Mexico

Mexico is the second-largest economy in Latin America, a federal republic of 130 million people sharing 3,145 kilometers of border with the United States — the world's largest bilateral trade relationship by volume. The country carries the institutional weight of three centuries as the Viceroyalty of New Spain, independence achieved in 1821, and a revolutionary rupture in 1910 that produced the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed without interruption for seventy-one years until Vicente Fox broke that monopoly in 2000. Claudia Sheinbaum, elected in June 2024 as the first woman to hold the presidency, governs under the banner of MORENA, the movement built by her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador — a political inheritance that defines both her coalition and her constraints. The USMCA, which replaced NAFTA in 2020, binds Mexico structurally to North American supply chains in automotive, aerospace, and agricultural sectors; that integration is the central economic fact of contemporary Mexican governance.

The cartels are the second. Since 2007, transnational criminal organizations — the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel foremost among them — have conducted a sustained contest for territorial and market control that has produced more than 450,000 homicides and an unresolved crisis of forced disappearances exceeding 100,000 cases. The federal government's capacity to project legitimate authority across all thirty-one states is the defining political question of this generation of Mexican leaders.

Mexico occupies 1,964,375 square kilometres at the geographic coordinates 23°00′N, 102°00′W — slightly less than three times the size of Texas — and sits at the junction of North America's continental landmass with the Caribbean and both the Gulf of America and North Pacific Ocean. Its land boundaries total 4,389 kilometres, shared with three neighbours: the United States along 3,155 kilometres to the north, Guatemala along 958 kilometres, and Belize along 276 kilometres. A coastline of 9,330 kilometres completes the perimeter, granting Mexico maritime claims extending to a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf reaching either 200 nautical miles or the edge of the continental margin.

The terrain is defined by contrast. High, rugged mountains and elevated plateaus dominate the interior; low coastal plains frame the edges; desert occupies the northwest. Mean elevation stands at 1,111 metres. The highest point, Volcán Pico de Orizaba at 5,636 metres, anchors the volcanic arc that runs through the central and southern regions, while the lowest point, Laguna Salada, sits 10 metres below sea level. That vertical range across a relatively contained territory imposes the country's climatic diversity — from tropical in the south and along the coasts to arid desert in the north — and shapes nearly every dimension of land use.

Volcanic hazard is structural, not episodic. Colima, at 3,850 metres, holds the designation of Decade Volcano from the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior, a classification reserved for volcanoes combining explosive history with proximity to dense settlement. Popocatépetl, at 5,426 metres, poses a direct threat to Mexico City. Other historically active systems include El Chichón, Michoacán-Guanajuato, and Tacana. Tsunamis add risk along the Pacific coast; hurricanes strike the Pacific, Gulf of America, and Caribbean coastlines; destructive earthquakes affect the centre and south. The natural hazard profile is among the most compound in the hemisphere.

Land use registers 50.7 percent as agricultural, with 10.3 percent arable, 2.3 percent under permanent crops, and 38.1 percent permanent pasture. Forest covers 34.2 percent. Irrigated land reaches 59,910 square kilometres as of 2022. The principal freshwater body is Laguna de Chapala at 1,140 square kilometres; the largest saltwater lake, Laguna de Términos, covers 1,550 square kilometres. The Rio Grande, whose mouth lies within Mexico and whose course is shared with the United States, runs 3,057 kilometres; the Colorado, also shared, extends 2,333 kilometres to its mouth on Mexican territory. Both drain into major watersheds spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres — the Rio Grande basin covering 607,965 square kilometres into the Gulf of America, the Colorado basin 703,148 square kilometres into the Gulf of California. Groundwater is anchored by the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains Aquifer.

Natural resources include petroleum, natural gas, silver, copper, gold, lead, zinc, antimony, and timber — a subsurface endowment broadly aligned with the country's mountainous geology and its long position as a primary producer in global metals markets.

Mexico is a federal presidential republic comprising 32 states, governed under a constitution ratified on 5 February 1917 — one of the oldest continuously operative constitutions in the Western Hemisphere. Amendments require a two-thirds majority of members present in the Congress of the Union and ratification by a majority of state legislatures, a threshold that distributes constituent power across the federation's full geographic span, from Baja California to Quintana Roo. The capital, Mexico City (Ciudad de México), sits at 19°26′N, 99°08′W, and has operated without daylight saving time since October 2022, when DST was permanently abolished; the country otherwise spans four time zones.

The legal system rests on civil law foundations with acknowledged influence from US constitutional law, and incorporates judicial review of legislative acts. Mexico accepts compulsory ICJ jurisdiction with reservations and recognizes the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Suffrage is universal and compulsory at eighteen years of age.

The Congress of the Union is bicameral. The 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, fully renewed every three years, last held elections on 2 June 2024. MORENA emerged as the dominant force, taking 236 seats; the Ecologist Green Party (PVEM) secured 77; the National Action Party (PAN) held 72; the Labour Party (PT) returned 51; the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — which governed Mexico without interruption for most of the twentieth century — took 35; and Citizens' Movement (MC) claimed 27. Women hold 50.2 percent of chamber seats, meeting the parity threshold embedded in Mexican electoral law. The 128-seat Senate, elected for six-year terms on the same June 2024 ballot, mirrors the lower-chamber balance: MORENA leads with 60 seats, followed by PAN at 22 and PRI at 16, with PVEM, PT, and smaller groupings filling the remainder; women constitute exactly 50 percent of the upper chamber. Senators elected from 2018 onward are eligible for a second term; deputies may serve up to four consecutive terms — a structural departure from the rigid no-reelection norms that defined Mexican legislative culture for most of the post-revolutionary period.

