As US president Donald Trump began his second term in January, Mexico loomed large in his crosshairs.
Thousands of migrants a month were crossing the US border illegally from Mexico. Mexican cartels were smuggling huge quantities of the lethal drug fentanyl into American cities. And the country had elected a leftwing nationalist who vowed to stand up to the Americans – just the kind of politician to raise Trump’s hackles.
Yet as Claudia Sheinbaum completes a year in office, Mexico’s first woman president has surprised many. Instead of confronting Trump, she has embraced dialogue – 14 telephone conversations so far – and won concessions which have helped the economy dodge recession.
The US-Mexico relationship is one of the world’s most important bilateral partnerships and while its future is unpredictable, diplomats on both sides of the border credit Sheinbaum with handling a difficult situation well.
RM Block
“There’s no other government that’s co-operating as much with us in the fight against crime as ... Mexico,” US secretary of state Marco Rubio said while visiting the country last month.
In contrast to some world leaders, Mexico’s president has avoided public spats with Trump over his threats of higher tariffs on trade, preferring private diplomacy.
Advocates hail Sheinbaum as an exemplar, a modern left-wing Latin American leader whose freshness and vitality stand in sharp contrast to some of the region’s other socialists, such as Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
But critics point to sweeping changes to the judiciary and planned electoral reforms to suggest that behind a technocratic mask, Sheinbaum is an ideologue bent on strengthening what is one of the world’s most powerful presidencies, hastening Mexico’s return to the one-party state that dominated its 20th-century history.
Either way, she faces huge challenges in a country with many regions under the thumb of drug cartels, investors reluctant to commit and an economy that has barely grown in per capita terms for years.
“She’s managed a terribly difficult, adverse situation rather well in her first year, given all the headwinds she has had,” says Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister. “On the other hand, most of the main challenges remain unaddressed.”
When Sheinbaum emerged as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s preferred successor in 2023, the odds seemed stacked against her.
The outgoing president, known by his initials as Amlo, was a charismatic leader who had coined the “Fourth Transformation”, a leftwing remake of Mexico that he compared in ambition to independence from Spain in the 19th century.
Alternating harsh attacks on opponents with a folksy, grandfatherly charm, López Obrador held the nation in thrall during marathon news conferences every weekday at 7am. He is the founder of Morena, a political movement that now controls both houses of congress and most of Mexico’s 31 states.
Could Sheinbaum, a serious-minded former climate scientist raised in a family of academics, Mexicans wondered, replicate López Obrador’s popular touch?
Her predecessor won support because he had delivered for Mexico’s poor, almost doubling the minimum wage in real terms and tackling poverty with a plethora of welfare programmes. But his legacy also included rampant drug violence, a stagnant economy, a hollowed-out bureaucracy and empty coffers after a final-year spending spree.
Despite López Obrador’s vows to fight corruption, independent monitors judged that his country grew increasingly venal during his term. Transparency International ranked Mexico as one of the most corrupt nations in 2024, on a par with Uganda.
And the impressive-sounding figures on foreign investment masked the fact that most of the money was reinvestment of profits by existing companies. Few new firms were choosing Mexico.
Sheinbaum’s initial moves emphasised continuity. Her government said it would build the “second storey of the Fourth Transformation”. She lavished praise on López Obrador and followed him in denouncing previous governments as “the dark night of neoliberalism”. But in other areas, she signalled a different approach.
As the first woman leader of a country with a long tradition of machismo, she claimed her victory in the name of all Mexican women. And while many López Obrador trademarks were maintained – early morning news conferences, weekend travel to the provinces, an austere lifestyle in lodgings at the government headquarters – the new president has been doing some things her way.
Where López Obrador trusted his political gut, Sheinbaum prefers hard data. “She is meticulous, doesn’t trust but always verifies, studies issues carefully and has a strong character,” one person familiar with her says. As for her relationship with Amlo: “She said in a meeting that, ‘If you think I take instructions from him, then you don’t know him or me’.”
A diplomat who has had dealings with Sheinbaum describes the president as “calm, cool, calculating and cautious”. “She is data-driven but also deeply ideological,” he says. Observers note that she continues to send oil shipments to Cuba’s communist regime in defiance of US sanctions and expresses public support for Peru’s former far-left president Pedro Castillo, in jail on charges of trying to stage a coup.
