Detention of migrants at the hands of the US border patrol, in the border city of Yuma, in the State of Arizona. John Moore (Getty Images)
With a border that exceeds 3,000 kilometers between the United States and Mexico, the migration issue is one of the harshest policies between the two countries, which comes to the fore from time to time, almost always with controversy.
The latest tension has to do with the past and arises after the statements by Martha Bárcena, Mexican ambassador to that country between 2019 and 2021, who has said that Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard secretly negotiated with the Donald Trump Administration the 'Stay in Mexico' program. Mexico', through which thousands of migrants were returned while their procedures were being resolved in the United States.
Secretly, according to Bárcena, she means that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not know about those negotiations, with which the imposition of trade tariffs on Mexico was avoided, and that she herself, as a diplomat,
was also deceived.
Ebrard has come out to defend himself this morning, accusing Bárcenas of holding an "obsessive grudge" against him and assuring that he always kept the president and the Senate informed of everything that happened in those days.
To complete the defense, López Obrador has accused the diplomat of definitively placing herself "in the conservative bloc."
“Since she left office, the ambassador has dedicated herself to slandering me everywhere she could.
His great objective is not the truth, but to see how he hurts me every day", Ebrard stated in the morning conference, where he argued that, if he had not informed the president of the procedures that were being carried out, today would not be chancellor.
"There was never a decision or action that I took withholding the information from the president."
Bárcena has maintained in public interviews that the controversial measure known by the euphemism of the "Safe Third Country", through which Mexico collaborated with the United States to prevent the entry of migrants into its territory, was not an imposition of Trump, but the result of a bilateral negotiation.
He accepts the version of Trump's former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, as good.
Ebrard, however, has explained that he promptly informed the Senate of the United States' intentions to "impose" said measure.
He told them, as he has declared, that for this they were threatening tariffs and that, therefore, "a unanimous political agreement was needed, which was achieved, there are the documents", the foreign minister pointed out.
Martha Bárcena, former Mexican ambassador to the United States, during an interview with EL PAÍS, in June 2022. Mónica González Islas
Ebrard has framed these statements in the animosity, which, in his opinion, the former ambassador maintains against him and has suggested that the controversy has to do with electoral, campaign matters.
"She has her right, but it seems very
sui generis
that she is questioning the Government of which she was a part, and I would say, why didn't you say it at the time of her, why she right now...".
Bárcena was the first ambassador of the six-year term of López Obrador in the United States.
She is a career diplomat, but her relationship with the president has soured over time.
She from the López Obrador Administration has criticized certain appointments of ambassadors for which PRI governors have been used, such as the case of Quirino Ordaz, for example.
“It has happened in all the previous six-year terms.
The truly sad thing is that López Obrador promised the opposite”, Bárcena told this newspaper when that appointment took place.
However, the diplomat herself has reiterated in a tweet of hers her "respect and gratitude towards the President of the Republic", whose statement she finds "irrelevant" regarding this controversy.
She is she with Ebrard with whom she maintains the bitter discussion: “[The chancellor] attacks, lies and slanders from the powerful lectern in the morning.
I uphold the truth from retirement, in my house.
Without the symbols of power ”, she has written on social networks.
Asked by the president if he regrets having appointed Martha Bárcena ambassador in his day, he has denied that extreme, and added: “He is saying things that are not true, it is nothing more than exercising the right of reply.
We have raised it and what Marcelo says I support it, they are campaigning and they write their books ”.
López Obrador considers that "we must not be silent, but rather enforce transparency, the golden rule of democracy."
“Before you couldn't talk about these issues, now there's nothing to hide.
Go ahead with the controversy, the debate is good, because it shows what conservatism means, get rid of masks, we are going to define ourselves clearly, not the robbery policy ”, he pointed out.
The president believes that "everyone is responsible for their actions and history will judge them for them."
Bárcena, he has said, is free to act as he considers, "it is much better than hypocrisy, than simulation."
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