This editorial first appeared in the March 5, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.
Following the implementation of the 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico, Donald Trump repeated the lie that our country is defrauding the United States because of the surplus in the trade balance: that is, because on paper, products leave here worth more than those that enter through our northern border. This approach distorts reality by not taking into account the level of intertwining of North American production chains, which in fact are one with nodes distributed on one side or the other of the political borders according to cost optimization criteria not decided in the White House nor the National Palace, but rather in the boards of thousands of companies with bi or trinational operations, including Canada.
The automotive industry is a good example of this. If the sales value of a finished vehicle is counted as an export from Mexico to the United States, the latter appears to be at a disadvantage; an absurd perception not only because many of the components are only assembled, but not produced, in Mexico, but also because there are no Mexican automotive companies, so the most important profits – from industrial property – remain in the United States. This has been explained to the magnate by the corporations and top organizations of his own country, but with his actions he shows that he is either incapable of understanding the complexity of the global economy built by Washington (often through violence) or understands it but is not interested, because his objectives have nothing to do with this trade balance.
Precisely ambiguity, if not open contradiction, has been distinctive of the entire process of tariff war launched by the Republican. Just yesterday, his Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, asserted that tariffs are a drug policy and not a commercial one. At various times, Trump has said that his purpose is to force Mexico and Ottawa to control fentanyl trafficking; that it is a pressure mechanism on immigration issues against the same countries; that he seeks the reversal of the deficit so that the United States stops being the stupid country; that it is important for tax collection or job creation.
In addition to the incoherence between means and ends, each of these arguments is based on lies. For example, it is undeniable that Mexico has done much more against drug trafficking than the current or any US government: it is not just about the figures of seizures or the 50 percent reduction in the flow of fentanyl in less than half a year, but about the fact that Washington has so far never recognized the existence of their own cartels and large local bosses; about the US’s resistance to lifting a finger to stop the river of weapons that fuels violence and, above all, about the configuration of its banking and business system as a haven for money laundering.
In addition to all of the above, the tariffs were imposed abruptly, after Trump announced their postponement until April and dozens of members of his cabinet held working meetings with their Mexican counterparts, in which agreements were reached that both parties considered satisfactory in both trade and drug matters.
This chain of nonsense forces us to wonder what Donald Trump is really looking for by taking the first step towards the demolition of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which he himself promoted and signed during his first presidential term. If this question is disturbing for Mexico as a neighbor of a superpower headed by such an unstable individual, with equivocal behavior and motivated by opaque causes, it should set off alarm bells in American society, whose destiny is in the hands of irrationality.
In Mexico, the best thing citizens can do is to reinforce the unity that has been reaffirmed in the face of external attacks, show firmness without panic, and remain attentive to the message that President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo issues this Sunday, March 9 in the Plaza de la Constitución in Mexico City, whether she announces countermeasures to confront tariffs or offers a summary of the actions that have allowed them to be circumvented if they are paused or revised in the meantime, as Lutnick anticipated yesterday.