Vice President Kamala Harris Meets With Mexican President

DENISE DRESSER, POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Kamala Harris and President Biden face a very tough situation, because, while President Biden is trying to pass through a number of very ambitious legislative reforms and pull the U.S. out of the hole that it was in, given the pandemic and the economic crisis, he’s also facing a challenge on the border, which is an influx, an unprecedented influx, because migrants are fleeing their countries due to the violence there, and also feel that the new administration will abide by its asylum commitments. So, Kamala had to go to Mexico in order to enlist the support of President Lopez Obrador. AMLO had a very warm relationship with President Trump and has seemed quite distant and prickly vis-a-vis Biden. So, I think the U.S. understood that, finally, it had to look at Mexico, get support on controlling the crisis at the border, and also deal with the huge rise and surge in violence over the past several years. This is not a new problem. Mexico, over the past decade, has become one of the most violent countries in the Western Hemisphere. But what is new is the way in which the violence has become political. Organized crime is no longer just fighting itself, cartel against cartel. It is now taking on politicians and killing them in order to install its own favorite candidates or leaders at the local and state level. So, this was a clearly top of the agenda for Biden and Kamala Harris, after months of really not focusing on Mexico, due to the complexity of the problems that the president and the vice president were facing in the U.S.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, nearly 100 politicians, as we mentioned, have been killed throughout this election cycle. This, as we mentioned, was the biggest election that this country has faced. And it didn’t necessarily go AMLO’s way. They have a simple majority, it appears, and not a supermajority. He came into office, and now he’s midway through his six-year term — we’re three years in — promising reforms, fighting corruption, fighting poverty, boosting the economy, lowering crime. His detractors would suggest that that is not what’s happening right now. Do you think — as you mentioned, there was a prickly relationship or prickly approach towards the Biden administration. Do you think what’s happened with these elections may have lowered the tensions there and weakened that hand that AMLO felt that he had going into this relationship?

DRESSER: Well, AMLO came in promising a fourth transformation for Mexico. And the election was a hopefully a wakeup call for him that the direction of that transformation faces opposition among a vast majority of Mexicans, because, over the past two-and-a-half years, he has proceeded to carry out a series of reforms that have not necessarily led in the right direction.