Tag Archives: President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

Mexico celebrates November U.S. border opening, date to be decided

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Wednesday cheered a U.S decision to open their shared border in November after more than a year of pandemic restrictions, but added that the precise date was still being worked out.

“The opening of the northern border has been achieved, we are going to have normality in our northern border,” Lopez Obrador said in his daily morning press conference.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier said U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico would reopen in November for fully vaccinated travelers after being closed to non-essential crossings since March 2020 due to the pandemic.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the border reopening will coincide with a push to reactivate economic activities in the frontier region, where Mexico has made a vast effort to bring vaccination rates in line with the United States.

He said high-level bilateral economic meetings taking place in November will focus on the border region. Other meetings will be held in coming days to work out details of the reopening.

Ebrard said Mexico had been strongly pushing Washington for the border to reopen, including laying out proposals during a visit by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.

The United States “have accepted many proposals that we made along the way to achieve this,” Ebrard said, without giving details.

(Reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez; writing by Drazen Jorgic; editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

Blinken meets Lopez Obrador to soothe thorny U.S.-Mexico relations

By Simon Lewis

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a visit to Mexico on Friday held talks with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, trying to mend fractious ties as the two nations hash out a new security cooperation accord and deal with a jump in migration.

The top U.S. diplomat visits Mexico at a time when the Biden administration is increasingly reliant on its southern neighbor to stem the flow of Latin American migrants heading to the United States.

Blinken’s visit is part of the Biden administration’s first U.S.-Mexico High-Level Security Dialogue, in which the two countries will negotiate a sweeping new agreement on how to tackle everything from drug flows to the United States to the smuggling of U.S.-made guns into Mexico.

Lopez Obrador took Blinken on a mural tour of the National Palace before the two delegations had a working breakfast, where the Mexican leader invited U.S. President Joe Biden to visit.

Blinken said Lopez Obrador’s earlier comments were “exactly in line” with what Biden has in mind for the U.S.-Mexico relationship.

“I’m very inspired by the vision you expressed. The work now we have to do to translate that into reality, into truly a transformational partnership, a shared responsibility,” Blinken said at the start of the breakfast meeting.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland accompanied Blinken, who is also meeting with Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.

U.S.-Mexico relations suffered a major blow last October when U.S. anti-narcotics agents arrested Mexican former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos, outraging the Mexican government. Cienfuegos was freed, but the detention strained relations and hurt security cooperation.

U.S. officials are touting the new security accord as broader than the previous agreement, the Merida Initiative, under which the United States channeled about $3.3 billion to help Mexico fight crime.

Launched in 2007, the Merida Initiative initially provided military equipment for Mexican forces and later helped train Mexico’s security forces and the judiciary. But Lopez Obrador has been a vocal critic of the program, saying it was tainted by its association with previous governments and for financing security equipment in the 2000s.

Mexican officials say the new agreement will likely focus on the exchange of information, the root causes of violence, and stemming the flow of U.S.-made guns to Mexico, a key point of concern for Lopez Obrador.

But negotiating a new agreement will be painful. The United States wants a more muscular approach to battling drug cartels while Lopez Obrador prefers softer and less confrontational methods to fighting gangs, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security and foreign policy analyst.

“There is a minimal area of overlap,” said Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “The U.S. is in an awkward position here because the Lopez Obrador administration is very comfortable with ending security cooperation.”

What is more, the talks about the new security cooperation may be overshadowed by immigration concerns.

A surge in the number of Haitian and Latin American migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged the Biden administration into another crisis last month and underlined Washington’s reliance on Mexico to help stem the flow.

Mexico’s importance in managing immigration has given the Lopez Obrador administration leverage to pursue more independent policies in other areas, Mexican officials say privately.

During the U.S. presidential transition early this year, Mexico made it tougher for American law enforcement agents to operate in the country. Mexico has also delayed visas for U.S. anti-narcotics officers, the U.S. media has reported.

A senior Mexican security official said there was optimism about the new agreement on the Mexican side and there may be scope to review the restrictions imposed on U.S. agents operating on Mexican soil, but the conditions cannot return to how they were before Cienfuegos’ arrest.

“I think part of the U.S. government knows that that’s not possible,” the Mexican official said.

(Reporting by Simon Lewis, additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in WashingtonWriting by Drazen JorgicEditing by Leslie Adler and Alistair Bell)

Migrants’ hopes dashed by surprise deportation to Haiti from U.S. border

By Daina Beth Solomon

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Haitian migrant Nikel Norassaint did not know where he was headed when Mexican migration officials put him on a flight last week in the southeastern city of Villahermosa, days after they had detained him near the U.S.-Mexico border.

