When Mexicans elected a new president, they also chose the next chief negotiator who will make tough choices with the United States on issues ranging from immigration to trade to fentanyl trafficking.
Mexicans voted overwhelmingly for Claudia Sheinbaum, giving her more than 58 percent of the vote and a substantial mandate to govern Latin America’s second-largest economy and the United States’ top trading partner.
When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves office and Ms. Sheinbaum takes office on October 1, she will inherit a country plagued by low economic growth and violence linked to organized crime. She will also face a fractured relationship with the United States. Despite strong cross-border economic ties, U.S.-Mexico relations have been tested by the two countries’ shared problems with global immigration and drug trafficking.
“Both countries have suffered from incredible awkwardness in their relations,” said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “I think both countries need to come back to the negotiating table.
Americans may love Taco Tuesday and Cancun vacations, but the complexity of the U.S.-Mexico relationship is often lost in marketing and political rhetoric. Mexico’s imprint on the United States is omnipresent.
We find it in the auto parts made in Mexico that allow American auto workers to keep their jobs in Detroit, in the wind turbine blades exported to American clean energy factories, in the pacemakers that save the lives of American heart failure patients and in the $15 avocado toast that appears on restaurant menus across the country.
U.S. exports to Mexico include grains grown in the Midwest and natural gas pumped in Texas. Mexico sends fruits and vegetables north, helping to keep food prices lower amid volatile inflation in the United States.
Last year, Mexico became the United States’ largest trading partner, pushing China into second place. According to the US Census Bureau, trade between the two neighbors now amounts to nearly $800 billion per year.