Sheinbaum’s security strategy marked the clearest break with the past. Under heavy pressure from Washington to deliver results, she appointed Omar García Harfuch, a swashbuckling police chief and trusted collaborator, as security supremo.
Sheinbaum has quietly discarded López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding confrontation with heavily armed cartels, a strategy critics said was akin to appeasement. Instead she has expelled 55 high-profile traffickers to the US and claims to have cut fentanyl smuggling by half. The president also points to official figures showing a big fall in murders, although the number of missing people, many presumed dead, continues to climb.
Against expectations, Sheinbaum managed to secure agreement from Trump to postpone hefty tariffs on Mexican exports and maintain zero duties on most products that comply with the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA). “The Mexican government has acted with prudence and caution,” says José Medina Mora, a business leader. “The top objective has been to keep the treaty and secure lower tariffs than our competitors.”
Instead of going into recession, as many experts had expected, Citi forecasts that Mexico’s economy will grow 0.5 per cent this year.
“She is trying in a very understated way to mark a difference with Amlo,” says Andrés Rozental, a consultant and former diplomat. “She can’t and won’t do it openly.”
But on key issues – the leading role of the state, a mistrust of the private sector, a determination to push through major constitutional changes – Sheinbaum hews closely to her predecessor’s line. “Ideologically, she is completely convinced of the Fourth Transformation,” says Rozental.
Sheinbaum’s mix of continuity with modernising touches seems to resonate with many Mexicans. Polling between 70 and 80 per cent, her approval rating is one of the world’s highest and even opponents concede that she has outperformed expectations.
But as López Obrador’s legacy begins to unravel, she now faces her biggest challenge yet.
Scandals
The man in the photographs was unmistakable. Snapped while visiting Prada’s luxury boutique in Tokyo in late July was Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, one of the former president’s sons who heads the ruling party Morena’s national organisation.
“Andy”, as he is popularly known, was staying at a $400-a-night hotel and splurged nearly $2,600 on a restaurant meal, according to receipts published by a local news outlet.
López Beltrán acknowledged the hotel cost and the Tokyo holiday in a statement but accused “conservative hypocrites” of spying on him as part of a “political lynching campaign”.
His case was one of a wave of scandals that broke over the summer involving three top members of the previous cabinet and key figures in Morena.
Adán Augusto López Hernández, Morena’s Senate leader and López Obrador’s former interior minister, is facing an outcry over more than $4 million in undeclared outside income he received in 2023-24, as well as the alleged links between one of his top appointees in a previous role and a leading drug cartel.
Several navy officers, including two high-ranking nephews of former navy minister Admiral Rafael Ojeda, were arrested in September on suspicion of involvement in a huge fuel theft and a multibillion-dollar smuggling racket. The opposition party PAN describes the scandal, known locally as “huachicol”, as “the biggest fraud in the history of Mexico”.
A brokerage owned by López Obrador’s former chief of staff Alfonso Romo was hit with US sanctions for allegedly laundering the proceeds of fentanyl trafficking from China. Mexican prosecutors later accused the brokerage, Vector, of laundering money from the fuel theft racket.
López Hernández has denied impropriety while Sheinbaum has publicly supported Ojeda. Romo has not spoken publicly, though Vector has denied wrongdoing. None of the three former cabinet members has been charged with a crime.
Other Morena legislators facing criticism include Gerardo Fernández Noroña, until last month leader of the Senate, over a $650,000 second home and flights on a private plane.
Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a billionaire who has launched a civic movement to oppose the government, says that López Obrador’s government was “a criminal and corrupt regime”. Himself a controversial figure because of a public battle with the government over back taxes owed by his companies, Salinas describes the fraud in the country as “incredible”.
“We have never seen corruption on this scale,” he says in an interview. “They steal fuel from [state oil firm] Pemex and sell it in petrol stations for cash, and that cash is recycled into political activities through the Morena party ... It’s completely criminal.”
Even commentators sympathetic to Morena concede that there may have been some rotten apples in the party barrel.
“I think that Andrés Manuel understood the historic nature of the time at which he was governing,” says Vanessa Romero, a columnist who has worked with the government on judicial reform. “We can’t forget about all the ... implicit pacts which he had to accept ... it was a little bit about turning a blind eye to keep governing.”
