Mexico’s Sheinbaum Shows Off English to Build Rapport with Trump

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(Bloomberg) — Mexico’s leader surprised Donald Trump in a phone call by speaking in fluent English, an ability he’s rarely encountered with Latin American leaders. 

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The move eliminated a barrier between the pair by removing the need for a translator, helping to create rapport between the two leaders in the interaction last week, according to people familiar with the conversation, who asked not to be named discussing the private call. Trump shortly after described it as a “wonderful conversation” in a post on Truth Social.

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That marked a contrast from their first call at the start of November, when President Claudia Sheinbaum called to offer her congratulations on Trump’s election — all in Spanish and via an interpreter, the people said.

Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, stands out among her contemporaries in Latin America’s largest economies — including Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro and Trump favorite Javier Milei in Argentina — for her fluent command of English. It’s a language skill that she honed during her time living in Berkeley, California while completing her doctorate in energy engineering.

Sheinbaum rarely shows off her English in public, signaling its use is strategic. Days after she was elected in June, amid market jitters over the power her party had amassed in Congress, she posted a video of a call in English with the head of the International Monetary Fund.

While the common language helped, Sheinbaum still has much work to do to win over the president-elect, who has blasted Mexico with claims the government should do more to curb undocumented migration and fentanyl smuggling.

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The most recent conversation with Trump has led officials to believe the tone of interaction between the two has improved — for now — after he earlier in the week threatened a 25% tariff, the people said. It also represented a contrast with her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, who is monolingual and seldom traveled outside Mexico, and Enrique Pena Nieto, who canceled a planned meeting with Trump after a confrontational phone call in 2018.

Also helping the interaction was Sheinbaum’s insistence that Mexico is keeping migrant caravans from reaching the northern border, the people said. 

Sheinbaum is taking various steps to preserve the relationship with the US, buyer of 75% of Mexico’s exports. Since the conversation, Mexico raided a shopping complex in Mexico City filled with allegedly illegal Chinese goods and announced its biggest seizure ever of fentanyl pills in the violence-torn state of Sinaloa. It also released a report outlining how the proposed tariffs might cost the US as many as 400,000 jobs. 

Trade Talks Preparation

In addition, Mexico is reopening its trade office in Washington that AMLO shuttered amid a push to reduce government spending, and making other moves to prepare for expected difficult negotiations with the Trump administration over the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, according to people familiar with the plans.

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Sheinbaum’s administration is hiring Ernesto Acevedo, a former deputy economy minister and until recently Mexico’s top representative at the World Bank, to run the office, said the people, who asked not to be named before a public announcement. 

The press office for Mexico’s economy ministry declined to comment. Sheinbaum’s press office and Trump’s transition team didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The move will bring back an office that was closed by AMLO after he took office in 2018. Before then, it was an important base for the Mexican government in the US capital, giving Mexico City trade experts representing its interests a base just a few blocks away from the White House. Prior heads included Ildefonso Guajardo, who later became the nation’s economy minister and top USMCA negotiator, and Kenneth Smith Ramos, the deal’s chief technical negotiator.

Beyond Trump’s most recent tariff threat, Mexico is gearing up for the review and possible renegotiation of the USMCA, set for the middle of 2026 at the latest. Mexico’s economy ministry is also starting to hire back some career negotiators who worked on the USMCA and left under AMLO, the ministry confirmed following a question from Bloomberg News. 

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Luis Rosendo Gutierrez, Mexico’s deputy minister of economy for international trade, said at a business event in Washington on Thursday that the country is looking to collaborate with, rather than compete, with the US and Canada as an economic bloc. The goal is to better confront Asia, he added at the event.

The official held 33 meetings over the course of four days, with representatives for multinationals like Stellantis and General Motors, US lawmakers, and trade associations, according to a statement. 

As part of the visit, Gutierrez met officials from the Treasury Department and the Canadian government to gain insight into how Mexico can best implement a foreign investment screening process for strategic industries, similar to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which evaluates possible national security risks.

Such a mechanism could be created by a decree and wouldn’t necessarily require approval by Congress, since the former might be a faster route to implementation, Gutierrez told Bloomberg News on the sidelines of the event.

“We would like to have the same framework for all our region,” he said.

—With assistance from Maya Averbuch, Alex Vasquez, Josh Wingrove and Jose Orozco.

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