Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.

López Obrador’s successor is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female President. She is as precise and controlled as AMLO was blustery, but she has kept up the tradition of the mañanera. If anything, she talks with reporters even less, so her statements in the Treasury Room often provide the best indications of her administration’s priorities and plans.

On the morning of January 21st, Sheinbaum’s arrival was announced by the click of high heels on stone. “Buenos días,” she said as she walked onstage, wearing a black pencil skirt and a shirt embroidered with Indigenous motifs. It was the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and an expectant crowd had gathered to hear how the Mexican government would deal with the belligerent new Administration to the north. To everyone’s surprise, Sheinbaum said that her comments that morning would focus on health.

Sheinbaum, who is sixty-two, had been in office almost four months, and for much of that time public discourse had been consumed by Trump’s impending return to power. The American President had, once again, made Mexico a target. He vowed that on Day One he would impose “a 25% Tariff on ALL products” from Mexico. He claimed that he would declare a national emergency at the border, suspend refugee admissions, and designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, allowing the U.S. to pursue them more aggressively. Drug kingpins would “never sleep soundly again,” he said.

How much any of this would translate into actual policy had been a subject of frenzied speculation in Mexico. Officials at the border had announced a state of emergency to prepare for mass deportations. Mayors declared themselves profoundly unprepared to deal with the legions of people Trump planned to send back. News outlets proclaimed the advent of “Trump Reloaded” and warned of “La Invasión.”

Every Mexican President has to contend with the looming influence of the United States—accommodating its whims and imperatives while convincing citizens that their interests come first. López Obrador dealt with this mainly through force of personality. Despite the mayhem that Trump sowed in his previous term, the two men had temperamental similarities, and AMLO at times referred to Trump as a “friend.” Though Sheinbaum is a protégé of AMLO’s, she does not entirely emulate his style. She trained as a physicist and spent years in academia before building a political career on technocratic competence. As Trump took office again, she seemed determined to project quiet control.

At the mañanera, she acknowledged the political atmosphere. “We will always defend our sovereignty,” she said. “That is a maxim the President must live up to.” Though Trump had already signed a flurry of executive orders, Sheinbaum reminded the audience, with a wry smile, “It’s always important to keep a cool head.” A screen behind her magnified the text of some of Trump’s most controversial orders, which she proceeded to parse in the patient tones of a graduate seminar.

Sheinbaum pointed out that this wasn’t the first time that Trump had declared a national emergency at the border, or tried to get Mexico to take back migrants the U.S. didn’t want. His declaration on the “Gulf of America,” she made clear, was hardly worth discussing. “For us, it will continue to be the Gulf of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said. The only real novelty was the executive order to designate drug cartels as terrorist groups. But there, again, the Trump Administration had yet to determine who would actually be on the list. So why overreact now?

Sheinbaum invited up her minister of foreign affairs, Juan Ramón de la Fuente. A former psychiatrist with silver hair and rimless glasses, he had been sitting with a hand on his chin, looking unconvinced by his boss’s assurances. Now he produced a graph showing that migrant encounters at the southern border had dropped nearly eighty per cent in a year, to “the lowest levels of crossings.” Whether these numbers could help placate Trump was an open question. But Sheinbaum seemed determined to give at least the appearance of rationality.

Midway through the press conference, she tried to turn the subject decisively away from Trump. She called on the minister of health and his deputy to detail her administration’s public-health initiatives. For nearly fifteen minutes, they discussed a campaign against dengue fever—which had spiked alarmingly the previous year—and an effort to treat cataracts for free.

After the presentation, Sheinbaum opened the floor to questions, and the conversation turned swiftly back to the U.S. Would Mexico take in all migrants? Who would cover the cost of deportations? How would the government respond to tariffs? Sheinbaum remained vague on details, but insisted that her administration would seek to work with Trump. “Step by step,” she said, gazing levelly at the audience. As reporters shouted questions, she announced that the conference was adjourned. “Thank you, compañeras, compañeros,” Sheinbaum said, and began heading for the exit. Then she backtracked to add, with a grin, “Don’t forget about the cataract program—it is very important.”

In the months before the Mexican Presidential election last June, banners went up across the country with the message “Es Claudia”—it is Claudia. The phrase, summoning a kind of papal succession, alerted the political faithful that Sheinbaum had been chosen to succeed López Obrador as the head of his party, the National Regeneration Movement, or MORENA. Sheinbaum had spent most of her career in Mexico City; she was an urban intellectual, a type that populists tend to dislike. But AMLO was revered to the point of worship, and his endorsement gave her a potent advantage. When the votes were counted, Sheinbaum had beaten her closest competitor by thirty-one points. How she would govern was less clear. The view in Washington was cautiously optimistic, a senior Biden Administration official told me—though skeptics worried that “she’d have all the flaws of López Obrador without any of his authority.”

