Mexico’s president putting his own twist on Trump’s art of the deal

MEXICO CITY — Former U.S. President Donald Trump cast himself as a master of “The Art of the Deal,” but his old buddy, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, may be taking over that title.

Last month, Lopez Obrador pressured a U.S. gravel company into agreeing to operate a tourist resort and cruise ship dock at a quarry it owns on the Caribbean coast.

The Alabama- based aggregates company Vulcan Materials — once known as Birmingham Slag Co. — has no experience at doing either, and would just like to continue mining gravel.

But Lopez Obrador has used pressure and threats in a bid to get private and foreign companies to shore up his infrastructure plans and pet projects — state-run ports, terminals and rail lines that could become white elephants unless the private sector boosts them with real traffic.

For a leader once depicted as a leftist, Lopez Obrador is in fact more of a populist and nationalist, and is quite conservative on some social issues. And he and Trump share an essentially transactional view of politics: two old- style bosses who like making deals.

Last week, Lopez Obrador became one of the few foreign leaders to say he genuinely liked Trump.

“We understood each other, and it was good for both countries,” Lopez Obrador said of Trump’s time in office.

The examples of Lopez Obrador’s pressure are many.

In 2020, he called a referendum that stopped a partly built, $1.5 billion U.S.-owned brewery in the border city of Mexicali, which had received all the needed permits but brought complaints from some residents that it would use too much water.

The Victor, N.Y.- based Constellation Brands, the company that brews Corona beer, wanted to be on the border in order to export Corona to the U.S. market. But Lopez Obrador has a long-range goal of promoting investment in southern Mexico. That’s the region where he grew up, and where poverty is greater and water is more plentiful.

So recently, Lopez Obrador said the governor of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, who belongs to the president’s Morena party, smoothed the way with all necessary permits for Constellation to build a brewery there.

Some say the president may be scaring off foreign investment with such heavyhanded tactics.

“The critics and the pundits are complaining … because he chases away investments,” said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “That’s what they haven’t understood. He’s not after growth. He’s not after investment. He’s not a normal politician.”

In March, Lopez Obrador issued an ultimatum to the U.S. energy company Sempra saying it had one month to sign an agreement to build a natural gas export terminal in the Pacific coast port of Salina Cruz. Industry insiders say the project isn’t attractive for foreign investors, since it involves building pipelines to the port.

Lopez Obrador has renovated the port as part of a plan

to revive a 150-year-old dream of a rail line linking ports on the Pacific to the Gulf over Mexico’s narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he desperately needs commercial customers for the ports. Sempra hasn’t yet responded to the demand.

Similar thinking — and practices — went into the president’s most surprising deal yet, the tentative agreement with Vulcan Materials to run a resort and port.

Vulcan wound up with a series of crushed-limestone quarries on Mexico’s Caribbean coast near the resort of Playa del Carmen in the 1990s, when the area wasn’t as popular as it now.

Vulcan would like to keep exporting gravel, but its export permits have been blocked since late 2018, leading the company to file a trade dispute arbitration case under NAFTA, which has yet to be resolved.

The quarries are near XCaret, a lagoon that private investors turned into a highend theme park that charges $100 a day in admission. The Mexican president loves stateowned businesses and hates pricey private ones.

One of Vulcan’s gravel quarries was dug out to below the water table, and it filled with turquoise water. Lopez Obrador wants to turn it into an artificial swimming and snorkeling lagoon.

His other pet project in the area is the Maya Train, a 950-mile rail line that will run in a rough loop around the Yucatan peninsula, connecting Caribbean coast resorts with archaeological sites inland.

Controversially, and with no environmental studies, the president decided to cut down a swath of low jungle between Cancun and Tulum, near the quarries, to build the train line.

The project needs huge amounts of gravel spread between rail ties to stabilize them, and it needs a seaport to get rails, cars and other train-building materials into the jungle.