Mexico’s Lopez Obrador meets Biden amid tension over migration, fentanyl

López Obrador, the first modern Mexican leader to emerge from the leftist opposition, delights in tweaking the United States. On July 4, he proposed a campaign to dismantle the Statue of Liberty if a U.S. judge handed a life sentence to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

More serious was his snub of the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. The Mexican president announced he would skip the June event unless the leftist autocratic leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela were invited. Several Central American leaders followed his lead, casting a shadow over Biden’s premier gathering with Latin American leaders.

López Obrador’s boycott “has only further contributed to fears surrounding the shaky health of Mexico’s democracy and its partnership with the United States,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in the Mexican newspaper Reforma. (López Obrador, widely known as AMLO, said his critics in the U.S. Senate had “a lot of hate for the Cuban people.”)

AMLO is Mexico’s strongest president in decades. Some say he’s too strong.

Tuesday’s meeting marks the second face-to-face talks between the U.S. and Mexican presidents. They are expected to address several long-running concerns — migration, narcotics trafficking and the economy — as well as their sharp divisions over López Obrador’s nationalistic energy policies.

Biden, like Trump, has relied on Mexico to serve as a buffer as migration has surged through the hemisphere. The Democrat is under heavy pressure as midterm elections approach and detentions at the border hit record levels. López Obrador’s government has obliged, detaining nearly twice as many migrants in the first third of 2022 compared with the same period last year.

Yet at the same time, a growing number of Mexicans are headed to the United States, reversing a decade-long decline in such migration ending in 2019. Mexicans now make up the largest group of people apprehended at the U.S. southwest border, with more than 560,000 detentions in the first eight months of fiscal 2022 — a 35 percent jump over the same period in 2021.

López Obrador is keen to obtain more temporary U.S. work visas for Mexicans and Central Americans, and the two countries are working on streamlining procedures for applicants.

The U.S. government is also worried about skyrocketing drug-overdose deaths from fentanyl, most of which comes from Mexico. López Obrador has had an icy relationship with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, alleging it became too involved in Mexico’s domestic affairs during prior governments. For years, his government played down Mexico’s role in the fentanyl trade.

Yet it has dramatically stepped up raids on synthetic drug labs and seizures of fentanyl in recent months, in what has been perceived as a reaction to American pressure.

Roberto Velasco, chief of the North America bureau at the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said the move reflected Mexico’s concerns about the impact of synthetic drugs at home. “We are seeing growing use of fentanyl in our country,” although it’s still much less than in the United States, he said in an interview.

The war next door: conflict in Mexico is displacing thousands

López Obrador arrives at the meeting deeply concerned about inflation, which has rocketed to 7.99 percent, a 21-year high. The two presidents are expected to discuss how to ensure adequate supplies of grains, fertilizer and other agricultural goods as prices jump and shortages emerge around the globe.

While often described as a populist, the Mexican leader has pursued cautious fiscal policies and a stable peso, and supported the renovation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yet U.S. manufacturers, lawmakers and energy companies accuse López Obrador of contradicting the spirit of the new trade deal by seeking to limit competition, particularly in the electric power sector.

López Obrador tried last spring to reverse a 2013 reform that opened the state-run electricity sector to foreign investment, complaining it gave unfair advantages to the private firms, many of them providers of green energy. While that didn’t pass, international companies have complained that he’s delayed permits for renewable energy installations and taken other actions to stymie their growth.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s office said in a statement in March that it had “serious concerns with the deteriorating trajectory of Mexico’s energy policies.” Asked recently whether she would seek formal consultations with Mexico on its alleged violations of the trade agreement, she said: “I have made very clear that all options are on the table.”