This editorial by Ilan Semo originally appeared in the September 25, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
Editor’s Note: The USMCA does not “prohibit establishing trade agreements with countries outside the treaty”, (Canada just signed a trade agreement with Indonesia) but Article 32.10 of the agreement does essentially give veto power to the United States if either Mexico or Canada were to pursue a trade agreement with a “non-market economy”, widely acknowledged as an anti-China clause. Canada experienced significant damage to its economy and internal sectors because of its actions against China on behalf of Trump during the Trudeau period (including kidnapping Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, something even Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto refused to do; and putting tariffs on Chinese EVs), but has a new Prime Minister Mark Carney who appears to be attempting to mend fences with the People’s Republic of China in order to diversify Canada’s trading partners. In such a fluid environment, Canada might be open to partnering with Mexico to remove this clause during upcoming USMCA renegotiations. Any future trade agreement with China would also require Mexico to axe proposed tariffs on Chinese EVs, which were are set to be voted on in November. Regardless, there are very few barriers for Mexico in pursuing socially-oriented, developmental trade agreements with Latin American and Caribbean partners, and not treating North American integration, which is actually US domination and subjugation, as a fait accompli.
The term fetishism is ambiguous. The earliest modern version is usually attributed to Charles de Brosses, who formulated it in 1760 in On The Worship of Fetish Gods, an ostensibly Gothic text. Brosses speculates on a possible link between ancient Egyptian religions and the cults of the Namibian peoples described in the chronicles of the first Portuguese navigators along the West African coast and based on the worship of certain quasi-magical objects (statuettes, masks, diadems, gold-embroidered scarves dipped in animal blood). “Living objects”—fetishes—which, in that world, contain within them “the power of supernatural spirits.” (Incidentally, it seems that some of these cults, already brought to the Caribbean through slavery, gave rise to voodoo.)
In a way, his definition of fetishism has survived to this day: the belief that certain human-made objects radiate divine, magical, or erotic powers and are capable of altering or arousing our moods. Anchored in 18th-century ethnocentrism, the French Enlightenment scholar classified these African religions as “primitive,” while Western ones were considered “superior” for being subject to rational “abstractions.”
In 1861, the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor refuted Brosses’s theory of the existence of “inferior” and “superior” cultures (“There are only different cultures”) and defined the worship of fetish gods as “animism.” The “soul” was understood as the syntagm of desire and expectation. Marx possibly adopted this version of fetishism to signify the forms of subjectivity that sustain the world of commodities. (How Freud later applied it to the realm of sexuality remains enigmatic.)
The history of NAFTA, and subsequently of USMCA, is the largest transfer of wealth from Mexico to the United States in their shared history since the 19th century.
In the market, commodities are exchanged based on their prices, obscuring the origin of their value. This origin derives from the exchange of precise portions of labor. The effect is that of a Fata Morgana. It makes the commodity itself appear as the measure of wealth and desire, of immanence and expectation, rendering invisible the labor (and social relations) that are exhausted in the process of its production. In short, it makes them appear as not only “living” objects, but transcendental.
Since its approval in 1994, the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada was born—in the Mexican imagination—under this fascination (a new order that, by its very existence, radiated the conditions and powers that would finally allow the country to emerge from the periphery). Surprisingly, the dramatic devaluation of the peso in December 1995 (perhaps the first warning of the dilemmas that the FTA entailed) not only failed to dent this phantasmagoria, but actually multiplied it. Nor did the spread of organized crime, mass migration, the sale of more than a thousand public companies, the human and ecological devastation wrought by Canadian mining companies, or the sale of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil reserves manage to call it into question.
In 2016, the fetishistic fervor for the USMCA gained renewed momentum, despite the imposition of restrictive conditions equivalent to those of a protectorate (it prohibits establishing trade agreements with countries outside the treaty). Thus we arrive at the next negotiation in 2026. The final straw is that now, in the midst of tariff fever, the official position presents as an “achievement” the fact that “we are the second country with the fewest tariffs in the United States market.” The lesser evil syndrome returns once again as a silver lining.
North American Free Trade: decades of corporate giveaways, environmental degradation, public looting and worker exploitation, overseen by a parade of some of the world’s dumbest politicians.
Strictly speaking, the history of NAFTA, and subsequently of USMCA, never seems to obscure what every sphere of trade obscures: the grueling price paid in the world of labor. In principle, this is the largest transfer of wealth from Mexico to the United States in their shared history since the 19th century (perhaps larger, proportionally speaking, than the transfer that occurred in the 18th century from New Spain to Spain).
The mechanisms that have made this transfer possible are countless. The scandalous wage gaps (an auto worker in Mexico earns between $20 and $30 a day; their equivalent in the United States earns that amount in an hour’s work). The repatriation of profits from global corporations, which for two decades have not invested a single iota in locating their supply chains in the country. The giants that dominate the services and consumer goods sectors (Walmart, Home Depot, Office Depot, Starbucks, etc.). Not to mention the Big Data monopolies. Or the banking sector, which boasts of earning the highest profits from its Mexican subsidiaries. And that’s thanks to commissions, because they are conspicuously absent in productive credit.
Since a possible Mexit is beyond calculation, there’s no other option than to consider how to reduce the amount of wealth transfer. And there’s only one solution: ensuring that a greater portion of the “added value” remains in Mexico. To achieve this, the workforce exists, and it’s among the best in the world. What’s missing is the capital. It won’t come from banks or corporations, much less from Mexican business owners on their own initiative. Nor will it come from nearshoring. There are only two solutions: tax reform and transforming NAFINSA (Nacional Financiera) into a genuine bank dedicated to productive credit. Will the Morena administration take the risk?
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