When Sheinbaum talks about her ideological roots, she often describes herself as a daughter of el sesenta y ocho—1968, a year that Mexicans remember as a time of fervid student protests and brutal state repression. For most of the preceding four decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had governed unopposed, and people were beginning to demand greater freedoms. When Sheinbaum was six years old, the military, on the President’s orders, attacked a huge student protest in the Three Cultures square in Mexico City. Snipers opened fire, prompting a frantic stampede. Thousands were held at gunpoint and hauled off to jail. The death toll remains a state secret, but estimates suggest that more than three hundred people were killed.

Sheinbaum’s family had intimate knowledge of political persecution. Her father, a chemical engineer named Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who had fled Lithuania in the nineteen-twenties. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and academic, was born into a Sephardic family that left Bulgaria at the start of the Second World War. “It was a miracle they were saved,” Sheinbaum has said. “Many family members from that generation were exterminated.”

Compared with the U.S., which had strict immigration quotas, Mexico was a haven. Thousands of European Jews, including Sheinbaum’s grandparents, settled in the capital’s historic center. Still, Sheinbaum has said, “I grew up without religion.” In her family’s home, politics took its place. When students started protesting the PRI, Sheinbaum’s mother took up their cause. She brought her children to visit Lecumberri, a forbidding prison where protesters were held. The family welcomed activists into their home and hosted long deliberations around the dinner table. Sheinbaum recalls eavesdropping on their conversations, huddled on a staircase out of sight. When she found works by Marx and other subversive thinkers stashed around the house, she told herself, “Funny—there’s books in the closet.”

Her parents sent her to Escuela Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, a private school in the Tlalpan district, where children could shape their own curriculum. Early on, Sheinbaum got involved in a musical ensemble called Pilcuicatl—Nahuatl for “the children who sing.” Video from those years shows Sheinbaum, with her frizzy hair pulled back, strumming a charango, a small guitar carved from an armadillo shell. “The students all came from homes where writing, reading, and painting was encouraged and there was an appreciation for music,” Carmen Boullosa, a revered Mexican writer who was one of Sheinbaum’s teachers, said. Still, Boullosa distinguished her pupils from the city’s cloistered rich kids, chauffeured from one safe zone to another: “These were not children who were confined to their private gardens.”

At fifteen, Sheinbaum began to join protests in the streets. She participated in hunger strikes, and demonstrated alongside a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared by the state—“the very first night I spent away from home,” she later recalled. Imanol Ordorika, a social scientist and a high-school friend who joined Sheinbaum in the protests, said that the spirit of the sixties still lingered: “It all converged with the civil-rights movement, the music of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary.”

After high school, Sheinbaum studied physics at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), Mexico’s premier state-funded institution, but she stayed interested in activism. At Ordorika’s urging, she joined a group called the Council of University Students, in 1986. The university’s president was pushing controversial reforms, including a tuition increase. The CEU, as the Council was known, rallied thousands of students and forced the school’s leaders to debate them in public. The debates went on for weeks, at Che Guevara Hall, where students with long hair and beards sat across from bureaucrats in suits, waving cigarettes as they spoke of constructing unauniversidad democrática. Sheinbaum was deeply engaged, but behind the scenes. Each night after the debates, she met with the students to help them plan the next day’s line of attack.

After the dialogues, the CEU called for a general strike and gathered hundreds of thousands of protesters at the Zócalo, Mexico City’s grand central square. Within days, the administration had abandoned its reforms, and sympathizers celebrated across the capital. “We were effectively standing up to the government,” Ordorika said. Throughout, the CEU had stayed in communication with the leaders of el sesenta y ocho. The older activists provided a bit of tactical advice about dealing with a more powerful opponent—a lesson that Sheinbaum seems to have retained. “They always warned us against putting our adversary between a rock and a hard place,” Ordorika said. “We had to give them an exit.”

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is an extraordinary rarity in Mexican public life: a lifelong politician who has maintained an unblemished record. The son of a legendary President, Cárdenas grew up within the PRI, but broke away in 1986 to start a left-wing offshoot called the Democratic Current. Two years later, he defied the ruling party and ran for President—a crucial act in the inception of Mexican democracy.

On Cárdenas’s office bookshelf sits a photograph of him in 1988, addressing a vast crowd at UNAM. Early in the campaign, he sought support from the CEU. Sheinbaum, who was finishing her undergraduate studies, was still involved in the group, and had married one of its founding members, Carlos Ímaz. The Council held a meeting with Cárdenas at Sheinbaum’s home, and afterward convened a rally on his behalf at the university. “It was the single most important event of the campaign,” he told me. “It gave us the support of the intellectual class—not just the students but also the academics and the staff.”

