Last night my dad told me that the American Ambassador pulled the Mexican Secretary of State into a meeting to complain about Mexico’s corruption regarding renewable energy.

🌎: What? Since when does Trump care about renewable energy?

Let me break it down for you.

Mexico is an OPEC country. Pemex is the Mexican government owned oil company and it’s a huge source of corruption.

One of Trump’s big agendas is the trade agreement that succeeded NAFTA. He’s promised American renewable energy companies entry into Mexico. But how do you get renewable energy into a country whose leadership depends on petrodollars?

AMLO’s dirty. But he’s about as crooked as every other Mexican President. That’s not news. What this dilema really shows is that Trump isn’t anti-renewable energy. He’s just able to push a coal agenda to Americans to play to his supporters and use rhetoric to disparage renewable energy because he’s made deals with these companies to get them money through the use of a lopsided trade agreement with Mexico and then strong arm Mexico into buying technology they’ll never have the patents to.

This is classic Monroe Doctrine trade policy. During WWII, when American industry was devoted to the war cause and the burgeoning consumer tech market was on hold, Latin America was relatively free to innovate. U.S. manufacturers didn’t want to lose their hegemony over this huge consumer market, so American corporations flooded Latin America with commercials for all sorts of technology they’d be creating, like television sets.

When war ceased and American corporations returned to peacetime production, the U.S., now the world’s economic powerhouse, rebuilt Europe with essentially interest free loans to create loyal consumer markets. Meanwhile, they dismantled the nascent technology markets in Latin America and then implemented foreign policy to keep Latin America crippled and dependent upon American manufacturing. With the Soviet Union now in play, anything the U.S. did, they could justify in the spirit of preserving the Latin American middle class and democracy, up to and including toppling democratically elected leaders and instituting military dictatorships.

First it was consumer electronics and automobiles and microchips. Later it was Monsanto. Now it’s renewable energy.

But now it’s not just the U.S. It’s Canada and Europe who stand to lose a lot of money if Mexico doesn’t comply with trade deals.

“Foreign governments and international investors are worried Mexico is eroding the legal foundations of contracts worth billions of dollars with the previous administration, in what they see as a creeping squeeze-out of their interests.”

New tech, same story. Plundering for plundering’s sake.

If AMLO doesn’t watch out, he’s gonna end up like Salvador Allende. Mexico is ripe for political upheaval. The only reason it hasn’t faced a direct military coup to date is through the dedazo: the turn over of presidential office from one PRI leader to the next. The PRI has never had overarching political values. It’s been the banner of presidents whose politics fundamentally conflicted. But it kept power consolidated and stable. The power base has not disappeared with the end of the PRI’s control. It’s just morphed into something different. AMLO is dependent on this power base. But it doesn’t mean they’re dependent on him.

He can be undermined and replaced at the whim of internal and external forces and people would cheer because they’re none too happy right now. They would bang pots in the streets. And then, once AMLO was gone and replaced with someone “for the benefit of the Mexican people,” business will go on as usual.

I’m not saying it will happen. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.