The US Just Opened Its Biggest Embassy in… Mexico, Amid Souring Relations Between the Two Countries

Twenty years ago, the largest US embassy in the world was in occupied Iraq. Today, it is in Mexico. And the first person to take charge of the new facilities will be a former CIA agent and Green Beret. 

The US’ outgoing Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, just “opened” the United States’ new embassy building in Mexico — a full two years behind schedule. Obviously, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic will have hindered progress. Indeed, the new embassy is still not quite open to the public yet — hence the use of inverted commas in the first sentence– and is expected to remain that way until late 2025.

Work began on the project in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term. It was also the year that the revamped NAFTA trade deal, or USMCA, was signed.

Built on the site of a former Colgate-Palmolive factory that required extensive toxic clean-up (nice little metaphor), the new facilities cost $1.2 billion to build, measure 49,000 square meters and, once fully operational, will house 1,400 employees. It will be the US’ largest embassy in the world, according to Salazar, seeing off competition from the likes of Canada (#5), Afghanistan (#4), Pakistan (#3), Lebanon (#2) and Iraq (#1), which has been significantly downsized from an initial staff of 16,000 to just 349 today.

Note that two of those countries have been militarily occupied by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan, which was eventually abandoned by US forces in 2021). Lebanon is currently under attack by Israel for the umpteenth time while Pakistan has a been key strategic ally of Washington’s for decades, especially from the time the US began supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). And then there’s Canada, whose government is probably livid that Mexico has once again leapfrogged its way to the top.

The new US embassy campus in Mexico provides a “secure, modern, and environmentally sustainable platform” for US conniving diplomacy, according to Davis Brody Bond (h/t upstarter), one of the architectural firms chosen to design the project:

The Embassy is sunken several stories into the ground, and designed around a large covered open air courtyard, responding to the scale of the neighborhood and climate of the region. Several additional smaller courtyards permeate the dense office block, providing sunlight, air, and natural scenery deep within embassy operations. The exterior façade is protected by a large, bronze brise-soleil that minimizes heat gain without diminishing views out of Mexico City.

The new facility incorporates rigorous sustainability and energy-saving goals, aiming to reduce environmental impact, optimize building performance, and enhance the self-sufficiency of the campus… 

It is a relief to know that the US’ Mexico-based spooks will soon be doing their plotting in a “campus” that is sustainable and energy-efficient. During the ceremony to mark the embassy’s near-inauguration, Salazar described the scale and ambition of the new facility as testament to “the singular relationship between the two nations, not only as the main trading partners, but as a family. It also reflects the importance of our bilateral integration to make North America more prosperous and competitive.”

That word “integration” is, I believe, key. There is no way that Washington would undertake such a grandiose project if it didn’t have larger plans for Mexico, and the broader Latin American region. My guess is that those plans will include further intensifying the integration of the three NAFTA 2.0 members, before possibly extending the USMCA trade deal beyond the immediate confines of North America. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t first destroy it.

Just a couple of days ago, President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated the position of her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), that the USMCA should not be limited to the three current member countries, but should be extended further south to other parts of Latin America. According to Sheinbaum, this expansion would transform the continent into an “economic power”, surpassing even other regions of the world.

Strained Relations

However, diplomatic relations between the US and Mexico are at a low point, even as their bilateral trade reaches record levels. Roughly three months ago, Mexico’s then-outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), took the largely symbolic step of putting his government’s relations with the US and Canadian embassies on ice after their ambassadors publicly criticised his proposed judicial reforms, which AMLO argued are a purely domestic affair. In the end, the concerted efforts to derail the reforms fizzled to nothing.

There have also been clashes over Mexico’s security agenda. When Ken Salazar lambasted AMLO’s security policies just days after the president left office, AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by criticising Salazar’s inconsistent messaging on security matters. Indeed, one of Sheinbaum’s first acts in government was to put a leash on Salazar by insisting that all contact between the ambassador and the Mexican government must go through Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.

“A series of, let’s say, general guidelines have been established because the ambassador often calls one government minister after another. So, now have we told him: ‘If you want to discuss issues pertaining to the Ministry of Energy because US businessmen are interested in investing [in Mexico] and they want to know the minister’s availability, [you must go] through the Foreign Ministry.”

If relations between the two countries are strained today, they appear set to sour a whole lot more in the months to come. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has threatened to close the US-Mexican border, to carry out mass deportations, including of undocumented Mexicans, punish trade with tariffs on Mexican goods of 25% and make cooperation between the two countries contingent on the containment of drug trafficking and the migration crisis.

At the same time, members of the Trump administration have been debating to what extent, not whether, the US should “invade” Mexico. This is par for the course these days. Throughout the election campaign, droves of Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits, including arch neo-con and regime change-specialist Lindsay Graham, the governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, media pundit Tucker Carlson and former attorney general, Bill Barr, called for direct, overt US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels, ostensibly to stem the flow of fentanyl.