On election day, early results gave Cárdenas a commanding lead over the PRI’s candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. But, as ballots were being counted, government authorities announced that the electoral system had collapsed. Poll watchers were ousted at gunpoint, and sacks of ballots were tossed in the trash. Cárdenas denounced the government’s meddling and declared that voters had aligned against the PRI’s “authoritarianism.” By then, however, Salinas had been pronounced the winner, and the PRI-dominated Congress subsequently ordered all the ballots burned.

After the election, Sheinbaum diverted some of her attention from politics. At UNAM, she became the first woman to pursue a Ph.D. in energy engineering, and then she and Ímaz moved to California to continue their studies. The couple had two children: Rodrigo, Ímaz’s son from a previous marriage, and Mariana, their two-year-old daughter. Sheinbaum conducted research at Berkeley, where she found a thriving community of activists and intellectuals.

Yet her focus inevitably returned to Mexico, where a growing sector of society shared Cárdenas’s outrage at the PRI. Cárdenas had founded a new opposition party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática. Sheinbaum spread the word about the P.R.D. in study halls at Berkeley, and travelled to farm towns like Watsonville to speak with strawberry pickers. When Salinas toured California to promote the North American Free Trade Agreement, in 1991, Sheinbaum joined protests against his visit. The Stanford Daily ran a front-page photo of her, looking indignant in a headband and holding a sign that read “Fair Trade and Democracy Now!!”

When she and Ímaz returned to Mexico, a few years later, Sheinbaum worked in academia and remained active in the P.R.D. In 1997, Cárdenas ran in Mexico City’s first free election for mayor, and won decisively. The PRI’s monopoly was broken, and rival parties across the ideological spectrum began to gather strength. As Cárdenas later wrote, Mexico was at last on its way to “dismantling the state’s party regime.”

By then, the P.R.D. had found a new leader—López Obrador, who at the time was still an ambitious upstart. In the run-up to the 2000 elections, when he ran to succeed Cárdenas as mayor, Sheinbaum and Ímaz hosted campaign meetings for him. The son of shopkeepers from Tabasco state, AMLO had an outsider’s charisma: he drove an old Nissan to work and moved around the country without an entourage, talking with regular Mexicans. He vowed to purge the government of corruption. But, rather than encouraging unity, he inveighed against “élites” and the “power mafia”—a group that came to include seemingly anyone who opposed him. Nevertheless, Sheinbaum was fascinated by his political conviction. It was, as she saw it, the essential fuel for a “movement of transformation.”

The Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, a monumental complex sprawling across nearly forty acres, lies in the center of Mexico City. On the façade, a mural by a disciple of Diego Rivera presents visitors with a brief tour of crucial moments in Mexican history. Inside is the vast Chamber of Deputies, where the country’s past eight Presidents have been sworn in.

On the morning of Sheinbaum’s Presidential inauguration, last October, she left her home in Tlalpan and got in a gray sedan headed for San Lázaro. While she was still navigating the streets, AMLO arrived at the hall, where lawmakers greeted him with a laudatory chant: “It’s an honor to be with Obrador.” Inside, a raucous crowd had assembled. His coalition had won three hundred and sixty-four of the chamber’s five hundred seats, an almost insuperable advantage. People swarmed around to take selfies, grasp his shoulder, offer praise. It took him more than ten minutes to reach the dais.

Outside, Sheinbaum climbed the stairs to the main esplanade, where an all-female delegation was waiting, then made her way to the lobby and saluted the flag. Throughout, López Obrador’s name continued to reverberate inside. It was only when the hall’s doors opened, revealing Sheinbaum, in a white sheath embroidered with tulips and daisies, that clusters of people took up a new chant: “It’s an honor to be standing with Claudia today.”

Sheinbaum began her speech by hailing AMLO as “the most important political leader and social activist in modern history, the most beloved President.” Before she outlined her policies, she emphasized that she represented a break with the past. “For the first time, we women have arrived to lead the destinies of our beautiful nation,” she said. Yet her platform closely matched her predecessor’s. It was another reminder that, for nearly three decades, her career had been inseparable from his.

Their partnership began in late 2000. López Obrador had recently been elected mayor of Mexico City, and a longtime friend recommended Sheinbaum to lead his environmental agenda. Her credentials were undeniable: she held graduate degrees in energy engineering, and she had dedicated years to researching greenhouse-gas emissions. (At unam, she had spent time with the Purépecha Indigenous group, and developed a woodstove that would use less fuel while limiting women’s exposure to smoke.) López Obrador invited her to coffee and told her that he wanted to address the city’s noxious pollution. “You know how to do those things,” he said. “Plus, you get along with all the scientists who are experts in this field.” Sheinbaum accepted at once.

As environmental secretary, she worked to ease some of the city’s intractable problems, including chronic water shortages. Over time, her responsibilities grew: in 2001, she was asked to oversee AMLO’s marquee project, a four-hundred-million-dollar renovation of Mexico City’s beltway. She led a team of engineers who designed the segundo piso, or elevated highway—an eleven-mile extension hailed as a way to ease traffic and curb emissions. Environmentalists staunchly opposed the project. “They wanted the government to promote public transportation rather than facilitate car use,” Alberto Olvera, a sociologist and a prominent political observer, said. “Sheinbaum went with the contractors that López Obrador had appointed. And, to this day, no one knows how many contracts were appropriated, or how much money was spent.”

