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Mexico’s presidential front-runner and the politics of violent crime
In June 2022, a man fleeing a drug gang took refuge inside a church in a remote region of northern Mexico. Armed men followed him into the church, killed him, and murdered two Jesuit priests who tried to intervene.
That event has since strained relations between the Catholic Church and President Andres Manuel López Obrador, whom church leaders blame for failing to contain the country’s still-high rates of violent crime.
López Obrador’s presidency will end – he’s term-limited – later this year following an election to choose his successor. The popular leader has endorsed former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum of his Morena party, and she is the heavy favorite in June’s election.
This week, all three presidential candidates signed a document entitled “Commitment for Peace,” drafted by Mexico’s Roman Catholic leadership, that calls for new efforts to lower the country’s violent crime rate. But Sheinbaum, beating back implicit criticism of López Obrador’s failure on the issue, noted that she disagreed with the church’s claim that Mexico suffers a “profound crisis of violence.”
López Obrador’s security minister reported in January that the country’s homicide rate fell 10.8% in 2023, but Mexico's 29,675 murders last year still averaged 81 per day. The challenge of violent crime, and the delicate political dance around it, will continue.Hard Numbers: Alberta renewables ban, ‘Dirty Harry’ smuggler arrested, Three Amigos at risk, China keeps digging into Canadian mines
0: New regulations from the Alberta government will permitzero new renewable energy projects to be built on private property that has high value for irrigation, specialty crops, or other farming importance, as well as areas where projects would interfere with “pristine viewscapes.” Alberta, which leads Canada in renewables development, has drawn nearly $5 billion into the sector in recent years, stoking concerns about the balance of farmland vs. alternative energy.
25,000: A man has been arrested in Chicago and charged with human trafficking in connection with the death of an Indian family of four that froze to death while trying to cross illegally from Canada into the US in 2022. The 28-year old man, nicknamed “Dirty Harry,” is accused of paying $25,000 to the driver who smuggled the family. With so much attention on the migration situation at the US southern border, the number of migrants seeking to enter the US from Canada has soared in recent years.
2: The so-called “Three Amigos Summit” could wind up with only two amigos this year, after Mexican President Andrés Manual Lopez Obradorthreatened to ditch the North American Leaders meeting. AMLO, as the left-populist leader is known, said that he wouldn’t show up unless his country got “respectful treatment.” The remark comes as AMLO’s administration blasts possible new US and Canadian tariffs on Mexican steel, but it probably doesn’t help that last week it emerged that the US had spent “years” investigating ties between AMLO and drug cartels.
2.2 billion: Tighter restrictions on Chinese investment in Canada’s critical minerals industry appear not to have had much deterrent effect, according to a new study which shows that Chinese firms plowed at least C$2.2 billion into the sector last year. That came even after Ottawa forced three Chinese companies to sell their stakes in Canadian businesses in 2022. Copper miners were a particular focus, according to the report.
Hard Numbers: Election violence in Mexico, Baby deficit in Korea, tactical nuke leak in Russia, A gigantic disappearance in the Pacific, Gaza's bleak milestone
2: Two mayoral candidates in the central Mexican farming town of Maravatío were shot dead within hours of each other earlier this week. One of the candidates was from President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, the other from the opposition National Action Party. Maravatío is in Michoacán state, where cartel wars have raged recently, spotlighting broader concerns about narco-fueled political violence across the country ahead of nationwide elections in June.
29: A cache of 29 secret Russian military documents from a decade ago appears to lay out the Kremlin’s threshold for using tactical nuclear weapons. The slides, leaked to the Financial Times by Western spooks, say Moscow would use the weapons – which are far smaller and more targeted than the intercontinental ballistic missiles that target the US – if Russia suffered an otherwise unstoppable conventional incursion, or sustained significant damage to its submarine fleets, airfields, or command centers.
0.72: South Korea’s birth rate, the world’s lowest, dipped further in 2023, according to new data which show that the average South Korean woman will have just 0.72 babies. That was down from an already dismally infertile 0.76 in 2022, and it’s far below the “replacement” rate of 2.1 children per woman. Experts say the high costs of child-rearing – as well as gender pay gaps and difficulties of balancing career and motherhood – are causing the fertility collapse.
7,000: What could have caused 7,000 of the world’s largest creatures to disappear? Scientists think that unusually high sea temperatures in the North Pacific led to the starvation of that many Humpback whales in the decade or so after 2013, as the hotter waters reduced the prevalence of their main source of food - tiny phytoplankton. The big bump in humpback deaths put a dent in what had been several decades of remarkable recovery for a species driven to the brink of extinction by hunters in the 1970s.
30,000: Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed amid the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, health officials in the enclave said on Thursday. It's likely that the official death toll is an undercount, given the challenges of tracking deaths in a warzone and the fact that many bodies are still under rubble. The Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, but Israel estimates it's killed roughly 10,000 Palestinian militants so far.
