Mexico City has a housing problem familiar to dozens of other global cities: neighborhoods built for residents are increasingly becoming Airbnbs.

To avoid this, two years ago Mexico City passed a law designed to contain the growth of short-term rentals. The problem is that since then it has struggled to enforce it. That may finally be changing this month.

Yet, the story of why it took so long to begin implementing the law reveals not only the enormous power that international corporations like Airbnb often wield in Mexico, but also the inability of local governments to move from laws on paper to actual enforcement.

So today’s Mexico Decoded essay tells the story of the dark saga of Mexico City vs. Airbnb.

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Morena, Mexico’s ruling party, has built its identity around former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. His political trajectory not only marked Mexico’s last 20 years but also turned him into a widely recognized figure that even found a small niche in the economy, with t-shirts, keychains, and plush toys.

It’s no wonder that, when López Obrador retired in 2024 after ending his presidency, the party he founded started showing cracks, and the cliques that had already formed inside started pushing to grab control of the machinery that generated over 33 million votes for current president Claudia Sheinbaum.

With the 2027 Mexican midterm election coming up, finding strong leadership is the only way Morena can keep the majority it holds in the Legislative Branch and win over the 17 states that are up for grabs. Because of its scale, the election will largely determine Mexico’s political future.

So today, in Mexico Decoded, we’ll analyze Morena and what happens when a party is constructed around a leader, such as López Obrador, who retires and leaves no undisputed successor.

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Violence in Mexico is largely explained by the cartels’ criminal activities, since they operate drug trafficking routes but have expanded their activities to migrant smuggling, extortion, and money laundering, among other crimes. The mystery is why the Mexican State has never been powerful enough to defeat them.

In this edition of Mexico Decoded, we’ll discuss the underlying causes of the violence to understand what has made Mexico fertile ground for the growth of criminal groups.

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This idea is repeated constantly on social media and has even made its way into foreign media outlets and think tanks, most of which argue that social programs should be replaced by paid work. Former right-wing president Vicente Fox famously called recipients of social programs “lazy bums.”

This idea is, at its core, not just mistaken but deeply perverse.

That is why today’s Mexico Decoded essay will unpack this idea, explain who actually receives social benefits in Mexico, and examine what the evidence tells us about their real effects on the labor market.

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This does not mean every private-school student in Mexico is poorly educated. Yet, many students whose families are paying for what is supposed to be a better education often look unusually weak by international standards.

That is why today, we decided to use Mexico Decoded’s weekly essay to examine the evidence behind this surprising pattern and explain why it happens.

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To put Slim’s wealth in perspective, consider this: relative to the size of his country’s economy, he is richer than Elon Musk. Musk’s fortune is equivalent to roughly 2.6% of the GDP of the US. Slim’s is equivalent to about 5.9% of Mexico’s GDP.

Yet, to truly understand Slim’s impact on Mexico, dollar figures are not enough. One has to look at the legacy he has built in the country or, more accurately, at the legacy he has failed to build.

That is why, in today’s edition of Mexico Decoded, we take a closer look at how Carlos Slim became Mexico’s richest man and how his rise may have come at the expense of Mexico’s growth.

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If you have visited Mexico City during the rainy season, you have probably noticed one of its most dreaded features: flooding. In 2026 alone, storms have flooded major roads, brought traffic to a standstill, and sent rainwater pouring into Mexico City’s international airport.

This leads many people to assume that the city gets most of its water from rainfall collected through the drainage system and later filtered. Yet, that is not how it works. In fact, most of the rainwater that enters the drainage system goes to waste.

Mexico City’s main source of water is a mysterious forest that few people know about. This week, Mexico Decoded will devote its essay to this forest and to show you how to plan a wonderful visit to it.

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As a result, the Mexican government has faced various accusations from the United States, including colluding with the drug cartels and benefitting China and Russia regarding the steel trade, followed by demands on both the political and economic fronts.

So, in this edition of Mexico Decoded, we’ll break down what Mexico should do to defend itself from the United States’ growing and abusive demands while keeping the relationship healthy enough to avoid a fallout.

To do so, we examine how other countries have successfully prevented the United States from overreaching and how Mexico could benefit from adopting some of their strategies.

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Source: Screenshot from Reddit post

A more realistic picture would point to an unequal distribution of these green areas, with the bigger part of them located in tourist-friendly areas such as Condesa, Roma, and Chapultepec.

What’s behind the uneven distribution of green areas in Mexico City? This week’s essay on Mexico Decoded will dive into some of the reasons behind it.

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This is an excellent measure for reducing corruption, but many analysts agree that it puts Morena at a disadvantage. Unlike other parties, which agreed on applying the anti-nepotism law in 2030, Morena unilaterally decided to enforce it immediately. This means that, in the 2027 election, opposition parties will be the only ones with the advantage of nominating political bosses and members of clans that control a significant number of votes in certain territories.

