We are approaching the end of another year of big news in Mexico.
It was a historic year, as Mexicans elected a female president for the first time ever.
It was a year of change, as Claudia Sheinbaum took office, Andrés Manuel López Obrador left public life after a long political career and various modifications were made to the Mexican Constitution.
And, unfortunately, 2024 was also a violent year in Mexico, as the country’s notorious cartels continued to fight each other — and in the case of the Sinaloa Cartel, itself.
Of course plenty of other adjectives and nouns could be used to describe 2024 in Mexico: A year of hope. An uncertain year. A record-breaking year. A year of extreme weather.
As we did at the end of 2023, Mexico News Daily looked back at the year that was and selected 10 news and politics stories that we believe are among the biggest of 2024. In some cases they are stories that are ongoing, stories with no clear end or resolution in sight, stories that we will continue to watch closely in 2025.
Without further ado, let’s look back at 10 of the biggest news stories in Mexico in 2024, including those mentioned above.
Mexico makes history by electing a female president
June 2, 2024, will go down in history as the day Mexicans elected a female president for the first ever time in an election in which — in another first — the two leading candidates were women.
Oct. 1, 2024, was an equally momentous day: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was sworn in Mexico’s first female president.
Sheinbaum scored a comprehensive victory in the June 2 election, receiving 35.92 million votes, or 59.75% of all ballots cast.
Her ascension to the presidency less than three months ago ushered in a new period in the public life of Mexico — one in which the president has vowed that the well-being of women will be a central consideration in policy and decision-making.
“It’s time for women” is a familiar refrain of the 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor.
As president, Sheinbaum has already signed into law a constitutional amendment that enshrines a range of rights for Mexican women.
“Women are now in the constitution, our rights are guaranteed,” she said Nov. 15.
Next year could well be a defining one for Sheinbaum, who was included on the Financial Times’ “25 most influential women of 2024” list, and on Time magazine’s shortlist of finalists for its 2024 “Person of the Year” designation.
During her first full year as president, she will aim to further emerge from AMLO’s shadow even as she perpetuates virtually all of his signature policies.
She will also confront the task of dealing with Donald Trump and his unique style of governance, and no doubt face ongoing criticism over the government’s judicial reform as voters go to the polls to elect judges for the first time ever in Mexico.
* MORE READING ON CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: Check out this profile of Mexico’s first female president, published the day after her election victory, and this interactive, real-life “case-study” consideration of her presidency.
AMLO departs public life after a long political career
The beginning of the Sheinbaum era in Mexican politics marked the end of the AMLO era, drawing the curtain on the long political career of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
López Obrador thoroughly dominated Mexican politics for the six years before Sheinbaum took office, holding press conferences every weekday morning that allowed him to set the national agenda as he held forth not just on government policies and actions but virtually anything that took his fancy.
Before assuming the presidency in late 2018, AMLO was essentially in campaign mode for some 13 years, a period that included two failed attempts to win Mexico’s top political job and his establishment of Mexico’s now dominant ruling party, Morena.
While he is now absent from the national political stage — he has retired to his ranch in Chiapas and made no public remarks since leaving the presidency — many believe that López Obrador will continue to have an influence on the decision-making of Sheinbaum and other federal government officials.
AMLO made certain that his vision for Mexico would survive his presidency: He sent a large package of constitutional reform proposals to Congress in February, over a dozen of which have been approved since he left office at the end of September.
With the election of Sheinbaum, López Obrador has his preferred successor as president, while his son, Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, is the ruling Morena party’s secretary of organization.
It wouldn’t be fanciful to argue that the ex-president is now Mexico’s most powerful non-elected person. At the very least, he has the ears of Mexico’s political movers and shakers.
* MORE READING ON AMLO: On López Obrador’s final day as president, we published this article about how Mexico changed during his six-year term. Just after he left office we looked back at 12 events that defined his presidency.
‘El Mayo’ Zambada is finally arrested
The Sinaloa Cartel kingpin widely known by his nickname “El Mayo” eluded justice for decades. But on July 25 news broke that the septuagenarian and alleged drug lord had been arrested, not in Mexico but at a little-known New Mexico airport about 30 kilometers northwest of El Paso, Texas.
