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Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum hinted at retaliation over US president-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on her nation’s exports on Tuesday as the peso slid against the dollar.
Trump vowed on Monday night to impose tariffs of 25 per cent on all imports from Mexico and Canada on his first day in office, accusing the two countries of failing to do enough to curb illegal migration and drug trafficking.
“The phenomenon of migration or the consumption of drugs in the United States will not be dealt with by threats or with tariffs,” Sheinbaum wrote in a letter to the next US president, which she read out at her daily press conference.
“One tariff will come in response to another, and so on until we put shared companies at risk,” she said, noting that big US carmakers were among Mexico’s principal exporters to the US.
Sheinbaum added that tariffs on such companies were “not acceptable and would cause inflation and joblessness for the US and Mexico”.
The Mexican peso was 1.7 per cent softer against the US dollar on Tuesday, having earlier weakened as much as 2.5 per cent, while the Canadian dollar fell to its weakest level in more than four years.
The Mexican president added that Trump was “probably not aware” of the work Mexico was doing on migration, saying that US border patrol’s apprehensions of undocumented migrants were down by three-quarters from last December and that tonnes of illicit narcotics had been seized.
Trump had said in his post on Monday that “thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before”.
Some commenters contrasted Sheinbaum’s outspoken letter with the approach of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her predecessor as Mexico’s president, who built a strong relationship with Trump by avoiding critical comments and beefing up migration enforcement.
“It wasn’t necessary to react this way. There’s still two months until Trump’s inauguration,” said Antonio Ocaranza, director of Mexican consulting firm Oca Reputación. “At this rate, the number of letters to write from here to January could be numerous.”
The proposed tariffs marked the opening salvos in his protectionist trade plan since his victory in this month’s election.
The president-elect also said he would impose additional levies of 10 per cent on Chinese exports, pointing to what he characterised as Beijing’s failure to stop “massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States”.
However, this figure was lower than the 60 per cent he had previously threatened.
China’s onshore renminbi weakened 0.2 per cent on Tuesday to Rmb7.25.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to Trump on Monday night to discuss border security and trade. On Tuesday, Trudeau told reporters: “There’s work to do and we know how to do it.”
In a sign of the reverberation in the US from the tariffs, the chief executive of US electronics retailer Best Buy warned that 60 per cent of its cost of goods had historically come from China, with Mexico as the second-largest source of imported products. There was “very little in the consumer electronics space that is not imported”, said Corie Barry. “Almost everything is imported.”
Additional reporting by Gregory Meyer in New York
