by Mexico News Daily 

Mexico and the United States announced on Saturday the launch of a new bilateral initiative aimed at disrupting the southward flow of illicit weapons across the Mexico-U.S. border.

Mexican and U.S. officials thrashed out the details of the joint project — called “Mission Firewall: United Against Firearms Trafficking Initiative” — at the inaugural meeting of the Mexico-U.S. Security Implementation Group, held last Friday in McAllen, Texas.

The establishment of the binational security group was announced earlier this month during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Mexico.

The group is set to meet regularly to coordinate joint security actions and operations.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry (SRE) said in a statement that the “main goals” of Mission Firewall include:

• Increasing border operations to prevent weapons from entering Mexico.
• Expanding use of the eTrace tool to strengthen firearms investigations in both countries.
• Implementing ballistic identification technology across all 32 states of Mexico.
• Strengthening information sharing between Mexican and U.S. authorities.
• Increasing investigations and prosecutions of criminal cases involving firearms.

The U.S. State Department said that the U.S. would “increase inspections and coordination with Mexico to stop the southbound flow of firearms.”

It described Mission Firewall as “an ambitious bilateral effort to combat illicit firearms trafficking through an unprecedented level of collaboration between both nations.”

Many of the hundreds of thousands of firearms smuggled annually into Mexico from the United States end up in the hands of members of notorious drug cartels. They use the weapons to commit violent crimes, including murder.

The Mexican government has long called on its U.S. counterpart to do more to stem the southward flow of weapons, and has complimented the Trump administration for heeding that message. It also sued a number of United States-based gun manufacturers and distributors, accusing them of negligent business practices that have led to illegal arms trafficking and deaths in Mexico. The United States Supreme Court threw out Mexico’s US $10 billion lawsuit in June, but the Mexican government has continued to push U.S. authorities to crack down on arms trafficking to Mexico, where guns are only sold legally at two army-run stores.

On Monday, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that for “years” the United States “didn’t accept” that the trafficking of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico was a “problem,” or “did the Fast and Furious operation [in Mexico] with the consent of the then [president Felipe] Calderón.”

Now, “for the first time, the United States recognizes that it has to do operations to control … the illegal trafficking of weapons to Mexico,” she said.

The agreement to conduct Mission Firewall is “very important,” Sheinbaum said.

The United States Ambassador to Mexico, Ron Johnson, said on social media on Saturday that “for the first time,” the U.S. and Mexico were “implementing joint inspections, real-time info-sharing, and expanded investigations to stop weapons fueling cartels.”

“… Mission Firewall marks a new chapter in U.S.–Mexico cooperation,” he wrote.

The meeting in McAllen

The meeting in McAllen, a border city opposite Reynosa, Tamaulipas, took place just over three weeks after Rubio held security talks with Sheinbaum and other Mexican officials in Mexico City. He subsequently said that the U.S. and Mexico were “amplifying” their security cooperation in order to combat organized crime groups and the narcotics they traffic on both sides of the border.

The State Department said that representatives from six U.S. government agencies and their Mexican government counterparts attended the meeting in McAllen on Friday.

The SRE said that the U.S. government reported on the progress that has already been made to stop arms trafficking to Mexico. The ministry said that U.S. officials reported that since January, the Trump administration has “opened more than 125 arms trafficking investigations, seized firearms, and identified suspected members of criminal networks involved in this crime on U.S. territory.”

At the meeting, the Mexico-U.S. Security Implementation Group also announced “the formation of a bilateral working group to combat cross-border illicit finance and cooperate on civil asset forfeiture,” according to the State Department.

It also said that “at Mexico’s request, the United States has created a first-of-its-kind secure platform to allow information sharing regarding suspicious air shipments and packages to identify and interdict illicit drugs, chemical precursors, firearms, and illicit fuels.”

The ramping up of security cooperation between Mexico and the United States comes as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to pressure the Mexican government to do more to combat cartels and stop narcotics, especially fentanyl, from reaching the U.S.

So-called “fentanyl tariffs” that Trump imposed on non-USMCA compliant imports from Mexico in March remain in effect.

Sheinbaum has said on countless occasions that her government is willing to cooperate and collaborate on security issues with its U.S. counterpart, but won’t accept subordination or any violation of its sovereignty. She revealed in May that she had declined an offer from Trump to send the U.S. army into Mexico to combat cartels, and has ruled out the possibility of the U.S. “invading” the country or bombing cartel targets.

by Peter Davies

Mexico News Daily

China’s loss is Mexico’s gain.

Between 2018 and 2024, the value of China’s exports to the United States declined by 18.5%, falling from US $538.5 billion in the former year to $438.95 billion in the latter year. China’s share of the U.S. market for imports declined significantly as a result.

According to Mexico’s Finance Ministry (SHCP), Mexico captured 24% of the U.S. market for imports that China lost in the 2018-2024 period.

