New & free to read today: Is Mexico’s water agenda aiming too high?

New & Free Today: One year into Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term, a “complex” operator is emerging, writes @davidagren.bsky.social

New & free to read today: Is Mexico’s water agenda aiming too high?

Trump‘s drug war “escalation“ simply doesn’t add up. Free to read now:

A massive fuel theft scandal in Mexico has ensnared the Navy, business, and government officials - reaching senior members of Morena. It’s too big for the government to contain, so for Luis Rubio the question now is if President Claudia Sheinbaum can seize the crisis as an opportunity. Free today:

A massive fuel theft scandal in Mexico has ensnared the Navy, business, and government officials - reaching senior members of Morena. It’s too big for the government to contain, so for Luis Rubio the question now is if President Claudia Sheinbaum can seize the crisis as an opportunity. Free today:

What place does Claudia Sheinbaum want in Mexico’s history?

This week Claudia Sheinbaum branded ex-president Felipe Calderón a traitor. But for all her talk of sovereignty, Sheinbaum has yet to stand up to Washington the way Calderón once did. It’s an awkward truth that was on display again this week.

A reality check for the week... @themexicobrief.bsky.social: "Editor’s note: Claudia Sheinbaum is not Donald Trump’s foil. She is his parallel." www.themexicobrief.org/latest/edito...

Claudia Sheinbaum’s ‘end of neoliberalism’ looks like Donald Trump’s statist oligarchy. Her ‘poverty reduction’ hides a collapse in healthcare access. Her murder stats mask a disappearance crisis. She‘s redefining the terms of reality itself in a direct parallel to Trump’s assault on truth.

A note to the many progressives who have embraced Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum as a foil to Donald Trump: she isn’t Trump’s foil, she is his parallel. Here is why, free to read: www.themexicobrief.org/latest/edito...

"The #mañanera (the morning news conference) has dragged down the public discourse with an unedifying mix of trolling, shittalking, gaslighting, provoking, deflecting and accusing", opines @davidagren.bsky.social for @themexicobrief.bsky.social. #Mexico #4T

An entrenched culture of political trolling reached an unedifying peak this week in Mexico’s Congress, @davidagren.bsky.social breaks down how we got here. Free now:

“This line against Andy is approved and rewarded,” a source familiar with presidential communications told us. “It’s paving the way for Sheinbaum to have more of a say in reconfiguring Morena…with her people.”

✍️ My latest take for @themexicobrief.bsky.social, out today, on the current state of Mexico-US tariff/trade negotiations and bilateral affairs www.themexicobrief.org/latest/spoil...

Free today: “They are using us as pretext”: Mexico’s government is using the disappeared to build a surveillance state, victims’ families say in an exclusive report.

Mexican democracy turned 25 this week, but the ruling Morena party barely acknowledged the milestone. That’s because, as @davidagren.bsky.social reports, for its loyalists only the last seven matter.

⚠️🚨 @themexicobrief.bsky.social: "Editor’s note: On Mexico’s rapid, breath-taking descent into total surveillance" www.themexicobrief.org/latest/edito...

On Mexico’s rapid, breath-taking descent into total surveillance.

Free to read today: @davidagren.bsky.social on how Morena’s upcoming congressional agenda channels the infamous maxim of the late, scandal-ridden PRI ex-governor Fidel Herrera: “Estoy ahorita en plenitud del pinche poder.”

#Sheinbaum "didn’t post any photos with Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenskyy, a leader unpopular with her base", underlines @davidagren.bsky.social in an analysis for @themexicobrief.bsky.social. And people still believe that #Russia is not influential in Latin America anymore... #Mexico #4T

“Sheinbaum broke with AMLO’s approach to international affairs by actually attending the G7. She continued with the rest of his kabuki, however.” www.themexicobrief.org/latest/shein...

✍️ In case you missed it, here's my take last week for @themexicobrief.bsky.social on the protests in LA and what's at stake for US-Mexico ties.👇 www.themexicobrief.org/latest/pride...

“The President and the ruling party, which no longer complies with the President’s wishes, will control some judges, maybe most of the time, but not all the time; it’s in this inconsistency that a sign of weakness will prevail instead of power and control.”

Bad timing and high stakes hang over Claudia Sheinbaum’s trip to the G7. Once praised for deftly defusing Trump’s tariff threats, she’s stumbled of late. Next week’s summit offers a chance to regain her footing, as @davidagren.bsky.social reports.

Free today: In his debut for The Mexico Brief, @ambarturosarukhan.bsky.social unpacks the pride and the prejudice swirling around the Mexican flag — once again at the center of LA’s pro-immigration protests — and how it’s deepening tensions between Sheinbaum and Trump.

✍️ My take today for @themexicobrief.bsky.social: "Pride and Prejudice: Mexico’s flag becomes a flashpoint — again" www.themexicobrief.org/latest/pride...