Zambada later alleged that Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the sons of convicted drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, kidnapped him in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and forced him onto a private plane that delivered him into the hands of United States law enforcement.
Guzmán López flew to the United States on the same plane and was also arrested at Doña Ana County International Jetport.
Both El Mayo and Guzmán López are accused of drug trafficking in the United States and remain in U.S. custody awaiting future court appearances.
The arrest of the Sinaloa Cartel founder triggered a full-blown war between the Sinaloa Cartel faction loyal to him, Los Mayos, and that led by El Chapo’s sons, Los Chapitos.
There is no doubt that Zambada’s arrest was one of the biggest, most impactful, most surprising and most intriguing news stories in Mexico in 2024.
* MORE READING ON EL MAYO: The day after his arrest, we published this profile on “El Mayo” Zambada. For an overview of the developments in the Zambada case, read this.
Morena dominates Mexico’s 2024 elections
Another big news story in 2024 was the electoral success of Mexico’s National Regeneration Movement, the political party commonly known as Morena.
Sheinbaum won the presidency on a Morena ticket on June 2; the ruling party and its allies secured a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Congress; and the governing coalition went mightily close to obtaining a supermajority in the Senate as well.
Morena’s electoral domination didn’t end there: The party won six of eight gubernatorial elections held on the first Sunday in June, including that in Yucatán for the first time.
In addition to governing Mexico, Morena currently holds power in 23 of the country’s 32 states. The Green Party, a Morena ally, governs San Luis Potosí, meaning that exactly three-quarters of Mexico’s states are ruled by the ruling party or one of its coalition partners.
That kind of political dominance hasn’t been seen in Mexico since the 20th century, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ruled the country as a virtual one-party state. The full impact of Morena’s dominance will only become clear in the years ahead.
As of late 2024, the once all-powerful PRI governs just two states — Durango and Coahuila — and has minimal clout at the federal level.
* MORE READING ON MORENA: In September, we reported on the election of former labor and interior minister Luisa María Alcalde as president of Mexico’s ruling party.
New Congress passes constitutional reforms in a flurry
As mentioned above, López Obrador sent a package of constitutional reforms to Congress in February, even though at the time Morena and its allies didn’t have the two-thirds majority required to pass them in either house of Congress.
Once the lawmakers elected in June assumed their positions on Sept. 1, the time was ripe for Morena to bring the proposals to Congress. The party didn’t waste any time.
The most controversial of AMLO’s constitutional bills — his judicial reform proposal — was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on Sept. 4 and the Senate a week later. Accompanied by Sheinbaum, López Obrador signed the reform into law on Sept. 15.
The former and current president argued that the reform — which allows Mexicans to directly elect all judges including Supreme Court justices — was necessary to rid the nation’s courts of corruption and other ills. Critics assert that the election of judges will lead to the politicization of Mexico’s judiciary. In a nutshell, they argue that Mexico’s courts will come to be dominated by judges sympathetic to Morena’s agenda, thus removing an essential check on government power.
The Congress’ approval of the judicial overhaul set Mexico’s Constitution-reforming train in motion. More than a dozen of AMLO’s reform proposals have now been approved, including one that placed the National Guard under military control and another that eliminated seven autonomous watchdog agencies.
At the end of 2024, Mexico’s Constitution is a considerably different document than it was just four months ago. Government critics argue that some of the modifications have a simple — yet dangerous — objective: to consolidate and concentrate the political power of Morena.
* MORE READING ON THE JUDICIAL REFORM: In early September, The Washington Post published a letter written by Mexico’s current economy minister and foreign affairs minister in defense of the judicial reform. Read our report on their views here.
Mexico’s trade and investment relationship with China raises concerns
Mexico’s trade relationship with China, and Chinese investment in Mexico, became even more contentious issues in 2024, partially — but certainly not entirely — due to Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his election as president in November.
