Biden, Mexico relations are rocky
Migrant crisis could hurt both presidencies
WASHINGTON – When President Joe Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris in March to address the surge of migrants seeking to enter the United States, he also enlisted her help to solve a thorny diplomatic problem: improving relations with Mexico.
A smoother relationship with Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador could be a game changer for efforts to stem the flow of migrants. But López Obrador, a populist leader also known by his initials AMLO, has been slow to warm up to Biden and his team. Harris had a virtual meeting Friday and will have another chance to make inroads during a planned visit June 7-8.
It probably won’t be easy.
López Obrador’s lack of enthusiasm for close ties with Biden was evident months before the Democratic president took office. Last summer, López Obrador, who had forged an unlikely friendship with President Donald Trump, traveled to Washington to mark the enactment of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). He lavished praise on Trump for “respecting” Mexico but snubbed senior Democrats and skipped the chance to meet then-candidate Biden.
In a more pointed diplomatic jab, López Obrador was one of the last foreign leaders to congratulate Biden on his election win and even as he did so, he issued a chilly salvo making clear he wanted the incoming president to stay out of Mexico’s affairs.
More recently, López Obrador piled on as Republicans blamed Biden for an influx of migrants, particularly unaccompanied minors, showing up at the southern border, undercutting the Biden administration’s defense that the increase was the result of a seasonal surge compounded by the coronavirus pandemic and a series of natural disasters.
“Expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants,” López Obrador said in a March 23 press conference. “And this has caused Central American migrants, and also (migrants) from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so.”
But the Biden administration has a huge stake in better ties as he and López Obrador look to resolve a migration problem that could damage both of their presidencies.
Harris takes on diplomatic negotiations with Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle countries – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – to address the root causes of migration. It is a role Biden similarly played under former President Barack Obama.
Harris is seeking Mexico’s continued cooperation on immigration enforcement amid a surge of illegal border crossings after Biden reversed Trump-era, hardline immigration policies, some of which were brokered with López Obrador.
The vice president also pitched Mexico on a regional approach to limit migration by investing in anti-corruption and economic programs in Central American countries as well as look for commitments on climate change and labor protections.
“We must continue to do our work in a way that is both bilateral and multilateral. It is our intention and it has been a guiding principle of us that we are going to do this work in a way that internationalizes our approach,” Harris told López Obrador. “That reaches out to our allies, to our friends around the globe in the mutual interest that we all should have to address the root causes in the Northern Triangle.”
He acknowledged that “relations were not completely positive between our countries” when he first met with Biden in March, but he assured Harris the U.S. could count on Mexico when it comes to migration policy.
‘America is back’
Biden has promised a sharp break from his predecessor’s foreign policy, trumpeting the message “America is back.”
That pledge has done little to win over López Obrador, who established a rapport with Trump despite the Republican president’s 2016 campaign rhetoric attacking Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murderers” and his promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border – which he said Mexico should pay for.
While Trump and López Obrador made strange bedfellows, the pair found a balance in a transactional approach on immigration. López Obrador would help stem the tide of Central American migrants, including allowing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico border towns for U.S. court appearances, and Trump would turn a blind eye to Mexican domestic issues.
David Rothkopf, author of “Traitor: A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump,” said he doesn’t expect Biden’s relationship with López Obrador to be as easy as it was under Trump.
“AMLO’s populist, nationalistic thrust is one that is very much tied to the idea of shaking off the influence of the giant to the north,” Rothkopf said. “And he’s essentially adopted a Trumpian lens through which to see the relationship ... which translates to, ‘We don’t want you to call us out on our problem areas.’”
The number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border climbed 71% in March, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, making it the busiest month in nearly two decades. As the numbers swelled, Democrats and Republicans alike criticized overcrowded facilities as officials scrambled to house migrants in sites large enough to accommodate coronavirus restrictions.
In March, the U.S. struck a deal with Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to tighten their borders and provide more troops to curb the tide of migrants. Mexico doubled the number of its detentions and has maintained a deployment of 10,000 security personnel at the border.
Mexico also agreed to close its northern and and southern borders to nonessential travel – a step the country had never taken in the year since the coronavirus spiraled out of control. Barely an hour later, Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard confirmed the U.S. agreed to “loan” Mexico 2.5 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be approved for federal emergency authorization.
Biden has also revived a strategy he pursued as vice president: emphasizing a diplomatic approach by addressing root causes driving migrants to head north. In remarks to the Conference on Americas, Harris outlined root causes as corruption, violence, poverty as well as a lack of economic opportunity, climate resilience and good governance.
