The Reign of Arbitrariness

November 23, 2025

Luis Rubio

President Sheinbaum insists that the decision to move flights from Mexico City’s airport to the AIFA wasn’t political. Perhaps not. It’s plausible that the former president never intended to hurt airlines or even realized that, in doing so, he was violating the rules of our bilateral agreement on aviation. But that’s precisely the point: when arbitrariness becomes the norm, everything seems possible — even breaking the most basic principles of social coexistence and of how politics and economics are meant to function.

Worse still, once arbitrariness and indifference are accepted as normal and legitimate, everyone starts behaving the same way. Recently, Mexico’s Supreme Court announced it was “analyzing the revocation of rulings by predecessors,” implying that what was once decided could now be reopened — or that, as in the case of the amparo law, retroactivity is fair game. Step by step, the so-called Fourth Transformation has moved from dismantling existing institutions to undoing the very elements that kept the country running. In such a setting, expecting investment to grow — as the government claims to want — is pure fantasy.

Lawyers have a phrase for this: pacta sunt servanda — agreements must be kept. Yet since 2018, Mexico’s government has violated the USMCA, often without even realizing it. It has banned imports of certain agricultural goods, frozen energy investments, imposed new telecom regulations, and altered the criteria for determining tax credits. The same pattern applied to the airports: when the former president forced airlines to move to AIFA, it was all to justify his irreversible decision to cancel the nearly completed Texcoco airport — a political act disguised as policy.

Laws, like contracts and treaties, are products of negotiation. Otto von Bismarck famously said, “Laws are like sausages — it’s better not to see them being made.” In theory, a congress is a deliberative space where different views and interests collide until a workable consensus is reached. International treaties follow the same logic — they involve trade-offs, winners, and losers. The goal is to maximize collective benefit.

NAFTA and its successor USMCA were one such success. It required a painful economic adjustment, but it became the backbone of Mexico’s modern economy. Even many of its original critics — including today’s rulers — now acknowledge its significance. Mexico’s failure wasn’t in signing that treaty; it was in neglecting those left behind, in not creating conditions for the uncompetitive to adapt and join the productive economy.

That’s why some sectors still protest — farmers blocking highways, for instance, seeking political redress instead of adjustment. Their grievances are understandable, but the methods reveal the long-term failure of successive governments that ignored or mishandled economic and educational reform — not to serve ideology, but to give people the tools to succeed.

When a government — and, increasingly, a society— falls under the rule of arbitrariness, limits vanish. Laws, treaties, and institutions exist to set the boundaries within which social, economic, and political actors coexist. When those boundaries are ignored or dismantled, Pandora’s box opens: government decisions serve ideology and patronage; groups with power demand special favors; and the foundations of social order begin to erode. There is nothing more corrosive to governance than arbitrariness itself.

As Cantinflas once put it, perfectly capturing the absurdity of it all:

“Why are you going to harm me? On what grounds, what arbitrariness — aren’t we in a democratic country? Do you even know what democracy means?”