Mexico and Brazil are becoming increasingly isolated on a continent that is responding almost entirely to the baton of Donald Trump, and a harsher landscape to the north and south is forcing them to look to each other. Against that backdrop, Mexican foreign secretary Roberto Velasco traveled to Brasília on Thursday to co-chair, with his counterpart Mauro Vieira, the sixth meeting of the Mexico-Brazil Binational Commission, “the main mechanism for political dialogue and bilateral cooperation between the two countries,” the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs said. The moment is especially sensitive for Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is facing reelection and is in the midst of a growing rift with the U.S. president after the cancellation of the Brazilian ambassador’s visa.

At a later meeting directly between Lula and Velasco — who attended on behalf of Claudia Sheinbaum — the officials discussed, among other things, the “state of democracy in Latin America,” the Brazilian leader later said, renewing his invitation for the Mexican president to visit Brazil. After the defeat of Gabriel Boric’s party in Chile in the spring and this summer’s setback for Gustavo Petro in Colombia, a Lula victory in the fall is more important than ever for Mexico. Even more so for Lula, who values Mexico’s support.

The Lula and Claudia Sheinbaum administrations are practically the last progressive strongholds in the region, the main bulwark against interventionist ambitions coming from the Anglosphere, which seeks to exert pressure on both countries. Both have faced tariff threats from Trump, carried out against Brazil twice: a 50% tariff a year ago and another 25% rate this summer. Mexico has fared better, but the threat of trade punishments as political pressure forces it to stay vigilant and look for allies abroad. Brazil is the most natural partner because of its economic clout and its ideological alignment.

Efforts are under way on both fronts. Brazil’s Petrobras and Mexico’s Pemex, the two largest oil companies in Latin America, signed a cooperation agreement in June to explore waters in the Gulf of Mexico for oil, another topic discussed Thursday at the binational working table. The autonomy of the region’s two largest economies is as important as containing the far right. According to Brazilian government figures, 2025 projections point to trade between the two nations totaling $13.9 billion. Brazil is also the largest Latin American exporter to the Mexican market, and Mexico is the second-largest exporter to Brazil.

In their ability to boost those figures, both countries are also defending national sovereignty, the axis of Mexican foreign policy and the principle once again shaping the continent’s geopolitics. Sheinbaum is fighting to prevent Trump’s interventionism in his crusade against drug trafficking, and Lula faces the explicit support given by Trump to former president Jair Bolsonaro — jailed for an attempted coup — and to the rest of his family. The 50% tariff imposed the previous year, in fact, sought unsuccessfully to prevent Bolsonaro’s conviction; he is serving a 27-year sentence. Now his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, will run against Lula in the October elections.

In the context of the upcoming elections, Lula described Trump’s latest actions as a “deliberate escalation of hostile measures” that, he argued, can only be understood in ideological terms. The United States has just canceled the visa of Brazil’s ambassador, Maria Luiza Viotti — in response, U.S. officials said, to Lula’s government delaying approval of Washington’s designated ambassador to Brazil. Washington also criticized the refusal of visas to two diplomats who wished to visit the country. The Latin American argument was that those moves aimed to encourage Brazil’s far right and cast doubt on the credibility of the country’s electoral system.

The tension between the two leaders is total, and they speak bluntly of their mutual rejection. Sheinbaum is more subtle; Mexico shares a 1,954 miles (3,000 kilometer) border with its northern neighbor and Sheinbaum does not want to provoke Trump any further. Still, the chessboard forces positions to be taken, and the Mexican president is raising her international profile — a signal of distance from her predecessor, fellow Morena party member Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who rarely traveled abroad.

Sheinbaum has attended various forums and in April answered the call of Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to attend the Fourth Meeting in Defense of Democracy, where she stood with the region’s progressive leaders. A month later, she reaffirmed a united front with Lula against U.S. pressure on Colombia and Cuba. In barely a couple of months, however, Petro had already fallen out of the group photo. Efforts now focus on keeping Lula in that picture, with whom Mexico is also seeking to promote Chilean Michelle Bachelet’s candidacy for UN secretary-general. Anything could help in an increasingly uneven scenario. The leaders have not yet fully tapped the potential of the bilateral relationship, and that may be the last lifeline for progressives facing the region’s rightward shift.