Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador needled President Biden over high gas prices in the United States during a White House visit Tuesday intended to serve as a make-up meeting between the two leaders.
Mexico’s president meets Biden amid tension over migration, fentanyl
Speaking for 31 minutes to Biden’s 10, López Obrador said that gas in his country is roughly a dollar less than in the United States — the average U.S. gas price is now $4.66, according to AAA. He also noted that “since the energy crisis started, Mexico has sent 72 percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries.”
The meeting between the two men came a month after López Obrador boycotted Biden’s Western Hemisphere summit, and was intended to reflect something of a detente amid rising concerns over migration, trade and the flow of fentanyl across the southwest U.S. border.
Despite the tensions, López Obrador expressed optimism about the relationship between the two countries, telling Biden: “We trust you because you respect our sovereignty. … Count on our support and solidarity always.”
After boasting about the United States as the “fastest-growing” economy in the world, Biden returned the favor, calling Mexico a “great nation” and suggesting that both countries would benefit from a cooperative relationship.
“I do believe that working with you we can help solve both our problems,” Biden said.
Mexico is the second-biggest trading partner of the United States, and the countries are bound together by geography and culture — for better and for worse. Mexico is the top source of unauthorized migrants and illegal drugs reaching the United States, while flowing the other way are guns from the United States that are used in Mexico’s spectacular organized-crime violence.
Despite the neighbors’ common interests, relations have remained rocky, even as Biden has sought to chart a more diplomatic course than President Donald Trump.
López Obrador, the first modern Mexican leader to emerge from the country’s leftist movement, delights in tweaking the United States. On July 4, he proposed a campaign to dismantle the Statue of Liberty if a U.S. judge handed a life sentence to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
More serious was his snub of the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The Mexican president announced he would skip the June event unless the leftist autocratic leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were invited. Several Central American leaders followed his lead, casting a shadow over Biden’s premier gathering with Latin American leaders.
López Obrador’s boycott “has only further contributed to fears surrounding the shaky health of Mexico’s democracy and its partnership with the United States,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the Mexican newspaper Reforma. (López Obrador, widely known as AMLO, said his critics in the U.S. Senate had “a lot of hate for the Cuban people.”)
Tuesday’s meeting the second face-to-face talks between the U.S. and Mexican presidents. They long-running concerns — migration, narcotics trafficking and the economy — as well as their sharp divisions over López Obrador’s nationalistic energy policies.
The Mexican leader’s comment about cheaper Mexican gas “was a clear attempt to show that division between Mexican energy policy and U.S. energy policy and what AMLO sees as the implications of each policy,” said Jason Marczak, a Latin America scholar at the Atlantic Council.
Marczak said López Obrador has prioritized Mexico’s government-owned oil industry and favored development of fossil fuels over renewable energy, a very different approach from Biden’s green energy policies.
Biden, like Trump, has relied on Mexico to serve as a buffer as migration has surged through the hemisphere, and he faces heavy pressure as midterm elections approach and detentions at the border hit record levels. López Obrador’s government has obliged, detaining nearly twice as many migrants in the first third of 2022 compared with the same period last year.
Yet at the same time, a growing number of Mexicans are headed to the United States, reversing a decade-long decline in such migration ending in 2019. Mexicans now make up the largest group of people apprehended at the U.S. southwest border, with more than 560,000 detentions in the first eight months of fiscal 2022 — a 35 percent jump over the same period in 2021.
López Obrador is keen to obtain more temporary U.S. work visas for Mexicans and Central Americans, and the two countries are working on streamlining procedures for applicants.
“I say this in a very sincere fashion in the most respectful manner: It is indispensable for us to regularize and give certainty to migrants that have for years lived and worked in a very honest manner, and who are also contributing to the development of this great nation,” López Obrador told Biden.
The U.S. government is also worried about skyrocketing drug-overdose deaths from fentanyl, most of which comes from Mexico. López Obrador has had an icy relationship with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, alleging it became too involved in Mexico’s domestic affairs during prior governments. For years, his government played down Mexico’s role in the fentanyl trade.
Yet it has dramatically stepped up raids on synthetic drug labs and seizures of fentanyl in recent months, in what has been perceived as a reaction to American pressure.
Roberto Velasco, chief of the North America bureau at the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said the move reflected Mexico’s concerns about the impact of synthetic drugs at home. “We are seeing growing use of fentanyl in our country,” although it’s still much less than in the United States, he said in an interview.
López Obrador also arrived at Tuesday’s meeting deeply concerned about inflation, which has rocketed to 7.99 percent, a 21-year high.
While often described as a populist, the Mexican leader has pursued cautious fiscal policies and a stable peso, and supported the reworking of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yet U.S. manufacturers, lawmakers and energy companies accuse López Obrador of contradicting the spirit of the new trade deal by seeking to limit competition, particularly in the electric power sector.
López Obrador tried last spring to reverse a 2013 reform that opened the state-run electricity sector to foreign investment, complaining it gave unfair advantages to private firms, many of them providers of green energy. While that effort failed, international companies have complained that the Mexican president has delayed permits for renewable energy installations and taken other actions to stymie their growth.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s office said in a statement in March that it had “serious concerns with the deteriorating trajectory of Mexico’s energy policies.” Asked recently whether she would seek formal consultations with Mexico on its alleged violations of the trade agreement, she said, “I have made very clear that all options are on the table.”
After delivering a filibuster of sorts in the Oval Office for a half-hour, López Obrador finally joked, “President Biden, I’m about to finish,” prompting Biden to laugh and marvel at how a member of the press corps was still holding their phone aloft to record a video of the meeting.
Sheridan reported from Mexico City.
Source: WP