Will Trudeau bring back visas for Mexican visitors?
Justin Trudeausaid last week that Canada is in talks with Mexico to try to find ways to cut down on the number of asylum-seekers flying into Canada with the help of organized criminal groups.
Trudeau is under pressure from the Conservatives, and the Americans to reinstate a visa requirement on Mexican travelers, which his government lifted in 2016. The government said last month it is considering doing so.
The Biden administration would also like the visas to return because the number of migrants crossing the northern border has spiked in the past year — 2,200 interceptions in 2023, up 240% from 2022. Most of the crossings are made in the lightly patrolled areas of upstate New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
The route via Canada to the US is appealing to Mexicans and other Latin Americans who face detention and deportation at the more heavily patrolled southern border. A network of human smugglers has sprung up to facilitate the crossings, but would-be migrants face danger in the cold northern woods.
The Liberal government seems to be signaling that it’s working with Mexico rather than moving immediately to require Mexican visitors to apply for visas, which would be a setback for the trade and diplomatic relationship.
Everything’s political: sofa, tomato, shoe
If you’re reading this column, chances are you’ll agree that at some level everything is political, right?
All around us, the things we touch, eat, buy, and wear, the people we meet, the ways we communicate – there’s a little politics in all of it. There’s the trade policy that determines where your shirt comes from. There’s the immigration policy that shapes who your kids will befriend in kindergarten or where they’ll work when they grow up. There are the decisions about war and peace that can shape life for you or for family members thousands of miles away.
So from time to time, I want to take a look around the world closer at hand, spotting the big political stories in the small objects around us. Today we’re gonna do three quickies: a sofa, a tomato, and a shoe.
Let’s go.
Your sofa: Where’s it from? If you’re in the US, chances are that for most of the past 30 years, it’s been made in China, the major exporter of furniture to North America. But if you bought it over the past year? It just might be from somewhere closer to home.
That’s because just this week México officially passed China as the US’ largest annual trade partner, taking the top spot for the first time.
That’s a big deal. China has ruled the roost for most of the past 30 years on the strength of its business-minded dictatorship and its vast, relatively cheap labor force. But in recent years, two things started to change all that. First, Donald Trump uncorked a banger of a trade war against Beijing. Then, pandemic-related lockdowns shut much of China’s economy and choked off supply chains around the world.
Companies got spooked. Investors who once prized low costs over everything began to prioritize safer shores. They began scrambling to find places not named "China" to make things to sell to the vast American market: Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. They all boomed.
But México was the big winner. After all, it’s right next to the world’s largest consumer market and has a free trade agreement with Uncle Sam (renegotiated by Trump himself, no less.)
Nowadays, the industry-heavy states of northern México are practically choking on incoming investment. The catch? A lot of it is coming from … China, as companies like, say, Man Wah – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sofas – pile into Mexico to keep a foot in the American market.
So while you sprawl out on that sofa, ponder this: the 1990s and 2000s world of peak globalization, when companies scoured the planet for the lowest cost production, is over. We now live in a world where proximity and security matter more than cost. Get close to someone on that couch!
Tomato: Speaking of México, consider one of that country’s greatest gifts to the world: the tomato.
The once-feared fruit* didn’t make it widely to Europe until about 250 years ago – no penne al pomodoro or pan con tomate until then – but at the moment it’s a little political grenade on the continent: France and Spain have gotten into it over tomatoes in recent days.
First France said the Spanish ones were “false organic” frauds. Spain shot back that France’s were “inedible.” French farmers roughed up a Spanish tomato truck.
The issue? Paris says Spanish tomato farmers are shirking the EU’s strict rules on pesticides to flood France with cheaper produce. Spain says its own campesinos are fully following the rules and points to massive imports of cheaper Moroccan tomatoes to France as the culprit.
This is more than just a tú dices “tomate,” je dis “tomate” dispute. It echoes the larger wave of farmer protests that is roiling Europe. Across the EU, farmers are raising pitchforks against Brussels, mad about climate-conscious fuel subsidy cuts that are hurting their bottom lines at a time when their costs (for fuel and fertilizer) are already up because of the Ukraine war. Meanwhile, they’re also getting squeezed by cheaper competition from abroad.
Critics of the protests point out that European agriculture has been protected by massive subsidies for decades, and that it’s a shrinking sector of small farms and old farmers that has resisted modernization.
That may be, but no sane politician in Europe wants to be seen ignoring granddad the farmer, so governments across the continent have been rolling back subsidy cuts and icing new trade deals.
Lastly, look at your shoe. And while you’re looking at it, consider the Houthis, the Iran-backed rebel group that controls Yemen.
What could these two things possibly have to do with each other?
