A visit that will be closely scrutinized. Joe Biden begins his first official visit to Mexico on Sunday with the persistent issue of record migration and overdoses by the thousands in the United States due to fentanyl, a synthetic drug produced by Mexican cartels, on the agenda.
The US president will begin his visit to Mexico, Washington’s fundamental partner, with a stopover in the border town of El Paso, in southern Texas, to silence the reproaches of his adversaries for never having set foot on the 3,100 km common border in two year term.
He will travel to Mexico City on Monday to meet with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with whom he will participate in a tripartite summit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday.
“Mexico is extremely relevant to address these two acute problems, which have become political vulnerabilities for Biden,” magistrate with AFP Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue institute.
high voltage countries
At a time when some 2.3 million arrests and deportation measures of undocumented immigrants have been made in 2022, Biden must show his strength if he decides to run for a second term.
Before going to El Paso, he has already announced a program that will allow up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to legally enter the United States each month.
This new quota applies to legal workers who have a sponsor in the United States, those who enter illegally still risk deportation.
Faced with more than 230,000 arrests of illegal candidates registered in November on the southern border of the United States, a record level, Joe Biden knows the limits of his program and criticizes the Republicans for blocking a more ambitious plan.
The visit will be high tension. In recent days, the arrest of the son of drug lord El Chapo has sparked violent protests across the country. Thousands of soldiers regained control of the city of Culiacán, in northwestern Mexico, on Friday, the scene of scenes of war the day before after the capture of Ovidio Guzmán.
deadly fentanyl
The bilateral meeting will also be marked by the tragedy of Fentanyl, a synthetic drug 50 times more powerful than heroin, whose production and trafficking are controlled by Mexican cartels with chemical precursors from China, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). .
Nearly two-thirds of the 108,000 overdose deaths recorded in the United States in 2021 involved synthetic opioids. And the amount of fentanyl seized in 2022 alone is more than it would take to kill the entire US population, according to the DEA.
The United States seeks to “expand the exchange of information” with Mexico on precursors and “strengthen prevention,” said the head of US diplomacy for Latin America, Brian Nichols.
Ecology also on the menu
However, the United States and Mexico announced in 2021 a change of focus in their anti-drug policy, focusing on the causes of trafficking after 15 years of purely military strategy. Since 2006, 340,000 people have died violently in Mexico and thousands more have disappeared, without the cartels having weakened.
In the midst of this bloodbath, the Mexican government has filed two lawsuits against the US arms industry, which it accuses of fueling violence by drug traffickers in its territory.
Climate change will also be on the agenda, with the two countries announcing at COP 27 a $48 billion renewable energy investment project in which Mexico pledged to extend its greenhouse gas reduction targets by 2030.
Exploitation of lithium, relocation of electric vehicle assembly plants, construction of six solar power plants on the Mexican side are intended to articulate with the semiconductor cluster under construction in Arizona, as part of Washington’s strategy to reduce its dependence on Asia for the manufacture of electronic components.
Source: BFM TV
