President Joe Biden highlighted U.S. cooperation in the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and immigration in his first phone calls with Mexican and Canadian leaders.
In phone calls Friday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Biden promised to strengthen regional cooperation, according to reports.
In the call with Trudeau, the first foreign leader to speak with the new president, the two leaders “discussed collaboration on vaccines and acknowledged that the two countries’ efforts are being bolstered by existing medical staff exchanges. and the flow of critical medical supplies “. according to Canadian reports.
Although Trudeau hailed Biden’s presidency as a “new era” of cross-country relations, he complained that Biden had scrapped a pipeline linking the two countries on his first day in office. According to a White House statement, Biden acknowledged “Trudeau’s disappointment over the decision to terminate the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.”
In a conversation with López Obrador, the Mexican president addressed the contribution of Mexican migrants to the United States and said that the best way to manage migration was to create economic development in the impoverished regions from which migrants left, according to a statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico.
The call comes at a time of tension over the U.S. federal investigation into former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, which was withdrawn in November. U.S. prosecutors had claimed that Cienfuegos was the head of the H-2 drug cartel.