Mexico’s president called Donald Trump “a friend” Friday and said he would write to the former U.S. president to warn him against pledging to close the border or blaming migrants for bringing drugs into the United States.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called Trump, president from 2017 to 2021 and again the Republican nominee for this fall’s presidential election, “a man of intelligence and vision,” despite Trump’s repeated calls to close the two countries’ border. Obrador is the country’s outgoing leader, and President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum will take office on Oct. 1.
Mexicans were offended in 2015 when then-candidate Trump claimed that, in many cases, immigrants arriving in the U.S. illegally included “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.”
And Mexico was shocked in 2019 when Trump as president threatened to close the border “for a long time” unless Mexican authorities stopped migrants from crossing. López Obrador said the two countries’ economies were so intertwined that they couldn’t bear a closure for even a month.
López Obrador said that in a letter he planned to send next week, “I am going to prove to him that migrants don’t carry drugs to the United States,” adding that “closing the border won’t solve anything, and anyway, it can’t be done.”
“They wouldn’t last a month with the border closed,” he said, referring to U.S. automakers and manufacturers who depend on a steady, uninterrupted supply of parts and finished products for their plants on both sides of the border.
López Obrador also addressed a growing discomfort in the United States with the massive transfer of U.S. auto companies to lower-wage plants in Mexico.
López Obrador claimed that moving auto production back to the United States “would mean that on average, each automobile sold would cost U.S. citizens between $15,000 and $20,000 more.”
Despite the frequent frictions and Trump’s belligerent statements, the two leaders had an outwardly amicable relationship between 2018 and 2020, with López Obrador agreeing to use Mexico’s National Guard to make it harder for third-country migrants to cross Mexico to the U.S. border. He has also done that during the current U.S. administration.