The sea below was his only clue until the plane touched down in Port-au-Prince a few hours later, his first time in the country in five years.

“I said, ‘Wow, I’m in Haiti,'” Norassaint, 49, recalled. “My heart almost stopped.”

Norassaint, who has lived abroad for two decades, and another Haitian migrant on the flight said they were stunned to be returned to their homeland without warning.

They joined some 7,000 people expelled to Haiti from the United States after more than double that number amassed last month at an encampment in Del Rio, Texas on the Mexican border. Mexico has sent 200 people total back to Haiti as well.

Migrant advocacy groups and even a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti have condemned deportations to the Caribbean country beset by poverty and violence as inhumane, casting doubt on pledges from both the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to aid struggling migrants.

Norassaint said he had been hopeful that Biden, who had advocated for a “humane” immigration policy, had “opened the door” for migrants when he crossed into Del Rio to seek entry to the United States.

But he decamped to Mexico once word began to spread of U.S. deportations. Migration officials detained him in the city of Ciudad Acuna opposite Del Rio and then bused him 930 miles (1,500 km) south to Villahermosa.

The Mexican government’s National Migration Institute (INM) had described the Sept. 29 flight to Port-au-Prince with 70 migrants on board as “voluntary assisted return.”

But for Norassaint, who lived in the Dominican Republic for 16 years before resettling in Chile in 2018, nothing about going back to Haiti was a matter of choice.

“There’s no work, it’s unsafe, there was an earthquake, many people are dead,” he said, noting even President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in July.

When asked about Norassaint’s experience, Mexico’s migration institute said it followed legal administrative protocol to return people to Haiti.

MIGRATION POLICY OF ‘EUPHEMISMS’

Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of Human Rights Watch in the Americas, said in an opinion article on Sunday that the group has documented past instances of Mexican officials pressuring migrants to agree to “voluntary” returns, and described the country’s migration policy as “riddled with euphemisms.”

The migration institute sent another 130 migrants back to Haiti by plane on Wednesday; that flight was not labeled “voluntary.” A video of migrants boarding the plane, filmed by a migrant rights activist and posted on social media, showed one man jumping from the stairs and dashing across the tarmac.

Norassaint is now staying with family in the coastal city of Miragoane and asking relatives in the United States to send money because he cannot withdraw funds from his Chilean bank account.

His 12-year-old daughter and 17-year-old stepson are still in Mexico with their mother.

Another man on the flight, Alfred, also mourned his surprise deportation to Haiti after he left the country in 2009 to live in the Dominican Republic, and then Chile.

He hoped to reach the United States to escape worsening discrimination in Chile, but hung back in Mexico to avoid deportation.

Officials detained Alfred, who requested anonymity because of Haiti’s precarious security situation, as he was leaving his hotel in Ciudad Acuna to buy food and supplies for his wife, who is two months pregnant.

Alfred had made it to Mexico by following tips in a WhatsApp group while his wife took a plane so she would not need to risk her life crossing the jungle between Colombia and Panama.

During the week in migration detention, he was allowed to make one brief call to his wife, who said she was making her way to the northern border city of Tijuana.

“I’m about to have a heart attack, thinking I left my wife behind,” Alfred said. “We’ve been together for ten years. Look where she is now, and I’m here.”

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Mexico adopts firm stance on auto dispute ahead of U.S. talks

By Sharay Angulo

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexico expects the United States to comply with automotive rules in the new North American trade pact, a senior official said, taking a firm line ahead of high-level talks next week clouded by a dispute over the future of the car industry in the region.

Mexico and Canada have been at odds for months with the United States over the application of regional content requirements for the auto industry, one of the cornerstones of last year’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade pact.

The two countries favor a more flexible interpretation of the rules than the one taken by U.S. officials.

When asked late on Thursday whether a new methodology could be used to avoid taking the row to an international tribunal, Deputy Economy Minister Luz Maria de la Mora told Reuters: “No, because we’re not renegotiating (USMCA). It’s about honoring what was agreed in the treaty.”

“The text of the agreement made very clear what scope for flexibility there was in the deal,” she added, noting that differences between the United States and Mexico on the issue had begun while the Trump administration was still in office.

Under USMCA, which replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), carmakers must meet a 75% threshold for North American content for vehicles in order to qualify for tariff-free trade within the region.

