Antonio Navalón
The North American Leaders’ Summit, held on January 9 and 10, not only marked the beginning of the year in a truly shocking way in terms of politics, economics, forms, and what may or may not happen. This meeting between Biden, López Obrador, and Trudeau marks, above all, the moment in which an obvious question in our country’s life and politics has taken shape: do we want, or do we not want to be part of the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC?
Initially and in terms of gestures, President Lopez Obrador can be thrilled since his two guests, the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Canada, landed in his AIFA. Moreover, they granted him all the concessions that the Mexican leader had initially proposed. The President of Mexico was seen as a happy child, and in a certain sense, he deserved it. However, the Felipe Angeles International Airport is not his; it belongs to all of us. This facility accurately represents what we Mexicans have and do not have. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to add that this airport is called to be the best military airport in all of Latin America.
When you go on an official visit to Washington, D.C., you do not land at Washington-Dulles International Airport, much less at Ronald Reagan National Airport, but at Andrews Air Force Base located at Camp Springs. A military base, like AIFA, is operated by that country’s armed forces and is also where Air Force One rests between trips. Foreign official visits are received at this facility. With this mention, I am not trying to make a negative reference nor a bad destination for an investment such as the one made to build the AIFA. The problem is that even though, and even though it will eventually become one and will be needed, the AIFA was not built for that purpose. It was built to communicate all Mexicans from the country’s capital with the rest of the world at a time when if you don’t have a place to land planes, you don’t have the infrastructure to receive investment and development.
But no matter what, whatever happens, Texcoco will not be built, and the old Mexico City Benito Juarez International Airport, no matter how much investment and resources are allocated to it, is no longer capable of receiving the wave of visitors that is increasing every day. The old Mexico City airport, despite the need for modernization in infrastructure matters, is the busiest in Latin America. However, its limitations to become the leading transportation element in the 21st century and our country’s future are becoming more evident.
Beyond President López Obrador’s joy -I repeat, for which he is right to be happy- at least formally for what it meant to receive Biden and Trudeau at his airport, at his AIFA, it must be acknowledged that what he asked for was granted. Another very different thing is what happened with the content and in what situation Mexico is left. However you look at it, whatever you want and whatever you expect, the fact is that the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC represents the most important and complete attempt to create the largest domestic market on Earth. And it is the only element that can genuinely channel the shaping of an economic and, therefore, social reality unprecedented in the world, at least in the last century.
What the United States and Canada seek to do with their energies, with climate change, with the evolution of minimum wages, and to create a new universal benchmark for economic development, are the issues they came to Mexico to address. But not only that, the Summit of the so-called “Three Amigos” also dealt with important topics such as immigration, supply chains, imports, drug trafficking, and border security. At the Summit, our President left the testimony of a world that has moved on from old leftists who, for a long time, practiced the sport that everything was easier when going against the United States. In addition to leaving the testimony of saying that they had not paid enough attention to us – undoubtedly true – it was decided to act differently than usual.
One element that Americans really should or will have to think about in the future is that the lack of social revolution and the lack of modernization of the economy and societies of Latin America have provoked this wave in which, whichever way you look at it, they are isolated – as if they were an island – in the middle of an ocean of frustration. They are in the middle of a situation in which, let’s be very clear, it is easier to live against them than to recognize the failures Latin American countries have been committing to have never been able to consolidate the needed social regulation.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of those who popularized the situation and the interference that the United States had at some point in Latin America when he said about the Nicaraguan dictator, Tacho Somoza, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch”. Even a President who did such transcendental things as the “New Deal” and who served so well to modernize and promote -socially speaking- his country in the 20th century was part of those who made the colossal mistake of not understanding that the Marines should not have been used to defend their “sons of bitches”, but should have been used to perpetrate the social revolution. Be that as it may, what is certain is that now the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC, Biden’s, and Trudeau’s speeches are speeches and elements in which we have no choice. It does not matter whether the President of the United Mexican States likes it.
At this moment, we are called to be the most important internal market in the modern world. If China learned the lesson of the domestic market to become the other great economic colossus of the 21st century, we would see which model Narendra Modi’s India, internationalist India, will finally choose when – having become the most populous country on Earth – it takes over the leadership, at least numerically, of planet Earth. In the meantime, the facts that really matter – not the childish testimonies of what could have been and was not, not the bitterness accumulated in our hearts due to the disappearance of our ideologues – do not prevent the creation of economic realities from being as important a factor today as it has always been.
In this reconfiguration of economic realities, the world is in the hands of semiconductors. Whatever happens to Taiwan and invade it when they invade it, at this point, a lot of the world’s staple products – ranging from automobiles to airplanes – are in the hands of semiconductors. The proposal embodied in the High-Level Economic Dialogue agreements held in April of last year and ratified at the North American Leaders Summit with the first trilateral semiconductor forum puts us in a unique position that we cannot ignore. Not every day, the letter carrier knocks on the door, inviting you to be part of something fundamental to the economy of today and the future.
We have many mixed feelings, but, above all, we have a life lived in failure, in what could have been and was not. However, now, for our children and ourselves, we have the opportunity to live an experience of success. To this end, what we must ask of the three Leaders, and the only thing we must ask of the people who are part of the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC is not to allow anyone to condemn the rest of us to a life of blood, sweat, and tears because of their inabilities, their failures or their dreams.
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