With the announcement of tariffs of 30% on Mexico and 35% on Canada , the United States wants to sabotage the next review of the T-MEC, experts told EL UNIVERSAL .

“The letters sent seek to complicate or even undermine the negotiations of the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement); the wording undermines efforts by Mexico and Canada to control fentanyl trafficking,” said Jorge Molina, former North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiator and foreign trade expert.

Everything indicates that US President Donald Trump, “will continue to use the fentanyl emergency to sabotage the renegotiation of the USMCA and argue the need to generate a new instrument that includes trade and issues of security and border control ,” he said.

Molina said, “We are facing a situation in which any treaty with the United States will include tariffs, so it is incomprehensible why President Claudia Sheinbaum insists on not taking any measures to protect Mexican industry. To date, the application of tariffs has not been reflected in imports, but this will change starting next month.”

The coordinator of the Laboratory of Analysis in Commerce, Economy and Business (LACEN) of the UNAM, Ignacio Martínez, pointed out that, with this announcement of 30%, it is observed that the negotiation strategies of President Claudia Sheinbaum, and that Trump has demanded, have not worked.

“Mexico has given in to what the White House has requested, but the latent threat of imposing tariffs, beyond what was established on March 4, showed that these strategies are useless at all,” for example, it was not enough to seal the southern US border and hand over 29 criminals.

Martínez considered that the Mexican government"must change strategies to contain Trump, because once the new requirements of the Oval Office are met, he will once again threaten the country."

From his perspective, Mexico should withdraw the 10,000 troops from the border and impose tariffs on Republican-governed states in the United States, which would affect hardline Republican Party members ahead of the upcoming U.S. elections.

For the former negotiator of the Secretary of Economy and former Mexican ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Roberto Zapata,"it is a good time to review the strategy considering that we have been in dialogue with the United States for three or four months and no result has been reached and it is unknown if a result can be produced."

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"I don't know if the United States' bar is unreachable or if it simply doesn't want to reach an agreement... because (given the new tariffs) we don't know what it will take to reach an agreement, and secondly, what the cost of the concessions will be... because there is a significant sacrifice in the short term, in terms of rising prices without any clearly sustainable agreements in the long term," he said.

He noted that the problem also lies in the fact that these agreements are signed by executive order, so it's unknown whether"the countries that reach agreements will be certain that the next administration, or Trump himself, will respect them."

Former technical head of the USMCA negotiations, Kenneth Smith, indicated that we must not forget that"in addition to the announced 30% tariffs, there are national security investigations that could lead to tariffs on key sectors for our economy such as heavy trucks, aircraft turbines and their components, copper, wood, minerals, and pharmaceuticals."