Worse still, the Sheinbaum government will soon have to deal with Donald Trump’s picks for US Secretary of State, Marc Rubio, a hardcore neo-con with dripping disdain for progressive governments in Latin America, and US ambassador to Mexico, retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson, a former CIA officer and ex-army special forces officer whose missions included combat in El Salvador’s 12-year civil war (1980-92).

Johnson has already had one tour of duty as a senior diplomat, serving as ambassador to El Salvador during Trump’s first term, where he apparently got on like a house on fire with the country’s strong-arm president, Nayib Bukele. He was also formerly the senior representative for the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA at US Southern Command — in other words, a man who presumably knows a thing or two about regime change operations.

As Oaxaca-based US journalist Kurt Hackbarth said on his (excellent) weekly podcast, Soberania, while Salazar is a “metiche” (meddlesome), Johnson is a hired thug. In the clip below, Hackbarth reads out a brief and rather graphic account (from Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop) of some of the dark deeds US special forces got up to in Central America during the 1980s:

Ken Salazar era un metiche, pero Ron Johnson es un matón a sueldo. https://t.co/NsKnW6LvPq

— Kurt Hackbarth 🌹 (@KurtHackbarth) December 19, 2024

Hackbarth even suggests that Mexico should reject Johnson’s appointment as ambassador — something, he said, the Sheinbaum government is well within its rights to do, but probably won’t:

This is very clearly an ambassador chosen to implement and cover for US covert operations in Mexico, which Trump has promised. It’s unlikely that the US would do something as stupid as to march across the border like they did against Pancho Villa in the punitive expeditions 100 years ago. But to step up covert operations based on the model they used of kidnapping (the Sinaloa cartel capo) Mayo Zambada, absolutely. And remember, the United States’ strategy in Syria, very sadly, has worked. So, I think they are all the more revved up to try these manoeuvres elsewhere.

US Ambassador: A Crucial Role in Mexico

For Mexico, the role of US ambassador is even more important than it is for most other countries — partly due to the sheer number of times it has been invaded by its northern neighbour over the past 200 or so years (at least 10, according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs).

Mexico City even hosts a National Museum of Interventions, which I visited a couple of months ago. Housed in the former Monastery of San Diego Churubusco, which was used as a makeshift fort during the US army’s invasion of Mexico City in 1847, the museum offers a fascinating trip down a dark collective memory lane. Among the exhibits are photos of US soldiers storming into the city of Veracruz in 1914 as well as maps of the Mexico that existed before the US invaded and seized possession of over half its territory  between 1846-8.

The US ambassador is also a vital figurehead in Mexico due to the scale of influence the US wields within Mexico’s political, business and military circles. For example, during June 2022, Salazar visited Mexico’s National Palace 18 times in two weeks, to chaperone AMLO in meetings with US businessmen, sparking caustic rumours that Salazar had his own office in the building.

Johnson’s appointment coincides with an intensification of hostilities between rival gangs in Sinaloa following the DEA’s arrest/kidnapping of cartel kingpin as well as calls from Republican politicians in the US and members of Mexico’s National Action Party to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as “narco-terroristas”. Marco Rubio, for one, has fully embraced Trump’s proposal to label Mexico’s cartels as terrorist groups to justify US military incursions into Mexico.

These hyped-up concerns about narco-terrorism generally are merely intended as pretexts to justify occupation, regime change or lawfare. In an article for the news website Contralinea, Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence School for National Security of Mexico’s Centre for National Intelligence (CNI), describes the ideology of the “war” on drugs and organized crime in the US as an “immense fabrication”:

That does not mean that the problems linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited drugs and the criminal organizations that have specialized in it, and everything that this entails, do not exist. They exist and are very acute, but both phenomena were ideologized for the purposes of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and were imposed through exportable reactive and punitive public policies in matters of intelligence and security, causing social, political-institutional, cultural and economic devastation. By assuming a military dimension, (the War on Drugs) laid the foundations for armed intervention in the Latin American region and converted the territories, as well as national sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic action.

Mexican journalist, Guadalupe Correa, who has written extensively on organized crime, migration and the US-Mexico borderlands, warns that Trump’s recent rhetoric and appointment of Johnson and Rubio will probably signal the end of AMLO’s “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) approach to the drugs war, and the adoption of a more belligerent approach toward Mexico’s drug cartels.

This has been tried before, of course — not just in Mexico but also in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, to name a few countries — and it has invariably led to a sharp rise in violence, bloodshed and political instability while generally failing to stem the flow of drugs. In the case of Afghanistan, the production and exports of opium exploded during the US occupation. Plan Colombia also oversaw a sharp rise in cocaine exports. During the rare periods when supply does fall, the price goes up, propelling the cartels’ profit margins even higher. All the while, the southward flow of US-made weapons — the so-called “iron river” that accounts for roughly 70% of homicides in Mexico — continues unabated.

