Summit in Mexico

The presidents of the United States, Mexico and Canada have closed the Summit of North American Leaders with an agenda of commitments that, on paper, seeks to strengthen the commercial alliance between the three countries and increase the specific weight of the bloc in the global market especially against China.

The meeting, which was held in Mexico City, however, had other common threads that determine the balance of the region on a daily basis, beginning with the management of immigration and the fight against drug trafficking, with special emphasis on the fentanyl that comes from Mexico: it is a synthetic opioid that causes tens of thousands of deaths in the US The general balance of the summit left some notable good news and too many pending issues.

In the first place, Joe Biden arrived with the purpose of legitimizing his new plan to contain migration, with which he agrees to receive 30,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians each month in exchange for the migrants excluded from the program staying in charge of the Mexican authorities.

The host president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, recognized his good intentions and humanism, especially in comparison with the heavy hand of Donald Trump.

He showed his gratitude for being "the first president of the United States who has not built even one meter of the wall."

But on Monday the Mexican president had launched a substantive message, at the beginning of the meeting, asking Biden to end the neglect of the United States towards Latin America.

The claim has several supports, and migration policy is precisely one of them, since the philosophy to face this challenge must look beyond the northern border to design a regional strategy that goes through Central America, especially Guatemala and Honduras, and even part of South America.

Any ambitious plan must have more resources, and Washington, very interested in boosting the production of semiconductors in Latin America, for example, is destined to lead the economic efforts.

The summit also addressed security and drug trafficking.

The arrest days before the conclave of Ovidio Guzmán, son of El Chapo, is a powerful sign and marks the only possible path to combat the cartels.

Biden, López Obrador and Justin Trudeau promised to deepen cooperation in this and other areas and, although each president took advantage of the summit to vindicate their own agenda, they all condemned without nuance the assault on the three powers of the State that Brazil suffered last Sunday. .

Their meeting is, in itself, good news.

However, the path towards deeper regional integration still has a long way to go.

And migration is the mirror that reflects this enormous asymmetry on a daily basis.