President Andrés Manuel López Obrador must hurry to get on Joe Biden’s train, for his sake, that of his government and that of Mexico.
He will already pay the cost of backing President Donald Trump in his allegations of electoral fraud and his attempts to reverse an election violating the principles of democracy, but that can be maintained on a personal level, but his stubbornness must turn to pragmatism in the face of the announcements that the president-elect is doing in matters of foreign and security policy, and that his collaborators establish contact with those who will be the heads of those sectors to start working.
López Obrador does not need to congratulate Biden, but rather act intelligently because the first appointments have policies antagonistic to his.
The most confrontational issue will be energy. During the Trump administration, frictions were continuous with the US private sector due to the change of rules, but the indifference of the head of the White House and the lack of energy of Ambassador Christopher Landau to defend the interests of the energy sector of his country before the violations, will change in the Biden Administration.
The next Secretary of State will be Antohny Blinken, very close to him for 30 years, and with extensive experience in foreign policy issues.
Blinken will have among its missions that the United States returns to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which seeks to promote clean energy.
López Obrador is an enemy of them, and has opted for dirty energies. Its entire policy has been focused on the injection of resources for the generation of fossil fuels, even seeking to renovate refineries – such as Cadereyta -, despite environmental pollution studies.
Ignoring the evaluation studies of her in projects such as the Mayan Train, Dos Bocas and the Santa Lucia airport, go against the guidelines outlined by Biden since the campaign. “Either we adjust our policies, or the demands under the trade agreement with the United States, could be continuous,” admitted a Mexican diplomatic source.
The energy issue is transversal in the new Biden team. Avril Hines, who will hold the position of Director of National Intelligence, a key position within the White House because under her supervision are all the intelligence services, civil and military, of the United States government, worked in recent years in energy responsibilities She worked during the Barack Obama administration as deputy director of the CIA and deputy director of the National Security Council.
The Obama White House was particularly tough on Peña Nieto for his rapprochement with China, and intervened so that the Bullet Train between Mexico City and Querétaro was frustrated by the financing of Beijing.
The government abandoned other plans for heavy Chinese investment at Cabo Pulmo in the Sea of Cortez and at the Dragon Mart in Cancun.
When Peña Nieto invited Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the then head of the National Security Council, Susan Rice, demanded from former Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu, during a G-20 meeting in Asia, that there had to be consequences for that affront to the Democrats.
Upon returning, Peña Nieto dismissed Luis Videgaray, the Secretary of the Treasury who promoted the meeting. Currently, although Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard worked on the relationship with Trump like Videgaray, it was López Obrador who showed his dedication to the head of the White House, accepting his impositions.
A measure that López Obrador did to satisfy Trump, will be reversed in the first 100 days of Biden’s government, the Migrant Protection Protocols, when sovereignty was ceded to accept that Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States would wait in Mexican territory the process of your request, through a memorandum with the Trump administration, signed by Alejandro Celorio, the legal consultant of the Foreign Ministry.
The person responsible for dismantling that infamous agreement will be the new Secretary of Territorial Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-American who, as a federal prosecutor in California, took the cases against the so-called Mexican Mafia, which operated from prisons, and was director of Migration.
In the Obama administration, whose work on behalf of the human rights of immigrants was widely recognized. Mayorkas, on the other hand, has had a godmother for 20 years, California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who since the Obama administration defended arbitrariness in Mexico against the Sempra company, whose subsidiary Ienova was painted by López Obrador and the director of the CFE , Manuel Bartlett, as the enemy of the Nation.
On the issue of security, what will probably change radically is the architecture of bilateral cooperation, which was managed through the High Level Group between the two countries, where Ambassador Landau sat in front of six secretaries, at a table chaired by the Secretary of Defense, General Luis Cresencio Sandoval.
It was deficient, and today it can be described as failure due to the mutual loss of credibility. The rebuilding of trust will be very uphill, because the release of General Salvador Cienfuegos was for political reasons, given the recent criticism of the new intelligence director, Haines, of Trump’s politicization of justice.
The networks of ties of the next officials do not look good for López Obrador, who says he knows Biden, when in reality, the then vice president met him in Mexico when in the 2016 presidential campaign, he came to palomear the candidates.
However, the bilateral relationship is very important for the United States, which will help López Obrador to qualify his disdain for Biden, if he hurries the reconstruction of the relationship with the Democrats, discreetly if he wants, but effectively, and gives the green light to officially have your diplomats come up and work with the president-elect team.
