Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Saturday that Mexico emerged from negotiations that averted U.S. tariffs with its “dignity intact,” according to The Associated Press.
“There are no tariffs, Mr. President, we emerged with our dignity intact,” Ebrard, who helped negotiate the agreement, said he told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador during remarks at a rally in Tijuana, the AP noted.
López Obrador, meanwhile, told the crowd that he was prepared to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products.
{mosads}He said he would have been reluctant to apply the tariffs but added that “as chief representative of the Mexican state I cannot permit that anyone attacks our economy or accept an unjust asymmetry unworthy of our government,” according to the AP.
The rally in the border city had initially been scheduled as a show of national solidarity as the clock ticked down to the imposition of U.S. tariffs, the news service noted, which the Trump administration had said would incrementally increase from 5 percent to 25 percent until Mexico took more action to deter migrants from crossing its northern border into the U.S.
On Friday, however, President Trump announced that a deal had been reached to prevent the tariffs from going into effect. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that key concessions from Mexico on border security had in fact been reached in March during talks between Mexican Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
In his remarks at Saturday’s rally, López Obrador said he urged the U.S. to understand the roots of the influx of migrants even as they worked to improve border security.
“The migratory phenomenon doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from the material needs and the insecurity in the Central American countries and in marginalized sectors and regions of Mexico, where there are human beings who need to set out on a pilgrimage to mitigate their hunger and their poverty or to save their lives,” he said, according to the AP.