With NAFTA, which former U.S. President Donald Trump had decried as a “disaster” for U.S. industry, the content threshold stood at 62.5%.

Top U.S. and Mexican officials are due to restart the so-called high level economic dialogue on Sept. 9 in Washington, talks that were suspended during Trump’s time in office.

Mexican Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier will be among the participants at the dialogue, which Mexico’s government said is in part aimed at deepening economic integration.

On Aug. 20, Mexico requested formal consultations over the interpretation and application of the stricter automotive content rules, but de la Mora said these had not yet begun.

Making the rules tougher than what was agreed under USMCA risked backfiring on the industry, reducing competitiveness, raising costs and making the region “less attractive for investment and production,” de la Mora said.

She added that disputes over content requirements only fanned uncertainty and could even end up benefiting suppliers from other parts of the world with laxer rules like South Korea.

Nevertheless, earlier this week, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he did not expect the dispute to end up before an international tribunal, and expressed optimism that agreement could be reached before long.

(Reporting by Sharay AnguloEditing by Chizu Nomiyama and Frances Kerry)

Mexico president floats referendum option on recreational marijuana after court says to legalize

By Raul Cortes

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday he will respect a court ruling telling the government and lawmakers to legalize recreational marijuana use for now, but opened the door to convening a public referendum on the issue.

The Supreme Court ruling on Monday brings Mexico closer to creating one of the world’s largest legal cannabis markets and pressures the Mexican Senate to approve the sweeping legalization bill that has been stalled there since the Lower House of Congress approved it in March.

“Of course we’re going to respect what the court has decided and we’re going to evaluate. We’re going to see what effects it has,” Lopez Obrador said at a regular news conference in response to a question about the Supreme Court’s decision.

However, Lopez Obrador acknowledged “there are two views” on the legal weed issue, including in his cabinet, and said his government was evaluating the best path forward.

“If we see … that it’s not working to address the serious problem of drug addiction, that it’s not working to stop violence, then we would act,” the president said, suggesting he could send a new bill to Congress or push for a public referendum.

Lopez Obrador has in the past used referendums to decide thorny policy issues. On Tuesday he again laid out the argument for such “participative democracy” in the context of the cannabis debate.

His comments were not decisive however, and he did not explicitly say he was leaning toward such a solution.

Colombian-Canadian Khiron Life Sciences, Canada’s Canopy Growth and The Green Organic Dutchman, as well as Medical Marijuana, Inc. from California, are among the firms eyeing opportunities in Mexico.

The court ruling removes a legal obstacle for the health ministry to authorize activities related to consuming cannabis for recreational purposes, and was the final step in a drawn-out legal battle to declare unconstitutional a prohibition on non-medical or scientific use of marijuana and its main active ingredient THC.

Lopez Obrador said he will instruct health regulator Cofepris to comply with the ruling to authorize activities related to the cultivation, transformation, sale, research and export or import of marijuana.

(Reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez; Writing by Anthony Esposito; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Harris meets Mexico president in effort to lower migration from Central America

By Nandita Bose

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday as part of her first trip abroad since taking office as she tries to lower migration from Central America which has spiked in recent months.

Harris and Lopez Obrador witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding on development agencies working in Central America.

The accord is aimed at reducing the number of migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle countries – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – to the United States through Mexico.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January, the number of migrants taken into custody per month at the U.S.-Mexico border has risen to the highest levels in 20 years. Many are from Central America.

Harris has been tasked by Biden to address the migrant flow.

On a visit to Guatemala on Monday, she told potential migrants “Do not come,” to the United States.

She visits Mexico after midterm elections on Sunday eroded Lopez Obrador’s power base in Congress,

Lopez Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) party held the lower house of Congress but was weakened. The party dominated state votes.

A Mexican government official said the timing of Harris’ visit was not ideal. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said the United States had pushed for the visit.

When asked if the election results would change the U.S. strategy in Mexico, Ricardo Zuniga, the Biden administration’s special envoy to the Northern Triangle countries, said the relationship does not depend on who is in power or domestic politics. “It really doesn’t impact our plans.”

Harris spokeswoman and senior adviser Symone Sanders said late on Monday the vice president’s meeting with Lopez Obrador will follow up on a virtual meeting they had in May.

Sanders said Harris on Tuesday will look to build on topics discussed during the May meeting such as the two countries jointly agreeing to secure their borders and bolster human rights protections and spurring economic development in the Northern Triangle countries and in southern Mexico.

