The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said Thursday that the telephone conversation she had with the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, was “very cordial.”
The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, reported through social networks that she had a “very cordial” telephone contact with the president-elect of the United StatesDonald Trump, and seemed optimistic about bilateral relations between both neighbors.
One of the unknowns that arise after Trump defeated his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, is what will happen between the two governments, whose relationship had its ups and downs during the Republican president's first four years in the White House.
Mexico and the United States share a wide border of 3,000 kilometers, and the management of it in Joe Biden's government has been widely criticized by Trump and Republicans.
Other details about the conversation have not been revealed.
“We talked about the good relationship that will exist between Mexico and the United States,” Sheinbaum wrote on his profile on the X social network, formerly Twitter, where he appears in a smiling photograph.
Sheinbaum, who took office in October as the first female president in the history of the Latin American country, had said on Wednesday that there was “no reason for concern” about the triumph of Trump, who during his electoral campaign threatened with tariffs on various products manufactured in Mexico, such as automobiles, and advanced his plan to carry out mass deportations of irregular migrants.
Trump's plans
The US president-elect had commented previously to today's telephone conversation: “Now we have a new president in Mexico. She is supposedly a very, very nice woman, they say. I have not met her. And I am going to inform her on the first day, or before , that if you do not stop this avalanche of criminals and drugs entering our country, I will immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything you send to the United States.”
Trump has even said in the past that he could send troops to Mexico to combat powerful organized crime groups, which are blamed for the massive entry of fentanyl, the deadly drug impacting the United States.
The vice president of the Council of the Americas, Eric Farnsworth, told the Voice of America: “I think we will see a Trump administration using pressure mechanisms that the United States has to try to encourage certain behaviors in Latin American countries, and when I say economic pressure mechanisms, I mean access to the US market.”
Farnsworth cited, for example, tariffs and trade restrictions, some of the possible measures “to try to impact the interests of countries and help the United States restrict migratory flows.”
The director of the Rule of Law program at the Inter-American Dialogue, Tamara Taraciuk Broner, told the VOA that although Trump “has shown to be impulsive and very unpredictable (…) on immigration issues and the issue of tariffs, he has been consistent.”
In that direction, the expert predicted that “we can expect that the campaign promises of going strong against migration, of deportations, of increasing tariffs, are going to happen,” but clarified that this could happen “at a lower level in which announces what it will be.”
The United States is Mexico's main trading partner. About 12 million Mexicans live on US soil, many of them without legal residency documents.
(With additional reporting by Salomé Ramírez and Jorge Agobian, Voice of America correspondents in Washington)