Mexico Is Acting Like an Adversary to the U.S.

 

“Nearly all political sentiment for the past decade has been mediated through the lens of prior reaction to Donald Trump. Those who like the American president, or at least aren't fixated on him, tend to give his actions in government a fair assessment. So, in the case of the American raid on Caracas to arrest Nicolas Maduro, we see the British Tories, the Chilean president-elect and the recently reformed Washington Post editorial board giving a qualified approval. Emphatically disapproving are Democrats, a variety of European political figures and the New York Times.

 

Then there is the Mexican government of the Morena party, which under the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum has sought good relations with Mr. Trump. It is issuing strident denunciations of Mr. Trump's actions. This reveals a fundamental truth about Morena: It is a friend to the Western Hemisphere's autocracies and a false friend of liberal democracies, including the U.S.

 

The morning after the American raid, as Venezuelans at home and in exile celebrated, Ms. Sheinbaum issued a statement: "The Government of Mexico energetically condemns and rejects the military actions unilaterally executed by the Armed Forces of the United States of America."

 

The Morena majority in the Mexican Senate condemned "the military intervention undertaken on the territory of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela." The Morena government of Mexico City condemned "in the most emphatic terms the military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela." Party eminences took to Twitter to hint at a U.S. plot to seize Venezuelan oil in what Sen. Gerardo Fernandez Norona called "a grave aggression against a brother nation."

 

In September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. has "a great relationship" with Mexico, "the closest security cooperation we have ever had." Yet what we see in Mexico's condemnations of Mr. Trump and the U.S. is real Mexican policy, and the real worldview of Morena.

 

Ms. Sheinbaum's antagonism toward the Venezuelan liberty movement is well-known. When Maria Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Ms. Sheinbaum refused to congratulate her, or even to comment, citing a longstanding Mexican doctrine of noninterference in other nations' affairs. This principle of Mexican diplomacy, the Estrada Doctrine, is at best a polite fiction. Under eight years of Morena governance, Mexico has run one of the most interventionist foreign policies in the Western Hemisphere. Its interventions have all been in support of regimes like itself: leftist autocracies with strong ties to criminal cartels.

 

The record is stark and unambiguous. Mexico refused to condemn the fraud in Venezuela's July 2024 election by which Mr. Maduro stole the vote, but it condemned U.S. efforts to curb and isolate Mr. Maduro's regime in 2025. Mexico has been engaged for years in direct support of the Cuban Communist regime, supplying it with refined fuel in particular. Mexico severed relations with Ecuador in 2024 after offering its diplomatic facilities as refuge for Ecuadorean politicians escaping corruption charges.

 

Mexico invited Russian and Chinese soldiers to march in the Mexican Independence Day military parade in 2023. Then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador boycotted the 2022 U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas and organized a countersummit of dictatorships, including Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Mexico sent a military aircraft to rescue leftist Bolivian autocrat Evo Morales in 2019, after he lost power and was in danger of being held accountable by the successor government.

 

Then there is the long-running pattern of Mexican intervention in the U.S., which has included the past Morena president's seeking to sway the Mexican-American vote and Ms. Sheinbaum's directing Mexican consulates in the U.S. to help Mexican illegal aliens evade American law enforcement. If we include the regime's cartel partners in the mix, then the robust and underreported history of Mexican military personnel entering American territory, likely to protect cartel shipments, also enter the record.

 

With this history, the Mexican regime's opposition to Mr. Trump and the American raid on Caracas becomes more than rhetoric. What we see is a regime fundamentally opposed to the U.S. and the values of liberty and democracy across the Western Hemisphere -- and with a record to match. It is an active friend to the narco autocracies that America now faces across the region. That regime and its Morena party have sought to obscure their agenda through tactical security cooperation with the U.S. They deliver cartel men to justice but never their politician partners. They have also appealed to the trade relationship with the U.S., enshrined in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

 

The USMCA is due for renewal this year. The U.S. needn't accept the Mexican government's hypocrisy any longer. The U.S. armed forces went into harm's way and did more for liberty in Latin America in a single night than the Mexican state has achieved in a generation -- and that state condemns us for it. That is its choice. Whether to continue granting Mexico the benefits of American trade and forbearance is our choice.

 

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Mr. Trevino is senior director of the America First Policy Institute's Western Hemisphere Initiative.” [1]

 

1. Mexico Is Acting Like an Adversary to the U.S. Trevino, Joshua.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Jan 2026: A15.