I wrapped up trips to Maine and Texas with posts offering policy advice to those states, and I had Mexico on the brain while I was in the country last week.

Unfortunately, I don’t understand the domestic political situation in Mexico nearly well enough to grasp what ideas are and aren’t in the realm of plausibility. I also don’t have any good ideas for addressing what seems like Mexico’s biggest problem: the endemically weak state capacity to take on drug cartels.

But I do have advice for the United States of America, which is that we could and should revise our own trade policies to be more favorable to Mexico and the members of the awkwardly named DR-CAFTA group (the Dominican Republic and most of Central America). In negotiating NAFTA and CAFTA, and then especially in revamping NAFTA into USMCA, we’ve consistently acted like the main point of negotiating trade deals is to help American exporters, using the lure of access to the American domestic market to try to bully smaller count…