In April, Mexico implemented new tariffs on hundreds of products from China and other countries with which it doesn’t have free trade agreements, a move that appeared largely aimed at appeasing the United States.
The same month, pressure from United States authorities led the Mexican government to refuse to offer incentives to Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers planning to invest in Mexico, according to Reuters.
More recently, the Sheinbaum administration has embarked on an attempt to reduce Mexico’s reliance on imports from China. That too appears at least partially motivated by a desire to not upset the United States, although the need to protect Mexican industry from cheap imports is another key consideration.
In October, Trump pledged to renegotiate the USMCA, in part to insert into the three-way trade pact what he described as “strong new protections against transshipment, so that China and other countries cannot smuggle their products and auto parts into the United States tax free through Mexico to the detriment of our workers and our supply chains.”
The president-elect has threatened to impose hefty tariffs on vehicles made in Mexico, rhetoric (at least at this stage) driven at least in part by Chinese automakers’ plans to open plants in Mexico — and perhaps export cars from here to the U.S. sometime in the future.
It’s not just the current United States government, U.S. lawmakers and the incoming Trump administration that are concerned about Mexico’s trade relationship with China and Chinese investment in Mexico.
Leaders of Canadian provinces have also expressed concerns, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in late November that Canada “may have to look at other options” beyond the USMCA in light of “the decisions and choices that Mexico has made” vis-à-vis Chinese investment.
Sheinbaum — whose government has also carried out raids on stores selling counterfeit Chinese goods — has made it clear that Mexico’s primary allegiance lies with North America, and the president is determined to negotiate a continuation of the USMCA when the scheduled review of the trade pact takes place in 2026.
But Mexico’s trade and investment relationship with China still looms as a potentially contentious issue between the USMCA partners.
Mexico-China relations was a big news story in 2024, and could well be an even bigger one in 2025. We’ll be watching closely.
MORE READING ON CHINESE INVESTMENT IN MEXICO: In November, we reported on Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard’s statement that Mexico received less than 1% of total Chinese investment in North America between 2016 and 2023.
Trump’s tariff threats: Bluster or a real cause for concern?
Way back in March, some eight months before he won the U.S. presidential election, Trump declared he would impose a 100% tariff on cars manufactured in Mexico by Chinese companies if he returned to the White House. That threat was apparently directed at Chinese automakers considering opening plants here, such as BYD, as only one (Mexican) company currently makes Chinese cars in Mexico — and it doesn’t export cars to the United States.
Trump issued additional threats to impose tariffs on vehicles made on Mexico — even those manufactured by United States companies — as he sought to tout his “America first” credentials and court voters in states such as Michigan.
While tariffs would no doubt hurt Mexico’s vast auto sector, of even greater concern to the Mexican government is Trump’s repeated threats to slap a 25% tariff on all Mexican exports to the United States due to what he sees as insufficient action by Mexico to curtail the flow of migrants and drugs to the U.S.
Sheinbaum promptly responded that such a tariff would be met with a reciprocal tariff on U.S. exports to Mexico, while the Mexican government has argued that the biggest losers of trade protectionism would be the U.S. economy and consumers.
Are Trump’s threats just rhetoric, a negotiating tactic designed to pressure Mexico to do even more to stop migrants and drugs reaching the United States?
History suggests that could be the case.
Or will the 47th U.S. president actually follow through and initiate a trade war with Mexico, in apparent violation of the USMCA?
MORE READING ON TRUMP’S TARIFF THREATS AND MEXICO’S VIEWS: Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard said in late November that the U.S. would be shooting itself in the foot if it imposed tariffs on Mexican exports. Read our report here.
Drug busts rise and border crossings fall, but Trump is still not satisfied
The seizure of large quantities of drugs in Mexico and the significant reduction in the number of migrants illegally crossing the Mexico-United States border were also big stories this year.
The potential for the issues of drug trafficking and migration to have a major impact on Mexico-United States relations in 2025 makes the stories even more significant.
