Ashish Kumar Sen

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has his work cut out. The populist leader, who is more popularly known as AMLO, will be sworn in as the president of Mexico on December 1. This may be good news for the US-Mexico relationship.

The Trump administration is expected to deploy at least 800 troops to the US-Mexico border in response to a caravan of an estimated 5,000 migrants from Central America that is heading north. In an October 25 tweet , US President Donald J. Trump wrote that he is “bringing out the military for this National Emergency. They will be stopped!”

Canada agreed, moments before the clock ran out on a September 30 deadline, to sign on to a trade agreement between the United States and Mexico that would replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The new agreement will be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or USMCA.

The new trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico “modernizes” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and lifts a cloud of uncertainty that has lingered over the past several months, according to Earl Anthony Wayne, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Business and Economics Program.

For Andrés Manuel López Obrador it was third time lucky. The new president-elect, popularly known as AMLO, won Mexico’s July 1 presidential election by a landslide picking up more than 50 percent of the vote.

US President Donald J. Trump’s administration announced on May 31 that it will no longer exempt Canada, Mexico, and the European Union from previously announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. This means tariffs—25 percent on imports of steel and 10 percent on imports of aluminum—will go into effect at midnight on June 1. The decision will strain US ties with some of its closest allies and has already sparked retaliation.

Halting the ‘Caravans’ US President Donald J. Trump on April 3 announced that he would deploy US troops to the border with Mexico to stop the flow of unauthorized migrants into the United States. The comment followed a series of tweets in which the president warned about the “caravans” of migrants that are headed through Mexico to the United States.

There is a strong likelihood that US President Donald J. Trump will withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Robert Zoellick, a former US trade representative, said at the Atlantic Council on October 5, while advising US lawmakers to be prepared to push back.

To Secure the United States' Southern Border, Look to Central America   US Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly has some advice for people thinking of crossing over illegally into the United States: don’t bother coming. “The message is, ‘If you get here—if you pay the traffickers you will probably get here—you will be turned around within our laws relatively quickly and returned. It is not worth wasting your money,’” Kelly said at the Atlantic Council on May 4. People from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—make up the vast majority of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico.

Trump’s Wall Drives a Wedge Between the United States and Mexico  US President Donald Trump’s demand that Mexico pay for a border wall has plunged the US-Mexico relationship into an unseemly crisis, according to two Latin America analysts at the Atlantic Council.

At Last, Some Good News for Mexico’s Peña Nieto  Mexico’s June 7 mid-term elections, which unexpectedly strengthened the ruling coalition’s majority in the lower house of Congress, will boost President Enrique Peña Nieto’s efforts to reform the Mexican economy, predicts the Atlantic Council’s Peter Schechter.  

US Drug Habit Deadly for Latin America  A demand in the United States for drugs—specifically cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines—is devastating communities across Latin America, says Marine Corps Gen John F. Kelly, Commander of US Southern Command.

Mexico’s President Visits Washington; He and US Hope He Can Regain Initiative at Home Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto visits the United States in the midst of the toughest moment of his presidency. He will hope to use his meeting with President Barack Obama today to advance his domestic agenda, according to the Atlantic Council’s top Latin America analysts.