C
hen the government of the Fourth Transformación took the reins of the country’s economic management. At that time, Mexico was the 15th largest economy in the world and the new version of the North American Free Trade Agreement was coming into operation under the name T-MEC. Its content reflected the concerns of the governments of the United States and Mexico: on the American side, the alert over the trade conflict with China that resulted in greater conditions for the automotive industry – which was the pivot of economic integration during NAFTA – and, on the Mexican side, the need to establish a sovereign framework in the energy sector. These two issues were the most relevant from a geostrategic point of view. Just as NAFTA had been born and had been in place for 24 years with the approval of shared neoliberal dogmas, the T-MEC, on the contrary, was an agreement under suspicion by the hegemonic side because of a partner that no longer made the traditional friendly gestures towards the country. market
.
However, for Mexico, the decision to maintain and deepen its status of belonging to the North American economic space was clear, and therefore the arrival of foreign investment flows was out of the question. The idea was to establish a new model of post-neoliberal development without breaking ties with globalization represented by foreign investment flows. As the six-year term progressed, new events raised the temperature of the USMCA as a symptom of the geopolitical turn that was brewing. On the one hand, a transformation of the wage policy was carried out that broke the three-decade hindrance to the entry of workers and began the recovery of minimum wages; on the other hand, the legal structure that allowed the existence of anti-democratic practices in the union world was broken – the latter, it should be remembered, was part of the new conditions of US unionism in the corpus of the USMCA. These two processes undermined Mexico’s historical attractiveness as a source of cheap labor for foreign companies, a mechanism maintained since the inauguration of NAFTA in 1994 and which had been established as a static comparative advantage in our insertion into the international economy.
Recovering wages was accompanied by other recoveries of the spectrum of forgotten sovereignty, such as the execution of the new electricity policy, whose most questioned aspect – and fought by the transnationalized Judiciary – has been the majority market share for the Federal Electricity Commission. Added to this, the decision not to allow new concessions in mining and the nationalization of lithium, culminating in the controversial sovereign decision on the right to food and the prohibition of importing transgenic corn. In the exhaustive territorial policy followed by the 4T, the Isthmus corridor stands out, changing Mexico’s role in the geography of global logistics.
Today, Mexico is the 12th-ranked economy in the world, has caught up with China as a partner of the United States, and foreign investment has reached historic levels despite the temporary economic collapse brought on by the health crisis. These are the results of a new development policy that breaks the extractivist scheme with which we were passive actors in globalization.
The López Obrador administration is coming to an end and distance allows us to recognize Mexico’s radical turn in the geopolitical arena, through economic actions that challenged the established framework of submission to hegemonic interests. The constitutional reforms that definitively stop the commercialization of transgenic corn and prevent the prevalence of private companies in the electricity market are just beginning their legislative path. Neither of these two measures is friendly to the interests of the United States and will generate high-pitched claims, although the hot moment will be in the future negotiation of the T-MEC, which will confront two partners with disparity of forces but, for the first time, with the same convictions about their own national needs. The geopolitical turn takes us to a scenario with new risks in the bilateral relationship, leaving behind a submission that was easier to manage.
