Marcelo Ebrard, Foreign Minister of Mexico, rejected this Tuesday, Feb. 14th, and described as “slander” the statement of Martha Bárcena, the country’s former ambassador to the United States, who affirmed that he secretly accepted the “Stay in Mexico” program, as Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State for Mexico, assured in his new book.
“What he maintains in the interview with (journalist) León Krauze, which he has said in other forums is, that is simply false,” said the Secretary of Foreign Affairs during the president’s morning press conference Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Ebrard thus referred to the statements that Bárcena gave to Krauze in a podcast, where he asserted that the foreign minister accepted the “Stay in Mexico”, a program of then-President Donald Trump (2017-2021) for migrants to wait in Mexican territory while their asylum processes in the United States were resolved.
The former ambassador thus supported the statements of Pompeo, who in his new book accused Ebrard of secretly accepting the program in a negotiation in 2018.
“It is absolutely false, and I am proud to be part of the government of President López Obrador and of what we have achieved with the United States in extremely difficult conditions,” Ebrard said.
The official explained that, with Trump, the US tried to impose the treaty known as a “Safe Third Country” that they have with other countries such as Canada and, if they do not accept, they would impose tariffs on Mexico.
“So the main, paramount instruction, what we had to achieve despite all the enormous tension and difficulty that this task meant is that Mexico did not have to sign the safe third country and at the same time we did not have tariffs,” he asserted.
In addition to this, Ebrard accused Bárcena of slandering him and being “ungrateful” to the government that appointed her ambassador.
“Since she left office, the former ambassador has dedicated herself to slandering me every time she can. It’s an obsessive grudge ” the Secretary of Foreign Relations said.
For his part, López Obrador also defended Ebrard’s position and assured that Bárcena’s statements are unfounded.
“It has no foundation, it is the right to demonstrate, the freedom to express oneself, but it is nothing more than a conjecture and whoever interviewed her, as you all know, León Krauze, is an enemy of us, an adversary,” Lopez Obrador pointed out.
The “Stay in Mexico” program was one of the most controversial immigration measures in the United States during the Trump administration, which forced migrants who wanted to enter the country to wait for the resolution of their bureaucratic procedures in Mexico, which caused chaos in Mexico. the border and accusations of human rights violations.
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