Mexico

Mexico built Plan Kukulkan, a federal security operation that eventually ran to roughly 100,000 personnel, to guard the World Cup's stadiums and fan zones across Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. On 8 July that resourcing choice was tested when the cartel La Nueva Familia Michoacana hit the rural Guerrero hamlet of Guajes de Ayala with an aerial bomb dropped from a drone, sending around 70 women, children and elderly residents into an abandoned clinic for shelter; a resident said state police had been warned for weeks and ignored it .

Security analyst David Saucedo linked the village's exposure directly to the tournament deployment, arguing federal manpower had been concentrated on stadiums rather than rural policing. The episode became a touchstone for the wider question of who Plan Kukulkan was actually protecting, months after cartel violence had already killed at least 70 people in February.

Mexican crude shipments that had backstopped Cuba's thermal power fleet stopped within days of President Trump signing Executive Order 14380 on 29 January, which declared a national emergency over Cuba and threatened secondary tariffs on any country supplying the island's oil . Tariff exposure, not a formal embargo or a bilateral dispute with Havana, forced Mexico's hand.

The cutoff shows how a single US sanctions order can reshape one of Mexico's regional energy relationships without any direct confrontation between the two governments. Cuba's energy minister confirmed in May that Venezuelan supply had also stopped, since November 2025, leaving the island reliant on Russian tankers alone and Mexico's former role as a fuel backstop unfilled.

Mexico finished Group A with a perfect nine points, beating Czechia 3-0 in Guadalajara on 24 June to become the only side in the tournament to win all three group games . The run ended on 5 July, when Jude Bellingham struck twice inside 98 seconds at the Estadio Azteca to send England through 3-2 .

The defeat closed out Mexico's third home World Cup, after 1970 and 1986, without reaching a quarter-final for the first time since 1986, and Left the United States as the tournament's last standing co-host. It followed a tense build-up: a crowd crush on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma had killed four fans on 30 June, forcing the capital to nearly double policing before the Azteca fixture.