The PRI's combined Senate and Chamber presence — 51 seats across both chambers — marks a steep decline for a party that monopolized federal power from 1929 until 2000. MORENA's legislative bloc, reinforced by allied parties including PVEM and PT, commands working supermajorities in both chambers. Citizenship is acquired by birth or descent; naturalization requires five years of residency. Independence, declared on 16 September 1810 and recognized by Spain on 27 September 1821, is commemorated as the national holiday each 16 September.

Mexico's economy registered a nominal GDP of $1.853 trillion at official exchange rates in 2024, with purchasing-power-parity output reaching $2.883 trillion — placing it among the fifteen largest economies by either measure. Real GDP grew 1.5% in 2024, a deceleration from 3.3% in 2023 and 3.7% in 2022. Real GDP per capita stood at $22,000 in 2021 dollars. The economy is structurally service-led: services accounted for 58.2% of GDP in 2024, industry for 31.6%, and agriculture for 3.8%. Household consumption drove 70.3% of output by expenditure; fixed capital investment contributed 24.2%.

The export base is the economy's defining feature. Goods and services exports reached $680.798 billion in 2024, equivalent to 36.8% of GDP, with automobiles, vehicle parts, crude petroleum, trucks, and computers constituting the five leading commodity categories. Seventy-six percent of those exports flow to the United States, with Canada at 5% the nearest rival — a concentration that reflects both the logic of proximity and the legal architecture of USMCA. Imports reached $697.067 billion in the same year, producing a current account deficit of $5.986 billion. The import ledger mirrors the export one: vehicle parts, refined petroleum, integrated circuits, broadcasting equipment, and passenger cars together represent the five largest inbound categories. The United States supplied 46% of imports; China, 20%. That bilateral asymmetry — Mexico sells nearly everything north and buys from two directions — is the structural signature of the post-NAFTA manufacturing model.

Remittances contributed 3.7% of GDP in both 2023 and 2024, down from 4.2% in 2022, and function as a material buffer for household income across states with high emigration rates. Foreign exchange and gold reserves climbed to $232.035 billion in 2024 from $201.119 billion in 2022, providing coverage well above the conventional three-month import threshold. The peso traded at 18.305 per dollar in 2024, having strengthened from 20.127 in 2022. External debt stood at $306.308 billion in 2023; public debt at 45.1% of GDP.

The fiscal position reflects structural constraint. Tax revenues equalled 14.2% of GDP in 2023 — a figure that ranks among the lowest in the OECD club Mexico joined in 1994. Central government revenues reached $342.571 billion against expenditures of $417.843 billion in 2023, a gap of roughly $75 billion. Inflation fell to 4.7% in 2024 from a peak of 7.9% in 2022. The headline unemployment rate of 2.8% in 2024 coexists with a poverty rate of 36.3% as of 2022, a pairing explained in part by the large informal sector that keeps measured unemployment low without generating formal income security. The Gini coefficient of 43.5 in 2022 locates Mexico in the upper tier of income inequality; the lowest decile captured 2.1% of income while the highest captured 34.4%. A labor force of 60.959 million supported industrial production growth of just 0.2% in 2024, indicating that employment gains have outpaced output gains in the manufacturing and industrial core. Households allocated 25.7% of expenditures to food in 2023, marking a population whose consumption basket leaves limited discretionary margin.

Mexico fields approximately 260,000 active-duty personnel across its armed forces — the Army, Navy (Armada de México), and Air Force — alongside a National Guard of roughly 110,000, bringing the combined uniformed security establishment to around 370,000. Figures carry the caveat that precise counts vary by reporting method, a recurring feature of Mexican defence accounting. The National Guard, stood up in 2019 to absorb and supersede the Federal Police, operates under a constitutional mandate that formally classifies it as a civilian body while assigning it paramilitary functions alongside the regular military in public-security operations.

Defence spending reached 0.9 percent of GDP in 2024, up from 0.7 percent across each of the three preceding years and 0.6 percent in 2020. The trajectory is gradual rather than abrupt — a steady climb across five consecutive years rather than a single budget shock — and in absolute terms leaves Mexico well below NATO's two-percent benchmark and below the Latin American median for comparably sized economies. The 2024 figure represents the highest recorded share of national output directed to defence in the period under review.

Military service combines voluntary and compulsory elements. Men become subject to mandatory service at eighteen, assigned through a lottery system to a twelve-month obligation. Women may volunteer from eighteen; parental consent permits enlistment at sixteen for both sexes. The lottery structure means the burden of compulsory service falls unevenly across male cohorts, a design that has produced a force reliant in practice on volunteers supplemented by a rotating pool of conscripts rather than a universal-service model. Mexico employed a similar selective-draft architecture throughout the twentieth century, making the current arrangement continuous with established institutional practice rather than a post-reform departure.

The armed forces carry a domestic-security role that extends well beyond conventional external defence. The Army and National Guard deploy across organised-crime theatres, border control, infrastructure protection — including guard assignments at ports and airports — and emergency response. This breadth of tasking across a 370,000-strong establishment at 0.9 percent of GDP defines the operational posture: a large, domestically oriented force sustained on a comparatively constrained budget.