In 2004, Sheinbaum was beset by a corruption scandal. A leaked video showed Ímaz, her husband, taking some forty thousand dollars in bribes from a prominent businessman. Images spread around the country of Ímaz, who was then an elected official in AMLO’s party, stuffing bundles of cash into a plastic bag. Ímaz claimed that the money was for an initiative to prevent voter fraud, but he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. (He appealed, and was ultimately acquitted. He and Sheinbaum have since divorced.)

Sheinbaum, who wasn’t implicated, kept pushing López Obrador’s initiatives. The highway project was completed in early 2005, just in time for AMLO to announce his first Presidential bid. He appointed Sheinbaum as his spokesperson. She was not yet a stirring public speaker, but she was intelligent and effective—“a loyal soldier,” as Paola Ojeda, a longtime aide to López Obrador, put it. AMLO lost the race by a fraction of a point, and he demanded a recount, claiming fraud. Sheinbaum was asked to help lead an investigation, and, with a team of mathematicians, she built a theory of how the election was stolen. Ultimately, most people found it unpersuasive: AMLO’s opponent, Felipe Calderón, was inaugurated, and the country moved on.

Many of López Obrador’s allies abandoned him, but Sheinbaum didn’t. When she wasn’t working at UNAM’s Engineering Institute, she was often seen around his office, making calls to voters or helping plan rallies. “She maintained a quiet but constant presence,” Ojeda said. In 2013, when AMLO fought a federal initiative to reform the state-owned oil industry, Sheinbaum took up his cause. They cast the effort as a brazen attempt to privatize Mexico’s oil resources, which had been held by the government since the nineteen-thirties. “Scientifically, it’s a hard position to defend,” Vicente Ugalde, a scholar of environmental policy, said. “The evidence shows that we need to decarbonize. But López Obrador has defended hydrocarbons since his youth, and the energy reform became a rallying cry for MORENA. Sheinbaum’s political calculations at the time were at odds with her technical expertise.”

After López Obrador lost his second Presidential bid, in 2012, he set out to form a new party, which he called MORENA, a Spanish word that can indicate either dark hair or dark skin. Sheinbaum helped draft a declaration of principles, filled with grandiose appeals to history. “There have been three main transformations in our country: the Independence, the Reform, and the Revolution,” it read. “MORENA will usher in the fourth social transformation.” Within a few years, the Party had picked up nearly a third of Mexico City’s districts, and Sheinbaum had been elected the mayor of Tlalpan. By the time of the 2018 general election, MORENA had become the country’s dominant political force.

Before the Presidential election, López Obrador asked Sheinbaum to manage his campaign, promising to appoint her secretary of the interior if he won. She politely declined, saying that she wanted to run for mayor of Mexico City. As AMLO wrote in his memoir, “Because she’s a little stubborn, or, to put it elegantly, persevering—like you know who—she decided to enter the primary and won.” Both she and López Obrador ended up winning decisively in the general election.

In a matter of months, Sheinbaum went from overseeing a district of fewer than seven hundred thousand people to governing a city of nearly ten million. Aides describe her administration as disciplined, exacting, and highly attuned to data. Officials were expected to traverse the streets, seeking problems. “You can’t be a public servant without living like a citizen,” José Merino, who led the Digital Innovation Agency, told me. “She took the subway, used the escalators, walked around, reporting the whole time. ‘I tried to go online, but the internet didn’t work.’ ‘The street lights on the avenue aren’t working.’ ” Sheinbaum assembled facts and quickly came to unshakable conclusions. “She’s not confrontational,” Merino said, then corrected himself: “She’s not needlessly confrontational.”

One night in 2021, the city’s newest subway line collapsed, killing twenty-six people. Sheinbaum’s allies pointed out that the line had been built long before her time—and that López Obrador had imposed stringent austerity measures, gutting institutions across the government. Yet engineers and operators had persistently raised concerns. One government employee recalled telling Sheinbaum in a meeting that an inquiry into the subway’s finances had found that “practically no money was spent on maintenance in a full five years.” The response was muted, the employee said, and “no one ever raised the subject again.” It seemed clear that the people in the room were aware of the problem. When the collapse came, the only surprise was the timing: “I think they knew it was going to happen. They just didn’t think it would happen under their watch.”

In last year’s Presidential race, Sheinbaum’s main opponent was also a woman, so gender was much less of an issue than job performance. The subway collapse came up repeatedly. Sheinbaum countered by enumerating her achievements, including her management of the COVID-19 pandemic. While AMLO dismissed the severity of the virus, holding rallies and insisting that the talismans he carried around would protect him, Sheinbaum increased testing, quickly tripled the number of I.C.U. beds, and retooled a factory in Mexico City to produce masks.

