Chapter 1: Fue el Estado

The newly elected Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, spoke before the assembled journalists and set forth her policy toward the United States. Certainly, she said, there was a border crisis — a term preferred by the Americans, not by Mexico — but it was important to understand what created it. The Americans love to blame Mexico: it is practically an American habit to ascribe its sins to others. Looking outside is easy, and looking within is hard. But, said the president-elect, it was time to look within. At the root of America’s border problems, and its immigration problems, and its addiction problems, were American social decay, American familial dysfunction, American narcotics demand, American gun trafficking, American neglect of development in Latin America (especially Central America and southern Mexico), American political paralysis, American racial iniquity, and America’s insufficient law enforcement.

Across the following several months, from her election on June 2nd, 2024, to her accession to the Mexican presidency on October 1st, 2024, to the close of that fraught year, Sheinbaum and her outgoing predecessor — charismatic left-populist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), whose faithful deputy she was for a generation — publicly undertook a series of extraordinary measures that fundamentally revised the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Sheinbaum and AMLO, one or the other and sometimes both, announced the transformation of Mexico into a leftist autocracy, a de facto one-party state with no judicial independence nor any remaining institutional checks on executive power. They declared a core national interest in the welfare of Mexican nationals in the United States and announced their intent to influence U.S. elections. They pressed the United States for “development” aid that would mostly flow into their institutional coffers. They sponsored Mexican nationals staging a confrontation with Texas law enforcement in Eagle Pass, Texas. They liaised with Russian and Chinese military personnel. They purchased Russian air-defense systems — for protection against the United States, which was warned that Mexican strategic doctrine was now oriented toward the total exclusion of Americans from operations within Mexico, including operations against trafficking cartels. They announced a refusal to re-implement the successful Remain in Mexico migration policy in the event of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. They announced a suspension of all security cooperation with the United States. They announced a hemispheric security alliance, oriented against the United States, with other leftist autocracies including Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and beyond. They announced a deployment of Russian forces to Mexico — ostensibly for advising on the setup and operation of the air-defense systems.

Outside of public view, the two successive Mexican presidents and their deputies quietly welcomed Chinese forces into northern Mexico, who then liaised directly with preexisting Chinese organized-crime personnel in Nuevo León and elsewhere. PRC drone operations into American airspace, based out of Mexico, began shortly thereafter. The trafficking cartels themselves were given the green light from their sponsors and partners in the formal state to surge goods, legal and illegal, and migrants into the United States. The limits were lifted, and the gloves were off.

American officialdom responded to this exceptional activity — overt hostility and intervention in American civics — with an affirmation from the Biden Administration that, as president-elect Sheinbaum said, racism is indeed a problem in the United States. Later, that same Administration offered some trade concessions to placate Mexican concerns. That’s what the American left did, and from the apparatus and institutions of the American right, there was no response at all. In sum, the United States let Mexico get away with all of it and got a hostile state on two thousand miles of land border as a consequence. 

Everything I have just described above is, on one level, fiction. It is fiction in the sense that it was the course of a weeklong simulation, called the Transition Integrity Project 2024, run by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (where I serve), the Heritage Foundation, and an expansive coalition of U.S.-based conservative institutions in June 2024. The intent of TIP2024 was to work out both probable and worst-case scenarios attendant to United States’s own 2024 elections — a context that included actors both foreign and domestic. As the Mexican player in the simulation, I didn’t have to look far for my own courses of action: all that was required was reference to Mexico’s actual actions in the past decade. 

