Amlo unscathed after Trump meeting but snags cameo role in US election
It was a high-stakes encounter for a man taking his first foreign trip as president of Mexico: a visit to the White House to meet a man who has made reviling Mexicans a central pillar of his rhetoric.
After the meeting on Wednesday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lauded Donald Trump in Spanish for showing “respect” to Mexico and “not treating us like a colony”.
The comments caused some back home to cringe. Critics say that López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has meekly agreed to US demands to step up migration enforcement, and accepted Trump’s policy of sending asylum seekers to await their hearings in Mexico.
But Amlo also won praise for voicing support for Mexican migrants in the US – and escaping relatively unscathed from his encounter with Trump.
Trump showed “an unusual courtesy to his peer” and“@lopezobrador gave a speech of historic, political and diplomatic depth as the representative of a free, dignified, democratic and sovereign country,” tweeted Álvaro Delgado Gómez, columnist with the newspaper El Heraldo de México.
Mostly, however, Amlo won plaudits for simply avoiding humiliation.
“Trump surprised us in a good way: he behaved,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst. “He didn’t score any goals against Amlo. It was Amlo who scored an own goal, when he talked about ‘respect’ and ‘understanding’. That was unnecessary and excessive, and provided the fodder Trump’s campaign was looking for electorally.”
The visit underscored the surprisingly warm personal relations between the austere Mexican and his US counterpart. “The predictions were wrong,” Amlo told reporters. “We didn’t fight. We’re friends, and will continue to be friends.”
Reactions to the trip reflected Mexico’s own political polarization. A pre-trip poll published by the newspaper El Financiero showed 59% support for travelling to Washington, though 85% of Mexicans disapproved of Trump.
Amlo remains relatively popular – despite polls showing worries over his handling of issues like crime, the economy and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Observers say Amlo supporters were simply backing the president on the Washington trip rather than expressing an opinion on the propriety of visiting Trump.
“People aren’t evaluating the impact of the trip itself, rather the president’s decision to go to Washington,” said Carlos Heredia, professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics. “If our president wanted to go to Mars, there would be majority support without discussing why he needed to go.”
The trip to Washington was already something of a paradox: a celebration of North American free trade by two protectionists, and a Mexican leader who rails against “neoliberalism” praising billionaires for their “social concern”.
“It’s strange to hear the 1970s anti-imperial left squarely defend Trump,” tweeted José Antonio Crespo, a historian and political analyst, who noted that the Mexican left would routinely criticize previous presidents as “servile” for their eagerness to remain on good terms with the US.
North of the border, Democrats blasted the visit as unnecessarily helping Trump’s re-election. Joe Biden tweeted: “Trump launched his 2016 campaign by calling Mexicans rapists … We need to work in partnership with Mexico. We need to restore dignity and humanity to our immigration system.”
Trump’s campaign was quick to produce videos of Trump welcoming Amlo to the White House and spread them on social media – something that didn’t go unnoticed in Mexico.
“Trump has capitalised on this according to script. And he’ll continue doing so until election day,” Heredia said. “If voters say, ‘you’re a racist,’ he can now answer, ‘Look, I have the president of Mexico at my side … If I were a racist, he wouldn’t be here.’”