They will also discuss migration specifically to the U.S.-Mexico border by stepping up enforcement, Sanders said.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, however, said ahead of the meeting on Tuesday that migration enforcement would not be part of the discussion.

Temporary work visas would be on the agenda, Ebrard said, as well as expanding options in Central America.

“We are not going to talk about operations or other things,” Ebrard said.

“What is going to be the focus of attention today is how we can promote development in the short term in these three countries,” he added, referring to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Biden administration has been overwhelmed by the number of migrant children and families arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, mostly from Central America and has looked to Mexico for help in slowing transit across its territory.

On Monday, Harris met with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and said the two leaders had “robust” talks on fighting corruption to deter migration from Central America.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Mexico City, additional reporting by Dave Graham, writing by Cassandra GarrisonEditing by Nick Zieminski and Alistair Bell)

U.S. downgrades Mexico air safety rating

By David Shepardson and Tracy Rucinski

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government on Tuesday downgraded Mexico’s aviation safety rating, an action barring Mexican carriers from adding new U.S. flights and limiting airlines’ ability to carry out marketing agreements.

Plans for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) downgrade were first reported on Friday by Reuters.

The FAA said it was “fully committed to helping the Mexican aviation authority improve its safety oversight system to a level that meets” international standards and “ready to provide expertise and resources” to resolve issues in the assessment process.

The agency had held lengthy talks with Mexican aviation regulators about its concerns.

On Monday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said U.S. authorities should not downgrade Mexico’s air safety designation, arguing his country was complying with all relevant norms.

“We have been complying with all the requirements. We feel that this decision should not be made,” Lopez Obrador said at a regular news conference when asked about the possibility.

The FAA said its reassessment of the Agencia Federal de Aviacion Civil from October 2020 to February identified several areas of non-compliance with minimum international safety standards.

The Category 2 rating means Mexico lacks “necessary requirements to oversee the country’s air carriers in accordance with minimum international safety standards, or the civil aviation authority is lacking in one or more areas such as technical expertise, trained personnel, record keeping, inspection procedures, or resolution of safety concerns,” the FAA said.

Downgrading Mexico to Category 2 means current U.S. service by Mexican carriers are unaffected, but they cannot launch new flights. U.S. airlines will no longer be able to market and sell tickets with their names and designator codes on Mexican-operated flights and the FAA will increase scrutiny of Mexican airline flights to the United States, the agency said.

Delta Air Lines said on Tuesday an FAA downgrade was not about partner Aeromexico and will have little impact on customers.

“This is not about Aeromexico. This is about the Mexican version of the FAA not having some of the right protocols in place,” Delta president Glen Hauenstein said at a Wolfe Research conference.

Delta has a codeshare arrangement with Aeromexico enabling the two air carriers to sell seats on each other’s flights.

Delta will be forced to remove its codes on Aeromexico flights following the downgrade, though Aeromexico could continue to code on Delta flights and members of Delta’s loyalty program could still receive SkyMiles on Aeromexico flights that would normally carry the code, Hauenstein added.

This would not be the first time the FAA downgraded Mexico’s air safety rating. In 2010, the agency downgraded Mexico due to suspected shortcomings within its civil aviation authority, then restored its top rating about four months later.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Howard Goller and David Gregorio)

Mexico’s president disputes rights concerns over trapped asylum seekers

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) – President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador brushed away concerns on Friday about the living conditions of thousands of asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico under a U.S. program that President Joe Biden is scrambling to unravel.

Humanitarian organizations have documented cases of attacks, extortion, kidnapping, and sexual violence against those in the program. Most are from Central America and many live in shelters and cramped apartments in dangerous border towns or in a squalid tent city in Mexico’s far northeast.

Lopez Obrador disputed the accounts, saying he had “other data” and that his government would release a report on the migrants next week.

“We have been taking care of the migrants and we have been careful that their human rights are not affected,” Lopez Obrador told a news conference.

“…It’s nothing like it was before, when they were kidnapped and disappeared. We have been attentive and we have protected them.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under Biden’s new administration, said on Wednesday it would end all new enrollments in the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, which since 2019 has forced more than 65,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court hearings, sometimes for months or even years.

The announcement did not specify what will happen to the tens of thousands currently waiting in Mexico under the program, saying only that they “should remain where they are, pending further official information from U.S. government officials.”

(Reporting by Laura Gottesdiener; editing by John Stonestreet)

Mexico publishes medicinal cannabis regulation, creating new market

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s health ministry on Tuesday published rules to regulate the use of medicinal cannabis, a major step in a broader reform to create the world’s largest legal cannabis market in the Latin American country.