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Mexican state has in fact done most of the things listed above in real life in recent years. It has, at levels ranging from the President of Mexico downwards, blamed the border crisis and its attendant drug- and human-trafficking crises on American societal dysfunction, in which Mexico itself is largely blameless. It has announced the impending transformation of Mexico into a leftist autocracy, a de facto one-party state with no judicial independence nor any remaining institutional checks on executive power. It has actively interfered in American elections and civics, mostly — but not only — through AMLO’s own exhortations to Mexicans in the United States to vote against Republicans (Gobierno de Mexico, 2022). It has constituted its own party cells of the ruling MORENA coalition in the United States: you can see their posters in Laredo, Texas, and they have staged protests against the New York Times over unfavorable coverage for AMLO in New York City. It has pressed the United States for “development” aid that can be construed as extortion for good behavior at the U.S.-Mexico border. It has liaised with both Chinese and Russian military officials — at minimum for the participation of their military units in the annual parade through Mexico City’s Zocalo, but perhaps beyond (Gobierno de Mexico, 2023b). (In 2014, I was surprised to have a Mexican newspaperman ask me what the American response would be to Chinese military facilities in northern Mexico: a sort of question that rarely comes as pure hypothetical.) It has declared, via an AMLO speech in Veracruz on April 21, 2023, that it would use its armed forces to defend trafficking cartels against American action (Gobierno de Mexico, 2023a). It has participated in a political — not military — alliance with other leftist autocracies in the hemisphere, the Foro de São Paulo  (a forum of left-wing political parties and groups formed in 1990 by Cuba’s long-time communist tyrant Fidel Castro and Lula da Silva, leader of Brazil’s Socialist Party), directed against the United States and its allies, and furthermore welcomed in unnumbered Cuban “doctors” as part of its deepening ties with those regimes (Reuters, 2022). It has mostly suspended security cooperation with the United States — a process of diminishment begun in 2012 and hugely accelerated since 2020, when American law enforcement targeted a cartel-affiliated senior official of Mexico’s politically powerful army (U.S. Department of Justice, 2020). It has more or less controlled cartel access to the U.S. border, opening and closing the flow of trafficked good and persons as politically convenient. 

All that is real. And it isn’t the whole of it. I did not include in the simulation the real-world episodes of Mexican armed forces entering the United States for the protection of cartel operations, nor the corruption of U.S. officials and law enforcement who serve cartel interests. As bad as the fiction of the TIP2024 game was, the corresponding reality is in some ways worse. For years, lonely voices watching Mexico’s descent into state-cartel violence have forecast a variety of worst-case scenarios — and for years, they were dismissed by mainstream policy minds on right and left as speculative hypotheticals unlikely to occur. It’s past time to update that view. The tragedy of Cassandra, after all, is twofold: it is not just that she was disbelieved, but that she was also right. 

This brings us to the other way in which TIP2024 got it right: the Americans failed to respond in their own interest. Look to the real-world Mexican actions listed above as the basis for policy. Would United States policymakers ordinarily treat a country like this as a partner, or as a friend? Is there an objective basis for it? Is this a country that earns the benefits of near-free trade with the United States? Is this a country that meets its obligations to the United States as a safe and secure neighbor — obligations which, of course, the United States has toward Mexico, and consistently fulfills? Is this a country that earns a charitable interpretation for the actions and policies of its officialdom? The answers are obvious, and uniformly in the negative. Yet American policy remains rooted in a dead consensus, a belief unmoored from empiricism that the Mexican state shares fundamental interests and objectives with the United States of America. That belief was broadly defensible for the latter half of the twentieth century and until, perhaps, December 2012, when Enrique Peña Nieto was sworn in as President of Mexico. It is not now, and the evidence is out in the open, but the American policy apparatus mostly fails to adapt to the new circumstances. I remember very well an extended meeting with American governmental personnel in Mexico City some years back. I will be nonspecific because these were good men, good public servants, who did their best for their country under the conditions given them. Nevertheless, their message was clear: things are getting worse in every sphere, and therefore the only option is to press on with the status quo. Exiting the meeting, I texted a colleague its bottom line:

              Saigon 1962.

