Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security officials sometime next week “to discuss further actions that can be taken together to address current border challenges,” the White House said.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden spoke with Lopez Obrador on Thursday and that both leaders “agreed that additional enforcement actions are urgently needed so that key ports of entry can be reopened across our shared border.”
But Lopez Obrador told the Associated Press that he won't help the U.S. until Biden starts talking to Cuba and Venezuela.
“We are going to help, as we always do,” López Obrador said. “Mexico is helping reach agreements with other countries, in this case Venezuela.”
“We also want something done about the (U.S.) differences with Cuba,” López Obrador said. “We have already proposed to President (Joe) Biden that a U.S.-Cuba bilateral dialogue be opened.”
“That is what we are going to discuss, it is not just contention,” he said at his daily morning press briefing.
The "contention" is the routes that migrants take to travel to the southern border. The U.S. wants Lopez Obrador "to do more to block migrants at its southern border with Guatemala, or make it more difficult to move across Mexico by train or in trucks or buses," according to the AP.
The Mexican president also wants "more development aid" to the countries that migrants are fleeing.
Mexico is apparently offering to negotiate with Venezuela, whose people make up a large part of the surge of migrants at the U.S. southwestern border. That surge has led U.S. officials to pull immigration officers away from two Texas border rail crossings that are vital to Mexico’s economy.
López Obrador has long opposed U.S. sanctions on Cuba, whose migrants are also streaming to the U.S. border. And the Mexican president has long pressed the United States to contribute to a tree-planting program and to youth scholarship and apprentice programs that he has been pushing for Central America.
López Obrador said the development aid will help stem residents' need to migrate.
Mexico does very little to interdict migrants on their journey across Mexico. The reason is simple. They don't want the migrants to stay in Mexico and more than the U.S. wants them.
So Lopez Obrador will give lip service to tightening travel restrictions in Mexico while at the same time facilitating their travel through his country.
But the price he's demanding to help the U,S, get control of the border is too high. Does the Mexican president want to control U.S. foreign policy as well as the border?
Mexico is apparently offering to negotiate with Venezuela, whose people make up a large part of the surge of migrants at the U.S. southwestern border. That surge has led U.S. officials to pull immigration officers away from two Texas border rail crossings that are vital to Mexico’s economy.
López Obrador has long opposed U.S. sanctions on Cuba, whose migrants are also streaming to the U.S. border. And the Mexican president has long pressed the United States to contribute to a tree-planting program and to youth scholarship and apprentice programs that he has been pushing for Central America.
The current border crisis is not a matter of more aid or planting more trees. It's first, last, and always a government problem. Corrupt, oppressive, criminal politicians running constitutionally flawed governments are a recipe for drug gangs to move in and take over, buying off officials and murdering anyone who resists them.
The U.S. has good reasons not to talk with Cuba, among them the expropriation of tens of billions of dollars of U.S. property and several wanted fugitives who have taken refuge in Cuba. Cuba refuses to talk about either issue and until they do, the U.S. likely won't talk to them.
Venezuela is a far simpler problem. We have heavily sanctioned Caracas because President Maduro literally stole an election right under the noses of international observers. That fact doesn't seem to matter to Lopez Obrador, who accepts corrupt elections as a matter of course.
The closed border crossings are costing Mexican and American businesses billions of dollars. That fact should be enough to get Lopez Obrador to help Biden in any way he can to get control of the border.
