“We are true partners,” proclaimed Joe Biden at the end of the Summit of North American Leaders on Tuesday in Mexico City. From this encounter between amigos leaning to the left, much civility and goodwill has publicly transpired, which is certainly no small thing after the sick years of the Trump presidency. However, the stakes – social, economic, migratory, climatic – remain, so to speak, whole at the end of the said summit, and the partnership vaunted by Mr. Biden will continue to stop dead where his protectionist policy of “Buy American” begins. “. Justin Trudeau and the Mexican Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) know this only too well. Partners, perhaps, but unequal partners. Speaking is the fact that hot, the American press was far less focused on Tuesday evening on the analysis of these key questions of continental scope than on the explosive revelation of domestic politics of the discovery of official and confidential documents in a former office. of Mr. Biden, when he was vice-president.
There is the inextricable “migration crisis”, of course. Mr. Biden had found it useful, before embarking for Mexico City, to stop in El Paso, Texas, the time to be photographed along the high and famous fence erected on the border with Mexico. Question to seem to take the matter seriously and to refute the charges of laxity that the Republicans throw at him on this subject. The wall, however, does not change much in the desire of Latin American migrants desperate to make their nest in the promised land. Proof of this is that the number of arrests at the American border has exploded in recent years, reaching a record number of 2.4 million in 2022.
In early January, Mr. Biden made a more concrete gesture by announcing a new program under which up to 30,000 people from Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela will be able to come to the United States each month and obtain a working license. The initiative was welcomed this week at the summit by AMLO, but everyone knows that it is not a panacea. A large part of the solution requires a major reform of the American immigration system, which cannot be done without the collaboration of the Republicans, from whom nothing can be expected. Domestic policy, when you hold us… The other part of the solution goes upstream, as AMLO has repeated, through an improvement in living conditions in Latin American countries hard hit by economic injustice, by the violence and, increasingly, by the impacts of global warming. There is a site that urgently calls for inter-American collaboration, beyond the pious hopes without a future that we have been harping on for decades.
A corollary and no less capital challenge: drug trafficking. The border wall has not changed much in this traffic either, whose major players today are two rival criminal networks, the Sinaloa Cartel and the New Generation Jalisco Cartel. In Mexico alone, the violence, which is not declining, leaves thousands of people dead and missing a year with impunity, a situation worse than at the worst of the war in Iraq in the 2000s. Behind the pomp of the Mexico summit , there is a Mexican state that is tottering — despite thirteen years of the “Merida Initiative”, supported to the tune of US$3 billion by the United States. In the north, the traffic of fentanyl, a synthetic product fifty times more powerful than heroin, has invaded the American streets – and Canada -, not without causing a serious public health crisis.
In this case, there is “an elephant in the room”: namely that the vast majority of weapons used in Mexico for criminal purposes come illegally from the United States. Here again, unhealthy considerations of American partisan politics make it impossible to tackle the problem.
Moreover, the Canada-Quebec issue of Roxham Road remains and will remain secondary in the eyes of the United States. It would be surprising if Mr. Biden’s March visit to Canada shakes things up.
It was a meeting that was basically trilateral only in appearance. Trudeau was an extra there. The summit will have happened essentially between MM. Biden and Lopez Obrador, whom other disputes separate, for example about the resistance – justified – that Mexico opposes to free trade dogmas in energy and agriculture.
Mexico does not weigh heavily in Canadian foreign policy, while Ottawa should logically give it a greater place, and not only in trade matters. He prefers to let it go — and let the Canadian mining companies, which play a murky role in Mexico — do it, when it would be to his advantage to expand his relations with Mexico City, so as to act as a counterweight to the American superpower. What untapped potential to see everything by this giant interposed.