The U.S. president welcomes an unlikely ally to the White House

It additionally supplied one other uncommon sight: In recognition of pandemic-era well being and journey protocols, López Obrador was carrying a masks, an motion he has seldom taken in public, whilst an infection charges spike by the nation. Like Trump, he’s underneath fireplace at house after letting complacency outline his preliminary response to the coronavirus pandemic.

López Obrador’s scheduled Wednesday look at the White House gives a wierd coda to the ultimate months of the U.S. president’s time period. Trump’s marketing campaign was launched, notoriously, on anti-Mexican animus: He decried Mexican “rapists,” demonized a choose of Mexican heritage and repeatedly vowed to construct a wall between the United States and Mexico, which Mexico would pay for. The southern neighbor turned the locus of a lot that ails Trump’s America — a beneficiary of unfair commerce offers, the staging floor for “caravans” of unlawful infiltrators, the abode of menacing cartels and different felony parts.

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For AMLO — a standard nickname for the Mexican president — Trump, too, introduced a helpful political foil. Earlier than his election, he spoke of Trump as a “neo-fascist” he likened to Hitler and as “an irresponsible bully” whose border wall plans had been a “monument to hypocrisy and cruelty.”

However since López Obrador got here to energy it has been a special story. The populist presidents have cultivated a conspicuously amicable friendship, regardless of the borders that separate them and their politics. Below AMLO’s watch, Mexico has diverted safety sources to clamp down on migrants touring into the nation over its southern border. Going through the White House’s punitive tariffs, it agreed to the Trump administration’s controversial Migrant Safety Protocols, which power would-be asylum seekers to await their instances in typically unsafe camps in Mexico.

“We must always not have folks pressured to look ahead to asylum — attempting to discover security for themselves and their households — whereas camped outdoors in the parts for months at a time,” Sister Norma Pimentel, director of a Texas-based Catholic charity that works with migrants, wrote in a Washington Put up op-ed final week. “It’s opposite to our legal guidelines and the dictates of humanity.”

Democratic lawmakers in the United States warned that AMLO’s arrival risks politicizing the U.S.-Mexico relationship by shifting the focus away from the catastrophe of the pandemic. In Mexico, critics have additionally decried the visit, not least as a result of it seems to endorse an American president with an extended observe file of demonizing immigrants and insulting Mexicans. Others contend that Mexico has little selection however to discover widespread floor with the White House.

“We’re speaking about the strongest man on Earth, Mexico’s most vital commerce associate. You need to be on good phrases with that individual,” Viridiana Ríos, a Mexican political analyst, told the Guardian. “Sooner or later throughout his marketing campaign, [Trump] goes to scapegoat Mexico and Mexicans once more. However the key factor is coverage: Will we get extra out of a Donald Trump who feels empathy in the direction of AMLO and in the direction of his authorities, or not?”

In Washington, optimists hope that variations over immigration received’t disrupt proceedings. The two leaders will have a good time the begin of the United States-Mexico-Canada commerce deal, a reasonably altered model of the earlier North American Free Commerce Settlement, which Trump vociferously attacked in his campaigning. “The deal presents buyers certainty, however 95 p.c of it’s principally the identical as NAFTA,” Valeria Moy, an economist and professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, informed my colleagues.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau opted out of the gathering, putting the highlight firmly on the different two leaders. Some analysts see them as a pair of demagogic peas in a pod.

“Each search the absolute dominance of the govt department,” wrote the Mexican commentator Enrique Krauze. “They dismiss establishments and the rule of legislation. They assault the crucial unbiased press: Trump cries ‘pretend information,’ whereas López Obrador repeats, ‘I have other data.’ They scorn science and have confronted the pandemic irresponsibly and ineffectively, and with complete lack of empathy. Each domesticate a twisted cult of character.”

“The two leaders are ideological foes however in some methods kindred spirits: populists whose strengths are in the realm of symbols quite than the substance of presidency,” noted the Economist.

The significance of López Obrador’s go to is predicted to stay a largely symbolic one. Analysts don’t see the leaders rising from the proceedings with far more than what already has been achieved. And even then, progress stays considerably skinny.

“Economists say the commerce deal is unlikely to drive a lot new overseas funding, given uncertainty created by the López Obrador administration,” my colleagues reported. “He has canceled a brand new Mexico Metropolis airport challenge and a U.S. agency’s $1.four billion brewery in Mexicali on allegations of corruption, and backpedaled on reforms to open the power sector to extra personal funding.”

The upshot of this summit, argued Genaro Lozano, a professor at Mexico Metropolis’s Iberoamerican College, might have little to do with the principals concerned. “Each Republicans and Democrats want to take Mexico and the area as an entire extra critically,” he wrote in Americas Quarterly. “Integration between the two economies and societies is unstoppable and, if nothing else, Mexico must be a daily cease for U.S. presidential candidates, simply as the U.S. is a cease for any Mexican presidential candidate.”