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Tillerson tries to soothe troubled allies in Latin America. It's not an easy sell

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday took on the daunting task of resetting relations with Latin America, a region where President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant invective and his disdain for trade ties are rattling allies of the United States.

“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of our economic relationships,” Tillerson said after meeting with the Mexican and Canadian foreign ministers, acknowledging that almost 3 million U.S. jobs depend on trade with neighboring countries.

Like much of what Tillerson said Friday, the statement seemed to contradict his boss. Trump has called NAFTA “the worst trade deal ever made” and has repeatedly threatened to pull the United States out of the accord, which took effect in 1994.

Tillerson will also travel to Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Jamaica with a broad agenda, including an attempt to create a united front to apply more pressure on President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as he grows increasingly authoritarian.

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But hanging over all the efforts is Trump’s heated language, which undercuts Tillerson’s diplomacy on Venezuela and much of the U.S. agenda.

“This is a way for Tillerson to say, ‘We’re elevating our voice,'” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego. “I don’t think they are in a position to elevate their voice.”

“This is the ‘bad Uncle Sam’ of the past,” he said, referring to Trump administration policies. “The horrendous insults to Mexicans, to every single Latin American immigrant, are there. They cannot have it both ways.”

In Mexico, other policies have been subordinated to maintaining NAFTA, which is being renegotiated in a process that seems likely to stretch into the summer.

But Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray has found himself in a difficult position, trying to placate the Americans to save NAFTA but facing pressure at home to respond sharply to Trump’s positions, including his demand to build a wall along the two countries’ border.

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“We didn’t talk about the wall,” Videgaray said curtly Friday. “It is not a bilateral issue.”

Despite Trump’s claims that Mexico is sending drugs and criminal immigrants to the United States, Mexico has continued a close security relationship with Washington. That could change, said Raúl Benítez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“For the government of Mexico, it is getting more difficult to cooperate with the United States” as public hostility to the Trump administration rises, he said, especially with Mexico’s presidential election approaching in July.

While much of Latin America shares the Trump administration’s concern over the escalating humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela, few governments would want to be seen as acting at Washington’s initiative.

“The United States has mostly lost its opportunity to be the big influencer in Venezuela,” said Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican diplomat now based in Washington. “They never came up with a unified solution. I’m not sure what the United States brings to the equation.”

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Washington has placed sanctions on more than 50 top Venezuelan officials, and Canada and the European Union have followed.

But Maduro shrugged off the international pressure last month, when the Constituent Assembly under his control pushed forward the date of the presidential election to April. With the most popular candidates either jailed, barred from running or in exile, there is little time for the opposition to organize around a new candidate to challenge Maduro.

Guajardo said the United States had also lost credibility on another issue that Tillerson hopes to highlight: anti-corruption efforts around the hemisphere. That will be the main theme of the Summit of the Americas in Peru in April.

“He doesn’t realize how out of tune that sounds these days,” Guajardo said, pointing to the potential conflicts of interest raised by Trump’s business activities and those of his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

Tillerson has taken pains to sound a conciliatory note on drugs, acknowledging, as have his predecessors, that the United States shares responsibility in the drug trade as a source of demand.

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But he will raise the issue of increased coca cultivation in Colombia when he meets with President Juan Manuel Santos, a complaint that may prove to be an irritant among Colombians.

As Tillerson travels throughout the region, his statements will be scrutinized at every stop, with the local press quick to point out slights. Latin Americans seized on his comments Thursday about the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which asserted that the United States would not tolerate European intervention in the Americas.

But in Latin America, the doctrine has long been viewed as a pretext for American armed intervention in the region. Tillerson said the doctrine “has been a success” because “what binds us together in this hemisphere are shared democratic values.”

He also seemed to suggest Thursday that the Venezuelan military might choose to mount a coup against Maduro, scratching a barely healed wound in a region with a long history of military dictatorships.

In the past, “when things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that they just — they can’t serve the citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition,” Tillerson said. “Whether that will be the case here or not, I don’t know.”

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On Friday, Tillerson stepped back from that suggestion. “What we would like to see there is a peaceful transition,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

ELISABETH MALKIN © 2018 The New York Times

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