The fundamental purpose of this book is to illuminate the cul de sac into which American policy toward Mexico has meandered, and to further illuminate the options needed to exit it, in the American interest first and foremost. Those options, necessary and stark as they are, will seem shocking to those accustomed to thinking of the Mexican state as a well-meaning (if dysfunctional) neighbor to our south, and therefore an apparatus with which partnership is the order of the day. Unfortunately, what was true in 1994, or 2006, is not true in 2024 and beyond. Decisive—and at points, severe—measures are required to correct the U.S.-Mexico relationship, as its present state has resulted in disaster for both nations. On the American side, it is a drug crisis killing unnumbered hundreds of thousands, a human-trafficking crisis affecting unnumbered tens of millions, and a corruption crisis whose scope is at once vast and unknown. On the Mexican side, it is the descent of a once-promising democracy into an autocratic synthesis of state and cartels, each profiting from and protecting the other — and grinding the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Mexicans, for the fundamentals of liberty and security, into dust. On both sides, the nightmare scenario looms, of military action and the reversion to the status quo prior to circa 1920: endemic warfare of a sort our forefathers knew, and which we lack the experience to fully imagine.

Writing about another state and another society from the standpoint of a foreigner is necessarily a fraught exercise. It is possible to do it the wrong way, as a nationalist antagonist, and thereby miss the insight and analysis that empathy and comprehension can bring. As a native Texan with roots stretching back three centuries in the Lone Star State, I am alive to — and positively appreciate — the value of belligerent nationalism in the preservation of a nation and the clarification of priorities. If there is an obscuring bias in most policymaking today, it is in the opposite direction: a gauzy universalism that incorrectly ascribes a commonality among all peoples that supersedes any particularism. This optimism, in the post-Cold War Western framework, was born of the idea of man as a creature of markets rather than of history, infusing the likes of the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is not a mistake the classical thinkers made: in both Euripides and Xenophon, we find discussion of the fundamental differences between Hellenes and barbarians (for those authors, the latter being Trojans and Persians respectively), who possessed fundamental differences that were at points irreconcilable, absent recourse to arms or separation. The Biblical authors recounting the generational struggle for Canaan would have agreed, although their sympathies toward the Hellenes would have been much reduced.

We should adopt the same wisdom, acknowledging the uniqueness and sui generis nature of the object of our study without condescending to it. (We will not, therefore, go fully in the direction of Euripides, who had his Iphigenia assert that only Hellenes are born free, with all others slaves. It is a proposition positively forbidden at the opening of the American Declaration of Independence.) The fact is that Mexico is not the United States with Spanish-speakers strewn about: a truth that might surprise the reader of trade publications extolling the success of U.S. consumer culture — Wal-Mart, Uber, Coca-Cola — in Mexico, or that might appall the Californian living long term in a Roma Norte AirBNB and believing she is in the real Mexico. If the United States is the conceptual descendant of Athens and Jerusalem by way of London and Philadelphia, then Mexico is the product of Athens and Jerusalem by way of Salamanca — but also by way of Tenochtitlan and other inheritances alien to the Western tradition, even if they are incorporated now into that tradition’s world-historical outcomes. Fortunately, we have ample resources for the understanding emanating from that. Most of them are in the public domain, and some of them as personal: the reason I have three hundred years of history in Texas is because, like a few million of my fellow Texans, I am descended from the original colonists of old Nuevo Santander.

We therefore begin with the proposition that will require reminding throughout this book: that Mexico is a great nation, whatever the dysfunction, disappointments, and crimes of the Mexican regime. Mexico is, properly enough, many nations — a fact that the real-world Mexican regime is leveraging at this writing to exploit in its revision of Mexican statehood into a Bolivian-type “plurinational” state, importing Anglosphere obsessions with race and ethnicity into a social context already overfull with the legacy of caste and class. For our purposes here, however, we will refer again and again to Mexicans as a nation, which they manifestly are — and which identity they will seek to defend even when it goes against what we on the outside may perceive as their own direct interest. One of the commonplaces of Catholicism is the observation that the Church must be God’s own, as it has survived the millennia despite the best efforts of its bishops. One may make a similar observation of the Mexicans, that they have coalesced as a real nation in every sense despite the best efforts of their ruling classes across two hundred years. Those elites, in a variety of forms, have led their nation to fiscal ruin, civil war, territorial loss, and worse — again and again and again — and yet the Mexicans endure. It is a testament to their tremendous resilience and vitality, all of which become immediately apparent upon their arrival in the United States, at which point a great many of them become entrepreneurs and workers of surpassing achievement. Someday, perhaps, there will be a Mexican state that deserves the Mexicans. But as the need for this book attests, that is not today.