Biden is seeking $4 billion in aid to Central American countries over the next four years, funneling a majority of the money to community organizations rather than government officials to avoid concerns over endemic corruption. Harris announced $310 million in humanitarian relief and food aid for Northern Triangle countries during a virtual meeting with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in April. Trump cut all foreign assistance to Northern Triangle countries in 2019.
A game of ‘high-level chess’
Joe Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, described diplomatic moves between the U.S. and Mexico as “high-level chess between one side that has a bunch of queens and the other side that has a bunch of pawns.”
“A pawn can take down a queen, and Mexico has some power,” Heyman said. “But the United States has this incredible economic threat. There isn’t a place in Mexico that is not completely tied to the U.S. economy.”
The countries’ economies are deeply intertwined. In 2019, Mexico surpassed China as the United States’ top trading partner. More than $677 billion in goods and services flow back and forth annually – roughly $1.8 billion per day, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
The United States buys roughly 80% of Mexico’s exports, accounting for about 39% of Mexico’s gross domestic product, according to a June report by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. is also Mexico’s most important source of foreign direct investment, with $100.9 billion invested in 2019 largely in the manufacturing, finance and insurance sectors.
Meanwhile, Mexico buys more U.S.made goods than any country after Canada.
Immigration, which has emerged as an Achilles heel for Biden in his first months, gives Mexico leverage as López Obrador looks to court the U.S. on foreign investment, more vaccines and funding for the Mexican president’s reforestation program in exchange for an eventual six-month U.S. work visa.
López Obrador is known for his populist style – though unlike Trump, he ran as a leftist politician. Both men consider the media an enemy and lash out at opponents using unflattering names, which often stick. Within Mexico, the populism that has come to define López Obrador’s political brand.
But his populist moves have been more than tinsel: Analysts say López Obrador has been systematically weakening institutions key to Mexico’s hardwon democracy.
Heading into the June 6 midterm elections, López Obrador has sought to discredit the country’s electoral institute known as the INE. In April he backed a decision by the Senate, where his party holds more seats than any other, to extend the Supreme Court chief justice’s term for two more years – a move that critics say could position López Obrador to propose reelection for presidents, who can now serve one sixyear term.
López Obrador recently bristled at the State Department’s annual human rights report, which warned of Mexico’s gang violence and limits on press freedom and criticized the country’s prison and detention center conditions
“We can’t opine on what happens in another country so why is the U.S. government opining on questions that are purely Mexican matters?” he asked.
Increases in migrant flows have resulted in another attempted crackdown by Mexican immigration officials, especially in the country’s south, according to Sergio Martin, the head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Mexico.
“These actions will not stop migration on the other side,” he said. “They are affecting and they are exposing more violence to the most vulnerable population among the migrant population.”
Mexico has already been under the microscope for its treatment of migrants. Local police officers were implicated in the massacre of 19 people, most of them Guatemalan migrants, in January just south of the Texas-Mexico border. The killing of a Salvadoran woman in the resort city of Tulum on March 27 unleashed protests nationwide.
López Obrador’s supporters are increasingly wary of U.S. intervention under Biden, particularly on human rights concerns and climate change. Some supporters openly backed Trump in the 2020 U.S. election. The Mexican president’s allies often see any support for Biden as a plea for U.S. meddling in Mexican matters.
“When people comment on Biden, they always relate it to Mexican politics,” said Brenda Estefan, a former security attache at the Mexican Embassy in Washington. “They actually take Trump’s words and say things like ‘Sleepy Joe,’” she said, relating what she sees in social media reactions to her international affairs commentary. “People who are for AMLO are against Biden.”
But Biden has a personal history with Mexico that stretches across his tenure in the Senate and as vice president when he visited Mexico four times.
Obama tasked Biden with confronting a similar crisis in 2014, when officials saw more families and unaccompanied minors coming from Northern Triangle countries showing up at the border. The then-vice president helmed the administration’s $1 billion Alliance for Prosperity plan, which sought to address the root causes of migration and invest in police training and judicial reforms in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Biden’s experience makes him wellpositioned to restore trust, said Anthony Wayne, U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015. “He oversaw the high level economic dialogue with Mexico, which was the most productive mechanism we had for dealing with a lot of interrelated and complicated economic and border management issues,” Wayne said. “The big challenge right now is to build a trusting relationship and there’s some really difficult issues to work through in that relationship.”
Harris, for her part, convened a Cabinet secretaries meeting to discuss how each agency can play a part and has weekly lunches with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a White House official said. Harris also regularly consults Biden on his own experience, the official said.
Harris is “realistic” and understands that “if it were a problem that could’ve been solved overnight, it would’ve been solved a long time ago,” according to the official.