Mexico makes small progress in negotiations with the US amid Trump’s onslaught

Relations between Mexico and the United States are experiencing a disturbing calm these days, considering the storm of recent weeks and months, and what lies ahead with the tariffs on July 9th looming ominously. There has been a welcome reduction in the tax on remittances that had been originally set at 3.5% and would have caused a huge economic crisis. It will now be 1% instead and only on remittances sent by migrants in cash, accounting for a very small share of the total. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also announced that livestock exports, which have been banned until now due to the screwworm fly plague, will gradually resume in the coming days.

These are small agreements that, however welcome, do not clear up the horizon, and which some experts attribute to negotiations between concerned sectors on both sides of the border rather than to a national diplomatic team robust enough to address the major problems that have arisen in bilateral relations.

“Diplomacy is falling short,” says the international analyst Aribel Contreras. These small agreements, she says, are being made by various non-political actors within the United States: “Businesspeople, legislators, unions, and other figures who also have their counterparts in Mexico along with some business leaders, chambers of commerce, and industrialists who are speaking out and have approached the U.S. ambassador, but what happens in the United States carries more weight,” notes Contreras, who coordinates the Global Business degree program at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

In her opinion, what the Mexican government has achieved is nothing more than “major failures” that have not dissipated tariff threats in a country that has a trade agreement with the United States. “It’s deplorable,” she asserts, adding that if there is a certain sense of calm these days, it is simply because President Donald Trump has other priorities to address, such as “the conflicts in the Middle East with its stock market turmoil, or the threat from China.” Mexico is important for the United States, she asserts, but it is not the priority right now.

Mexico and the United States have maintained important relations for centuries, as could not be otherwise given their shared border of nearly 2,000 miles. They have had agreements in the border region, the most commercially active, for many decades. The Sonora-Arizona Commission, for example, has been conducting negotiations for more than 60 years, with numerous agencies involved. And neighboring cities can reach their own legal agreements. Roberto Zepeda, of the Center for Research on North America (CISAN) at UNAM, refers to all of this when he mentions the “paradiplomacy” that could be resolving issues such as the screwworm crisis, which is still holding in suspense the export of more than $1 billion worth of cattle annually to the United States.

“There are small agreements, such as a labor deal that could end the crisis facing Mexican day laborers in the U.S. countryside, because farm owners there are complaining,” says Zepeda. “The problem is that Trump has now lumped all these agreements together,” says the researcher, and that complicates relations. But Zepeda feels that “there are few diplomatic channels, that there is a lack of flexible channels” to address all of this. “It may be a more silent diplomacy, in the style of the current Mexican Foreign Minister, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, but even so, more of a presence is required, a channel of communication with Trump like the one we had in his first term with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner,” says Zepeda. “Communication in Mexico is not at the same level and it is being reactive, waiting to see what Trump does.”

“I think things are going well,” says Arturo Rocha, who was the Mexican coordinator for the North American Strategy during the previous administration. “Mexico’s disadvantage is that domestic politics also weigh heavily. It’s not just a matter of foreign policy with the United States, as may be the case with China, Iran, or Israel. But I think President Claudia Sheinbaum’s cool-headed strategy is there for anyone to see; we’re moving forward step by step,” he asserts. “We’ve overcome a thorny issue with livestock, but also with the water supply on the border with Texas, which is no small feat. We’ve also achieved something reasonable with remittances, although they’ve fallen slightly in recent months,” he says. “There’s the silence of diplomacy, with clear results.”

But everyone consulted for this story agrees that high-level diplomacy still has “areas of opportunity,” that is, that more could be done than what is currently being done. With the storm unleashed between the two nations since Trump came to power, the same Mexican ambassador, Esteban Moctezuma, remains stationed in the United States, something of a a protocolary snub, says Aribel Contreras. “It would be the right thing to do to replace the ambassador, who worked with Biden and who also lacks the appropriate profile needed right now, more commercial and less political. We must not forget that the Trade Agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada is still pending negotiation, and not even the Ministry of Economy has formed the teams for that.” As if that were not enough, the former Undersecretariat for North America has been downgraded to a department “with less experienced people,” while the Undersecretariats for Latin America and the Caribbean remain in place, Contreras complains.

The fact that Trump and Sheinbaum held nearly 10 phone calls indicates to Zepeda that things didn’t get smoothed out conveniently beforehand, “not even with the ambassador.” Lately, the lack of human and financial resources at Mexican consulates in the United States has been repeatedly mentioned,and this is an area that everyone thinks should be “reinforced with new profiles and greater funding,” Rocha points out. “Mexico should lobby more robustly with Republicans, and the consular trenches are important in that regard,” he says. But these new appointments have yet to arrive, and criticism is mounting, because the eye of the storm only foreshadows a new storm.

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