The North American Leaders' Summit marks Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's first meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It’s also just his third trip outside the country since taking office in December, 2018.HENRY ROMERO/Reuters
As Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador prepares for the first North American Leaders’ Summit since 2016, economic integration, migration and public health will be high on the agenda.
But in the lead-up to the meeting, the inward-looking, populist leader – commonly known as AMLO – has mused about advancing international versions of his idiosyncratic domestic programs. And he’s certainly expected to be the outlier, a politician whose sympathies lie more with Latin American leftists than with the cosmopolitan leaders of Canada and the United States.
“He doesn’t feel any affinity for the idea of North America or for the idea of Mexico as part of North America,” said Barbara Gonzalez, a political analyst in Monterrey, Mexico. “Relations with the United States and Canada are a necessary evil.”
The trilateral summit marks AMLO’s first meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It’s also just his third trip outside the country since taking office in December, 2018.
Like his counterparts, AMLO has spoken of North America as a regional bulwark in a turbulent global economy. And the meeting Thursday in Washington comes as topics such as nearshoring – bringing manufacturing and supply chains closer to markets – heat up amid the pandemic recovery.
Still, Canada and Mexico head to the summit with their own suite of bilateral issues – and seemingly little in common.
“What’s bringing the countries together is the Washington vision of promoting the regional bloc,” said Brenda Estefan, a former security attaché at the Mexican embassy in Washington. “We’re talking about three of the biggest economies in the world.”
Mexico is concerned about guns pouring across the border and into the hands of drug cartels, having recently filed a suit in a U.S. court against American gun manufacturers. It has also pressed the U.S. to provide COVID-19 vaccines – along with allowing travel privileges for citizens vaccinated with Russian and Chinese vaccines not approved by the WHO – and wants to keep the border open.
The U.S., meanwhile, wants continued Mexican co-operation on slowing the flow of migrants through Mexican territory, along with stopping fentanyl and other drugs from crossing the border.
But the relationship has turned somewhat tense under AMLO, who showed more of a fondness for former president Donald Trump – a fellow populist who also played down the threat posed by COVID-19 – than Mr. Biden.
Mexico approved a law in December, 2020, curtailing the activities of foreign agents working on its soil, including Drug Enforcement Administration agents. AMLO has also railed against U.S funding for anti-graft and press freedom organizations, which the President considers hostile to his administration.
For their part, Canada and the U.S. have common cause in remedying an increasingly chilly business climate in Mexico, where the President has pursued a nationalistic energy policy. AMLO has also spooked foreign investors by putting construction projects that are already under way to snap plebiscites, including a partially finished Mexico City airport and a Constellation Brands brewery in Mexicali. (He objects to breweries being built on the border to exclusively export beer made with scarce Mexican water to the U.S.)
“Nobody is investing in Mexico now. Nobody is thinking of going into Mexico,” said Jorge Guajardo, senior director at McLarty Associates in Washington and a former Mexican ambassador to China.
“They’re trying to protect their investments if they are already there or they’re staying out. Nobody is considering new investments there.”
Climate policy could also become a sore point in trilateral relations.
Both Ottawa and Washington are also voicing concerns about the curtailment of clean energy investments in Mexico. The President is pushing a reform of the electricity sector that would force the state-owned utility to use power from its own, often more polluting plants instead of privately operated projects producing renewable energy.
AMLO did not attend the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. But he claimed a tree-planting initiative highlighted at the summit was inspired by his own program, Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life), which pays Mexicans in rural areas a stipend to plant fruit and timber trees. He even promoted the program as a solution for slowing migration from Central America and as a climate change mitigation measure to U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. “We all need to pay attention to what [AMLO] is doing here,” Mr. Kerry said last month in Chiapas state. “This is not only an issue of reforestation, it’s a program focused on the people.”
Unfortunately, the program has been accused of inadvertently sparking deforestation, as some farmers allegedly razed their properties so they could plant new trees and collect the stipend.
For some observers, Mexico’s continued co-operation with the U.S. on issues such as migration and trade ties reflects the rough realities of geography – even if AMLO rails against the neoliberal agendas of his predecessors.
“He accepts a geographic fate as much as he hates it,” said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “All our advantages are northward.”
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