacks by pro-government demonstrators on a key democratic institution did not prompt the same reaction.
“There was concern,” says the Pacific Council’s Wood, “but they felt they were held hostage by migration . . . They could have been tougher”.
The state department official says the US co-ordinates closely with Mexico “on a wide range of important issues . . . even as we make clear the need for strong democratic institutions.”
Now in the final months of his tenure, López Obrador has proposed to replace the Supreme Court with popularly elected judges — a move NGOs say would risk turning it into an appendage of the ruling party. Salazar, the ambassador, has said a strong justice system is important but that it is up to Mexicans to decide any changes.
“They depend on us over fentanyl and migration,” says one minister in López Obrador’s cabinet. “This government is more assertive in its relationship with the US government. It drives hard bargains.”
Buoyed by the Biden administration’s reticence, López Obrador has felt strong enough to pursue a foreign policy that at times ran counter to US interests. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he invited Moscow’s troops to parade at Mexico’s independence day celebration and described US military aid to Ukraine as “irrational”.
He sent free oil to Cuba and invited Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, who has a $15mn price on his head in the US for alleged drug trafficking, to a regional summit in Mexico City.
Most strikingly, he snubbed Biden when the US president hosted the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in June 2022, an absence which emboldened several other Latin American leaders to skip the event. Yet the following month Biden invited him to the White House.
US businesses have struggled with López Obrador’s nationalist and statist policies. The Mexican leader squeezed private investment in the energy sector, reversing a gradual opening under his predecessor. Other measures included banning the import of genetically modified corn from the US and cancelling a permit for a half-built US brewery in northern Mexico.
Even though the energy policy appeared to violate the USMCA, the US did not pursue the dispute procedure designed to deal with such cases. More than three years after López Obrador legislated to increase state control over electricity generation, Washington has not convened a dispute resolution panel. Salazar says he had spent hours in meetings between US energy companies and López Obrador and that several companies had moved forward with large investments as a result.
Another headache for businesses has been the explosion of organised crime under López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding open conflict with drug cartels. “Security has grown exponentially as a topic for companies,” says one business lobby head in Mexico. “Big US corporations didn’t use to have a problem . . . but not any longer.”
Migration is likely to remain a big and divisive issue in the November election, even after Biden’s withdrawal. Trump lost no time in attacking Harris on her record, saying last week that “as border tsar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20mn illegal aliens to stampede into our country . . . Kamala, you’ve done a terrible job.”
Harris aides have pointed out that the vice-president was never a “border tsar” and was instead tasked with tackling the root causes of migration.
This strategy foundered when political repression and economic crisis in Venezuela and Cuba triggered a big exodus from those nations. Security crises in Ecuador and Haiti added still more migrants.
Harris has said little about migration since Biden withdrew from the presidential race but her record as one of 10 senators who voted against the USMCA is likely to worry Mexico more than her views on migration.
Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s handpicked successor, won a landslide victory in June elections and their Morena party has enough votes in congress to rewrite the constitution — something the Mexican president intends to do before leaving office. Using the justification of rooting out corruption, the measures he has discussed include sweeping changes to the courts and the electoral system and dismantling independent regulators.
“Washington needs to pay serious and undivided attention to the potential reforms that López Obrador and Morena will seek to ram through in September,” says Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the US. “If Mexico morphs into an illiberal democracy on its doorstep, there will be three winners: China, Russia and Cuba.”
Civil society groups, opposition politicians and Mexico experts bemoan the erosion of the country’s democratic institutions.
“López Obrador ran rings around us on trade, foreign policy, Venezuela, migration and counter-narcotics co-operation,” rues a former US state department official, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the topic.
“While every nation prioritises its national interests, given that Mexico is our biggest trading partner and impacts the United States in so many ways, our failure to develop much beyond the transactional relationship we had under Trump is noteworthy.”
Castañeda traces what he calls a US indifference to Mexico’s domestic politics back to the chaos in the 1920s following the Mexican revolution and “this sort of Faustian pact that the Americans wrote subconsciously with the Mexicans”.
“As long as the place is stable, as long as core American interests are not threatened, meaning property and people, let the Mexicans govern themselves any goddamn way they want”.
But some Mexican civil society leaders feel let down by the Biden and Trump administrations’ failure to defend democracy more robustly. “There’s been very little, a very timid expression of concern on topics which are basic for a trade partner such as Mexico in terms of defending human rights and freedoms,” says Lorenzo Córdova, former president of the independent electoral institute INE.
“If you undermine the rule of law in Mexico, this will create a problem which affects US interests. That’s because authoritarian governments sort things out as they please, not according to the law.”