Obama Will Visit Mexico In April

By: Igor Kossov
Topics: Foreign Policy

(AP)

President Obama will visit Mexico for two days beginning April 16, CBS News confirms according to a senior official.

The trip will "strengthen bilateral relations," Mexican presidential spokesman Maximiliano Cort?zar said.

The two presidents will discuss trade, economic competitiveness and security. This will be Mr. Obama's second meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in 2009, but the first visit since Mr. Obama's inauguration. They met in January in Washington before the inauguration.

Mr. Obama has had disagreements with Mexico in the past few months. During the campaign, he suggested he wanted to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to strengthen labor and environmental controls, something that Calderon is against. Recently, Mexico and the U.S. got in a row over a ban on Mexican trucks delivering goods to the U.S., Fox News reported.

Security is another hot topic, following the flare-up in drug cartel violence on the U.S.-Mexican border. Mr. Obama praised Calderon's military response to the cartels but it hadn't done much to stop the killings that claimed about 5,300 lives in 2008, according to MSNBC. The president is considering troop deployment along the border but Calderon wants him to do something about American drug use that keeps the cartels in business, Reuters reported.

Mexico is one of the U.S. 's most important trading partners along with China and Canada. In 2008, U.S. exports to Mexico added up to about $151 billion and imports to about $215 billion, according to the Census Bureau.