The visit made by several officials of the United States government to the National Palace to speak with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, passed with so much pain and glory that what caught the most attention of the press is that Ambassador Ken Salazar came out with the book Thank you! under the arm. However, the meeting with the White House advisor on territorial security, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, and the coordinator of Energy Infrastructure, Amos Hochstein, was of the highest relevance, not only because one of the most important geostrategic issues was addressed. for President Joe Biden, but because the ice chest where López Obrador had placed the bilateral relationship broke.
Sherwood-Randall is the official in charge of the relationship with López Obrador, who was accompanied by Hochstein, with whom she had a first four-hour meeting last October. Hochstein’s official position is coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security, which is an initiative that Biden promoted at the G-7 meeting in Germany in 2022 to strengthen supply chains that guarantee the supply of critical minerals to the United States. , such as lithium, to manufacture batteries and chips for industries. In this field, Biden has offered resources for technological investments in Mexico, vital in the game of geopolitics and the trade war with China.
As in the first meeting, nothing emerged from these conversations, although it can be conjectured that they are reaching an agreement because Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena held separate work meetings with White House advisors. More hermetic, because no official from either country leaked almost anything to the press, was the reestablishment of a fluid dialogue that was interrupted by instructions from the President, as a political signal of his great annoyance with the United States government.
López Obrador put the relationship with the Biden administration on a impasse as a consequence of the first revelations in the press of that country about the DEA investigations that pointed to financing of drug trafficking in his presidential campaigns of 2006 and 2012, which unhinged him and keeps him upset until now, due to the hashtag on social networks of # NarcoPresidente, who has not abandoned him in X’s trends since then. The instruction to the entire government was blunt: they could not have any contact with US officials. Telephone calls stopped being answered and bilateral contacts in various fields were suspended.
The only signs that things were not going well came from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who in hearings on Capitol Hill last week and Tuesday, respectively, said that cooperation on security with Mexico was insufficient and that until now it had not been possible to reestablish the collaboration of the DEA with the security cabinet that existed, presumably until the arrest of the former Secretary of Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, in October 2020, which marked a turning point. an after in the Mexican relationship with that agency.
In the United States government there was concern about the attitude taken by López Obrador, whose orders to break all contact with US counterparts in the various areas of the government were fully followed. As there was no information about the ice that López Obrador put on the bilateral relationship, there is also no information about what influenced a restoration in form and substance, which is what happened this Tuesday. However, there is an episode that coincides with the lifting of this political and diplomatic blockade, which has to do with the breaking of relations with Ecuador.
After the assault on the Mexican embassy in Quito, the President instructed Foreign Minister Bárcena to lobby governments and international organizations for a condemnation against Ecuador for having violated international conventions by raiding the diplomatic mission. Bárcena did the work in a limited way, because the first reaction of the United States government was ambiguous, which led to the classification of “soft” by López Obrador.
The President did not stop at words. He asked a senior official in his government and a former collaborator who remains close to him to intercede with Ambassador Salazar to request a stronger stance in favor of Mexico. On April 6, a day after the breakdown of relations between the two countries, the State Department condemned the violation of the Vienna Convention, identified the two countries as “crucial partners” and called for them to resolve their differences. Seventy-two hours later, the White House said Ecuador had ignored its international obligations and condemned its government.
The speed with which the United States rectified is not free. With migration at the center of the presidential campaign in that country, López Obrador has Biden as a hostage in the short term, although on long-term issues, things are the other way around.