Set against the respect we must maintain for the Mexicans is the realism we must have toward the Mexican state. Throughout most of this book, where the word “Mexico” is used, it is the state to which we refer. Throughout Mexico — at demonstrations and at monuments commemorating the dead of this or that massacre or murder — you will see lofted on placards or inscribed in bronze a single repeating phrase:

              Fue el Estado.

              “It was the State.”

It is the cry of a people who know exactly who, and what, is responsible for their misery. It was the state. Fue el Estado. They write it on the monument in the Zocalo to the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which the Mexican army massacred Mexican students (Doyle, n.d.). They write it on the posters in the glorieta which has become an informal monument in Mexico City to the thousands upon thousands of desaparecidos, “disappeared ones,” across the stricken country. They write it on their banners when they protest the murder of forty-three students of Ayotzinapa, who in 2014 had the misfortune to accidentally commandeer a bus part of a drug-running operation carrying a huge cargo of drugs toward the U.S. border (Kryt, 2021). The narcos called in local law enforcement and army to kill them all, and — as far as anyone can guess — burn the bodies to ashes. The Mexicans have no compunction in saying fue el estado. Nor should we. Those of us who live in relative safety — which is not to say out of cartel reach, because the cartels are in every American community now — ought to possess the same basic courage of the ordinary Mexican. When we enumerate the threat of Mexico to America now, we must remember: it was, and is, the state.

This is fundamentally an act of respect — and not one that the functionaries of the Mexican state necessarily want from us. We therefore give it. Nearly every American who has had candid conversations with Mexican officialdom has an anecdote in which the latter, confronted with some terrible event or act of unfriendliness, engages in the litany of excuses or deflections. I have sat with colleagues inside the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores in Mexico City and been told directly, by a senior official, that the Mexican state cannot possibly fight cartels when the Americans keep arming them. I have sat in private meetings with senior Mexican personnel who inform me solemnly that there is no sovereignty crisis in Mexico — no contestation of Mexican state sovereignty by cartels — and that it is dangerous for Americans to say so, lest it give credence to calls for intervencion. The official narrative of helplessness, of victimhood, is pervasive and ideological, touching every facet of the national story: go to the historical museum in Castillo Chapultepec, and you can read the plaques affirming that the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846-1848 was an unequal contest between the world’s best army and one of the world’s worst. Pobre México runs the narrative, and yet it is not so. Ulysses S. Grant, in his memoirs, observed that the Mexican soldiery was equal to the American in full, but that the Mexican leadership was deficient in nearly every respect. Thus, episodes like the Battle of Buena Vista, la Batalla de Angostura in Mexico, demonstrated how Mexican forces effectively defeated the American army of Zachary Taylor — and then failed to close out the victory by executing a precipitate and unforced withdrawal. Or consider the assault on Churubusco, won by the Americans only because Mexican leadership failed to provide the hard-fighting garrison there with sufficient stores and ammunition. These episodes from the nineteenth century and the modern cartel war of the twenty-first century alike must be recast as evidence of Mexican incapacity versus a superior United States because the alternative is for Mexican elites to assume responsibility. 

If that were to happen, who knows where it might end.

