Mexico holds off Trump's
fire but seen vulnerable to new pressure
JUNE 8, 2019
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico avoided the most
extreme immigration concession sought by U.S. President Donald Trump in the
deal reached to fend off threatened tariffs, but it is left even weaker than
before in the face of potential new pressure from Trump as he formally kicks
off his re-election campaign this month.
Under the deal reached on Friday, Mexico agreed
to use a large part of its newly formed National Guard to hold back immigrants
crossing from Guatemala, and to take in possibly tens of thousands of people
seeking asylum in the United States while their cases are adjudicated.
Led by Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, negotiators in
Washington resisted Trump’s core demand that Mexico be declared a safe third
country, a classification that would oblige Central Americans crossing through
Mexico to seek safe haven there, not the United States. But the two sides agree
more action could be taken if within 90 days the measures do not have the
desired result of drastically bringing down the numbers of undocumented
migrants reaching the U.S. border from levels that are at a more-than-decade
high. Last month alone 132,000 were apprehended by U.S. authorities.
Former World Trade Organization head Pascal Lamy called Trump’s
approach to coercing its neighbor and ally “hostage-taking,” reflecting widely
held concerns in Mexico that the U.S. president will come back with more
threats to extract greater concessions.
Those fears are sharpened because Trump has used Mexico-bashing
to fire up his base on repeated occasions since kicking off his first campaign
for the White House in 2015. All signs are that he intends to keep the focus on
immigration and cross-border issues in his second-term campaign, which
officially launches on June 18.
“We think the threats, demands and Trump tweets against Mexico
will continue, especially because it’s all tied up with the politics of the
2020 election,” said Gabriela Siller, an economist at Mexican bank Banco Siller
expects the peso currency to rise when markets open on Monday on relief that a
trade war has been averted, but she said the uptick could be short-lived. The
peso, which had been pummeled in recent months on fears over a trade war, on
Friday strengthened 0.5% after Trump tweeted that there was a “good chance” a
deal would be reached with Mexico.
“A SURRENDER”
Vicente Fox, a former Mexican president and long-term critic of
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador tweeted that by allowing the United
States to dictate how, for example, Mexico uses its security forces, the
government has already ceded some of its sovereignty.
That sentiment was echoed by center-left politician Angel Avila,
on the other side of the political aisle from Fox, who called the deal “a
surrender.”
“Mexico shouldn’t militarize its southern border,” said Avila,
who heads the Party of the Democratic Revolution.
Others, however, think Lopez Obrador had little choice beyond
giving some ground in the negotiations, because the threatened tariffs would
have caused economic devastation in Mexico, whose economy contracted in the
first quarter of this year.
Francisco Labastida, a former presidential candidate, said the
scale of the current immigration crisis was a threat to Mexico itself, and the action was needed regardless of Trump.
“Mexico would have had to
change its migration policy for its own reasons due to national security,” he
said, arguing that current numbers are unmanageable.
Carlos Pascual, a former U.S.
ambassador to Mexico praised the deal as preferable to the downward spiral of
a tit-for-tat trade war, but acknowledged it left Mexico open to further
pressure.
“Mexico is weak economically
and it’s always going to be vulnerable if the United States is willing to use
economic policy to enforce national security policy,” he said.
“There’s no doubt this leaves
a Damocles sword hanging over Lopez Obrador’s head,” he said, invoking a
metaphor that describes an ever-present peril.
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