The most recent Migrant Caravan arises at the juncture of the mid-term elections in the United States, the first electoral test of the Donald Trump project, and the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his “Fourth Transformation of the Republic” to the Presidency of Mexico. The social and political risks are enormous. The possible gains too.
Last spring, within a few weeks of his order to brake immigrants’ families at the border, president Trump managed to separate nearly a thousand immigrant children before suspending his own orders.
Limited by his constant personal scandals, his obscure links with the regime of Vladimir Putin and his empathy for dictators from different parts of the world, Mr. Trump is betting in hate and racism to avoid his own responsibilities at the polls.
After playing with the limits of the legal time to bring to the United States Congress a proposal to renegotiate NAFTA, Canada’s negotiating teams finally accepted the terms of the Trump administration. Mexico had done the same thing weeks before.
Thus, without a wall and with an agreement that maintains most of the trade rules of the old NAFTA, Mr. Trump was approaching the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 6.
The announcement, a few weeks ago, that a caravan of some 5,000 people – many of them women and children – would leave Tegucigalpa to try to reach the border between Mexico and the United States to ask for political asylum from the US authorities. It immediately became a new crisis.
From his favorite attack platform-his twitter account-Mr. Trump threatened Mexico with sending the US Army to close the common border if the Mexican government could not stop the Migrant Caravan from crossing its border with Guatemala.
The still Mexican chancellor, Luis Videgaray, traveled to New York, to seek the participation of the United Nations in the matter. At least for a decade within the global organization, it has been considered that the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Central American people must have considered them as “refugees” and not only “migrants”
Despite the voluntary return of a couple of thousand people, the images of Mexican police trying to stop the passage of Hondurans on the border bridge between Tecun-Uman, Guatemala and Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas, contrast with a policy maintained for decades in which “The Beast” (the freight train that runs from Tapachula to the north), served as a transport for thousands and thousands of people in their search for their “American Dream”.
“Mexico bows to Trump” immediately noted a sector of the Mexican press. While, in Washington, the mainstream media emphasized Trump’s electoral turn to the same theme: “Dems produces mobs, Reps produces jobs”.
Meanwhile, a few weeks after swearing in as Mexico’s new president, Andrés López Obrador, he also joined the issue, publicly recalling the letter he recently sent to his next colleague, proposing the convenience of the United States investing some 30 billion dollars. dollars in productive projects destined to create jobs and conditions so that neither Central Americans nor Mexicans are forced to migrate to their country.
In this context, it would be amazing is both populist leaders –Trump and Obrador–, are able to forge a win-win deal about i, the non-written immigration chapter of the new Trilateral agreement.
