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Obama pledges to strengthen ties from Day One
President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday that his administration will begin work immediately to strengthen the US-Mexico relationship.
- AP
- Published: 23:42 January 13, 2009
Washington: President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday that his administration will begin work immediately to strengthen the US-Mexico relationship.
He characterised the existing friendship between the two nations as strong, but said he believes it can be made stronger.
A week and a day away from taking over as president, Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, continuing a longstanding tradition by which new American presidents meet with their Mexican counterparts either before or shortly after they are sworn in.
Emerging from a private lunch at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington that lasted for 90 minutes, both leaders spoke only in general terms about the substance of their talks.
Drug drive praised
Obama said the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between Canada, Mexico and the United States, border security and immigration were among points of discussion. They also talked generally about the Western Hemisphere, he said.
Obama said he aims to build on the commercial, security and cultural ties between the countries, and pronounced himself an admirer of Calderon's stewardship of Mexico's economy, as well as his efforts to fight deadly drug violence.
Calderon, whom US officials have praised for deploying troops to fight cartels and capturing top drug kingpins, won a multi-million-dollar anti-drug aid package from Washington last year. Obama supports the plan, known as the Merida Initiative, and has promised to take up another of Calderon's causes: ending gun-smuggling from the US to Mexico.
Obama said the message he brought to Calderon is that his administration "is going to be ready on Day One" to work to build stronger bilateral relations.
Obama aides said the meeting was meant to underscore the importance of the relationship.
"The friendship between the US and Mexico has been strong. I believe it can be even stronger," Obama declared after a lunch of tortilla soup.
In a statement after the meeting, spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president-elect pledged to find ways to work with Mexico to reduce drug-related violence, stop the flow of arms from the US to Mexico and upgrade Nafta with stronger labour and environmental provisions. Obama also said he was committed to working with Congress to fix the "broken US immigration system," Gibbs said.
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