The then president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador had not completed two weeks of his triumph at the polls when on July 13, 2018 he had to face the toughest and most conservative wing of the government of donald trump, embodied in the Secretary of State, Michael R Pompeo. That quote and what it derived from marks Mexican diplomatic policy on fire and has written one of the most complex pages of the current administration.
Even AMLO’s modest halfway house, at 216 Chihuahua Street in the Roma neighborhood, Pompeo arrived that day in front of a dozen embassy collaborators and employees, transported in 20 armored vans with diplomatic license plates and the coverage of at least one helicopter. The entourage included Ivanka Trump, daughter of the North American ruler, and her husband Jared Kusner, the adviser with vast power, a key channel of access to the government’s White House. Peña grandson (and that it would be later with Palacio).
Pompeo would declare that it was a meeting of “neighbors, partners and friends.” But that seemed more like a landing before AMLO and his collaborators, who would still take almost five months to take real possession of their positions. After the protocol photographs, they all understood that Pompeo’s mission was to put a foot around their necks.
Pompeo’s fame as a “hawk” of Trumpism was amply demonstrated. A politician born in California but rooted in Kansas, he was forged in the most conservative movements of the Republican Party, particularly the so-called “Tea Party” that incubated the far-right trend from which Trump emerged. As a representative (deputy) for Kansas in the Capitol (2011-2017), his legislative work leaned to the service of his main benefactors, the Koch family, owner of an oil and mining emporium, among other businesses. The first 16 months of the Trump government he was director of the CIA, favorable to massive espionage against citizens.
That stark experience about the cost of sleeping next to an elephant -the largest global empire still today- was shared by López Obardor with the future heads of the Foreign Relations secretariats, Marcelo Ebrard; from the Treasury, Carlos Urzúa; Economy, Graciela Márquez; Security, Alfonso Durazo; the negotiator of the new stage of the now T-MEC, Jesús Seade, and Martha Barcena, proposal as ambassador in Washington, for Mexico the most important country in the world.
In his book “Do not give in an inch”, published more than three years later to keep up with the times of US politics, Pompeo assures that he imposed conditions on Ebrard since 2018 to accept a “safe third country” treaty, a condition that would force Mexico, permanently and inflexibly, to shelter in national territory tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the United States, who would be returned across the border. Ebrard disagreed with that version in a comprehensive statement.
According to testimonies from those attending the July 2018 meeting, this same lobbying was carried out in parallel by the Secretary of National Security, kirstjen nielsen -promoter of the border wall and the separation of migrant families-, who out of the official record released in the ears of Martha Bárcena the query about whether Mexico would accept such a condition.
On March 19, 2019, four months into the government, the then Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, traveled to Miami, USA, to negotiate with Nielsen conditions for the deportation of migrants from North American territory. They did not agree on the number or the cities where they would be expelled. Nielsen was aiming for at least twice as many, on every issue. Far above the guideline that she had set for the Mexican official.
In what seemed like a theatrical device, the powerful Homeland Security secretary told Sánchez Cordero: “If I don’t get this done, I will be fired when I return to Washington.” Her interlocutor was silent. Three weeks later, on April 8, Nielsen announced his resignation. “It’s the right time to step aside,” she said. Trump was relentless. And then he doubled down. What followed was a spate of increased pressure and open threats from the Trump administration (including the possible imposition of tariffs on Mexican products).
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An as yet unwritten history of this style of savage diplomacy will have to account for the scheme consequently established by López Obrador: a sequence of personal, secret and direct internal agreements, especially with Ebrard, on how to act, to the exclusion of other officials, among they Sánchez Cordero and Martha Bárcena. This meant extraordinary tasks for Ebrard, such as managing migration policy, which formally corresponds to the Interior. The balance that this story generates, in cuts of times and circumstances, will mean merit or detriment to the image of both.
He moment that Trump’s book imposed was used by Bárcena to reiterate his animosity towards Ebrard, which has spread since before the start of the AMLO government. On February 14, for the first time in the face of a long list of accusations, Ebrard turned Bárcena around from the “morning”, with acidity and, it must be assumed, also with the endorsement of Palacio. The ambassador replied in turn, however, leaving the President in good custody, who kept it for just 27 months in Washington and then, with the arrival of Joe Biden, he forced his “retirement”.
In December 2019, both governments announced the “Stay in Mexico” program, which in its first year alone imposed shelter in national territory for 71,000 asylum seekers, including many children and people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. In October 2022, when the border shelters were saturated and the flow of deportees generated instability on both sides of the border, its suspension was announced as part of the Biden government’s commitment to cancel the so-called Title 42 established by Trump, which allows compulsory expulsions. of migrants. After being canceled for just weeks, Title 42 was restored by court order, which accompanies a general tightening in the negotiations of the entire binational agenda between the Biden-AMLO governments. The nightmare continues.
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