OPINION | Mexico recommits itself to doing the dirty work the United States demands | CNN

Central American migrants await transportation in Penitas, Texas, on March 12 Adrees Latif / Reuters

Editor's Note:

Jorge G. Castañeda is a CNN contributor.

He was Secretary of Foreign Relations of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He is currently a professor at New York University and his most recent book, “America Through Foreign Eyes,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

(CNN Spanish) -

At the beginning of this week, the first doses of vaccines “loaned” by President Joe Biden to his colleague Andrés Manuel López Obrador arrived in Mexico.

One and a half million AstraZeneca vaccines were flown in from the United States;

It is an initial shipment that will be supplemented by another, later, of a million additional doses.

It is the result of an agreement between the two governments announced on March 19, the same day that a series of decisions by Mexican authorities on immigration matters were also made public.

These measures included, among others, the closure of the border between Mexico and Guatemala for all transit of “non-essential” people;

the dispatch of even more Mexican military and police to the southeast of the country to prevent the passage of migrants;

a greater willingness for Mexico to accept again unaccompanied or family Central American minors in facilities of the National Migration Institute (despite a new law that prohibits it);

and, in general, closer cooperation between the two countries to stop the Central American flow.

Spokesmen for the two governments were quick to affirm that it was not a quid pro quo: vaccines for Central Americans.

But for the United States it was more difficult to deny the obvious - the US media insisted on underlining it, although in Mexico this was not the case.

Old questions, from the Trump era, or new ones soon arose.

The 8,000 soldiers and policemen, were they added to the other 25,000 that former President Trump always cited as the support that AMLO gave him?

Had those already been removed?

When and why?

Biden revealed in his press conference last week that Mexico refused to receive minors who were not Mexican, accompanied or not, but that negotiations were continuing;

Has something happened?

What would Mexico do to stop the flow of Mexicans, who made up 60% of those detained by US authorities in November, December, January, and February?

As for vaccines, doubts also arise.

First of all, for a country of 126 million people, 2.5 million doses is a bicoca.

Second, a large number of questions about the AstraZeneca vaccine surface around the world, starting with the United States itself, whose regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, has not even approved emergency use.

It seemed that Biden was sending López Obrador the doses of a vaccine that is not approved in his country (although it is in Mexico) and that his own government was reluctant to apply it.

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More than these questions and the immoral - or in the best of cases, transactional - nature of the trade, it is evident that this first negotiation between the new US government and that of Mexico yielded ambivalent results.

On the one hand, López Obrador obtained what he most urgently needed, namely a small, but not insignificant number of vaccines, in a short time.

In view of the extreme slowness of the vaccination process in Mexico and the enormous difficulties that the Mexican government has experienced in obtaining doses of any kind, it is not a small thing.

However, Mexico recommits itself to doing the dirty work that the United States demands, with greater kindness than before, but dirty work at last.

At some point, surely, we will see the proliferation of migrant camps and crowds in abominable conditions on the Mexican side of the border between the two countries.

Likewise, as the patrolling of the southern Mexican border is reinvigorated, its accompanying consequences will reappear as always: more corruption, more extortion of migrants, more human rights violations.

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For Washington, the arrangement allows expecting a relative, but undeniable increase in Mexican cooperation to control Central American migration, and limit the damage to the image and in the polls that the so-called migratory crisis has inflicted on Biden.

The cost is practically zero, since 2.5 million vaccines are barely what the United States applies in one day, and today it has a huge inventory of antigens.

The problem is another.

Biden and López Obrador have not enjoyed a good relationship.

In July 2020, the Mexican president visited Donald Trump in the White House in what was seen by many as an endorsement of his reelection campaign.

AMLO was one of the last world leaders to congratulate Biden on his victory, and one of the last to condemn the insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6.

In view of the fact that both look after the interests of their respective countries as they understand them, their relationship has tended to normalize.

But it is delicate.

Biden knows that he needs López Obrador on the immigration issue, and that he can't afford to do anything that irritates him.

By being forced to be friendly, Biden in fact renounces to proceed in the most effective way to address the underlying problem: the growing Mexican migration of single men of legal age, caused by the collapse of the Mexican economy, by violence widespread in Mexico, by the pandemic itself and by the imminent US economic boom.

Many of these factors are the direct product of López Obrador's disastrous decisions, both in macroeconomic and health policy, and of repeated mockery of the rule of law.

Only Biden can ask you to change your course.

But that would irritate López Obrador beyond measure, perhaps inducing him to let Central Americans pass.

Biden cannot take that risk, but neither can he turn a blind eye to the Mexican disaster.

To postpone any warning to AMLO is to postpone solutions to the real problems.

Acting now entails running the risk that any attempt to convince López Obrador could fail, backfire, or provoke an unexpected reaction.

Poor Biden, so far from an immigration solution and so close to López Obrador.