Sheinbaum also boasted of reducing the homicide rate by more than fifty per cent, and of empowering her police chief to create an investigative unit to confront organized crime. She didn’t mention that, while she strengthened Mexico City’s civic forces, AMLO had largely handed over the national-security strategy to the Army. As Carlos Bravo Regidor, a noted political analyst, told me, “Sheinbaum championed the city’s security efforts without ever facing the fact that there was an implicit criticism of López Obrador’s policy. And it’s taken on a second life now that she’s President.”

In the weeks before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, violence rocked the cartel stronghold of Sinaloa. In the capital, Culiacán, drug gangs killed scores of people. Policemen were shot in broad daylight. Explosions and bursts of gunfire were heard almost every day.

After two boys, ages nine and twelve, were brutally murdered one Sunday morning, protests broke out, under the slogan “Not the children.” Demonstrators called for the governor of Sinaloa to resign, and publicly torched a piñata made to resemble him. The governor was widely rumored to be linked to the cartels—but he was also friendly with López Obrador. The pressure on Sheinbaum grew. “The President had to prove, from Day One, that she would confront organized crime,” Eduardo Guerrero, a well-regarded security analyst, said.

In recent decades, the cartels had increased their influence; according to the U.S. Northern Command, they controlled about a third of Mexico’s territory. “The government doesn’t have a strategy to reduce violence at the national level,” Guerrero said. “The situation in Culiacán has overpowered them.” López Obrador argued that the best solution was a philosophy of “abrazos,no balazos”—hugs, not bullets. His plan for containing turf wars between gangs was to allow monopolies to flourish. “In the best cases, it led to a reduction in violence for one or two years,” Guerrero said. “In the worst cases, it allowed criminal groups to grow more powerful and violent.”

When Sheinbaum became President, she did not remove the governor of Sinaloa. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) But, without acknowledging it, she took a radically different approach to security than her predecessor had. “There is no continuity whatsoever between the two leaders,” Guerrero said. The watchdog group México Evalúa compared her first hundred days to AMLO’s and found that Sheinbaum’s forces had carried out more than five times as many raids. Drug seizures increased from thirty-three kilos to 665,000, and arrests from thirty-one to 7,720. Guerrero said, “She’s going after cartel leaders, hit men, the people who transport drugs and guard safe houses.”

Guerrero suggested that Sheinbaum was motivated in part by scrutiny from the United States. Yet the U.S. helped bring on the recent spasm of violence in Culiacán, by creating a power vacuum. For years, American authorities had targeted the Sinaloa cartel, a major player in fentanyl production, but with limited success. “The United States grew tired of asking for Mexico’s coöperation in a number of areas, especially the arrest of high-profile individuals,” Guerrero said. In July, U.S. agents seized an opportunity to capture Ismael Zambada, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel. They secretly negotiated with his godson—Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of the former drug lord El Chapo—who lured him to an ersatz meeting. In Zambada’s telling, he was abducted and forced onto a plane to an airport outside El Paso, where agents were waiting to take him into custody. It was only afterward that Mexican authorities were given notice.

The news came as a surprise in Washington, too. “This was purely done through law-enforcement channels,” a senior Biden official told me. “There was never a discussion at the N.S.C. about its political implications, or the bloodshed that predictably ensued.” In Mexico, senior officials were left scrambling. Zambada’s kidnapping had shown that the U.S. was willing to pursue its objectives without Mexico’s consent. “The United States realized that organized crime had festered under López Obrador,” Guerrero said. “Now it’s figuring out whether the new administration is to be trusted.”

Sheinbaum has become a sharp observer of Trump’s behavior. Soon after he won last year’s election, she declined an invitation to join Joe Biden at a state dinner, apparently wary of angering the new President by acknowledging the old one. During the transition, her cabinet led a series of operations meant to send an unequivocal signal to the new Administration. Military personnel seized four hundred million dollars’ worth of fentanyl. Migrant caravans headed north were systematically dispersed. Tunnels used for smuggling drugs and migrants into the U.S. were sealed off. The border was so quiet that National Guardsmen were reportedly struggling with boredom.

Trump wasn’t pacified. He and many of his aides have declared that Mexico is “essentially run by the cartels.” Among his advisers, there is an unprecedented insistence that the situation requires a military intervention, though they are debating whether to bomb Mexico or to lead a kind of “soft invasion.” Days after Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he told high-ranking Mexican officials that the Administration was taking no options off the table. Hegseth has publicly expressed a preference for targeted strikes. “Combine that with actual border security,” he said, “now you’re cooking with gas.”

