Facing Trump

In the past decade, Mexico became a beacon for foreign investment as the imperialists pulled their capital out of China. This process of nearshoring allowed AMLO’s populist government to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the U.S., but it also led to an enormous growth of the proletariat, which now holds in its hands a very large portion of the U.S. economy. Today, Trump’s tariffs and policies threaten to put an end to this equilibrium and redouble the oppression of the U.S.’s main semicolony.

After Trump’s first attacks, the newly elected president and heir to AMLO’s Morena party, Claudia Sheinbaum, has emerged with a strengthened authority. She has been presented as a model of firmness in defense of Mexico’s sovereignty. However, this analysis is based on fatuous optimism about the country’s ability to navigate this turbulent period. The populist government’s foundations are highly unstable and dependent on foreign investment, and are coming under strain as Trump’s attacks intensify. Tariffs on the auto industry, as well as on steel and aluminum, are already sending shock waves throughout the Mexican economy—which could enter recession this year—resulting in layoffs and attacks on living and working conditions. Trump’s decision not to apply tariffs to all imports from Mexico is about the calculations of the imperialists and the deep interpenetration of economies, not Sheinbaum’s diplomatic skills or Mexico getting “preferential treatment.”

What is most urgently posed is the defense of Mexico against imperialist attacks. Defensive strike actions must be prepared and carried out against wage cuts and layoffs. However, the union leaderships are wasting precious time. They openly support Sheinbaum’s response and lull the workers to sleep by pushing the populists’ “national unity.” Instead of organizing their own independent struggle, workers are told to rally behind the national bourgeoisie and the government, who will not hesitate to betray the workers and the national interests of Mexico to save the privileges of the elites.

In the face of Trump’s protectionist attacks, there is growing pressure in the working class to defend the USMCA. This comes from the union misleaders, who are seeking to obtain a place at its renegotiating table, claiming that they can use its labor chapter to advance the interests of the workers. This also is the policy of the populists. Sheinbaum too defends the predatory USMCA, seeking to convince the U.S. imperialists that the way to compete with China and stop its growth is to strengthen the North American trade zone. Her Plan México speaks of strengthening the domestic market, expanding self-sufficiency in food and energy, promoting domestic production and strengthening social programs. But this is nothing more than a pipe dream of the Mexican bourgeoisie, which is trying to reconcile the country’s development with the sharpening of imperialist subjugation under Trump. Achieving each of these things requires fundamentally challenging imperialist domination and wresting from it the resources needed, a line Sheinbaum is unwilling to cross.

Against Morena’s policy of appeasement, Mexico must repudiate the USMCA, secure control over its foreign trade and strengthen ties with China. To confront the U.S.’s attacks, a genuine anti-imperialist government would take steps to strike at imperialist property in Mexico. An elementary measure would be to expropriate the energy sector and the mines without compensation. To confront the imperialists’ financial extortion and ensure the livelihood of the people, the banks should be nationalized and the debt repudiated.

Sheinbaum, like AMLO before her, claims to oppose the imperialists’ meddling in Latin America, but has collaborated with imperialist forces on issues of security and combating crime in Mexican territory and has mobilized thousands of National Guard troops to stop the flow of illegal migrants to the U.S. A government that truly seeks to combat the depredations of imperialism would mobilize and unify Latin America, as opposed to the various national lackeys who think they can get a better deal with the imperialists at the expense of the Latin American masses. In addition, it would also forge an alliance with the workers and oppressed in Canada and the U.S. against their common enemy: U.S. imperialism. For an anti-imperialist united front of the Americas to fight Trump!

Trump’s plans will not be smoothly implemented. Resistance is to be expected, and workers and peasants will enter the scene in opposition to imperialist plunder. But in the absence of a revolutionary pole, the anti-imperialist impulse of the masses will be diverted toward reform of Morena or a new populist option. The question of leadership will be posed pointblank. Part of the Marxist left counters Sheinbaum by vociferating that she and Morena are bourgeois, repressors, lackeys of imperialism, etc.; but these accusations, while true, are sterile, since they do not deal with the contradictions of the populists and do nothing to dent the massive illusions that exist in them.

Other leftists speak of the need to make a front against the imperialists, but end up dismissing the crucial role of the powerful proletariat and are incapable of pushing a strategy different from that of Morena and the union bureaucracies. That is why the Mexican left is marginal. It is urgent that it reorient itself! The task of revolutionaries is to offer a road to victory for every working-class struggle, linking it to the broader struggle for national and social liberation. It is a matter of using every opportunity to counterpose a truly anti-imperialist program to Morena’s dead end, showing concretely the weaknesses and vacillations of the populists in the struggle against the imperialists, in order to wrest the leadership of the struggle from them.