President Claudia Sheinbaum delivered her second annual government report from the National Palace on Tuesday, and posted the scene herself: "Segundo Informe de Gobierno. Palacio Nacional." The investor brief wrote itself. Foreign direct investment in the first half of 2026 reached $35 billion, up 12 percent from the same stretch of 2024. [1] She also said 75 percent of the natural gas Mexico consumes is imported, and that 17 Mexican nationals have died in U.S. detention facilities and operations. [1] Those sentences shared an hour.
Mexico Business News treated the address as a scorecard for manufacturers and energy investors: Plan México, a 60-day single window, 32,000 megawatts of planned grid additions, PEMEX and CFE restored as public firms. [1] Second-quarter GDP grew 1.4 percent quarter on quarter and 1.9 percent year on year. [1] Employment reached 60 million people at a 2.7 percent unemployment rate. [1] Federal revenue hit a record 6.046 trillion pesos in 2025. [1] The peso sat near 17 to the dollar. [1] That is the sovereignty speech as a spreadsheet.
The energy chapter is the tell. Sheinbaum said constitutional changes had recovered "energy sovereignty," with 32,000 additional megawatts due by the end of her term and renewables rising from 24 percent to 38 percent of the mix. [1] Six combined-cycle plants adding 3,000 megawatts are finished. [1] Thirty-eight mixed-investment generation projects, 54 percent public and 46 percent private, add 8,025 megawatts of generation and more than 2,500 megawatts of storage, backed by $10.6 billion. [1] PEMEX debt is down $20 billion, output at 1.77 million barrels a day. [1] Then the import number: 75 percent of consumed natural gas still comes from abroad, 90 percent of that from unconventional sources, and a government committee has recommended against unconventional extraction in the Tampico-Misantla basin. [1] A National Gas Pipeline Plan of 141 billion pesos runs through 2030. [1] Sovereignty, in this hour, is a pipeline still fed from the other side of the border.
On security she reported a 51 percent drop in intentional homicides since taking office, 44 fewer killings a day, and high-impact crime down 54 percent from 2018 levels. [1] Since October 2024, authorities have detained 63,000 people linked to organized crime, including 207 priority targets. [1] On the United States she named tariffs on vehicles, steel, and aluminum, and oil-price pressure from the Iran war, as "difficult circumstances," then said the economy held. [1] She said her government has formally protested the 17 detention deaths through diplomatic and legal channels. [1] She closed that Mexican sovereignty "is not negotiated, not surrendered and not shared." [1]
The balcony post is the official tape. The investor brief is the MSM tape. The import share and the detention deaths are the sentences that do not fit either. A reader who only sees the FDI round number will miss that the same report still buys three-quarters of its gas, and still counts Mexican dead in someone else's jails.
-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo