>> The message for killers and for the drug cartels is very simple -- you kill in Mexico and nothing happens to you.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today, a look at the road ahead for U.S. relations with Mexico -- border security, busting up drug cartels and containing the coronavirus pandemic.

Just a few of the critical issues on the table.

Will President Biden see eye to eye with the controversial but still very popular Mexican president known as Amlo?

We're talking about that and much more today with Univision's Jorge Ramos.

And then I've got your "Puppet Regime."

>> It was the summer of 1987 in East Germany.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> U.S. relations with Mexico are strong and vital.

That's the first line of a State Department fact sheet published just a few months ago.

The vital part is hard to argue.

A shared 2,000-mile border makes Mexico one of America's most essential security partners on everything from immigration to terrorism to fighting drug cartels.

Mexico is also America's second biggest trade partner, edged out only narrowly by China.

So, yeah, it's vital.

But some recent moves by Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

or Amlo, as he's known, are raising doubts about the strength of that bond.

Exhibit A -- the phone didn't ring after the election was called for Joe Biden.

Congratulations came pouring in from heads of state around the world, and Amlo was one of only three world leaders who waited six weeks until the Electoral College vote was official to acknowledge Biden's victory.

The other two -- Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Then, in the weeks ahead of Biden's inauguration, Amlo extended an offer of political asylum to one of America's most wanted -- WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

And he pardoned a Mexican general who had been arrested in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Amlo, a leftist populist, elected in 2018 to a single six-year term -- that's all you get in Mexico -- had a reasonably, even surprisingly smooth relationship with President Trump.

As The New York Times put it recently, "Mr. López Obrador enforced Mr. Trump's hard-line immigration agenda and in exchange, the United States let him run Mexico as he pleased."

Nice of us, really.

We'll see if that continues.

On energy and climate policies, human rights, even views on democracy itself, Amlo and Biden are likely to butt heads.

Which brings us back to the vital issues right now.

Immigration policy moving forward and controlling a raging pandemic.

Mexico now has the third highest death toll in the world.

There won't be any talk of walls in the Biden administration, that's for sure.

But is there a window to be found, a chance for greater cooperation between Mexico and the United States?

We're discussing all that and more today with one of the biggest news names in Latin America, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos.

Here's our conversation.

Jorge Ramos -- they call him the Walter Cronkite of Latin America.

So happy to be with you today.

>> Thanks so much.

Great to be here.

>> We don't have the Trump administration anymore, but there was certainly a presumption when Trump became president, relations with Mexico were not going to be easy, and yet, at least from my perspective, didn't have many blowups.

Talk to us a little bit about the relationship between these two men and how it affected the country.

>> It was an incredibly strange relationship because here you have the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist, having an incredible relationship with this far-right president Donald Trump, and López Obrador has always had this idea that Mexico's issues have to be solved only by Mexicans, that nobody should get involved.

So right from the beginning, López Obrador just didn't want to -- he didn't want to fight with Donald Trump.

And he was saying that openly.

"I don't want to have a fight with the United States and with Donald Trump."

So what happened at the end, unfortunately, is that because this reluctance to fight with your northern neighbor became a very unequal relationship in which Mexico, basically López Obrador did everything that Donald Trump wanted.

So Mexico at the end became the wall, that wall that Donald Trump had promised.

Mexico became that wall, preventing hundreds of thousands of Central Americans from crossing all the way from Central America to the United States.

And not only that, the newly created National Guard in Mexico that was supposed to be created precisely to fight crime in Mexico became Donald Trump's immigration police.

So, yes, there was not a fight between López Obrador and Donald Trump.

They had a pretty good relationship, and now the relationship with Joe Biden is going to change completely.

We can talk about that later.

But there's going to be a shift of responsibility on immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States.

>> We'll get there.

We'll get there.

But, you know, it's interesting because in the United States, the perception is that this wall that Trump keeps talking about and of course, you know, even at the end of his administration, it was desperate.

He had to go to the border and show the bits of the wall that were being built.

>> But unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises.

>> It was actually seen as a failure, one of the promises that he couldn't deliver.

And what you're saying is actually in a much more real, albeit not symbolic way, it was actually a success of Trump at Mexico's expense.

>> Well, I mean, just see the numbers on a regular year, Ian, the United States would have about a million legal immigrants every single year.

But with Donald Trump, those numbers went down to about 600,000.

It's the lowest numbers in decades.

So something was changing.

Because of the pandemic, we have to remember that, and because of very unusual agreements between the United States, Mexico and Central America, the United States, the Donald Trump administration, they were able to establish this new program called Stay in Mexico for immigrants, Central American refugees coming from Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and also the Trump administration, they were able to establish agreements with Central America so that people would stay in their countries instead of coming all the way to the United States.

So, yes, Mexico didn't pay for the wall.

Donald Trump built just a few miles of wall, not 2,000 miles as he expected, but at the end, the end result is that less immigrants were able to come to the United States.

>> So now that Trump is gone and you say the Biden relationship will be dramatically different, not a surprise.

But to start on the immigration point, should we just expect that those numbers are going to go right back up after pandemic to pre-Trump levels?

>> I think so, because the situation in Central America and in Mexico are not only bad, but it's becoming worse.

The problem is that you still have violence in Central America.

You still have the gangs.

We still have to remember that they went through two horrible hurricanes.

There was an earthquake.

So the push factors in Central America are over and then the pandemic.

So if you put everything together, that means that for hundreds of thousands of people, their only alternative for a better life is to come to the United States.

Now, Joe Biden has a plan.

He wants to invest $4 billion in Central America.

The Mexican president has exactly the same idea of investing in Central America so that people over there don't have to come to the United States.

But that's long term, Ian.

The reality is that in the short term and we are already seeing those numbers increasing right at the border in the short term, and without the agreement for the refugees to stay in Mexico, we are seeing right now, as we speak, more immigrants coming to the United States.

>> I mean, clearly, the United States is by far the most important country for Mexico.

I mean, economically, from a security perspective, I mean, you name it.

It felt a little surprising to me that one of the last leaders to call Biden to congratulate him on winning the election from anywhere around the world was actually President López Obrador.

Why did that happen?

>> It's a little bit of Mexican history here.

López Obrador believes that the first two times that he ran for president in Mexico, he believes that he won and that there was fraud, and that because of fraud, he was not able to become president.

And he's very resentful of the fact that many governments, including the United States government, recognized his opponents on those days.

So in a way, what López Obrador didn't want to do is to congratulate Biden before the whole process ended.

And that's why he waited so long.

Of course, on the other hand, we have to remember that he had a very close relationship with Donald Trump and he just didn't want to upset Donald Trump and then to get economic sanctions or to be reprimanded in public or to be tweeted by Donald Trump.

>> But we shouldn't expect any hangover from that in terms of the relations between these two presidents now?

>> I don't think so.

I don't think so.

But the truth is that at the border, we are seeing the beginning of a new crisis, and it is going to be very similar to what happened during the Obama administration.

We're going to be seeing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Remember that right before Donald Trump established these anti-immigrant policies at the border, we already had more than 60,000 Central American refugees waiting on the Mexican side, waiting to come to this country.

And now that that Mexico police, the National Guard is not anymore the U.S. immigration police, it is going to be increasingly easier for immigrants to cross to the American side because Mexico is not putting in a resistance anymore.

>> So what would a successful U.S. trajectory on immigration policy look like that would work for both the Americans and the Mexicans?

Because as you and I both know, a comprehensive immigration reform in the United States is virtually impossible in this divided environment.

>> Yeah, let's start with that.

For immigration reform, we've been waiting for immigration reform, Ian, since 1986, 35 years, and nothing has happened because there has always been this idea that we get everything, that we legalize everybody or that we don't legalize anyone.

So from my point of view, I would start with those who are already here.

It is, as you mentioned, very difficult to get 10 Republican senators to go along with Democrats to approve immigration reform and legalize 11 million, as Joe Biden promised.

Joe Biden promised that he was going to send a bill to Congress and he has already, to legalize 10, 11 million undocumented immigrants.

But to get 10 Republicans is going to be close to impossible.

So either you do it in parts through a budget reconciliation process and then you legalize a few million Dreamers and a few million farmers and a few million essential workers, or we might not get anything.

So what I'm proposing is plan B.

Instead of just getting everything together, which seems almost impossible in the Senate, let's legalize first the Dreamers.

There's already a plan with Lindsey Graham and Senator Durbin that might provide legalization to about 2 million Dreamers.

And maybe we can get their siblings and their parents and then farmers and then essential workers instead of just waiting to get enough votes to legalize everything.

So that would be the first step, and the second step -- and we are always missing the second step -- is that there has to be an immigration plan that includes the fact that 1 to 2 million immigrants are going to be coming every single year to this country.

Those are the facts, like it or not.

But legally, we get about 1 million immigrants every single year except for during the Trump administration.

And then illegally, we might get from 500,000 to another million immigrants.

So we have to understand that the U.S., especially in the middle of a pandemic, people are coming to this country for a reason.

So we have to adapt to it, and we don't have a plan for it.

>> It is so interesting that so many countries, people across Central America, see Mexico itself as such an incredible success story compared to their own.

And yet so many Mexicans are living illegally without benefits in the United States, can't be fixed.

How does this make Mexico feel about itself in terms of national identity, in terms of awareness, in terms of the future of the country?

>> Lately, there has been a reverse migration.

More Mexicans are leaving the United States than Mexicans coming in.

And that's really interesting.

And it has to do with many different reasons.

First, that they've waited for decades and they are still illegal in this country, and to be undocumented in this country is increasingly difficult.

And then on the other hand, there has been economic progress in Mexico.

Mexico is becoming a country increasingly more attractive to those immigrants that were in the United States.

So even though it isn't perfect and even though it has a huge problem with violence and with the pandemic, and despite that, Mexico is growing.

And so we are seeing this reverse migration of Mexicans going to Mexico instead of the opposite way.

>> It's a very important point.

And it leads directly to talking about some of these challenges in Mexico itself.

I mean, first and foremost, coronavirus.

I mean, I see that Mexico now has more deaths from coronavirus than India.

I mean, how much of that is direct mismanagement by the president, by the government?

>> 165,000 Mexicans have died of coronavirus, more than, as you mentioned, in India.

And I don't think it is a coincidence that the countries that have the most people dying of coronavirus, which are the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, those three countries had a president -- Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrés Manuel López Obrador -- who publicly didn't want to wear a mask.

So in the last press conference of López Obrador, he came back and said that he was feeling good.

And then a reporter asked him, "So are you going to be wearing a mask finally?"

And he said, "No, because I am not contagious."

He says, "Wait, wait, wait.

Your medical advisers are telling you and are telling everyone that it is risky that everybody should wear a mask."

And he said "No."

So, yes, I think it was -- the crisis was mismanaged in Mexico.

Even though they've announced hundreds of thousands and millions of vaccines, most Mexicans have not been able to be vaccinated.

And I still remember when López Obrador not only refused to wear a mask, but openly he was saying to families, "Go out and go to the restaurants because the economy needs that."

And at some point, he even said, "Embrace each other.

It is needed," right in the middle of the pandemic.

So it was clearly mismanaged.

It just didn't work, and now Mexicans are suffering the consequences.

>> Are we at least getting good advice from the president and his government on the vaccines?

>> Even though they've announced millions of vaccines, some of them coming from Russia to Mexicans, up to 24 million vaccines, the vast majority of Mexicans haven't been able to be vaccinated.

And yes, absolutely, he's suggesting that the vaccines can help.

But at this point, Mexico is in a terrible, terrible situation.

And then when you have the president giving the bad example, just as Donald Trump did or Jair Bolsonaro did in Brazil, when they're telling you, "No, I'm not going to wear a mask," just imagine what that kind of impact having in a population of 120 million, 130 million.

>> So that's one massive problem that's been quite publicly mismanaged by the president.

Another one that, of course, everyone talks about, and you see the polls, and Mexicans are all saying violence across the country is one of their principal concerns, López Obrador, when he became president, promised hugs, not bullets, that he was really going to address this issue.

And yet we see record levels of violence this year under his leadership.

Why?

>> Because the cartels, the drug cartels control many areas of Mexico.

It was with President Felipe Calderón that Mexico declared a little more than 10 years ago the war on drugs, and Mexico has lost the war on drugs, not only has lost the war on drugs, but people dying in Mexico are reaching levels that we've never seen before since the revolution in 1910.

In 2020, 34,000 Mexicans were killed -- 34,000.

The year before, in 2019, it was exactly the same number.

And there seems to be no strategy that is working.

López Obrador promised that he was going to attack this problem in a different way.

So he created the National Guard about two years ago, and it really hasn't worked.

The message for killers and for the drug cartels is very simple -- You kill in Mexico and nothing happens to you.

Impunity is incredibly high.

At least 9 out of 10 crimes go unsolved in Mexico.

So right now, I would say those two problems, the pandemic and the violence, are two of the most important challenges facing Mexico and López Obrador.

>> And yet, despite all of that, in Mexico, López Obrador is well over 60% in his approval ratings right now.

How do we explain that?

>> Well, because of the past, because we have more than 70 years with no democracy, because of fake news.

It is funny.

When we talk about fake news here in the United States, I usually tell my friends, "Stop, wait.

I come from from the creator of fake news.

I mean, I come from Mexico."

So because of corruption, because of mismanagement, because of lack of democracy, because of censorship, because there was direct censorship from the presidential palace, Los Pinos, to the mass media, because of that, Mexicans remember.

So they just did not want to have the old politicians, the old guard, the state in power.

So in 2018, Mexicans said, "Enough.

We don't want that.

We want something completely different."

And they chose someone completely different.

They chose López Obrador, whose main message -- and he has been very consistent on that -- whose main message has been no to corruption.

I've been very critical of López Obrador because of his policies against violence and his policies against the pandemic.

But on the other hand, I do understand that millions of Mexicans still support him, as you just mentioned.

He's very popular because he's fighting the old guard, because he's fighting corruption, because at least people see him as fighting those that took their money away, those who are living rich lives because of their years in government.

So I do understand why he's so popular, yes.

>> No, I mean, I think one of the most interesting things, as you see people watching this show from around the world is that anti-establishment sentiment can manifest in very different characteristics and very different types of leadership in different countries.

And Mexico is a very interesting example of that.

>> Yeah, and this morning, he was asked, "Why and how did you get infected with coronavirus?"

And he said... "I got infected because I'm one of you."

That's what he was saying.

And he was, for instance, he was very critical of the presidents in other countries who already got the vaccine.

And he was kind of making jokes and laughing of them because he was saying -- the message that he was sending to Mexicans that "I could have gotten the vaccine," he said, "but I didn't because how can I get the vaccine if you cannot get the vaccine?"

So that kind of message is definitely percolating in Mexican public opinion.

>> Jorge Ramos, thanks so much for joining us.

>> Thank you.

>> And now to "Puppet Regime," as Angela Merkel's days as chancellor in Germany come to an end.

She's ready for a new beginning with an old flame.

Roll that tape.

>> Angela Merkel is celebrating her last Valentine's Day as German chancellor.

We asked her if there is any relationship that she wishes had turned out better.

>> Well, there is one.

It was the summer of 1987 in East Germany.

You, a foreign agent with a chip on your shoulder, and I, a physical chemist with vibrational properties of surface hydroxyls on my shoulder.

Was there an agency of physical chemistry in store for us?

I had learned your tongue, you had learned mine.

And yet how fast it all unraveled.

The walls fell.

Our world crumbled.

You betrayed, went east to take power ruthlessly, shirtlessly.

I, betrothed, went west to take power methodically, mirthlessly.

And then one day, years later, we would meet.

I still remember it.

You had to bring that bitch with you.

Alas, I will defend what you wish to destroy, Vova.

But yet I still think back to those hot summer days to what was and what might have been.

Do you think of me?

>> [ Gasps ] Angela.

Angela.

Dimitri, prepare my horse!

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see and of course you do because I mean, hey, it's all about Mexico this week and you wanted to hear about Mexico, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...