Sheinbaum says Washington is meddling. The river does not care who is right.

Claudia Sheinbaum used her morning conference to say the quiet part in a complete sentence: the United States is trying to meddle in Mexican politics. The fuse was a State Department visa pulled from the son of her predecessor and mentor. The powder was months of pressure over cartels, migrants, and who gets to give orders south of the river.

She has spent a year advertising a “cool head.” Cool heads last until a family visa becomes a diplomatic instrument. Trump has called her a wonderful woman and, in the next clip, a leader too afraid of the cartels to think straight. Both lines are policy.

Coordination, she said, is not subordination.

This newspaper’s Mexico desk is a foreign desk, not a sister paper. The job is to file what Mexico says when Washington talks over it — and what Washington does when Mexico files a protest. Coordination, she said, is not subordination. The border still has to be crossed by trucks either way.