Neither Pan-American integration, nor import substitution throughout the continent. No steps towards a community like the European Union, but to strengthen North American competitiveness. The productive chains to confront China will not incorporate Latin America, except for Mexico, which will play a strategic role in ensuring that production processes in the region are not interrupted in the future. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had to keep his utopias and dreams of being the leader that Latin America has been looking for since Simón Bolívar, because at the summit with his North American trade partners, they paid no attention to him.
The infeasibility of his proposals contrasted with the commitments that Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard negotiated with his peers in the United States and Canada, who are at the opposite of the thinking of López Obrador, who, as usual, will ignore them. He started from the press conference of the three leaders, where he denied what the White House reported about the creation of a center in southern Mexico to facilitate documented migration.
López Obrador does not speak the same language as Biden and Trudeau, and fundamental contradictions emerged from their messages at the end of the summit. Biden and Trudeau mentioned the middle class as the main objective for the development of North America; López Obrador despises her. He said that his Sembrando Vida program has been essential to reduce emigration from Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras, but Biden recalled that they have to order migration because the numbers of those who want to enter the United States are historic.
Biden and Trudeau were enthusiastic about the agreed commitments, while López Obrador preferred to enumerate his social programs and megaprojects in an epic way. Certainly, he did not have much room for maneuver given the range of agreements that he had to sign, which go against each other, in the actions that accompany the implementation of his own beliefs.
In their bilateral talks, for example, Biden and Trudeau discussed how to strengthen supply chains for critical minerals, electric vehicles and semiconductors, and unleash full economic potential, as well as take decisive action to combat climate change and transform North America into a powerful source of clean energy, which was reflected in the summit agreements.
López Obrador, on the other hand, is ideologically convinced of fossil fuels. When he inaugurated the skeleton of what will one day be the Dos Bocas refinery, in July of last year, he said: “We did not pay attention to the song of the sirens, to the voices that predicted, perhaps in good faith, the end of the era of oil and the massive arrival of electric cars and renewable energy”. Nothing has changed since then. At the time, he said that the refinery was “a dream come true”, which clashes with what was agreed at the summit.
Among the commitments acquired is a series of “ambitious, rapid and coordinated” measures to build economies that are powered by clean energy and that respond to climate change, which includes the reduction of methane emissions, to combat the environmental crisis. , of at least 15 percent by 2030 over 2020 levels, and increasing collaboration to mitigate polluting effects on agriculture.
Mexico recently committed at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Egypt, known as COP27, to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions from 22 percent today to 35 percent within seven years. 22 percent was offered by the government of Enrique Peña Nieto since 2015, but the current regime modified the parameters to simulate that emissions have been reduced, announcing that the Mayan Train and the Sembrando Vida program help reduce emissions, when in reality they are deforesting large areas of the south of the country. Both initiatives by López Obrador, by the way, were praised during the press conference.
The three countries agreed to deepen their economic cooperation, promote investment and strengthen competitiveness and innovation, through a series of actions that include the participation of the private sector in a new North American Student Mobility Project –created at this summit–, which is set up on the Continental Innovation Fund managed by the Department of State, which expands opportunities for future leaders to study abroad and prepare young people for the workforce that the interconnected and technology-driven world of the 21st century requires.
López Obrador breaks out in hives when training abroad is mentioned, and he continually criticizes that type of education. Although he does not admit it or does not see it, he intends the impoverishment of society by promoting the model of his Benito Juárez universities, which do not produce professionals or technicians, who lack titles and who cannot work anywhere. He is also not interested in technology, or innovation, or private investment in this field, which he considers a “neoliberal science” that must be eradicated.
The three leaders, according to the commitment documents released by the White House, “reaffirmed their commitment to work together to achieve humane, safe, and orderly migration in the region,” which implies that Mexico does the dirty work for the United States. United States and that it agrees to house in its territory at least 30,000 people – in addition to the 30,000 agreed a few months ago – while they wait for their asylum applications to be processed. The Mexican government accepted that, to further facilitate paperwork in the United States, a new center will be built in southern Mexico to help migrants in the legal immigration process with “strong” support from the private sector, which López Obrador last night unknown.
Biden and Trudeau spoke briefly and focused on the summit agreements. López Obrador spoke extensively, little about the commitments made and much about him, his affiliates, and nothing to do with the trilateral meeting.