According to Correa, the pressure on Sheinbaum’s government to intensify its crackdown on the cartels will be unbearable:

In Mexico, given the delicate situation in some regions, there are some who even support such a strategy, as well as the concomitant loss of sovereignty, in a process that seems already well underway. The hugs have ended and the gunshots have returned… President Claudia Sheinbaum and her security team are obliged to deliver results in the face of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs, scupper the USMCA and send troops into Mexican territory. A heavy-handed strategy is expected, perhaps in a similar sense—with all proportion kept—to the one that operated in El Salvador. This strategy augurs a period of extreme violence in Mexico that will further exacerbate the current difficult situation.

While AMLO may have achieved quite a lot during his sexenio (six-year term), especially on the economic front (more than tripling the minimum wage while more or less keeping a lid on inflation, bringing unemployment to its lowest level in decades, getting many corporations to finally settle their tax bills, and levelling up Mexico by significantly increasing investments in the poorer regions of the south), he has failed in other areas — most notably, security.

More people died during AMLO’s sexenio (199,619) than any other this century — though, to be fair, the death count has risen sharply during each sexenio since Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2007, at US insistence. As the malign influence of the cartels has grown, so too has the number of forced displacements. According to Correa, migrant shelters in Mexico were primarily catering to foreigners a few years ago. Today, their main occupants are Mexicans displaced by violence and organized crime.

Diverging Interests

Of course, deep down the US government’s real motivations in the War on Drugs have little, if anything, to do with stopping the drugs trade. Most places the US army and the CIA go, the drugs trade tends to flourish (e.g. Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam…). Indeed, the US shares a large chunk of the responsibility for the thriving global drugs trade by supporting drug lords and cartel bosses around the world, by refusing to address the root causes of drug addiction within its own borders, as AMLO repeatedly argued, and failing to properly crack down on drug money laundered through Western banks.

As the US prepares to open its biggest embassy in Mexico City, the US and Mexico face a clash of goals and interests. The incoming Trump administration wants to strike back against Mexico’s so-called “invasion” — or as some Mexicans call it, “reconquest” — of the US through mass migration. It also seeks to stifle Mexico’s growing trade and diplomatic relations with the US’ peer competitor, China. As we recently reported, Washington’s increasingly aggressive tone regarding Mexico-China relations has elicited rare criticism in the Mexican business press:

The online financial newspaper Expansión.mx featured a fiery op-ed from Jonathan Torres, a former editorial director for Forbes Media LatAm, titled “US to Mexico: You’re Against China or Against Me”:

Since 2022, US officials Janet Yellen (Treasury Secretary), Jake Sullivan (National Security Advisor) and Katherine Tai (Trade Representative) have repeatedly reiterated that the China threat is one of the most delicate risks in their national security strategy, so much so that they have deployed a range of measures to prevent Chinese investments from entering their territory, including through their trading partners. Reading between the lines, the message is blunt: “you are with me in my strategy against China or, otherwise, you will suffer consequences in terms of trade, investment, etc.”

The United States, given these circumstances, is not necessarily looking at the nearshoring phenomenon in the same way as the rest of the world… For the Biden administration, global supply chains are strategic but only under certain conditions; that is, as long as they do not threaten US national security. In other words, what the US is really interested is “security shoring,” not nearshoring.

The irony is stark: the superpower famed for its promotion of the (NC: so called) free market is attempting to impose its own legislation on trading with China on third countries. In Mexico, for example, the Chinese automotive industry is rapidly accumulating market share and therefore finds itself in the crosshairs of the US government.

There is no dispute, says Torres: “We are facing an illegal act.”

This is just one area in which relations between the US and Mexico could further sour. Other potential flashpoints include Mexico’s ban on GM corn (which the trade dispute panel it still to rule on), its proposed mining reforms, and its close ties with countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, China and Russia. Then there’s the possibility of the Trump administration delivering on its threats to deport millions of immigrants, impose ratcheting tariffs on Mexican goods, or even launch covert military attacks against Mexican cartels.

Mexico’s government has so far shown willingness to meet the US halfway on some issues. It has imposed tariffs on hundreds of Chinese goods, including some that pose a threat to Mexico’s domestic industries. Just today, the Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard announced a 15% tariff on textiles and 35% on finished garments entering the country. However, there are limits to how far it is willing to go to appease the US’ growing demands, even as its trade ties with the US continue to deepen.

One word that Sheinbaum, like AMLO, keeps using is “sovereignty”. Since taking office at the beginning of October, she has repeatedly stated that Mexico “must be respected” — in response not only to the incoming Trump administration’s tariff threats but also the Trudeau government’s recent attempts to throw Mexico under the bus, which appear to have backfired horribly. Public support for Sheinbaum is strengthening (76%) while even Trudeau’s vice president and economy minister, Chrystia Freeland, has abandoned ship.

Sheinbaum also likes to say that “Mexico is a free, sovereign, independent nation.” It’s a nice slogan. The problem for Sheinbaum, as well as Mexico as a whole, is that the US government has scant regard for other nations’ freedom, sovereignty and independence.