A succession of U.S. Presidents have considered and rejected the possibility of designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Even Trump, in his first term, ultimately decided against it. A military intervention would be a still more extreme departure from precedent. Leaving aside concerns about antagonizing a major trade partner, a strategy of targeted strikes rests on dubious logic. It assumes that Mexican cartels are integrated networks, like Al Qaeda, when in fact they rely on a patchwork of facilitators—lawyers, accountants, corrupt officials, lookouts—who vary from place to place. “We’ve got four cartels with regional presence across a third of the country,” Guerrero said. “But we’ve also got seventy-eight regional mafias and more than four hundred gangs.”

As the Trump Administration talks openly of sending troops across the border, Sheinbaum has denounced the “interventionist spirit at the door.” She has promoted a constitutional amendment stating that “the people of Mexico will under no circumstances accept interventions,” and raised the salaries of all military personnel, whom she hailed as “the guardians of our sovereignty.” Sheinbaum likes to point out that the U.S. plays its own part in the drug trade. She often asks, Who sells the fentanyl once it crosses the border, and where do the profits end up?

Yet Sheinbaum’s government is coöperating with Trump to an extraordinary degree. Her officials have agreed to continue an arrangement in which U.S. Special Forces train Mexican troops, and have reportedly allowed the C.I.A. to expand its operations in Mexico, where it has been leading a program of drone surveillance. Soon after Trump took office, a U.S. military plane was spotted off the coast of Sinaloa, one of at least eighteen flights reported in a matter of weeks. At first, Sheinbaum argued that the reports were just part of a “campañita”—a petty campaign to make her look weak. Then, as the news spread, she grudgingly admitted that the operations had been carried out with her government’s assent.

Early one recent morning, Mexico’s secretary of the economy, Marcelo Ebrard, stood at his office window, looking out at the city’s canopy of jacarandas. “They were a gift from Japan, like the cherry trees in D.C.,” he said. “A form of floral diplomacy.” Ebrard, who is sixty-five, with a fringe of graying hair, had just returned from his fifth trip to Washington in a little more than a month. He seemed wistful for a time when Mexico and its allies exchanged gifts rather than threats.

Two days before, Trump had unveiled an outrageous list of tariffs, throwing scores of countries—and trillions of dollars in trade—into turmoil. Mexico was among a few nations that escaped the levies, but Ebrard seemed only modestly reassured. “It’s a system of comparative disadvantages,” he said. “The question no longer is ‘What advantages do you have as a country?’ but, rather, ‘What disadvantages are you up against?’ ”

Ebrard is perhaps Mexico’s nimblest political operative—a canny centrist who served as secretary of foreign affairs under AMLO. He was in that position during Trump’s previous term, when the U.S. proposed a five-per-cent tariff on all Mexican goods. The threat cast Mexico’s leadership into disarray and allowed Trump to extract significant concessions on immigration. Compared with the current regimen, that threat seems almost negligible.

In the span of just a few months, Trump had vowed to impose wide-ranging tariffs on Mexico, then placed them on hold, then proposed them again. As the stock market plunged, the logic of the tariffs was elusive. When Trump’s advisers defended them in public, they frequently contradicted one another, and even themselves. Ebrard put it diplomatically: “It’s a system of thought with varied expressions.” In the hope of finding basic precepts to engage with, he had studied the writings of Trump’s current and former trade advisers, including papers by Peter Navarro and the book “No Trade Is Free,” by Robert Lighthizer. “At its core, the system calls into question the benefits of free trade and the tenets of globalization,” Ebrard said. The essential premise was that the U.S. had largely been a victim of free trade with Mexico—an idea that Ebrard described, dryly, as “debatable.”

Ebrard was preparing for a sixth trip to Washington, to begin a new round of negotiations. He had a little more than a month to convince Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that the tariffs were not in his country’s interest. Nearly all economists think that it is fantastical to believe that the U.S. can build enough factories to compensate for the loss of manufacturing abroad. “The United States will have to choose between two fundamentally incompatible objectives—reducing the deficit with Mexico and with Asia,” Ebrard said.

Since Trump’s first term, Mexico had become the United States’ top trading partner. The two countries exchange more than eight hundred billion dollars’ worth of goods a year, and industries throughout the U.S. rely on Mexican labor. “Mexico is deeply integrated with the U.S.—and that makes certain decisions very costly,” Ebrard said. But the decisions might be even costlier for Mexico, where trade accounts for about seventy per cent of economic activity, compared with twenty-five per cent in the U.S.

Ebrard argued that Mexico has another advantage: “Your bargaining power derives from the strength of your government.” He was referring to Sheinbaum, whose approval ratings were above eighty per cent. “She has built a rapport with President Trump by defending her viewpoints, while earning moral authority,” Ebrard said. Not long ago, this kind of praise would have been unthinkable from him. In the primary for last year’s Presidential election, Ebrard fiercely challenged Sheinbaum, and after he lost he threatened to abandon the Party. But those tensions had evidently been set aside. Ebrard had two framed photographs in his office: one of his wife, Rosalinda, and one of Sheinbaum, wearing the Presidential sash.