The question is why Morena is in a rush to eliminate nepotism within its ranks. The answer reveals more about how politics work in Mexico than the electoral results themselves.

That is why, today, we dedicate the Mexico Decoded essay to explaining the reasons why Morena’s leadership rightly believes that implementing this reform is not a disadvantage, but a critical step if the party is to remain in power.

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And while everyone knows Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world, what is less obvious is that inequality survives not only through low wages, inherited wealth, or weak public expenditure, but also through something more obscure like misleading tax statistics.

So today, we will dedicate the weekly essay of Mexico Decoded to analyzing how this works.

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At every World Cup, Mexico arrives with one of the largest and most visible fan bases in football. Yet its team never wins.

Mexico has not made it to the quarterfinals since 1986, which means that most of the country’s population, which is young, has not been alive to witness it.

For decades, this contradiction had a chant: “Sí se puede” (“Yes, we can”). It was the a battle cry that Mexican fans carried into stadiums and tournaments, a way of insisting that defeat was not inevitable, even when history suggested otherwise.

“Sí se puede” was the language of the hopeful underdog. It belonged to a country that knew its team was usually at a disadvantage, but refused to accept the match as lost before it began. It was less a prediction than an act of faith: maybe this time, somehow, things would finally go differently.

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Every Mexican fan knows that “Sí se puede” accumulated decades of disappointment. Mexico is a football country with a large public, a strong emotional investment in the sport, and a national team that has often promised more than it has delivered. The gap between expectation and result became part of the ritual.

That is why the rare moments of triumph mattered so much. There were not many occasions when fans could move from “Sí se puede” to “Sí se pudo” (“Yes, we did it”).

The reality is that over the last three decades, alongside the hollowing out and weakening of the state, Mexico’s national sport became precarious and privatized into fiefdoms of power. The Mexican league, which deserves the harshest criticism, became a plague of cronyism and corruption.

Perhaps that is why Mexico’s football chant has begun to dramatically change.

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Colombia’s left did what left-wing governments are supposed to do and what Mexico’s government is also trying to do. It reduced poverty, raised wages, and pushed reforms meant to improve the lives of workers and the elderly.

Yet this week, Colombian voters moved away from that government and replaced it with one by Abelardo de la Espriella, a wealthy hard-right lawyer promising a politics closer to Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro, and Bukele.

The question is why Colombian voters did this.

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While Mexico debates the World Cup and next year’s local elections, the question of how the country will cross the most consequential technological revolution of our era remains, at best, fuzzy.

Nobody, not inside the government, not inside the private sector, has come up with a concrete plan to make sure AI benefits Mexico. Or at least, that it doesn’t leave Mexico sidelined and dependent on technology that it doesn’t control and that will voraciously absorb the profits of Mexican companies.

As a result, Mexico is falling into one of its deepest development traps, yet one that is receiving very little attention.

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Countries have reacted in different ways. Some have ignored him. Others have complained behind closed doors. Mexico, however, is trying something different. Instead of simply brushing off Trump's remarks, Mexico is betting on a riskier approach: confronting him head-on.

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His argument is that pursuing a long-term USMCA extension under Trump is an illusion. Instead, he advocates for annual reviews because they would preserve the possibility of a swift, substantive renegotiation under a future administration, one that could align trade into a genuine engine of shared democratic prosperity.

I respect Dan and I know his work, but I want to dedicate this week’s Mexico Decoded essay to a respectful dissent.

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A small but vocal group of readers accused me of lying. In their view, the government data is manipulated and the reduction simply does not exist.

So today, I want to dedicate my weekly essay at Mexico Decoded to explaining why this reduction cannot be entirely dismissed as statistical manipulation, and to presenting the data that makes that case.

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There are doubts about the numbers. As we have reported in Mexico Decoded, it is likely that part of the reduction can be explained by the false reclassification of homicides as other types of crimes, whether accidents, disappearances, or other violent offenses. However, in recent months it has become evident that nearly all crimes are declining, including disappearances. The reduction in homicides appears to be real.

The news is excellent, but it hides a serious problem unfolding in Mexico, one that the international press is not covering. That is why I decided to dedicate this week’s essay in Mexico Decoded to discussing it.

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The comment was striking. Hearing that sentiment from ignorant and incendiary MAGA commentators is one thing, but hearing it from investors actively operating in Mexico really concerned me.

That is why I decided to use this week’s Mexico Decoded essay to address what a narco-state actually is, how corruption between authorities and criminal groups functions in Mexico, and why, despite the existence of such arrangements in certain regions, it is inaccurate to describe the Mexican state as being run by drug traffickers.

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