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Migration, security and climate change will be the focus of a meeting between the presidents of Mexico and the United States.

Migration, security and climate change will be the focus of a meeting between the presidents of Mexico and the United States.

The presidents of the United States and Mexico seek to make progress Monday on strengthening economic integration, fighting drug cartels and managing immigration, even as tensions over Mexican energy policy weigh on joint cooperation.

With President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard Leading the way, the Latin American country’s government set the bilateral agenda after Biden’s arrival in Mexico City on Sunday night for a North American Leaders Summit.

The president accompanied Biden from the airport to his hotel and said the two discussed the issues they would discuss on Monday, including regional economic cooperation and migration.

Integration needs to be strengthened”, said the president in his morning conference, where he assured that he hoped to reach “very good agreements” with his counterpart.

López Obrador will host Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the first summit between the three since late 2021, which runs through Wednesday. The latter will arrive later on Monday, and trilateral talks are scheduled for Tuesday.

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reported that the US president believed he would have “commitments for stronger cooperation” to address fentanyl, a synthetic opioid to which thousands of deaths are attributed in the North American country.

Mexican security forces last week arrested a major drug trafficker, Ovidio Guzmán, the son of jailed kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is wanted in the United States.

The three leaders are expected to talk about deepening economic ties even as disagreements linger over López Obrador’s nationalistic energy policies that prompted Washington and Ottawa to file a formal trade complaint in July.

Since the pandemic COVID-19 hit supply chains, policymakers have intensified calls for companies to relocate business from Asia to strengthen the economic zone under the US-Canada-Mexico (TMEC) trade agreement.

domestic policy

López Obrador also raised alarm in the United States with a plan to ban imports of transgenic corn. Mexico has agreed to delay the ban until 2025, but the issue is likely to come to light. The three partners have also disagreed over the cars’ rules of origin.

Trade tensions over Mexico’s cars, customs rules, GM corn and energy policies are already high and could escalatewarned Jake Colvin, president of the Washington-based National Foreign Trade Council.

To create a North American corridor to overtake China, the United States, Canada, and Mexico must be on the same economic page.”, he added.

The Mexican president, who defines himself as a leftist, maintains that his energy policy is a matter of national sovereignty, arguing that previous governments skewed the market to favor private interests.

The United States and Canada allege that their companies have been harmed by the campaign of the Mexican president to give control of the market to state energy companies with liquidity problems; the dispute has dulled investment prospects.

Trudeau told Reuters on Friday that he would argue that resolving the energy dispute would help bring more foreign capital to the Latin American nation and was confident of making progress.

As part of this impulse, López Obrador, who in June rejected the invitation of Biden to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles to protest the exclusion of the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, announced that on Monday his plan to promote solar energy in northern Mexico would be discussed, for which he seeks to secure the financial support of State.

Mexico has also urged Washington to commit funds to Central America and southern Mexico to boost development and stem migration from what has long been a poor region and to make it easier for immigrants to get jobs in the United States.

Christopher Landau, the US ambassador to Mexico under former President Donald Trump, noted that domestic politics made it difficult to find compromises on energy and migration.

There is no obvious agreement that satisfies all their local interests (…) but I think it is in their internal interest to say that they get along well “argument.

Source: Reuters

Source: Gestion

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