The figure is included in the SHCP’s 2026 budget proposal, a 93-page document that was submitted to Congress earlier this month.

U.S. protectionism against Chinese goods helped Mexico to increase its share of the United States’ market for imports in recent years, allowing it to overtake the East Asian economic powerhouse as the top exporter to the world’s largest economy in 2023 and maintain the enviable position ever since.

Mexico’s share of the U.S. market for imports increased two percentage points between 2018 and 2024 to reach 15.5% while China’s share declined 7.8 percentage points to 13.4%.

The SHCP believes that Mexico now has an even greater opportunity to capture a bigger share of the U.S. market for imports, given that the Trump administration has recently increased tariffs on imports from China, a country known colloquially as “the world’s factory.”

Mexico’s trade advantage widens 

According to the SHCP, the United States’ “effective tariff rate” on imports from China between 2018 and 2024 was 6.6 percentage points higher than its effective tariff rate on imports from Mexico, which, along with the U.S. and Canada, is party to the USMCA free trade pact.

The difference in the effective tariff rates “allowed Mexico to gain around 24% of the participation” in the U.S. market for imports that China lost, the ministry said.

The SHCP said that Mexico now has a “comparative advantage” of 35.6 percentage points over China in terms of the effective tariff rates applicable to the two countries’ exports to the United States.

“The current magnitude [of the difference] opens up an even greater opportunity to expand [Mexico’s] exports, production and employment in the manufacturing sector,” the ministry said.

Mexico vs. China, and the world

“Despite a more uncertain international environment due to changes in trade policy,” Mexico “maintains one of the most favorable positions in global trade and, in particular, with its main North American partners.”

So reads an inset in the SHCP’s 2026 budget proposal, including in the document under the title “Resilience of Mexico’s external sector in the face of a new trade environment.”

The Finance Ministry said that Mexico’s advantage is “explained by four factors”:

• A lower tariff rate to access the U.S. market compared to competitors.
• “Preferential access” to the U.S. market thanks to the USMCA. (Most Mexican goods that comply with the USMCA can enter the U.S. tariff-free).
• The “deep integration” of Mexico’s exports in “regional value chains.” (Mexico and the U.S. are said to be part of a “co-production system”).
• The “flexibility of the exchange rate regime, which allows orderly adjustments and preserves competitiveness.”

The SHCP said that the United States’ effective tariff rate for imports from Mexico was 4.7% in July. It described the rate as “one of the lowest” among the United States’ trade partners.

The ministry said that the United States’ “global average” tariff rate was 9.7%. For the European Union, it was a slightly lower 9.1%, while for China it was a much higher 40.4%, the SHCP said.

It highlighted that 81% of Mexico’s exports to the United States didn’t face tariffs in July, mainly thanks to the UMSCA, which superseded NAFTA in 2020 and is scheduled for review in 2026.

The SHCP also noted that the United States’ effective tariff rate on imports from Mexico has “only increased” 4.5 percentage points in 2025 compared to last year, whereas the U.S. hiked duties on Chinese goods by 29.5 percentage points, and 7.4 percentage points, on average, on products from countries around the world.

Mexico’s trade advantage over other countries “doesn’t depend on circumstances” that are subject to change (oftentimes due to the apparent whims of the U.S. president), but depends rather on an “institutional framework” — the USMCA — “that limits exposure to tariff increases,” the ministry said.

Mexico’s worsened yet still favorable trade situation with the U.S. — which Mexican officials, including President Claudia Shienbaum and Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard, have emphasized on innumerable occasions — should help the country to continue to attract foreign investment in the years ahead. Indeed, foreign direct investment in Mexico hit a record high in the first half of the year.

SHCP highlights importance of USMCA review 

The Finance Ministry said that the 2026 USMCA review “will be decisive to consolidate a more predictable framework for regional trade and to give greater certainty to companies, even in the event of adjustment to rules of access and origin.”

“Clarity in these criteria will be key to strengthening investment plans and expanding production chains with greater national content,” the SHCP said.

The Mexican government is determined to achieve even more favorable conditions for Mexico-based companies that export to the United States. As things stand, U.S. tariffs apply to a range of Mexican products, including vehicles, aluminum, steel and goods that don’t meet USMCA rules.

The government’s plan to impose higher tariffs on a broad range of goods from China and other countries with which Mexico doesn’t have trade agreements is widely seen as an attempt to appease the U.S. ahead of the USMCA review, while also protecting Mexican industry and spurring increased domestic production — key objectives of the Plan México economic initiative.

Sheinbaum is confident that the USMCA will endure beyond the 2026 review, and frequently asserts that the way in which North America can be most competitive globally is as a united trade bloc and production hub.

Trump — who has both questioned whether the USMCA is still needed and indicated that he wants to “renegotiate” the agreement rather than just review it — is the X factor in the upcoming review, a president who has reshaped global trade in 2025, and shown he is prepared to violate the existing North American trade framework to exert pressure on both Mexico and Canada.