President Claudia Sheinbaum used her Thursday morning mañanera press conference at the National Palace to push back on the Moody's sovereign rating downgrade and on first-quarter GDP figures that showed the Mexican economy contracting 0.2 per cent quarter-on-quarter. The president presented what she described as "twelve pieces of good news" about the economy, including record quarterly foreign direct investment of $24.3 billion and a 2.5 per cent unemployment rate.
Among the figures Sheinbaum highlighted: headline inflation has slowed to 3.4 per cent year-on-year in April, the lowest reading since November 2020; the labour-poverty rate has fallen to a record-low 31.2 per cent; remittances rose to a record $7.8 billion in March; and Mexico's gross international reserves have held above $230 billion since February. The president pointedly contrasted those figures with the Moody's text, which had cited deteriorating public finances and "constraints on growth potential."
On the cartel-policy front, Sheinbaum was asked about US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's statement earlier this week that the United States was "going to war with the cartels" through the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. She said his remarks applied "specifically to ACCC member states, not Mexico" and that the bilateral US-Mexico security framework continued to operate as agreed at the November Sheinbaum-Trump meeting in Mexico City.
The president also addressed Wednesday's Chamber of Deputies vote to allow Mexican election results to be annulled in cases of "demonstrated foreign interference." Sheinbaum said the measure responded to a "real risk," citing US Agency for International Development funding of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) under prior US administrations as her concrete example. Civil society groups have criticised the law as creating arbitrary annulment risk and the National Electoral Institute said it would publish implementing regulations within ninety days.
The mañanera also confirmed that interior secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez would brief reporters Friday on the federal arrest of three former Sinaloa cartel logistics operatives in Culiacán, the second wave of arrests in three weeks following the late-April identification of senior Chapitos faction figures. Homicide figures provided by the security cabinet showed a fifty-one per cent year-on-year decline in intentional homicides in the first four months of 2026, the largest such decline since 1997.
The peso firmed during the conference, trading at 18.62 to the dollar against a Wednesday close of 18.78, although traders attributed the move more to broad dollar weakness than to the mañanera itself. Mexican sovereign dollar bonds traded thirteen basis points tighter on the day, partially recovering ground lost in the Moody's aftermath.