The answer is floating in the Red Sea, where, as you probably have heard, the Houthis have been raining drones and missiles down on commercial ships as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. As a result, shipping companies that move goods through the Red Sea and onto the Suez Canal are rerouting around the Horn of Africa. What’s this got to do with shoes?
As my colleague John found earlier this week, fully HALF of all shoes that go to Europe travel through the Red Sea. And about 40% of all clothing. So if you see a European friend walking around with two left shoes or one bare foot – you know who to blame.
*Yes, the tomato is a fruit. Don’t shoot the messenger. If you can’t handle that, don’t let me be the one to tell you that a strawberry isn’t a berry, but an eggplant is.
Hard Numbers: Alt-aid for Gaza, 2024 economic outlook, Continent-sized drug racket busted, Stolen bear on the loose
30 million: Canada has made a new pledge to send nearly $30 million in aid to Gaza. The move comes after Canada followed the US lead in cutting funding to UNRWA, the UN relief agency, in light of Israeli accusations that members of the organization had participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. According to the last full year of data, in 2022 Canada gave about $24 million to UNRWA. The new batch of Canadian aid will be delivered by other UN agencies such as UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, and the World Health Organization. (What’s UNRWA and why is it controversial? Read our explainer here.)
1.4: The IMF’s latest forecasts see Canada’s economy expanding by 1.4% this year, good for second place in the G7’s league of wealthy democracies. The top spot goes to the US, which is expected to grow 2.1% in 2024. Behind Canada, France is in third place at 1%.
19: The US this week charged 19 people from the US, Canada, and Mexico with running a pan-North American drug trafficking scheme involving as much as $28 million worth of methamphetamines, cocaine, and fentanyl, destined chiefly for the streets of Canada. A dozen of the suspects have been arrested, and the others remain at large.
500: Speaking of criminals at large, Canadians, please keep an eye out for anyone trying to sell you a 500-pound taxidermied polar bear. You can’t miss it: It’s 12 feet tall and frozen forever in a “scary roaring bear” pose. Again, it weighs 500 pounds. It was stolen from a resort in Edmonton last month in a rash of taxidermy heists valued at more than $25,000.Hard Numbers: Accusations fly over Russian air crash, diplomats get a booze spot in Riyadh, Korea’s Dior look is a bad one, Egypt catches strays from Houthi resistance, prices stay spicy in Mexico
74: The death toll from Wednesday’s fiery crash of a Russian military plane near the Ukrainian border is up to 74. At least 65 of them were Ukrainian POWs set to be released as part of a prisoner exchange. Moscow says Kyiv shot down the plane, while Kyiv says Moscow was responsible for properly identifying the aircraft as it flew through a warzone. Both sides have been ramping up air attacks – and air defenses – as the ground phase of the war has become a rat-infested stalemate.
1: There will finally be at least one (but only one) store where foreign diplomats can buy booze in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The location – which will cater strictly to non-Muslims vetted by the foreign ministry – is set to open in the coming weeks. The move is part of the Kingdom’s cautious ongoing efforts to liberalize its strict Islamic social rules in order to attract more tourism and non-oil investment.
2,250: The bag is back in Seoul. Last year, a video emerged showing the South Korean first lady accepting a $2,250 Dior purse as a gift from a prominent Korean-American pastor. “Don’t keep doing this,” she tells him, “never buy something as expensive as this.” In recent days, that scandal has roared back as President Yoon Suk Yeol reportedly squabbles with members of his party over how to address the issue ahead of legislative elections scheduled for April.
40: Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea are meant to pressure Israel into stopping its siege and invasion of Gaza, but the knock-on effects of that strategy are catching other countries in the crossfire. Egypt’s receipts from the Suez Canal – a major source of Cairo’s hard currency – are already 40% lower than last year, as higher risk (and insurance premiums) scare companies away from the waterway.
4.9: Inflation continued to creep upward in Mexico in January, with consumer prices rising 4.9% on an annual basis in the first half of the month, higher than analysts expected. This is the fifth straight half-month period in which prices have risen, casting doubt on the possibility of the central bank easing rates in the coming months. Mexico will hold a general election in June.Hard Numbers: Mexico takes on US gunmakers, NATO shells out to Ukraine, Putin critic enters Russia’s presidential race, EU sanctions firms linked to Sudan violence
1.2 billion: On Tuesday, NATO announced a deal worth $1.2 billion to buy artillery shells for Ukraine. It’s not clear how much the new ammo will really narrow the margin in a war in which, according to EU estimates, Ukraine has been able to fire just one-third the number of artillery shells that Russia continues to launch into Ukraine.
100,000: Russian politician Boris Nadezhdin, who demands an end to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, got the 100,000 signatures needed to register as a candidate to take on Vladimir Putin in Russia’s March 17 presidential election. Will he be allowed to run? Will he be allowed to speak?
6: The European Council has imposed sanctions on six companies accused of financing and arming the warring Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The US issued similar sanctions last June.