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