Just this month, federal authorities completed the largest fentanyl bust in Mexican history, seizing more than 1,000 kilograms of the synthetic opioid in the northern state of Sinaloa. In October, the Mexican Navy made its largest-ever maritime drug bust, seizing more than 8 tonnes of unspecified narcotics off Mexico’s Pacific coast. And in August, the largest drug bust of the previous government occurred when the navy seized 5.6 tonnes of suspected cocaine off the coast of Colima.
Meanwhile, the number of migrants reaching the Mexico-United States border and attempting to cross into the U.S. between official ports of entry fell significantly.
The Biden administration’s enactment of a new border policy in June was a major factor in the decline, but in 2024 Mexico also ramped up enforcement against migrants. Earlier this month, more than 5,000 migrants were detained across Mexico on a single day, an indication that authorities are clamping down on migratory flows to the northern border ahead of Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president on Jan. 20.
Sheinbaum has stressed that Mexico is already making major efforts to combat the flow of drugs and migrants to the United States, but Trump has made it clear that he wants more to be done.
Will the Mexican government be effectively forced to crack down even harder on drugs and migrants to stave off tariffs on Mexican exports to the United States? That scenario currently appears quite likely.
MORE READING ON FENTANYL: United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged in May that that the López Obrador administration had seized “a record amount of fentanyl.” Read out report here.
Intense heat and drought take a heavy toll
Mexico had a HOT spring and summer in 2024.
By mid-June, 155 heat-related deaths had been recorded in Mexico and the number continued to rise as the year progressed.
Heat stroke and dehydration claimed lives as Mexico and its residents sweltered through heatwave after heatwave.
Widespread drought also afflicted Mexico in 2024, heightening concerns about water availability. The rainy season brought some relief, with the percentage of the country affected by some level of drought declining to 40% in August from 76% just two months prior.
Nevertheless, Mexico still had historically low water reserves in November, and the country is certain to continue to face water and other climate-related problems in the years ahead.
The federal government is aiming to improve the situation, presenting a National Water Plan last month that includes the revision of water concessions, law changes and the construction of new water infrastructure.
Let’s hope that it achieves its goals and water is guaranteed for all of Mexico’s needs in the near, medium and distant future.
MORE READING ON EXTREME HEAT IN MEXICO: In May we reported on monkeys falling dead from trees in Mexico’s tropical forests, and the hypothesis that the extreme heat sweeping the south of the country was to blame. Read our report here.
Homicides down (again), but violence remains a major problem
On Dec. 17, federal security official Marcela Figueroa Franco presented data that showed that the average daily number of homicides had decreased 6.9% annually in 2024 to 82.3.
Homicides also declined in 2023, falling 6.7% compared to the previous year, according to the national statistics agency INEGI.
But murder numbers still remain very high in 2024, with almost 29,000 by mid-December. Reports of violence continue to remain ubiquitous in the Mexican media.
Indeed, for residents of certain parts of the country, violence remains — or has become — a major concern.
That’s certainly the case in Sinaloa, where rival factions of the Sinaloa Cartel are engaged in a brutal war. That’s certainly the case in various municipalities of Guanajuato, where a long-running feud between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel has made the state Mexico’s most violent in recent years. And that’s certainly the case in the border region of Chiapas, where the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel are fighting each other for control of a lucrative smuggling route. The list goes on.
The Sheinbaum administration has developed a new security strategy that provides greater emphasis on the use of intelligence in the fight against crime. It has asserted that the strategy is already yielding results, highlighting last week that almost 7,000 people have been arrested for high-impact crimes since Oct. 1.
But will the government, in time, be able to make a real dent in the notoriously high levels of violence in Mexico even as demand for illicit drugs remains high in the United States?
We certainly hope so, but there is no doubt that plenty of work needs to be done on both sides of the border for that to happen.
MORE READING ON THE GOVERNMENT’S SECURITY STRATEGY: Last month we reported on signs that the Sheinbaum administration was forsaking the “not bullets” component of the so-called “hugs, not bullets” security strategy pursued by the administration of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Click here to read the report.
By Mexico News Daily chief staff writer Peter Davies ([email protected])
