Mexico has just recorded the strongest start to a year in its history for foreign investment: 23.600 millones de dólares solo en el primer trimestre de 2026, después de cerrar 2025 con un récord de 40.800 millones. Y en el mismo periodo, Moody’s bajó su calificación al último escalón del grado de inversión. Quien quiera decidir con la cabeza necesita las dos listas delante.
Five reasons in favor
- Nearshoring is not a fad, it’s geography. Factories are relocating close to the United States and Mexico is the site. That fills industrial parks and logistics corridors, and it’s driven by a map rather than a political cycle.
- 44 free trade agreements. Producing in Mexico means producing with preferential access to much of the world. Few middle-income countries have that network.
- It remains investment grade. It was downgraded, but it didn’t fall out: for many institutional funds that threshold determines whether they can invest or not.
- A comparatively resilient peso and, above all, an economy that’s easy to follow from the United States: the results of Mexican companies are easier to read than those of almost any other emerging market.
- Sectors actually attracting real capital: renewables, distributed generation and digital infrastructure. Microsoft committed more than 1.300 millones de dólares to cloud and artificial intelligence in the country.
Five reasons for caution
- The judicial reform. Since the reform approved in June de 2025, judges are chosen by popular vote. Foreign investors and legal experts have flagged this as a threat to judicial independence and, in practice, to contract enforcement. If something goes wrong, who decides the case matters a lot.
- Regulatory uncertainty in energy. The shift toward state companies, with the CFE at the center, has created doubts about the rules of the game for private capital.
- The power grid and water. This is not an abstract problem: manufacturers in states like Nuevo León have already suffered water restrictions. An industrial park without reliable water or power is just a pretty site plan.
- The review of the treaty with the United States and Canada, the most important since it replaced the TLCAN, together with tariff volatility. It’s the biggest open risk to nearshoring.
- The public finances. A rising fiscal deficit and a troubled state-owned oil company constrain what the country can invest in the infrastructure that nearshoring itself needs.
To that list you must add the cost of security, which in Mexico is not a footnote: companies spend between un 2% y un 10% of their annual budget on protection, depending on the state and the sector. We expand on it in this analysis.
How to read it all together
The honest conclusion isn’t “invest” or “run away”: it’s that in Mexico the risk isn’t at the country level, it’s in the detail. The difference between a good and a bad Mexican investment is almost never macroeconomic; it’s about the state, the sector and the contract.
Three questions that separate those who are prepared from those who just have the brochure:
- Which state, and what is that state’s water and power situation? The national average is useless for decision-making.
- How is a dispute resolved under this contract? With the judicial reform looming, arbitration and jurisdiction clauses have ceased to be boilerplate.
- Is the security cost factored into the financial model? If it isn’t, you don’t have a model: you have a wish.
And for those who communicate investments
This article is also an example of something we repeat often here: the list of benefits alone doesn’t convince anyone with real money, because the professional investor already knows the risks and notices when they’re being hidden. Presenting both lists is what makes the first one credible.
Sources: official figures for Mexico’s foreign direct investment in 2025 and the first quarter of 2026; Moody’s rating; country risk analysis, the June de 2025 judicial reform and nearshoring perspectives consulted in English on August 19, 2026. Image: Wiper México / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
