MI’s Mexico Foreign Press Chatter – August 22, 2025

August 22, 2025
7:25 am

Bilateral tensions remained front and center. In the story of the week, the WSJ looked at the human side of the U.S. immigration crackdown, chronicling the story of a Venezuelan family that fled hardship and braved jungles and gangs – only to end up stranded in Ciudad Juárez, an allegory of the fading promise of the American dream. ‘Let’s see if the American dream can turn into the Latin American dream’, said the father wistfully.

Then, in a sign of the tension of the times, two notable columnists made the case that President Trump should not, in fact, bomb Mexico. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a frequent Mexico critic in the WSJ, argued that American intervention would only ‘strengthen the worst, most corrupt elements of the ruling Morena party’. For his part, Ioan Grillo, a renowned, long-time reporter of organized crime, writing in the NYT cautioned that ‘the vast networks of organized crime and the U.S. drug market that keeps them going can’t be so easily blown away’.

Less auspiciously, the NYT reported President Sheinbaum surprisingly denied that her administration was cooperating with the DEA, after the agency announced a ‘bold’ bilateral initiative. ‘The DEA issues the statement, we don’t know based on what’, said Sheinbaum. One who will indeed cooperate is El Mayo Zambada – the Times reported he’s expected to plead guilty to ‘sweeping trafficking charges’.

On the domestic front, the Financial Times wrote of the ‘fractures’ within Morena, as Sheinbaum must balance placating Trump with maintaining unity in her ‘unwieldy’ party. Meanwhile, Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch enjoyed much better press, with a distinctly positive profile on Bloomberg, which quoted a former US official describing him as ‘probably the best interlocutor on the Mexican side’, and noting ‘many Mexicans call him Batman’. Violence, unfortunately, also made the headlines, with the BBC reporting on the discovery of human remains in Tlaxcala, while The Guardian profiled Las Nombramos Bordando, a collective that embroiders the names of femicide victims with mothers, daughters, and activists, turning grief into a ‘Trojan horse’ protest across Mexico.

On the economy and business, The Guardian reported the ‘historic’ reduction in the poverty rate – while noting that access to healthcare remains a key challenge. Ranchers and their struggle against the screwworm saw a third consecutive week of deep dives, now by Reuters. And Bloomberg covered the changing of the guard at Nubank’s Mexican operations, as well as an upbeat interview with JPMorgan’s Mexico head, who expects capital markets to bounce back.

Shifting gears, the NYT eulogized Rodrigo Moya, the Colombian-Mexican photojournalist whose lens captured the turbulence and transformations of mid-20th-century Latin America. His portraits of figures like Che Guevara, Celia Cruz and Gabriel García Márquez became iconic, even as much of his socially charged work remained unpublished for decades before later gaining global recognition. A ‘committed Marxist’ who later became ‘disillusioned with armed leftists and with the self-censorship of the Mexican press’, he described his photography as ‘documentary, realist, humanist and ideologically committed’. May he rest in peace.

Lastly, on this week’s MexMoves, Damian and Eduardo interview academic Andrew Paxman on the history of U.S.–Mexico business ties. They also break down McCormick’s $750M deal with Herdez; analyze the banking shake-up involving Intercam, CIBanco, Kapital, and Multiva; and discuss the CEO change at Nu México. You can listen to it here.

Photo of the Week

Rodrigo Moya’s 1976 image of a battered, grinning Mr. García Márquez was published in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada in 2007, inspiring years of literary gossip. Mr. Moya passed away on July 30 at his home in Cuernavaca.

FOREIGN PRESS COVERAGE

They Set Out to Find the American Dream. They’re Stuck in a Mexican Nightmare.

08/21/25, The Wall Street Journal, Kejal Vyas

Don’t Bomb Mexico, Mr. President