For months, her administration has been fighting what amounts to a war of attrition. In February, Trump threatened to impose a twenty-five-per-cent levy on Mexican imports, “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Mexican analysts warned that the economy was on the brink of a recession. Over a holiday weekend, Sheinbaum held half a dozen closed-door meetings with cabinet members. She sent a request to Washington to arrange a call with Trump before the tariff went into effect, that Tuesday. By the time word came back that he had agreed, people close to him had conveyed a message: “He’s looking for a way out. Let him claim a victory.”

Early Monday morning, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, and afterward he announced that he would “immediately pause the anticipated tariffs for a one-month period.” In exchange, he said, Sheinbaum had “agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican soldiers on the Border.” For the moment, Sheinbaum had averted disaster. She was hailed in Mexico as “la nueva dama de hierro”—the new iron lady. Opposition lawmakers praised her serenity and firmness. Europeans wondered, half in jest, if they could borrow her for a few days.

But the pause on tariffs was brief and tenuous. Amid the uncertainty, Mexico’s central bank halved its growth forecast, and business leaders acknowledged that sixty billion dollars’ worth of investments were frozen. Volvo and Nissan, which had built cars in Mexico for decades, entertained the possibility of leaving the country.

Ebrard was sent to Washington, along with Sheinbaum’s security chief, Omar García Harfuch, who had ties to American officials. The Mexican team was aware that its best hope of appeasing Trump was to offer some bit of easily publicized security coöperation. At one point, Ebrard turned to Harfuch and said, “It all depends on you, brother.” Mexico ultimately agreed to extradite twenty-nine cartel leaders, to be tried in U.S. courts. A Justice Department official bragged that the agreement was “a consequence of a White House that negotiates from a position of strength.”

As the negotiations dragged on into early March, Sheinbaum stalled to allow other players to exert pressure on Trump. “The tariffs went into effect on a Tuesday, just after midnight,” Bravo Regidor told me. “At the mañanera on Tuesday morning, Sheinbaum says, ‘I’m going to speak with Trump on Thursday and announce Mexico’s responses on Sunday.’ So she allows forty-eight hours for the stock markets to react, for Republicans in swing districts to weigh in, and for American companies with operations in Mexico to respond. By Thursday, when she gets on the phone with Trump, he’s already softened his stance. The call ends, and Trump says that, ‘out of respect for President Sheinbaum,’ he’s decided to delay tariffs. I don’t know if it’s good policy, but it sure is good politics.”

Under the new terms, all goods traded under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement were exempted from levies—though penalties remained on important exports like aluminum, steel, and auto parts. Ildefonso Guajardo, a former secretary of the economy who during Trump’s first term led the team that negotiated the U.S.M.C.A., suggested that Sheinbaum’s approach had limits. “You can’t allow Trump a constant extortion, where he’s extracting bargaining chips at every turn,” he said. “If you do, you’ll end up running out of chips.”

During the recent negotiations, the Trump Administration boasted that Mexico had offered to match its sweeping tariffs on China. In Guajardo’s view, “copying and pasting the U.S.’s trade policy would be a serious mistake.” There are simply too many things that Mexico, like the U.S., cannot produce for itself. Sheinbaum is attempting to increase manufacturing capacity, through an initiative called Plan México—but, as Guajardo pointed out, there is not enough money to fund it sufficiently. Her administration inherited the largest budget deficit in decades.

Mexican officials describe a strategy of patience and prudence, aimed at preparing for a more momentous fight: the U.S.M.C.A. is up for review next year. With more conflict seemingly inevitable, some analysts question whether the brief respites justify the concessions. “I sometimes wonder if I’m looking at a close collaboration between two countries,” Bravo Regidor said, “or if I’m looking at one of those nineteenth-century paintings of the Aztecs making offerings to wrathful gods, hoping to influence the weather.”

Within Mexico, Sheinbaum faces far less resistance. Over the years, MORENA has accumulated so much power that many analysts are asking whether the country once again has a ruling party that wields total authority. With a majority in both chambers of Congress, MORENA has amended the constitution at will and dismantled institutions designed to keep the executive in check. Sheinbaum’s coalition now governs three-quarters of Mexico’s states and controls nearly all the local legislatures. Soon, it may also control the judiciary: weeks before AMLO left office, he passed a controversial reform allowing judges to be elected by popular vote. Many of the candidates are affiliated with MORENA. If they win, the Party will effectively hold all three branches of government.

Cárdenas, who retired from politics a decade ago, believes that Mexico has progressed “in stumbles, from a dominant-party regime to a democratic system.” When I asked if he recognized elements of the old PRI in MORENA, he offered a cautious assessment. “From an electoral standpoint, our democracy has improved,” he said, noting that the votes had been properly counted in every election since 1997. But officials still regularly tried to influence outcomes at the polls, and criminal groups had become a lethally powerful force. In any case, democracy couldn’t be measured in purely electoral terms, he suggested: “Equality is a fundamental principle of democracy, and we’ve seen important setbacks on that front.”

