The US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, and State Secretaries, Antony Blinken, and national security, Alejandro Mayards, have traveled to Mexico City to participate in a high-level dialogue with which to lay the foundations of bilateral cooperation In terms of security for the coming years. The two parties come to this meeting with different proposals: while the delegation sent by Joe Biden simply seeks to "update" the existing agreements, Mexican negotiators want to change strategy and focus on "taking care of the causes that originate violence."
The issue that has marked all previous statements has been the possible continuity or elimination of the 'Mérida Initiative' signed by the former Presidents George Bush and Felipe Calderón in 2008. Although the United States has invested more than 13,000 million of Dollars to finance the Mexican Armed Forces and the fight against drug trafficking, that strategy has been demonstrated failed. On the eve of the meeting, the Mexican Chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard, gave the project buried: "There has to be a new stage, leave behind the Initiative Mérida that is assistance, is based on another security strategy other than that today is Implementing ".
Unlike the stage of former President Calderón, who declared the "war to narco" causing more than 350,000 deaths, the new strategy of the Mexican government has been marked by the "Hugs, No Balazos" politics, expressed in the past by Lopez Obrador The world was able to know well the consequences of that bet on the well-known 'culiacanzo', when the army was forced to free Ovidio Guzmán, son of El Chapo, after the Sinaloa cartel assaults will take the city of Culiacán.
Another of the issues on which the Government of López Obrador wanted to influence is US arms trafficking to Mexico. "What we want is that weapons no longer come, not that come more. 70% of arms, as we know, come from there," Ebrard explained. Last August, the Mexican government presented a historic demand against 11 US arms companies indicated by "negligent practices" that facilitate international traffic.
The meeting of this Friday will allow to lay the foundations of a negotiation that could be translated into a formal agreement on January 30. The US delegation has insisted that, beyond possible change of name, it is necessary to "preserve the significant achievements that the Mérida initiative has had." In addition to arms trafficking, other matters such as extraditions, combat to drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, respect for the sovereignty of both countries (with special attention to the DEA incursions in territory are now Mexican), and the management of the latent migratory crisis that, in recent weeks, has pushed thousands of Haitians to the border to misery and seek refuge in US territory.
Date Of Update: 09 October 2021, 16:48
