Mexico cooperation claims questioned despite Rubio praise on security issues

“”[T]Here is no other government, “said US Secretary of State,” who cooperates as much with us in the fight against crime as the government of Mexico. “Emitted several days ago from the Palacio Nacional to Mexico City, with the upper level of the Mexico political elite.

It is a great victory for them, in their despair to ward off what they consider as a series of results the worst cases, including the prices, the end of the United States – Mexico – Canada Commerce Accord (USMCA), American extraditions of their political class connected to the cartel and American military strikes in their country. In this context, the praise of Rubio – perceived as a Latin American falcon in general – is a huge relief. They will miss it, at least, as validation the next time an American suggests that Mexico will not be enough.

From the point of view of Mexico, it is almost a card without trigger. The question is what it means exactly.

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To borrow a sentence, Rubio’s assertion is “large, if it is true”. It is so large, in fact, that it raises many questions – none of them has answered or responsible in the public sphere. While long-standing observers of Mexican affairs know this, exemplary cooperation with the United States has not been the brand of Mexican governance for more than a decade now.

File: Secretary of state Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump walk on the Tarmac to talk to journalists at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, New Jersey on June 8, 2025, on the way to Camp David. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP)

What was formerly an exceptionally narrow security relationship was first bumpy under the Mexican presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, from 2012 to 2018, then almost completely breaking under his successor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from 2018 to 2018. Peña Nieto presided over a political structure crossed with corruption, and Lopez Obrador, himself, would have had a long relationship with the Sinalo At least the last 20 years.

All of this was combined to produce a Mexican state which was an antagonist, not a partner, in the United States-a narco-state in everything except, and moreover an active ally of hemispherical dictatorships, including those in Cuba and Venezuela.

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The current administration of the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, successor sorted on the side of Lopez Obrador, worked to present a different image, if not necessarily a different reality, for American consumption. Led early by the Trump administration with American military action against its Allied cartels, the Sheinbaum regime has done several things that the Mexican state could have done throughout, in particular by closing the border and extracting the narcos by the dozen.

All these measures are necessary, from an American point of view – and also tactical at best. What he has never done, to our knowledge, is to solve the strategic problem that underlies everything else: long-standing collusion between the diet and its criminal cartels.

This collusion is neither a minor nor the simple background noise of the Mexican civic. It is rather fundamental for the Morena regime – the political party of Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum – and was essential to the consolidation of its power. Almost unnoticed in the discourse on American politics, this regime has actively transformed Mexican society into an autocratic populist state similar to that which took place with a disastrous effect in Venezuela.

In this context, the cartel money and firearms were essential to the delivery of the elections, to the reduction of independent public life and to enrich the main motorized chargers, by which the coalition holds together. It is a policeman’s secret in today’s Mexico that, although Sheinbaum herself is probably not corrupt – she is this most ephemeral phenomenon in Latin America, the pure ideologist – his diet is stacked with those who are. There are beneficiaries of Cartel funds in the Senate of Mexico, in Congress, Governors and beyond.

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These men and women are the point of support, the essential link, between the state of Mexico and its cartels, and until they are treated, any arrangement with Mexico – no matter how silent the border is, and no matter how many narcos are sent to the north – is temporary. The problem is not resolved as long as the Cartel alliance remains in force.

It is also precisely the class of guilty characters that Sheinbaum has left intact and imparted by something like justice. In the absence of this action, it is quite difficult to say that “there is no other government which cooperates as much with [America] against crime that the Mexican government. “However, Secretary Rubio said, and we therefore come back to the initial question: why?

The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, attended a military parade commemorating the 114th anniversary of the Mexican revolution on Zocalo Square in Mexico, November 20, 2024. (Photo of Rodrigo Oropeza / AFP via Getty Images)

We must be open to three major possibilities.

The first is that the United States takes the well-used path to shower the Mexicans from unoriented praise, in the hope of calling on their best natures. This is a dreary standard in our communications with them – which never gives the expected results – and we must be open to the possibility that more than the same thing is at work here.

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Another possibility is that the current level of cooperation, as it is, is deemed sufficient by the United States, and we are content to leave the fundamental strategic problem of untreated Mexico. It would be a huge error – a worse crisis is therefore an inevitability – but there is a constituency in the American bureaucracy.

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The final possibility, and the one for which we hope, is that the Secretary of State is on the right – and there are many more behind the scenes than we know. Perhaps real action against the narco-state apparatus of Mexico is to come, and the Americans and President Sheinbaum are both.

We can hope for it, and we do it, but at some point, we owe it. In the circles of Mexico politics, a commonplace of conversation is that we will not know until approximately 2028, at the opening of the second half of Sheinbaum of his six -year term – not at all by chance, just when the responsibility brought by the Trump administration is in its last months. If this is the case, this is not enough.

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What Americans need, in the validation of the secretary of state’s rhetoric is a visible signal now. Sheinbaum, if she is a partner in good faith, does not need to risk her regime or her life with an immediate assault on her cartel -partner regime – but she can affirm the analysis and the principles of action that come from it. It can recognize reality and say it. She likes to proclaim her dedication to the Soberania of Mexico – her sovereignty – and now she has the opportunity to declare that Soberania includes the sovereignty of the cartels, her agents and her partners … No matter how much they go to government.

We need it on the American side. We want to trust – but we have to check.

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