President Joe Biden emphasized American cooperation in the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and immigration in his first phone calls to Mexican and Canadian leaders.
In phone calls on Friday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Biden pledged to strengthen regional cooperation, according to reports.
In the phone call with Trudeau, the first foreign leader to speak with the new president, the two leaders “discussed the collaboration on vaccines and recognized that the efforts of the two countries are strengthened by the existing exchange of medical personnel and the flow of essential medical supplies”, according to Canadian reports.
Although Trudeau hailed Biden’s presidency as a “new era” for relations between countries, he complained that Biden destroyed a pipeline linking the two countries on his first day in office. According to a White House statement, Biden acknowledged “Trudeau’s disappointment in the decision to terminate the license for the Keystone XL pipeline.”
In a conversation with Lopez Obrador, the Mexican president spoke about the contribution of Mexican migrants in the United States and said that the best way to manage migration is to create economic development in the impoverished regions from which migrants leave, according to a note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico .
The call comes at a time of tension with the US federal investigation into former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, which ended in November. US prosecutors claimed that Cienfuegos was the head of the H-2 drug cartel.