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Notes -
Something interesting is happening in Mexico. I will preface by saying this is a fact-finding point of analysis at this time but seems interesting. I have not yet made up an opinion on the situation.
Today Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum. Despite being widely expected Mexico etfs and markets took a huge dive. EWW appears to be one of the more popular etfs and was down 11% today. Milei and Trump each had big day 1 sell-offs but if my memory is correct both after winning elections had calm and relatively unchanged equity indexes by the close of U.S. trading.
Sheinbaum is from the same political party that has been running Mexico - AMLO. The big difference is the election was more of a landslide than expected. Super-majorities in Congress that will be able to pass whatever they want. She is even being called by the U.S. msm as a lifelong leftist. Her grandparents when they left Europe were both Jewish and communists.
On the plus side she was mayor of Mexico City and achieved a 10-15% reduction in murder (I usually think murder data is trustworthy). She does appear to be smart and technocratic but very left. I believe I saw her show support for Palestine and there is talk she will be friendly with Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia.
The other interesting thing to me is a Jewish (secular) women feels very odd as a national candidate to me in Mexico. No Spanish or indigenous roots. And Mexico’s Jewish population is extremely small (though as always there are some big hitters). Which feels very odd to me for a society to elect such an outsider (maybe Obama is close?). Also I guess she’s had some birther style attacks.
I talked to a few Mexican friends. One said he hated her and she was a communists, also said she wasn’t Jewish which surprised me as I thought most people considered Jewish an ethnicity. The other seems more open-minded.
Trump being elected could make negotiations between them tense since they are opposites on the political spectrum.
As far as markets go I want to figure out how she will govern. Mexico does seem to have some tailwinds with reshoring so the discount today looks interesting. The counter is the degree of the election victory means she has a mandate so if she does have leftist instincts I think there is a risks Mexico ends up on an Argentina or Venezuela path for a while. If you feel confident you can underwrite her politics will be more of a technocrat with leftist vibes/rhetoric but largely AMLO continuation then it’s an interesting time to pick up Mexico exposure at a discount.
https://x.com/BrazilBrian/status/1797627767808294933
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/world/americas/claudia-sheinbaum-jewish-mexico-president.html
Her previous political party was El Partido de la Revolución Democrática ("The Party of the Democratic Revolution"). Latin America continues to mostly think Communism is a great idea, no matter how often it screws things up.
Well Munro doctrine has its second order effects.
Believe it or not, there is agency outside the United States.
I agree that other countries have some agency, but there is a long history of US-backed regime change in Latin America. That can have chilling effects on any government that wants to do something the US won't like.
The United States may have a much more "hands off" form of imperialism, but it is historically willing and able to turn a country into a basket case if it furthers its economic interests. This limits the live options available to countries in Latin America, even if they still have agency within that limited set of options.
On a historical front, your long history of US-backed regime change is predominately the Cold War, when Latin America underwent a number of civil wars, with coups and attempted coups by various factions. If there is to be a chilling effect here, it would be because everything is chilling, not because the Americans are uniquely so.
More to the point, your list is anachronistic. There's a reason that only two cited events are after 1980, with one of them being the Panama invasion against a person who had functionally couped the Panamanian government, and the other being that time when the modern Venezuelan government ousted its own opposition-led legislature (which did not, in fact, involve a coup). This is neither a particularly long history, except by the short-history paradigm of Americans, nor is it particularly recent history, and the parts that are recent don't particularly mesh with the narrative of the past history. It does, however, miss all the other sorts of oustings / coups / palace maneuverings, which would be relevant to determine how much of something is a relatively important factor versus not.
On the agency-front, your framing is demonstrating the issue Nybbler was raising. Simply calling something like the Cold War military coups US-backed regime change is a framing device to re-characterize what would normally just be recognized as a internal government coup- which Latin America has had a history of without American involvement. While it fits a narrative, since it can imply that the coup governments wouldn't have occurred / wouldn't have been successful / wouldn't have done as they did without the Americans, this obscures rather than addresses the point that the post-WW2 Latin America had a number of civil wars and active insurgencies going on, for reasons the Americans were not responsible for, and that the Latin American governments have had a history of government instability- i.e. regime change- both before and after the American moment.
While Latin American nationalism, especially of the leftist slant, does like to rally against the Yankees, it doesn't really address that large parts of Latin American countries were willing to kill eachother, and that willingness or ability didn't come from the Americans.
This cultural chauvenism denies due credit to all the Latin Americans, who have a long and well established historical and contemporary records of turning regional countries into
breadbasketsbasket cases in further of personal or ideological interests, without needing the assistance of the Americans to do so and often in direct opposition to the yankees.Down with Yankee-centricism! Give the Latinos their credit!
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