Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Beijing's having a hell of a time.

The Red Compartida Network, this telecommunications network they were building there under AMLO.

And I think it started with the president before AMLO.

But she has really become very problematic for these Chinese telecoms.

and some of the Chinese infrastructure developers, they're still doing deals.

And actually, you know, the more positive relations you have with a country like Mexico, since we do have so many problems with illegal migration, if you have a positive relationship, because we know this because it's happened in the past, where a more positive relationship means they help us to stop some of the refugee flows and some of the migration.

I mean...

And we know that Trump is capable of it because in his first term, he got along with AMLO, who was the Bernie Sanders.

And you see sort of this massive protest, but then you see the State Department essentially saying that Mexico is experiencing like a democratic backslide.

And then you have AMLO, the president at the time, who says, we have more democracy here in Mexico.

I'll challenge the US to any debate.

But it's these types of questions that I think remain constant in that epilogue of the book and the conclusion of the book.

There's a, I think, a misapprehension in Mexico, which we've inherited from the previous administration.

Uh, President Sheinbaum's, uh, uh, mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, clearly thought of the USMCA as something you sort of had to get over and done with to please the business community, and then you can just get on with actually governing the country and growing the economy in the way he wanted to and w- and in the way that Claudia Sheinbaum wants to, which is domestic growth, the growth of dome- d- domestic market as the main driver of growth.

The great issue here is you can't do that in the way that they want to with the USMCA as it stands and definitely not in the ways that the United States wants to push towards, which is to give United States companies increasing access and competitive advantage within Mexico.

This is what I think Mark Carney found to be very unacceptable, which is not only is the US encroaching on the Canadian market, they want to have a say in their other relationships across the world in order to benefit American companies.

The people who do them the best are Morena.

AMLO did them very successfully.

Scheinbaum has continued them.

They do daily press conferences and it just seems to work.

While also strangling the sources of income and letting, you know, BEMEX, for example, also get into a tricky situation in terms of its debt.

And, of course, who have been the more fiscally responsible ones in that regard? It's been López Obrador and Claudio Sheinbaum.

who have done a tremendous job of trying to bring down the debt of the state-run, state-owned Petroles Mexicanos Pemex, and of course trying to address some of these.

We're going to get into some of the critiques that we've seen, principally from places like The Economist.

So that is a fair point in the sense of they are really going after tax cheats, tax evasors, holes in tax collection, right? Because Mexico historically is one of the lowest countries in the OECD with regards to tax collection.

We saw...

For example, López Obrador going after large corporations such as Walmart that hadn't paid their taxes or owed back taxes.

They ended this ridiculous discretionary policy of condoning taxes to wealthy individuals and corporations.