The scandals have left Sheinbaum, whose entire political career has been sponsored by López Obrador, in a quandary.
So far, the president has opted for a middle course, allowing details of the investigations to surface but not demanding resignations.
The corruption allegations are “a big dilemma for her”, says Viri Ríos, a public policy expert sympathetic to Morena. Ríos says Sheinbaum must weigh up how the electorate might react. “Will they celebrate that Morena is purging corrupt officials? Or accuse Morena of being just like the traditional political parties?”
Balancing act
For now, Sheinbaum is staying loyal to Amlo. She dedicated her opening words in a big speech celebrating her first anniversary in office to him.
“They have tried to separate us,” she said. “But that will not happen because we share values: honesty, justice and love for the people of Mexico ... Andrés Manuel López Obrador was, is and always will be an example of honesty, austerity and profound love for the people.”
Critics accuse La Presidenta, as she is known, of copying López Obrador’s authoritarian tendencies, noting that she was happy to execute her predecessor’s plan to dismantle independent regulators and replace the entire judiciary, including the supreme court, with elected justices.
[ Mexico’s new president faces first major crisisOpens in new window ]
Noting that Morena supported many of the judges chosen, former supreme court justice Juan Luis González Alcántara says that “people are not going to be able to obtain a real defence of their rights ... everything is going to be politicised”.
Carlos Loret de Mola, a government critic and founder of LatinUS news site, says “the most common threat now is not ‘See you in court’ but ‘We will make you pay for this’. They know they will win the court case.” He is currently being sued by López Obrador’s brother Pío after publishing videos of him receiving envelopes of cash from a political intermediary.
González Alcántara, who lost his job in the judicial reform, believes Sheinbaum has the same instincts as her predecessor. “She’s the same,” he says. “She considers herself the inheritor and guardian of the politics practised by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”
A law sent by Sheinbaum to congress aims to limit citizens’ rights to challenge government decisions and consultations have begun on a new electoral law, which may cut public funding to political parties and remove proportional representation, moves that the opposition says would cement Morena’s dominance.
Free speech advocates complain that the courts – now packed with justices who back Morena – are finding ways to censure dissenters. They cite the case of Karla Estrella, a homemaker who was accused of gender-based political violence after using social media to accuse a Morena legislator of applying undue pressure to secure a congressional seat for his wife. A tribunal ordered Estrella to post a public apology every day for 30 days.
“Mexico’s authoritarian government is removing people’s right to express themselves,” wrote Hector de Mauleón, a critical commentator, in a recent column for Letras Libres, a monthly magazine. De Mauleón speaks from experience – a judge ordered one of his columns to be taken down in May after it criticised a candidate running for election as a judge over alleged links to fuel theft.
Sheinbaum has denied censorship. “In México there is no repression; the force of the state is not used against the people,” she said this month.
But critics accuse her of dragging the country back towards a familiar single-party model. For most of the 20th century, that party was the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an organisation in which many Morena leaders including Amlo cut their political teeth.
“The legacy of 70 years of PRI rule has always been the norm,” says Duncan Wood, former director of the now-defunct Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. “The experiment with democracy since the late 1980s is the exception.”
As the pressure mounts at home and abroad, it will become harder for Sheinbaum to maintain a delicate balancing act of pleasing Trump, the Morena faithful and the country.
Trump has declared Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations and stated that the US is in a war against drug traffickers, moves that could provide a legal basis for drone strikes.
[ Hegseth says four killed in US strike on alleged drugs boat off VenezuelaOpens in new window ]
The USMCA free trade agreement comes up for renegotiation next year and its future is unclear. The economy is shaky and further tariff rises could plunge Mexico into recession.
More revelations of corruption in Morena could deepen rifts within the governing party, testing Sheinbaum’s political skill and her tolerance for dissent. Next year’s electoral reform could be a watershed, indicating whether La Presidenta’s instincts are to preserve a multiparty system or cement her own party’s permanence in power.
“Sheinbaum has had to deal with two presidents in the past year ... and she has done well so far with both,” says Antonio Ocaranza, a corporate consultant and former presidential spokesman in the 1990s. “But soon she will face Trump in the renegotiation of USMCA and López Obrador over who controls Morena. One big question remains: can she ignite the economic growth Mexico urgently needs?” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
