A Joe Biden presidency could reestablish ties with Mexico, the United States’ main trading partner, which has suffered since Donald Trump made his first run for the White House, accusing Mexican migrants of rapists and arms traffickers and vowing to keep them. outside with a border wall.
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Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, was declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election by several major television networks on Saturday, despite President Trump filing lawsuits, alleging fraud without providing evidence and saying the race was “far from end up”.
A fixture of US politics for half a century, Biden has vowed to stop construction of Trump’s southwest border wall and pursue a “humane” immigration policy much more in line with that adopted by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Under Trump, Mexico has had to duck, pretend and move quickly to circumvent abrupt demands to stop illegal migration or face a drop of more than $ 600 billion in annual bilateral trade.
López Obrador has readily acceded to Trump’s immigration dictates, forging an uneasy relationship of some mutual convenience. In return, the Mexican leftist made room to change the rules on energy sector investment after the fact.
Diplomats, politicians and foreign policy experts believe that Biden would put risky politics and outright coercion behind him.
“There will be no more intimidation. No more using the White House pulpit to harass Mexico, whether on the trade agenda or on any of the other agendas, “said Andrés Rozental, former Mexican vice chancellor for North America.
“We will return to a more normal relationship. With problems and disputes over trade and other things, ”including security, he said. “But they will be treated as in the past.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s treatment of Mexico.
Despite Biden’s conciliatory proposals on migration, Mexican officials acknowledge that he will not want to face a sudden surge in migrants. Then Mexico would maintain firm control of its southern border, they say.
To complicate matters, tensions have surfaced after the arrest last month of a former Mexican defense minister in Los Angeles on the orders of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Mexico has publicly expressed its disgust at being kept in the dark about the operation to arrest former army chief Salvador Cienfuegos on drug trafficking charges, and López Obrador said this week that he wants to review cooperation between the United States and Mexico on anti-drug policy.
“This is one of the most direct challenges to the strategic and prospective synergistic relationship that has been developing between Mexico and the United States,” said Arturo Sarukhan, former Mexican ambassador to Washington.
The dispute has arisen at a time when bilateral security cooperation was already weakening after steady and substantial progress over two to three decades, Sarukhan said.
Still, it would be better managed under a Biden administration and “would not contaminate the entire bilateral agenda, simply because of the practical experience that Biden has had in the relationship between the United States and Mexico,” he added.
PRESSURE ON ENERGY POLICY
Biden is also facing pressure to moderate López Obrador’s push to empower Mexican state energy companies at the expense of private companies, which has called into question billions of dollars of foreign investment.
More than 40 members of the United States Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, wrote a letter to Trump on October 22 urging him to take a firmer line with López Obrador on his energy agenda.
López Obrador argues that corrupt governments in the past skewed the energy market in favor of profiting from private interests, both in oil production and renewable energy generation, an area in which Biden has pledged to create millions of new jobs. .
Both Mexican and American business groups hope Biden will urge López Obrador to honor his contracts, and the related litigation already threatens to create problems for Mexico.
At the same time, Biden is indebted to unions that want to enforce new, stricter labor laws under the new United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement drawn up by Trump that aims to curb the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico. .
That may still fit in with López Obrador’s priorities, as he vowed to strengthen workers’ rights and improve their wages, overseeing large increases in the minimum wage.
López Obrador has said he would work with whoever won the election, though he upset some US Democrats by making his only visit abroad as president to Trump in the White House in July, lavishing him with praise, images of which quickly became part of the American campaign. re-election campaign propaganda.
López Obrador’s cunning towards media criticism and the tendency to polarize the electorate has generated comparisons with the president of the United States. A former Mexican official said Trump had privately referred to López Obrador as “Juan Trump.”
But those close to López Obrador say the Mexican was always cautious, viewing Trump as dangerously unpredictable and prone to turning against Mexico at any time if it suited him.
Many officials in Mexico privately hope that diplomatic businesses will return to more traditional institutional paths.
“No (US) party is peach and cream for Mexico,” said Gabriela Cuevas, a congressman and foreign policy specialist for López Obrador’s ruling Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA). But Biden appears to be far more committed to promoting a multilateral environmental agenda than climate change skeptic Trump, which will benefit Mexico in the long run, Cuevas said.
“It will be good to have someone much more concerned about what is happening on the planet at the head of a country as important as the United States,” he said.
(Reporting by Dave Graham; Edited by Frank Jack Daniel and Tom Brown)
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