That assumption of responsibility is long overdue. Mexico is a state that makes positive choices with full agency, and it is past time to act as if this were the case. List nearly any woe that afflicts Mexico now, and there is a decision—reflecting priorities—from the Mexican state underneath it. Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau has publicly estimated that 30-40% of Mexican territory is under cartel sovereignty (Davidson, 2021). (We agree with this estimate.) The cartels are increasingly powerful — and bring combat-effective hard power to the table as part of that — but none of them are more powerful than SEDENA, Mexico’s army, which could defeat any of them in a straight fight if it chose. The surrender of sovereignty to cartels is therefore a choice made by the Mexican government. Or, if you prefer, look to the horrors of human trafficking across the length of Mexico, south to north, which are easy to find — and not just in Mexico. I have come across trafficking safehouses and crossings in Starr and Presidio counties, in the Texas borderlands, and the evidence of the presence of women and children is heartbreaking in full. There is big money in this, and this too is a choice made by the Mexican state. Or, consider the open presence of cartels and cartel killers throughout Mexico: in 2019, for example, I and a colleague were surprised to find ourselves on the pilgrimage route to the Basilica of Our Lady the Virgin of Guadalupe, alongside men in black with “SUR13” emblazoned on their ballcaps. These were Sureños, killers mostly for the Sinaloa Cartel. Mere feet away were uniformed personnel of the Mexican Guardia Nacional, gazing on complacently. This too is a choice. 

Of course, there is a storefront in San Antonio, Texas, that sells Sinaloa-cartel branded gear — I bought a hat with El Chapo’s name on it just to illustrate the point — and that too is a choice, but this time of our own. 

Texas is uniquely placed to offer this critique, and to chart a new pathway in relations, because the Mexicans have no greater friend than Texas — even as Texas is properly a critic and antagonist of the Mexican state. This assertion sometimes surprises Mexicans who are accustomed to the historical view of Texas as an essentially Anglo-American enemy of themselves and their country. It’s a view with ample vindication, and not just because the Texas Revolution tore away some of the young Mexican state’s best territory. Texans throughout the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century were marked by their contempt for the Mexicans. It was a hostility so thoroughgoing that General Taylor’s army in 1846-1848 had to curb the use of Texas troops within Mexico, such troops who tended toward destruction and occasional atrocity; a mixed force of Texas Rangers and U.S. Army personnel essentially wiped out the Mexican-American population of the Texas town of Porvenir in 1918, killing the men and many of the boys, and expelling the women to Mexico; and the Forty-Eighth Texas Legislature of 1943 actually had to pass a resolution affirming that Mexicans were to be considered white, and therefore presumptively exempt from positive discrimination, in the context of the segregation-era South. Mexican-Americans of my own father’s generation, now aging into their seventies and beyond, still recall de facto segregated facilities and social norms. All this was of course transmitted back into Mexico, and a rational antagonism developed.

Yet as so often is the case in history, the tale is not one-sided. In the single lifetime from the Texas Revolution to the era of the First World War, Mexicans attempted a genocide of the Anglo Texans on two occasions: first in the Runaway Scrape of 1836, and then in the Plan de San Diego of 1915. Mexicans furthermore maintained a robust activity in raiding the Texas borderlands for nearly a century after Texas independence, creating an atmosphere, south of the Nueces, of perennial violence and endemic low-grade warfare. Those days are a century past but, to borrow a phrase, the past isn’t even past. Go to Presidio County and meet the elderly woman who is certain — because she will tell you — that history’s wheel only needs to turn a bit before Anglos like her are again swept away. Look at the Russian Embassy in Mexico’s tweet, just last year, affirming that someday Mexico will reconquer Texas — and see all the enthusiastic likes and re-tweets from Mexicans affiliated with the ruling MORENA party (Embajada de Rusia en México, 2023).

The difference is in the quality of historical memory. The average Texan of the twenty-first century, although increasingly aware of the Mexican state and its cartel partners as adversaries, does not consider Mexicans as such to be a threat, not least because he likely lives among them. The Texas Revolution invokes civic pride, not a basket of live issues awaiting adjudication. None of this is true in Mexico: the average Mexican does not live among Texans, and the issues of intervencion are real and current, thanks in part to generations of ideological conditioning. The explicit messaging around the Alamo and Chapultepec is that all this has happened before and may happen again.

