The crucial question is not whether Mexico has competent elites, but whether those elites are willing to stop managing subordination as if it were a virtue.

This editorial by José Romero originally appeared in the January 9, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.  The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those ofMexico Solidarity Media*, or the Mexico Solidarity Project.*

The relationship between the United States and Mexico is not primarily based on treaties or diplomatic discourse, but rather on an informal architecture of domination built on incentives, validations, and silences. It is not imposed through occupation or institutional rupture, but through the constant management of what is acceptable. In this framework, the central role is not played by governments in the abstract, but by the political, economic, and academic elites responsible for ensuring that the relationship functions smoothly. Mexico thus appears not as a full strategic partner, but as a key arena whose stability must be preserved at the lowest possible cost to Washington, even if this means limiting the country’s margin of national decision-making.

From the US perspective, the decisive criterion for evaluating a Mexican political elite is not its democratic legitimacy or its capacity to articulate its own national project, but rather its reliability. Reliability is understood as predictability of behavior, sustained cooperation, and alignment with US strategic interests.

As recognized by the realist tradition of US foreign policy, states do not reward intentions or normative virtues, but rather stable behaviors that serve their interests. Acceptable elites are those that guarantee macroeconomic discipline, openness to investment, regulatory continuity, and effective collaboration on the issues Washington defines as priorities: migration, security, energy, and supply chains. Politics ceases to be a project and is reduced to mere management.

The elites who challenge this framework—through energy sovereignty policies, industrial reconstruction, or institutional reforms that disrupt inherited balances—are not usually interpreted as legitimate expressions of democratic self-determination, but rather as risk factors. The problem is not ideological, but functional: they introduce uncertainty into a relationship designed to be manageable. Therefore, the dominant response is not open confrontation, but indirect pressure, technical delegitimization, and waiting for an internal realignment that will restore normalcy.

Exchange programs, scholarships, policy networks, and research funding have, for decades, built a transnational epistemic community that shares fundamental assumptions: market primacy, distrust of the development state, and a notion of the rule of law centered on protecting investment rather than building national capacity.

This logic is particularly pronounced in academia. For the United States, Mexican academia fulfills a silent strategic function: defining the boundaries of what is thinkable. The international system of academic prestige, dominated by Anglo-Saxon universities, journals, and evaluation criteria, is not neutral. It rewards certain agendas, languages, and approaches, while marginalizing others. Thus, the most valued academic elite is that which is integrated into the American intellectual circuit: trained at its universities, published in its journals , and aligned with its dominant analytical frameworks.

This is not a conspiracy or a crude imposition, but a sophisticated form of exercising power. Exchange programs, scholarships, policy networks, and research funding have, for decades, built a transnational epistemic community that shares fundamental assumptions: market primacy, distrust of the development state, and a notion of the rule of law centered on protecting investment rather than building national capacity. In this ecosystem, structural critiques of dependency or academic colonialism are tolerated as opinions but excluded as legitimate knowledge.

The result is an academy that explains the world as it is, but refuses to consider how to transform it from a national perspective. When voices emerge that question this consensus, the reaction is usually not open refutation, but disqualification. They are accused of being ideological, lacking rigor, or irrelevant to public policy. The control is not repressive, it is epistemic. Whoever defines the standards of quality also defines the limits of what is possible. This balance, however, is no longer sufficient.

Today, this hegemony has entered a qualitatively different phase. The bilateral relationship is no longer organized solely around incentives or institutional validations, but around explicit threats and the militarization of the relationship. Drug trafficking is no longer treated as a shared problem and has become a lever of political pressure through which the United States unilaterally redefines the terms of the relationship. Cooperation is no longer negotiated but demanded. Dependence is no longer managed but coercive. This is not an anomaly, but rather the form that a hierarchical relationship takes today when the margin of tolerance of the center is reduced.

This hardening does not operate in a vacuum: it becomes effective because it finds elites willing to manage it, rationalize it, and present it as inevitable.

The crucial question is not whether Mexico has competent elites, but whether those elites are willing to stop managing subordination as if it were a virtue. For decades, they were trained to guarantee external stability, not to contest power; to translate external demands, not to formulate their own project. Thus, dependency ceased to be perceived as a structural problem and came to be accepted as a natural condition of the order. When elites renounce imagining alternatives, the country renounces its ability to decide. And when academia abdicates its critical function to take refuge in a neutrality that serves the status quo , hegemony ceases to be imposed from the outside and is reproduced from within. No democratic process can be sustained on this prolonged surrender of intellectual and political sovereignty.

José Romero is Director General of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), appointed by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CIDE is a publicly-financed social sciences research center aiming to impact Mexico’s social, economic and political development.

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