Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, White House and Washington Reporter Daniel Lippman talks to Mexico’s top diplomat in Washington.

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Esteban Moctezuma Barragán is serving as Mexico’s ambassador to the United States at a particularly contentious time. The Biden administration is pressuring its southern neighbor to do more to stem the tide of illegal migrants crossing into the U.S. and stop the flow of fentanyl that fuels America’s opioid crisis. And Republican candidates for the U.S. presidency, including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to use the U.S. military in varying ways to go after Mexican drug cartels.

At the same time, Mexico is trying to capitalize on growing rifts between Washington and Beijing to convince American companies to set up industrial hubs in Mexico instead of in China.

Moctezuma came to Washington in 2021 after serving as Mexico’s secretary of public education. He has had numerous roles in the Mexican government since 1988, including under its former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, commonly referred to as PRI.

The following has been edited for clarity and length:

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador often attacks the press and political opponents on a personal level, in some ways similar to former President Donald Trump. How difficult is it for you to represent him and Mexico to an administration that is trying to move the U.S. away from Trump and Trumpism?

Well, he manages his communication scheme, and we don’t participate. The foreign affairs principles that guide every ambassador — and they’re written in the Constitution — are very clear. We are always focusing on having a very clear relationship with the core issues of the bilateral relationship, not everyday issues.

Do you often hear complaints from the Biden administration about what AMLO is doing?

No, no, no. What I think is that the Biden administration and my embassy are focused on the core issues of our relationship.

I want to ask you about the effort to get U.S. companies to invest in Mexico. Some American companies don’t expect Mexican courts to protect property and contract rights. AMLO himself has criticized courts for protecting multinational companies. So why should foreign companies feel it’s safe to invest in Mexico?

What companies do is to seek objective reasons to invest, and the objective reasons to invest in Mexico are very strong. There is a rule of law. There is always an equilibrium between what the executive wants and and the laws, the initiatives he sends and the presence of the Supreme Court and the legislature. So, in Mexico, we have our balance of power and it’s very strong.

What we have received in the last month is the highest for investment numbers in the last decade. We just learned that Tesla’s moving to Nuevo Leon with an investment of more than $5 billion. All the industrial parks are packed and everything is bought or leased. So, there is huge investment flowing to Mexico. And investors see that we have a very strong macroeconomic policy that has made a very strong peso.

This presidential campaign cycle is the first time where many Republican presidential candidates are calling for bombing the cartels and/or sending the U.S. special forces into Mexico. This comes at the same time homicides are still very high in Mexico and arrests of organized crime leaders have slowed. What do you see as the cause of these calls to intervene militarily in Mexico? Because obviously sovereignty would be a huge issue.

It’s not a huge issue. It’s the issue. Those kinds of ideas are really the biggest setback that the U.S.-Mexico relationship could have. Because we have a very strong relationship. Last year, Mexico bought more from the USA than the whole European Union together. Around the border, a million and a half or 2 million people cross every day from one country to the other one. The relationship between our peoples is very, very important.

We’re not just friends and allies, we are also roommates, and we share the future and we share values. We’re part of the North American region. We want to create the most competitive and most humanitarian region in the world. So when some — luckily they are some — when some people think or propose this nonsense, it’s because they’re not speaking seriously, because the implications of invading Mexico would be a game changer in geopolitics.

Why do you think they’re saying this stuff?

Because they want votes. Because they want to speak very loud, about things that can be catchy to some people.

Is this getting a lot of attention in Mexico?

Well of course. If an American senator or a candidate says that he will propose to send the military to Mexico with or without the consent of the Mexican government, what Mexico thinks is not, oh this is just rhetorical, we say first: Why are they saying that? We’re friends, we’re allies, we’re partners.

Don’t you think there’s an opening for them to say that because of the huge crime issues and the drugs and cartels and how they’re affecting America too?

Yeah, but why don’t we first see how these proposals can be followed inside American territory? Eighty-five percent of all the seizures of fentanyl that CBP has caught are carried by Americans. So we want to learn what they do from the border up. How does a drug get to New York, to Chicago, to San Francisco? That will be a good lesson and we can learn from that.

Is there a way for Mexico to try harder to stop more of the drugs coming across the border?

We’re working very hard with the American government.

And how successful do you think you guys are?

Well, you have to measure your success in terms of all these issues that have been happening in terms of all the drug cartels, people that have been caught. We have the Bicentennial Framework.

Why is there a perception that AMLO is weaker on this issue?

If you see how many people in Mexico are fighting against the drug cartels and die, it’s very unfair to tell the families of those people that Mexico is doing nothing. Because a lot of people are fighting every day against the drug cartels. There is a lot of effort in intelligence. And we are working together with the American government in the bicentennial agreements.

Just two months ago, President López Obrador sent a letter to Xi Jinping asking him to help to identify who is sending precursors of fentanyl to North America.

Do you know what Xi’s response was?

At first he wanted to know more. There was a seizure of these precursors that showed that they came from China and so there is a conversation with them in order to see how this is working. There’s a problem with finger pointing, that instead of solving the issues, what you do is you start vocalizing the policies instead of really fighting against the crime.

The drug cartels are transnational. They’re global. And we have to fight them in that way together. So instead of finger pointing, we need to get closer together. We’re very close working with the Biden administration. And we want to join the global coalition. We also have to stop the flow of American weapons to the cartels in Mexico.

AMLO said at a press conference recently that Mexicans in the U.S. shouldn’t vote for Ron DeSantis because of his immigration policies. Is it appropriate for him to be weighing in on specific candidates and U.S. domestic policies?

As an ambassador, I cannot speak about internal policy of the U.S. [Laughs]

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.

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