For the second time in less than decade, Mexico is preparing to negotiate with President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is threatening the neighboring country with sky-high tariffs, mass deportations and military strikes on cartels.
The stakes are huge for Mexico’s 130 million people. Among major economies, Mexico is exceptionally dependent on the United States, sending about 80 percent of its exports to the American market.
Mexico’s top negotiators are adopting an assertive stance to negotiating with Mr. Trump this time around. Some of them can draw from experience dealing with the first Trump administration: Mexico’s populist president at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, forged a warm relationship with Mr. Trump, and Mexico avoided steep tariffs while acceding to demands to curb migration.
“We will find a solution because we have structural advantages,” Marcelo Ebrard, the economy minister, said this month, listing factors like greater economic interdependence between the two countries and declines in fentanyl deaths and migration.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has set the tone of this approach. While Mexico’s government has been unable to meet with the incoming Trump administration, she has blended conciliatory words for Mr. Trump with rhetorical pushback and vows that Mexico could hit back with retaliatory tariffs of its own.
“We coordinate, we collaborate, but we will never become subordinated,” Ms. Sheinbaum said in a speech this month.
At the same time, Ms. Sheinbaum’s government has already mobilized to respond to some of Mr. Trump’s concerns, expanding migration deterrence efforts and increasing seizures of illicit opioids.
The cornerstone of this strategy is a wager that the new administration in Washington needs Mexico, and its fast-expanding, low-cost industrial base, if the United States hopes to counter its largest rival: China.
Here are four factors informing Mexico’s preparations for dealing with the new Trump administration.
Mexico is increasingly important to the U.S. economy.
Mexico’s economic relationship with the United States has changed considerably since Mr. Trump was last in the White House, especially as a result of the coronavirus pandemic’s disruption of global supply chains.
Mexico eclipsed China in 2023 as the United States’ top trading partner in goods, as manufacturers shifted operations to Mexico to be closer to the American market.
Trade ties deepened even further last year, when Mexico displaced China to become the top source of imports for the United States and the top destination for American food exports.
“It’s an unprecedented level of interdependence,” said Diego Marroquín Bitar, a scholar who specializes in North American trade at the Wilson Center, a Washington research group.
Mexico’s government is showcasing these trade ties as it makes the case that imposing U.S. tariffs on Mexico could raise inflation and hurt American consumers.
But those deepened ties also leave Mexico with heightened vulnerabilities.
One may be remittances. Mexicans working in the United States sent home $63 billion in 2023, twice as much as when Mr. Trump took office eight years ago, and mass deportations could cause that figure to plummet.
Proposals to tax remittances, including a bill sponsored by Vice President-elect JD Vance, are also gaining momentum.
Migration flows and fentanyl deaths are falling.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly raised alarms about migration from Mexico, illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border are at their lowest level since the summer of 2020. Only about 46,000 people crossed the border illegally in November, the lowest number under President Biden.
The Biden administration’s restrictions on asylum for migrants contributed to this decline. But so did policies in Mexico, which has sought to dissuade migrants, largely from other Latin American countries, from reaching the U.S. border.
Mexico has broken up migrant caravans and expanded a shadowy busing program that has transported thousands of migrants from the country’s northern border to sites deep in its south.
Just in the last quarter of 2024, Mexico intensified this crackdown by detaining about 475,000 migrants, the authorities said, more than double the number held in the first nine months of the year. Most of these migrants are quickly released, allowing them to stay in Mexico; only a small fraction are deported to their home countries.
Another issue that Mr. Trump has cited frequently is the impact of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl, flowing across the border. After surging to horrifying levels, overdose deaths from illegal drugs are also falling. They were down about 14.5 percent in the 12 months that ended in June 2024 from the same period a year earlier.
Experts say that expanded treatment, prevention and education efforts in the United States played a role in this decline. While more evidence is needed, U.S. efforts to crack down on chemical precursors from China and the Mexican cartels using these chemicals to make fentanyl also may be restricting supplies.
Ms. Sheinbaum has also begun targeting the fentanyl trade. Last month, Mexican security forces captured 20 million doses of the drug in the country’s largest synthetic opioid seizure.
Cartel violence is still rising over vast areas.
Neither declines in border crossings or fentanyl overdoses could much make a difference if Mr. Trump chooses to focus on the cartel bloodshed gripping large parts of Mexico as justification for imposing tariffs on its exports.
Clashes between rival cartel factions have recently turned the northwest state of Sinaloa into a war zone. Brutal political assassinations have cast a pall over Guerrero in southwest Mexico.
Turf battles in Guanajuato, a center for car manufacturing northwest of Mexico City, have been marked by one massacre after another in recent weeks.
During his previous term, and again while campaigning for his new term, Mr. Trump raised the possibility of taking military action against cartels as a way of limiting their smuggling of illicit drugs into the United States. A potential designation of these groups as “terrorist organizations” could open the way for such moves.
Mexico’s government has long viewed such a possibility as a nearly unthinkable violation of its sovereignty. But some former officials with previous experience negotiating with Mr. Trump warn that Mexico needs to take such threats seriously.
Ms. Sheinbaum highlighted last week the willingness of Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, to collaborate on curbing cartel activities.
“We take him at his word,” Ms. Sheinbaum said of Mr. Rubio.
“Trump 2.0 is going to be a different Trump,” said Ildefonso Guajardo, a former economy minister who negotiated with the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018. “His team will be far less balanced in terms of trying to make him aware of the consequences of some decisions.”
And while fentanyl deaths are declining in the United States, the drug is still claiming tens of thousands of lives each year. The explosion of violence in Sinaloa highlights how the groups responsible for the fentanyl trade remain active and well armed.
So is China’s economic profile in Mexico.
A recent flood of imported Chinese cars into Mexico has increased tensions over the inroads that China is making into key industries in North America.
Mexico, which has a $105 billion trade deficit with China, moved quickly in recent weeks to assuage concerns that China could use its foothold in Mexico as a way to gain greater access to U.S. markets.
Mexico imposed tariffs viewed as targeting online Chinese retailers like Temu and Shein, then unveiled a new industrial policy last week aimed at reducing imports from China while bolstering supply chains to the United States.
With such measures, Mexico’s government is seeking to drive home its contention that the United States needs Mexico to confront the greater economic threat of China. But will that be enough for Mr. Trump?
If not, and if ties with Washington sour significantly, Mexico still has a kind of “nuclear option” involving strengthening its economic ties with China, according to Scott Morgenstern, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Mexico could turn to Washington’s biggest economic rival at a time when Beijing is seeking to assert more influence across Latin America,” Mr. Morgenstern said.