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“[T]here’s no other government,” said the United States secretary of State, “that’s cooperating as much with us in the fight against crime as the Government of Mexico.” Issued several days ago from the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, with the uppermost tier of Mexico’s political elite beaming approvingly, it was a bold statement for Marco Rubio to make.
It’s a big win for them, in their desperation to ward off what they see as a series of worst-case outcomes, among them tariffs, the end of United States–Mexico–Canada trade agreement (USMCA), American extraditions of their cartel-connected political class, and U.S. military strikes in their country. In this context, the praise from Rubio — perceived as a Latin America hawk in general — comes as a tremendous relief. They will, at minimum, wield it as validation the next time any other American suggests Mexico isn’t doing enough.
From Mexico’s perspective, it is nearly a get-out-of-jail-free card. The question is what, exactly, it means.
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To borrow a phrase, Rubio’s affirmation is “big, if true.” It is so big, in fact, that it begs a great many questions — none of them answered or answerable in the public sphere. As longtime observers of Mexican affairs know, exemplary cooperation with the United States has not been a hallmark of Mexican governance for well over a decade now.
What used to be an exceptionally close security relationship was first dented under the Mexican presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, from 2012-2018, and then almost totally severed under his successor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from 2018-2024. Peña Nieto presided over a political structure shot through with corruption, and Lopez Obrador, himself, reportedly has had a long relationship with the Sinaloa Cartel for at least the past 20 years.
All this combined to produce a Mexican state that was an antagonist, not a partner, to the United States — a narco-state in all but name, and moreover an active ally of hemispheric dictatorships including the ones in Cuba and Venezuela.
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The present administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Lopez Obrador’s handpicked successor, has labored to present a different image, if not necessarily a different reality, for American consumption. Threatened early by the Trump administration with American military action against its allied cartels, Sheinbaum’s regime did several things that the Mexican state could have done all along, including closing the border and extraditing narcos by the dozen.
All these measures are necessary, from the American perspective — and also tactical at best. What it has never done, as far as we know, is address the strategic problem undergirding all the rest: the longstanding collusion between the regime and its criminal cartels.
That collusion is neither minor nor the mere background noise of Mexican civics. It is rather fundamental to the MORENA regime — the political party of both Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum — and has been essential to the consolidation of its power. Nearly unnoticed in American policy discourse, that regime has been busily transforming Mexican society into an autocratic left-populist state akin to that which unfolded to disastrous effect in Venezuela.
In this framework, cartel money and guns have been essential in delivering elections, curbing independent public life and enriching key powerholders, by which the coalition holds together. It is an open secret in today’s Mexico that though Sheinbaum herself is likely not corrupt — she is that most fleeting phenomenon in Latin America, the pure ideologue — her regime is stacked with those who are. There are recipients of cartel funds in Mexico’s Senate, Congress, governorships and beyond.
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These men and women are the fulcrum, the essential link, between Mexico’s state and its cartels, and until they are dealt with, any arrangement with Mexico — no matter how quiet the border is, and no matter how many narcos are sent north — is temporary. The problem is unsolved so long as the state-cartel alliance remains in effect.
This is also precisely the class of culpable figures that Sheinbaum has left untouched, and unworried by anything like justice. Absent that action, it is quite difficult to say that “there is no other government that is cooperating as much with [America] against criminality than the Mexican government.” Yet Secretary Rubio did say that, and so we return to the original question: why?
We must be open to three major possibilities.
One is that the United States is treading the well-worn pathway of showering the Mexicans with unearned praise, in the hopes of appealing to their better natures. This is a dreary norm in our communications with them — which never yields the hoped-for outcomes — and we should be open to the possibility that more of the same is at work here.
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Another possibility is that the current level of cooperation, such as it is, is deemed sufficient by the United States, and we are content with leaving Mexico’s fundamental strategic problem unaddressed. This would be a tremendous error — a worse crisis is therefore an inevitability — but there is a constituency for it within the American bureaucracy.
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The final possibility, and the one for which we hope, is that the secretary of State is dead-on right — and there is much more underway behind the scenes than we know. Perhaps real action against Mexico’s narco-state apparatus is forthcoming, and both the Americans and President Sheinbaum are in on it.
We can hope for it, and we do, but at some point, we have to know. Inside Mexico policy circles, a conversational commonplace is that we won’t know until 2028 or so, at the opening of Sheinbaum’s second half of her six-year term — not at all coincidentally, right at the point at which the accountability brought by the Trump administration will be in its final months. If this is the case, it isn’t enough.
What Americans need, in validation of the secretary of State’s rhetoric, is a visible signal now. Sheinbaum, if she is a good-faith partner, need not risk her regime or her life with an immediate assault on her cartel-partner regime elements — but she can affirm the analysis, and the principles of action that come from it. She can recognize reality and say so. She is fond of proclaiming her dedication to Mexico’s soberania — its sovereignty — and now she has the opportunity to declare that soberania includes sovereignty from the cartels, its agents and its partners … no matter how high up in government they go.
We on the American side need it. We want to trust — but we must verify.
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