Editor’s note: The constitutional obscenity happening in LA under the flimsiest of pretexts, and the resistance to it, may eventually be used by Stephen Miller and his allies as part of an equally flimsy pretext to push US military intervention in Mexico. This is not just a domestic crisis.

Free today: Trump’s power grab in LA has triggered a constitutional crisis, and reignited tensions with Mexico. MAGA is cynically seizing on Sheinbaum’s earlier talk of “mobilizing” against the remittance tax. Now she’s under pressure to defend migrants without blowing up diplomacy.

Free today: AMLO voted with a cheat sheet. His allies won. Just 13% voted. President Sheinbaum called it, “A triumph of democracy.” Critics say it's a partisan capture of the courts. Either way, Mexico just reinvented judicial independence - by abolishing it. @davidagren.bsky.social reports

Free today: Many experts say Mexico’s judicial reform was a presidential power grab. But historian Jacques Coste argues it’s worse: the courts are now in the hands of a tangled web of politicians, business elites, and criminal groups. Justice didn’t become freer this week — it fractured.

Free to read today: Sunday’s vote gutted Mexico’s judicial independence. With legal certainty fading and stagnation taking hold, nearshoring’s promise dims. Investors once looked to Mexico - but as that confidence wanes, Macario Schettino warns of imminent risk.

Today, thanks to a cynical reform by former President López Obrador, Mexico becomes the only country in the world to elect all of its judges in an election with 1000s of candidates. Most Mexicans likely won’t vote, but amid widespread apathy and confusion, @davidagren.bsky.social asks: will AMLO?

Free to read: She was a national sports star and senior aide to Mexico City’s mayor. Her brazen assassination last week shook the government and echoed as far as Washington. But behind the headlines is a local tragedy that is still reverberating through a community.

"Justice will not be the outcome, because it was never the objective," writes Luis Rubio on this Sunday's unprecedented nationwide judicial election in Mexico.

"Justice will not be the outcome, because it was never the objective," writes Luis Rubio on this Sunday's unprecedented nationwide judicial election in Mexico.

The Mexican government distorts crime stats by cherry-picking timeframes, using inconsistent databases, and inventing new categories to fake drops in violence. Emiliano Polo argues it amounts to a policy of impunity by design.

Free to read this weekend: Claudia Sheinbaum’s terrible, no good, very bad week. www.themexicobrief.org/latest/claud...

Free to read this weekend: Claudia Sheinbaum’s terrible, no good, very bad week. www.themexicobrief.org/latest/claud...

The mood music between Mexico and the US has dimmed in recent weeks. With Trump’s new Ambassador now in Mexico City, Mexico’s former envoy to Washington asks: is Claudia Sheinbaum convincing Trump of North America’s strategic value - and what happens next if she can't?

I know: there are too many subscriptions, and paywalls are frustrating. That’s why I make many of our articles free to read. But if you value what we do - independent, ad-free, sponsor-free reporting on a complex, vitally important country - I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. 1/2

Senate president, radical leftist, first-class flyer - chaos agent. Gerardo Fernández Noroña talks revolution, cuts off his critics, cozies up to autocrats, & antagonizes his own party's allies. He's also thriving. We chronicle Mexico's ultimate shit disturber.

Mexico City has no shortage of museums, but only one has a chamber built just for sonic experimentation. At MUAC, sound isn't ambient - it's investigative. Under Guillermo García Pérez's curation, MUAC's EES has become one of Latin America’s most radical listening labs.

Meet Fernández Noroña, the “shit disturber” in charge of Mexico’s Senate.

We're excited to welcome Macario Schettino to The Mexico Brief! One of Mexico's most renowned economists, Macario will be writing an exclusive bi-weekly column for us, his only one in English. In his first piece, he unpacks how Mexico arrived at its current moment of heightened economic risk.

Claudia Sheinbaum made much of her plan to protect CDMX’s water forest early in her term. But unchecked illegal logging is contributing to record forest fires that are threatening her centrepiece water initiative. We meet the under resourced community fire crew trying to tackle the problem.

Mexico’s decades-long push toward a more balanced federal system is showing signs of reversal. Former Ambassador Gerónimo Gutiérrez examines how chronic underfunding is reshaping the relationship between Mexico's states and the central government.

"In its third edition as part of Mexico City's TONO Festival, Aguas Frescas unfolded over two days in the courtyard of Museo Anahuacalli, proposing a new kind of “poetry fountain” - where bodies, liquids, and instruments formed a mutable, sonic ecology."

Claudia Sheinbaum has cultivated the image of a leader standing firm against Trump. But David Agren writes that recent under-the-radar remarks by Tulsi Gabbard - intended to flatter Donald Trump - suggest that behind the spectacle lies a quieter story of compliance.

"Once political niceties are discounted, with Trump praising Mexico’s President as a 'wonderful woman' and Sheinbaum repeating in her mañaneras that she has an 'excellent and respectful' rapport with Trump, the reality of his first 100 days in office paints a rather different picture."