U.S. officials fly
Top U.S. envoy joins Homeland chief in bid to repair soured ties
to Mexico City in an attempt to repair the U.S. relationship with Mexico, which went into a tailspin when President Trump used anti-Mexican rhetoric during his campaign.
MEXICO CITY — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived in Mexico City on Wednesday on a mission to mend deeply frayed relations with the United States’ southern neighbor.
John Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security, was arriving separately in a bid to repair the once-close relationship, which began deteriorating when President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Mexico during his election campaign.
Days after he took office, Trump argued on Twitter with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto over Trump’s demand that Mexico pay billions of dollars to build a massive wall along the border. The Mexican leader rebuffed Trump by canceling a planned visit to the White House.
Tillerson and Kelly on Thursday will sit down with Peña Nieto and with Mexico’s secretaries of foreign affairs, the interior, finance, national defense and Navy. In addition to the wall, they are expected to discuss trade, counter-terrorism, immigration and other key bilateral concerns.
In Mexico, the perceived enmity from the new U.S. president has caused profound resentment and calls for Pena Nieto’s administration to take a more forceful stand in bilateral affairs.
Yet Mexican officials must walk a fine line: appeasing get-tough calls from an irate domestic audience without further alienating the leaders of Mexico’s key trading partner at a time when the nation’s economy is already shaky.
The talks take place under a fresh cloud: This week the Trump administration released aggressive new guidelines on immigration enforcement, signed by Kelly, that could lead to deportation of millions of Mexicans living illegally in the United States.
The policy calls for using local and state authorities to enforce federal immigration laws, deporting even people who commit minor crimes, jailing more people while they await deportation hearings and trying to send illegal border crossers back to Mexico even if they aren’t Mexican.
The move received blanket coverage in the Mexican press, all of it condemnatory.
The bilateral meetings are the first since Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray visited Washington in January and met with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a key adviser on foreign affairs.
Videgaray later said the U.S.-Mexico relationship is at a crossroads.
“This is a moment of definition: The decisions we make in the coming months will determine how Mexico and the United States coexist for the next decades,” he said last week at the Group of 20 economic summit.
In addition to his vow to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it, Trump has threatened to slap a punitive tax on imports, including cars, that are made in Mexico. He also has vowed to scrap or renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 deal that eliminated almost all tariffs among the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
NAFTA is credited with vastly expanding trade — about $1.4 billion in goods now cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day — but at the cost of some U.S. jobs; the agreement made it easier for U.S. companies to move factories to Mexico.
In response to Trump, some Mexicans have called for national boycotts of U.S. brands and goods, using hashtags including #AdiosStarbucks, #AdiosWalmart, #AdiosCocacola and #A di os Product os Gringos, while lawmakers introduced a bill to stop buying U.S. corn. Protesters formed human chains last weekend along parts of the border where Trump has vowed to build a wall.
Some Mexican officials also have countered with threats to end cooperation on joint efforts that target drug trafficking, illegal immigration and organized crime. Mexico has prevented thousands of Central Americans from flooding U.S. border crossings and has allowed extradition of drug lords, including Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to the United States.
One Mexican lawmaker, Sen. Gabriela Cuevas, questioned this week why Mexico should continue its policy of deporting U.S.-bound Central American migrants on behalf of Washington.
“We have been cooperating with United States for many years on these issues, because they asked us to, and because we have a friendly, trustful relationship,” former Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda recently told CNN. “If that relationship disappears, the reasons for cooperation also disappear.”
Mexico and the rest of Latin America could turn from Washington toward an eager-to-please China. That could cost the United States economically and in terms of strategic power.
“We are now deeply concerned to see this (U.S.Mexico) foundation shaken,” six former U.S. ambassadors to Mexico, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote in a letter published this month on the Wilson Center website.