MI’s Mexico Foreign Press Chatter – Oct. 9, 2026

October 16, 2026
12:00 pm

Last week, the NYT portrayed President Sheinbaum as caught between a rock and a hard place as corruption allegations against Morena (and AMLO’s son) intensified; this week, the WSJ reports that she is getting “fed up with playing nice” with Washington. Citing people familiar with the matter, Santiago Pérez reported that she grilled her security chiefs over plans to freeze the accounts of former officials linked to Baja California’s Morena governor, whom the US Treasury was about to sanction over alleged ties to the Sinaloa cartel. She was “unusually harsh” with Security Minister Omar García Harfuch and saw the US measures as an attempt to destabilise her government, though she ultimately consented to the freeze.

Meanwhile, border security was catapulted into the headlines over the weekend. Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Mexico had sent 159 naval personnel to match about 500 US soldiers in the Rio Grande Valley under what it calls “mirror operations”; Mexico’s statement stressed “cooperation without subordination”. On Monday, US Ambassador Ronald Johnson said an armed attack had prompted the US deployment, and the Washington Post reported that the Coast Guard said it had come under fire from the Mexican side near Garceño, Texas, on 26 September. Sheinbaum says Mexico’s forces detected no such gunfire and has asked for evidence.

The iron river of guns flowing south was the subject of a NYT investigation by Paulina Villegas, who spent time with four anonymous teenage traffickers, all current or former high school students in Phoenix. They buy firearms legally, through private sales and messaging apps (or steal them), then sell them almost exclusively to US-based cartel operatives, most of them linked to the Sinaloa cartel. “What they do and who they kill is not my problem as long as I make my money,” said one. Mexican authorities estimate that up to 500,000 firearms are smuggled south each year.

On the economy, Reuters reported that auto exports fell 12 per cent year-on-year in September, the steepest drop since December 2025, which analysts blamed on US tariffs. Bloomberg reported that headline inflation rose to 3.45 per cent, slightly below forecasts, with food costs doing most of the lifting.

Mexico’s agribusiness suffered setbacks this week. On 2 October the FDA announced that inspectors had found cyclospora in wastewater from Taylor Farms’ Mexican processing plant and at a supplying farm, which the NYT described as “strong new evidence” that the summer outbreak in the US, which caused nearly 13,000 illnesses and two deaths across 21 states, came from the company’s lettuce. Mexico disagrees: Cofepris said the findings do not prove Mexican products caused the outbreak, pointing to its own earlier lab tests. The FDA itself concedes it cannot yet say how the contamination occurred. The WSJ reported on 8 October that Taylor Farms will suspend sales of iceberg lettuce from Mexico between May and August 2027, the parasite’s peak season. The FT reported that Mission Produce, which sells about a third of the avocados eaten in the US, is leaning on orchards in Peru and Guatemala to diversify away from Michoacán, where criminal gangs extort growers and packers and US fruit inspections have been suspended three times since 2022.

In culture, the NYT’s Melena Ryzik spoke to Alejandro G. Iñárritu about Digger, his widely panned satire starring Tom Cruise. “The movie is not perfect,” he conceded, but he prefers the debate to a lukewarm reception. And the Guardian’s Raúl Vilchis asked whether new head coach Rafa Márquez is really to blame for El Tri’s four winless friendlies since the World Cup, including a 3–0 defeat to the US. Rather than blame Márquez alone, Vilchis points to systemic problems, quoting one TV Azteca analyst: “Mexico’s problem is not that they don’t have good players, it’s that they don’t have enough of them.”

Notable blogs in English on Mexico

The Mexico Political Economist reported on “a little known presidential task force” set up to boost investment by removing bureaucratic hurdles. Although it is still in its early stages, the private sector is “making approving noises”, crediting the streamlining with “unblocking” billions of dollars of investment. In his CrashOut newsletter, Ioan Grillo reported on the black market in turtle eggs and meat in Mexico, and on the local conservationists who risk their safety to protect the animals. One woman who runs a turtle protection group in Acapulco says: “I have suffered a lot of consequences doing this work.” In Materia Gris, guest contributor Haydee Barahona wrote about Aztlán, túnel del tiempo, the first Chicano art exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. As one of the artists notes: “I think as Chicanos, Chicanes, we’re constantly grappling with this feeling of rejection, both in the U.S. and in Mexico … And I feel like standing in that in-betweenness right now is actually being studied and embraced, and people are trying to understand it and celebrate it.” Miranda Intelligence published its incisive, polymathic daily Mexico reports — spanning Culture, Fintech, Markets, Public Affairs, Energy, Podcasts, Politics and Foreign Press (i.e., what you are currently reading).

MXPE – The inner workings of the committee unblocking investment in Mexico
CrashOut – Mexico’s Black Market In Turtle Eggs
Materia Gris – Between Two Nations, Chicano Artists Reclaim Space at Bellas Artes
Miranda Intelligence daily reports on Substack

MI’s Mexico Foreign Press Chatter – Oct. 9, 2026

Notable blogs in English on Mexico

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