Cárdenas has clashed with AMLO, but he was hopeful that Sheinbaum could bring about change. “I think she has an interest in raising people’s standards of living,” he said. “I want to believe that she’s deeply invested in that.” Yet the government seemed uninterested in engaging critics: “There has been no possibility for dialogue—not with the opposition, nor with groups, like intellectuals, that play an important role in the country’s life.”

I asked if, ten years after the birth of MORENA, he saw evidence that the Party had delivered the transformation it promised. “First, I’d need someone to explain to me what the transformation is about,” he said. “I see social initiatives, I see public works under way, but I don’t see any changes in the structures of society.” He added, “I also don’t see solid economic growth, meant to last into the future. So I don’t see what would amount to a transformation. And I also don’t see an ideological proposal—that is, what society do we want to build?”

Some of the most troubling developments involved the armed forces. For one thing, Cárdenas said, there was no reason for the military to be involved in public security. For another, authorities had long provided immunity to individuals within the military who committed abuses. “We’ve been carrying that at least since 1968,” Cárdenas said. This was especially concerning in cases of forced disappearances, which remain perhaps the greatest unresolved legacy of the country’s history of violence.

People were disappeared first by the government, then by the cartels. The numbers of victims far exceeded those of military regimes in Chile and Argentina. “To speak of a country with more than a hundred and twenty-seven thousand disappeared people is to question democracy itself,” María de Vecchi Gerli, who leads the Truth and Memory Program at the human-rights group Article 19, told me. A series of Mexican governments had tried to suppress the issue, often by questioning the accounts of family members. “They’d say that the people who were missing had actually abandoned their families or run away with their boyfriends,” de Vecchi said.

As President, López Obrador said that he would make a priority of investigating forced disappearances, but it became clear that he had no intention of holding the military to account. Over time, he hobbled the very institutions that had been created to address the issue. In 2023, he announced a new census that would revise the official count of the disappeared—prompting the head of the National Search Commission, the main investigative body, to resign in protest. The results of the census, released as Sheinbaum was preparing to run for President, noted misleadingly that there were only twelve thousand “confirmed” disappearances in Mexico.

The families of the disappeared hoped for years that Sheinbaum, with her activist background, would be more assertive and compassionate than the men who preceded her. After she became President, though, she didn’t mention the mothers of the disappeared in speeches, and she cut the National Search Commission’s funding.

Then, between Trump’s first and second tariff pauses, a scandal erupted. A group of people whose children had vanished followed an anonymous tip to an abandoned ranch in the coastal state of Jalisco. Their findings made national headlines. There were heaps of clothes and shoes, backpacks, half-torn photographs, a letter to a loved one. Teams of mothers got shovels and began digging, until they found the evidence that they had feared: hundreds of bone fragments.

Parents around the country reached out, certain that they recognized the shirt or the sandals their children were wearing when they last saw them. While news spread about the “Mexican Auschwitz,” as the site came to be called, Sheinbaum finally promised meaningful reform. But a familiar pattern soon set in. When reports described the ranch as an extermination camp, Sheinbaum quibbled in the mañanera that it was actually a recruitment site, where the cartel had lured young men with fake job posts on TikTok. Her security chief acknowledged that some had been tortured and others murdered—the prosecutor’s office would take up an investigation. Meanwhile, MORENA blocked a legislative initiative to appoint a special commission. “Who’s to say that those shoes belong to missing people?” Gerardo Noroña, the president of the Senate, said. When the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances weighed in, Sheinbaum suggested that it was ill informed.

The mothers planned a protest, called 400 Shoes and 400 Candles, in honor of the people whose belongings were found at the ranch. Thousands gathered at the Zócalo, outside the Presidential palace. In a matter of hours, the entire square was covered with shoes. One pair belonged to Sara Hernández, a member of the Comité Eureka—the group of bereft relatives whom Sheinbaum had marched with decades ago. Hernández’s husband, Rafael, was detained by state forces in the late seventies and never seen again.

Hernández lamented the government’s years of inaction. “When the relatives say, ‘They took them alive, we want them alive’—it’s the same chant we’ve had since the seventies,” she said. Hernández had known Sheinbaum since she was a teen-ager, waving banners at protests, and she tried to reassure herself that the President had held on to those values. But when the Comité submitted a request to meet with Sheinbaum, the meeting was never granted. “The hope is there,” Hernández said. “It’s just becoming slimmer by the day.” Inside one of the shoes, she had stuck a handwritten note. “It said that the shoes bore traces of our struggle,” she told me. “They had wandered down many paths to find our missing relatives—and, now that we had reached a standstill, my hope was they’d be led on a new route.” ♦