In Mexico Meeting, a Show of Friendship with Few Results on Immigration and Trade Peter Baker and Elisabeth Malkin - The New York Times
go to original February 20, 2014

President Barack Obama, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper pose for a photo in Toluca, Mexico, on Feb. 19, 2014. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

TOLUCA, Mexico — They call it the “Three Amigos” summit meeting, and President Obama and his Mexican and Canadian counterparts played their parts on Wednesday. They shared a lunch, joshed about the Olympics, promised enduring cooperation, and took a staged stroll through a botanical garden, complete with requisite smiles for the cameras.

But the show of trilateral friendship did little to mask a series of stress points that divided the leaders during their first three-way gathering in two years. Although they announced agreements to make it easier to travel among the three countries and to find ways of protecting the Monarch butterfly, the divisive issues of trade, immigration and the hotly disputed proposed Keystone XL pipeline were left largely unresolved.

The meeting came 20 years after the three largest nations of North America tied their economies together in a landmark trade pact. Mr. Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada vowed to further expand commercial flows and to broaden their ties to partners across the Pacific. But they gave little hint as to how they would overcome the obstacles holding up a proposed trade agreement with the dozen nations involved in negotiations, much less the political hurdles in Washington where Mr. Obama’s own party refuses to give him the authority he seeks to seal the deal.

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