The new regulation was signed off by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and will now allow pharmaceutical companies to begin doing medical research on cannabis products.

The cannabis reform taking place includes the recreational use of marijuana, and will create what would be the world’s biggest national cannabis market in terms of population.

The new medicinal rules state companies who wish to carry out research have to obtain permission from the Mexican health regulator, COFEPRIS, and this research has to be done in a strictly controlled and independent laboratories.

The regulation also sets rules for the sowing, cultivation and harvesting of cannabis for medicinal purposes, which would allow businesses to grow marijuana legally on Mexican soil.

Foreign weed companies from Canada and the United States have been looking at Mexico with interest. Many had delayed making investment decisions due to policy uncertainty and were waiting for the final regulation to be published.

Mexico’s lawmakers are also in the final stages of legalizing recreational use of marijuana, with the bill expected to pass in the next period of Congress.

The regulation comes several years after Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers must legalize use of cannabis.

The legislation marks a major shift in a country bedeviled for years by violence between feuding drug cartels, which have long made millions of dollars growing marijuana illegally and smuggling it into the United States.

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; Additional reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez; Editing by Dave Graham)

Mexico vows purge after ex-defense chief arrested in U.S.

By Diego Oré and Frank Jack Daniel

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s president on Friday promised to clean up the armed forces but backed its current leadership after the arrest of a former defense minister on U.S drug charges, which he called evidence some of his predecessors were “mafiosi.”

The stunning detention in Los Angeles of Salvador Cienfuegos, defense minister until 2018, took Mexico’s security establishment by surprise, senior federal sources said. U.S. authorities did not warn their counterparts of the operation.

The fall of Cienfuegos marks the first time a former defense minister has been arrested, and will have far reaching implications for Mexico’s drug war, which has been led by the armed forces for more than a decade.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged to suspend anyone inside his government implicated in the charges

“We won’t cover up for anybody,” he said, before voicing fulsome support for Cienfuegos’ successor at the head of the army and his counterpart in the navy, noting that he had personally vetted them for honesty.

Under Lopez Obrador, the armed forces have taken on more responsibility, including establishing a militarized national police force, overseeing port security and working on infrastructure projects.

The arrest comes less than three weeks before the U.S. presidential election. President Donald Trump, seeking a second term, has made clamping down on drug cartels a priority, though without major progress since he took office in 2017.

Some Mexican officials were privately shocked at the detention of Cienfuegos in Los Angeles airport, worrying it was an unprecedented U.S. intervention against a symbol of Mexican national security.

“It was totally unexpected, I never saw this coming, never, never,” said a senior police source.

Lopez Obrador quickly incorporated the arrest into his narrative that predecessors had presided over a debilitating increase in corruption in Mexico, which for years has been convulsed by often horrific levels of drug gang violence.

“If we’re not talking about a narco state, one can certainly talk about a narco government, and without doubt, about a government of mafiosi,” Lopez Obrador said.

“We’re cleaning up, purifying public life.”

‘WE’RE CLEANING UP’

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said he had received word from the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles that Cienfuegos, 72, was facing five counts of drug charges and would be transferred from Los Angeles to New York. Sources earlier told Reuters that one of the charges related to money laundering.

Lopez Obrador said he only heard about the arrest after the event, though he noted that Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena, had informed him about two weeks ago that there was talk of an investigation involving Cienfuegos.

There had been no open probe in Mexico on Cienfuegos and his arrest was linked to the case against Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s security minister from 2006-2012, who Lopez Obrador said.

Garcia Luna is on trial in New York charged with accepting millions of dollars in bribes from captured kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, which he was meant to fight.

Like Garcia Luna, Cienfuegos had been a major figure in Mexico’s drug war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over the past two decades.

Under Cienfuegos, the army was accused of extrajudicial killings, including the June 2014 Tlatlaya massacre in central Mexico, where 22 drug gang members were shot dead.

A tall, imposing man, Cienfuegos fought to shield the army from potentially embarrassing investigations.

They included the kidnapping and suspected massacre of 43 student teachers in September 2014 in the city of Iguala by drug gang members in cahoots with corrupt police. Last month arrest warrants were issued in Mexico for soldiers linked to the case.

Mexico’s armed forces are generally perceived as less prone to corruption than the police. However, that image has been gradually corroded since former president Felipe Calderon first sent in the military to fight the gangs at the end of 2006.

(Reporting by Dave Graham, Diego Oré, Frank Jack Daniel and Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Tom Brown)