The election Sunday of a hardline leftist to Mexico's presidency can offer opportunities or major challenges, depending on the direction President Donald Trump chooses. If Trump mishandles future relations with President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, he can expect nothing but deepening trade woes, greater immigration and drug-trafficking problems, and long-term damage to what once was a flourishing binational alliance.
Lopez Obrador pledges to tackle out-of-control corruption and focus like a laser beam on the biggest problem facing Mexico: rampant poverty. Those happen to be two of the biggest factors feeding the immigration problem at the southern U.S. border.
Trump is mistaken if he believes that building a $25 billion border wall will solve the immigration problem. Congress remains reluctant to fund the wall, and until that happens, a porous U.S.-Mexico border will continue to tempt illegal border crossers. On this issue, Trump needs Mexico more than Mexico needs him.
The multibillion-dollar network for smuggling humans and drugs thrives largely because of endemic corruption in Mexico. Underpaid police survive by exacting bribes from smugglers and migrants. The government's failure to address the corruption problem and explosion in gang-driven violence is one of the main reasons why voters threw their overwhelming support behind Lopez Obrador's hard-left Morena party.
Voters remained particularly outraged by government inaction following the 2014 murders of 43 students in Iguala, southwest of Mexico City. The students were in police custody at the time. Incumbent President Enrique Pena Nieto pledged to bring the murderers to justice, yet the case remains unsolved _ an emblem of the corruption feeding violent crime across the country.
Equally problematic is the fact that more than 43 percent of Mexico's population lives below the poverty line, earning less than $10.52 a day in 2016.
Much of the recent U.S. immigration focus has been on security factors driving mass migration from Central America, but Trump cannot hope to address that issue without first addressing the factors feeding the migration problem in Mexico. Although the percentage of the U.S. undocumented-migrant population from Mexico has declined in recent years, it still represents more than half of the overall total.
Instead of attacking the trade imbalance with Mexico, Trump should recognize that a healthy churn of commerce is creating thousands of jobs in Mexico. The more that happens, the less incentive Mexicans will have to pull up stakes and migrate. The more Trump establishes a cooperative relationship with Lopez Obrador to tackle corruption, the better the two can work together to dismantle the gangs behind the smuggling and trafficking network.
More likely, however, Trump will continue on the track of confrontation and hostility. That approach has yielded no noticeable success so far. It's even less likely to produce positive results when a firebrand leftist assumes Mexico's presidency in December.
