Mexico was the site of several advanced Amerindian civilizations -- including the Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec -- until Spain conquered and colonized the area in the early 16th century. Administered as the Viceroyalty of New Spain for three centuries, it achieved independence early in the 19th century. Elections held in 2000 marked the first time since Mexican Revolution in 1910 that an opposition candidate -- Vicente FOX of the National Action Party (PAN) -- defeated the party in government, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He was succeeded in 2006 by another PAN candidate Felipe CALDERON, but Enrique PEÑA NIETO regained the presidency for the PRI in 2012. Left-leaning anti-establishment politician and former mayor of Mexico City (2000-05) Andrés Manuel LÓPEZ OBRADOR, from the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), became president in 2018.

The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or T-MEC by its Spanish acronym) entered into force in 2020 and replaced its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico amended its constitution in 2019 to facilitate the implementation of the labor components of USMCA.

Mexico is currently the US's second-largest goods trading partner, after Canada. Ongoing economic and social concerns include low real wages, high underemployment, inequitable income distribution, and few advancement opportunities, particularly for the largely indigenous population in the impoverished southern states. Since 2007, Mexico's powerful transnational criminal organizations have engaged in a struggle to control criminal markets, resulting in tens of thousands of drug-related homicides and forced disappearances.

Mexican Space Agency (Agencia Espacial Mexicana or AEM; established 2010 and began operating in 2013)  (2024)

The AEM’s focus is on coordinating Mexico’s space policy and the country’s commercial space sector, including developing specialists, technologies, and infrastructure, and acquiring satellites; manufactures and operates communications and scientific satellites; conducts research in a range of space-related capabilities and technologies, including satellites and satellite payloads, telecommunications, remote sensing, robotics, Earth and weather sciences, astronomy, and astrophysics; has relations with a variety of foreign space agencies and commercial space industries, including those of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member states (particularly France, Germany, and the UK), India, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, and the US; leading member of the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE) (2024)