How the Mexican Left Embraced Free Trade

The populists’ unexpected economic realism.

7/22/2025|Updated: 7/22/2025

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Commentary

Earlier this year, left-wing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hosted a rally in downtown Mexico City to celebrate Donald Trump’s one-month delay in imposing 25 percent tariffs on her country. To Latin American observers, this was baffling and not just because the victory was meager, but because since when does the left embrace free trade? Yet Sheinbaum’s stance ever since, alongside prior remarks by her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), show that there is a way of committing the Latin American left to free trade: by embracing it in the first place.

Marcos Falcone

Author

Marcos holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Political Science from Torcuato di Tella University. He created and hosted the podcasts "Téngase presente" and "Cuatro siglos de liberalismo", worked as a teaching and research assistant at several Argentine and American universities and was a Fulbright and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholar, among others.