Haiti, Cuba and Mexico

Haiti is a failed state, Cuba lives under a dictatorship that destroyed its economy, but Mexico?

Well, Mexico had López Obrador under whose administration, it can be stated with hard data that the country's economic growth was the lowest in the last 36 years, averaging 0.9% annually.

However, when the most recent economic outlook study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) identifies these three countries as those with the worst performance this year and next, it is simply a statistical coincidence and even a journalistic exaggeration.

Cuba and Haiti appear more compatible with Venezuela when it comes to the structural causes that make those economies a failure. Mexico is in a phase of defining whether structural degradation is a simple temporary condition.

Mexico, in the eyes of a psychiatrist, could easily be diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, because it is at a point of multiple personalities, where, on the one hand, it seeks at all costs to maintain economic association schemes with the United States, despite hyper-neoliberal free trade.

But on the other hand, he persists in making poor budgetary decisions and destroys trust with an authoritarian drive to control powers and autonomous regions, including, soon, the electoral authority.

ECLAC itself identifies in its report on Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean 2025 that Mexico has lost its capacity to receive these resources since 2019.

In this sentiment among many national figures, there seems to be an urgency from the federal government to deliver good results without having to say that doing so requires reversing many of the absurd measures of the López Obrador administration.

There are obvious changes in security matters, but we're just waiting for the results. There's more discretion in other matters, such as energy, and there are areas where this government hasn't budged an inch, such as propaganda practices, the centralization of power, and the welfare-based distribution of social spending.

If Mexico is currently at the bottom of the regional and global growth outlook, it is due to uncertainty. Obviously, this is due to the future of its trade relationship with the United States, but also, and importantly, to expectations of whether Mexico will maintain its status as an institutional democracy, or not.

For now, the differential treatment Trump has applied to Mexico and the expectation of lower tariffs on our exports have allowed us to move from an estimate of recession to 0.3% growth this year.

But the real engine of investment and growth is confidence. Trump's recent decisions certainly provide some relief, but the challenge lies at home.

Beyond external concessions, which are significant if they come from the United States, what Mexico needs is to regain the confidence of investors and many of its own citizens.

This can only be achieved if the rule of law is consolidated, democratic institutions are strengthened, and this authoritarian struggle is ended. Thus, either the instability of multiple personalities is maintained or certainty is chosen.