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Despite the dialogue between Joe Biden, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Justin Trudeau on migration, drug control and trade, the “three friends” lack a common vision for the future of the region, says the specialist in Mexico Gilles Bataillon.
After the trilateral summit in Mexico between Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to promote regional integration, the Mexican president met with his US counterpart and will hold a bilateral meeting with the Canadian prime minister on Wednesday.
In his first meeting with Biden, López Obrador reproached him for a certain abandonment of Washington towards Latin America. “I don’t think either Trudeau or Biden are going to pay more attention to Latin America. There is a major crisis in Ukraine, another one that could be coming in China. And after the peace agreements in Central America, the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990s, the North Americans withdrew from Latin America”, analyzes Gilles Bataillon, a specialist on Mexico at the French School of Social Sciences.
“The two agendas that (Americans) have are drugs and the immigration issue, but there is no great vision of a common destiny between Latin America, the United States and Canada. Clinton’s idea was that trade was going to solve everything and that free trade agreements between North America and the rest of the Latin American countries had to be multiplied, but it is not a policy”, remembers Bataillon.
The ‘three amigos’, as the North American leaders are nicknamed, met mainly to strengthen the USMCA trade agreement, to counterbalance China. Washington wants, for example, to reduce its dependence on Asia, to manufacture its own semiconductors.
“With the emergence of China as a ‘world factory’, there are maquilas that would have been developed in Mexico, that were developed in Vietnam, India or China because labor is cheaper. There is still part of the North American industry that works hand in hand with Mexican industries, and this could perfectly develop”, indicates Gilles Bataillon.
Unknowns about Mexican lithium
Within the framework of its investments to fight climate change, Mexico promotes the Sonora Plan, which includes the exploitation of lithium -a key mineral for new technologies and electric cars-, the production of these vehicles through the relocation of assembly plants- and the construction of six solar power plants.
However, doubts remain about the actual lithium reserves in Mexico and the potential impacts of this mining activity. “It would be necessary to ask where the lithium is, how it is going to be extracted and if it is going to cause environmental contamination or not”, says Gilles Bataillon.
