By Patrick J. McDonnell and Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY — She has been unflappable as President Donald Trump has fired off broadsides — threats to impose devastating tariffs, mass deportations and even a military campaign against what he called an “intolerable alliance” between the Mexican government and organized crime.
“Keep a cool head,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum likes to say.
It’s no easy job, appeasing the mercurial U.S. president while placating a nationalist base hypersensitive about U.S. meddling. But she has been pulling it off.
Last month, with the U.S. and Mexico on the brink of a trade war, she managed to persuade Trump, during a 45-minute phone call, to delay imposing tariffs. Afterward, Trump said he “had a great talk with Mexico” and called Sheinbaum “a woman I like very much.”
Her steady hand has calmed nervous markets and boosted her popularity at home, where she boasts approval ratings of about 75%.
The looming question is how long her success can last.
Trump has set a new, March 4 deadline for imposition of 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada — duties that could be catastrophic for an already precarious Mexican economy highly dependent on cross-border trade.
It could be a make-or-break moment for Sheinbaum, who is less than five months into her six-year term as Mexico’s first female president.
On Monday, she trumpeted the planned visits this week to Washington of her economic and security ministers as heralding a potential breakthrough.
“We hope that this week we can reach the agreement we are hoping for,” Sheinbaum said.
In its talks with Washington, Mexico is pursuing a two-front strategy: high-profile law enforcement actions — including seizures of fentanyl and troop deployments along the northern border — and a persuasion campaign enlisting allies from the U.S. auto industry and other sectors likely to suffer if longtime cross-border supply chains break down.
“It’s common sense: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s economy minister and a key figure in tariff talks with Washington, recently told reporters. “Don’t destroy what we’ve built up in the last 40 years.”
How, then, to persuade Trump that Mexico is doing enough to meet his demands to stop migrants and fentanyl from illegally entering the United States?
Experts say that ending smuggling completely would be impossible. And the White House has provided no metrics — such as targets for migrant detentions or drug seizures — to measure success or failure.
But Mexico can cite some positive trends.
Illegal border crossings have plummeted to their lowest levels since 2017, in part because of enhanced Mexican efforts and a series of U.S. crackdowns that began late in the Biden administration. Moreover, Mexico says arrests of suspected drug traffickers and seizures of fentanyl are up, as Sheinbaum has launched Mexico’s own campaign against the synthetic opioid.
It’s a stark contrast from the actions of Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who for months denied the existence of clandestine Mexican laboratories that produce fentanyl and who embraced a security policy that emphasized combating poverty over bloody cartel confrontations.
But will reams of data on seizures and arrests make much difference?
“Trump doesn’t read [Drug Enforcement Administration] reports, he doesn’t read Excel spreadsheets,” said John D. Feeley, a former ambassador to Panama and former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. “But what Trump lives for, and what his metric is, as we all know, is a headline, or a Truth Social tweet.”
Sheinbaum seems to get that.
Upon announcing a one-month reprieve on Trump’s tariff threats, she pulled a page from his playbook: She hyped the deployment of 10,000 additional National Guard forces to the border with the United States. TV cameras documented the troops patrolling along the fence. The White House took notice.
“There’s an element of theatrics” with Trump, said Arturo Rocha, a former senior migration official in the Mexican government. “He is trying to communicate that he has managed to strike an awesome deal, the best deal possible. So it would be self-defeating to debunk that idea.”
In Trump’s world, America always wins. Discarded to the memory hole are the setbacks, such as his first-term vow that Mexico would pay for the border wall.
Since Trump was elected in November, Sheinbaum, a scientist by training, has found herself in “the most tricky of positions,” said Renata Segura, program director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group.
“She has managed to walk this very, very thin line between being pragmatic and not wanting to engage in a massive fight with Trump — which she knows would be terrible for Mexico — but also not completely falling in line,“ Segura said.
Sheinbaum has presented her dealings with Trump as conversations between equals in which Mexico can also question U.S. about its problems— its organized crime networks, its voracious appetite for illicit drugs and its failure to stop weapons from crossing the border into Mexico to arm the cartels.
“She has managed to frame this so Mexicans see that she’s defending their interests, while not spurring more conflict,” Segura said.
One of Sheinbaum’s mottos: “Collaboration, coordination, without subordination. … Sovereignty is not negotiable.”
As the March 4 deadline nears, many expect more images of takedowns of drug labs and arrests of smugglers.
Mexico is also stepping up its efforts to persuade Trump that tariffs would batter U.S. manufacturers and automakers such as Ford and General Motors, both with large, longtime operations in Mexico. Ebrard, the Mexican economy minister, visited Detroit last month to enlist support.
“You’ve got to get together all the cross-border manufacturers, all the cross-border automotive executives,” said Feeley, the former U.S. diplomat. “You get them together and have them say: ‘It’s time to take the keys away from Grandpa, because he’s going to crash the car.’ “
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
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