But they won’t — or rather, they ought not — if the Mexican regime is dissuaded from its present course toward disaster. A Texas perspective is essential here because Texas lives most immediately with Mexico and its fate. The Texas interest, and the Texas strategic positioning, is linked to the Mexican in ways typically not reflected in Washington, D.C., thought and policymaking. Properly understood, we Texans are neither advocates for Mexico, nor fixers of Mexico. We are, however, advocates for the only people who can bring Mexico to its greatness in full: the Mexicans themselves. As well-disposed friends of that type, rooted in our own history but not imprisoned by it, we can point to solutions and ideas that the American policy class, by its nature, cannot. In this historical moment, with the Mexican regime and the Mexican cartels so closely allied with one another, it is the Mexican people who must implement tough measures to navigate these tough times. They are the only ones that can do the job.

Some years ago, I was asked what would constitute victory in the increasingly intractable issue of Mexico and its violence. The question is, in one sense, misplaced. We are not out to “win” versus Mexico, which is a nation possessing its own agency and beyond our control. But I understood what the questioner meant, and so I replied that victory was not a defined endpoint, but a state of being. One morning, a father of a family of four in Corpus Christi, Texas, will wake up and decide that it’s a great day for a long-weekend car trip with all the kids to Monterrey, Mexico. They’ll pack up and go, and six hours later they’ll marvel at the awesome ridges of the Sierra Madre Oriental looming over the venerable Mexican city.

Over half a century ago, that actually happened — plenty of times — including in my mother’s own south-Texas household. Today it would be an insane risk, a cruel chance to take with small children. But when it happens again, then we’ve won.

This book shows the way. 

Sources:

Davidson, J. D. (2021, April 28). Former US ambassador to Mexico: Cartels control up to 40 percent of Mexican territory. The Federalist. https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/28/former-us-ambassador-to-mexico-cartels-control-up-to-40-percent-of-mexican-territory/

Doyle, K. (n.d.). Tlatelolco massacre: Declassified U.S. documents on Mexico and the events of 1968. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 10. Retrieved on August 14, 2024, from https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10/nsaebb10.htm

Embajada de Rusia en México [@EmbRusiaMexico]. (2023, March 28). El secretario del Consejo de Seguridad de Rusia, Nikolái Pátrushev: No hay duda de que, tarde o temprano, los vecinos del sur de Estados Unidos recuperarán los territorios que les fueron robados [Post]. X. https://twitter.com/EmbRusiaMexico/status/1640440802126995458[MF26] 

Kryt, J. (2021, October 10). We finally know how 43 students on a bus vanished into thin air. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-finally-know-how-43-ayotzinapa-students-on-a-bus-vanished-into-thin-air

Presidencia de la República. (2022, July 8). Versión estenográfica. Conferencia de prensa del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador del 8 de julio de 2022. Gobierno de México. https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/articulos/version-estenografica-conferencia-de-prensa-del-presidente-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-del-8-de-julio-de-2022

Presidencia de la República. (2023a, April 21). Que se oiga bien y que se oiga lejos: No aceptamos ninguna intervención, afirma presidente. Gobierno de México. https://presidente.gob.mx/que-se-oiga-bien-y-que-se-oiga-lejos-no-aceptamos-ninguna-intervencion-afirma-presidente/

Presidencia de la República. (2023b, September 18). Versión estenográfica. Conferencia de prensa del presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador del 18 de septiembre de 2023. Gobierno de México. https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/articulos/version-estenografica-conferencia-de-prensa-del-presidente-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-del-18-de-septiembre-de-2023

Reuters. (2022, May 9). Mexico president says hiring Cuban doctors, praises Cuban counterpart. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-president-says-will-hire-500-cuban-doctors-work-mexico-2022-05-09/

U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). Joint statement by Attorney General of the United States William P. Barr and Fiscalía General of Mexico Alejandro Gertz Manero. Retrieved on August 14, 2024, from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/joint-statement-attorney-general-united-states-william-p-barr-and-fiscal-general-mexico