Back in 1986, Hollywood gave us Three Amigos, a silly, often funny movie about three "gringos" mistaken for real heroes.  The story is how they try stop a "bandido" known as "El Guapo," or the handsome one.  As I recall, the reaction in Mexico was not good.

Now the "three amigos" are P.M. Justin Trudeau, President Joe Biden, and host Presidente Andrés López-Obrador.  How did the "amigos" get along?  According to one story, the Mexican amigo wants the American amigo to do more for Latin America.  This is the story:

The bilateral meeting between Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday, Jan. 9, ahead of Tuesday's North American Leaders' Summit (NALS) with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, got off with a bit of a rocky start after López Obrador told Biden that the United States government has done little to support Latin America.

"This is the moment for us to determine to do away with this abandonment, this disdain and this forgetfulness for Latin America and the Caribbean," AMLO said. "This is opposed to the good-neighbor policy of that titan of freedom that was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

Biden took issue with López Obrador's statement, and replied — evidently going off script and straying from his prepared remarks — that on the contrary, the United States has spent "tens of billions of dollars in the hemisphere," over the past 15 years, adding that his government had secured agreements from G-7 countries to support infrastructure projects in Latin America.

"The United States provides more foreign aid than every other country, just about combined, in the world — to not just the hemisphere, but around the world," Biden told López Obrador. "Unfortunately, our response just doesn't end in the Western hemisphere: it's in Central Europe. It's in Asia. It's in the Middle East. It's in Africa. I wish we could just have one focus."

Glad that President Biden took issue with President AMLO's silly comment.  Latin America has a lot of problems, and leaders like AMLO in Mexico, Lula in Brazil, Maduro in Venezuela, and Raúl Castro in Cuba are the real problems.

Let's look at Mexico and the 2022 Index of Economic Freedom:

Mexico's economic freedom score is 63.7, making its economy the 67th freest in the 2022 Index. Mexico is ranked 14th among 32 countries in the Americas region, and its overall score is above the regional and world averages.

The Mexican economy grew slowly in 2017 and 2018, contracted in 2019 and more deeply in 2020, and returned to growth in 2021. 

During those five years, a trend of middling economic freedom has continued. With minor score changes across all 12 indicators, Mexico has recorded a negligible 0.1-point overall gain of economic freedom since 2017 and remains trapped in the middle ranks of the "Moderately Unfree" countries. Fiscal health, trade freedom, and investment freedom are relatively strong, but Mexico's long-time, very feeble rule of law does not befit the second-largest economy in Latin America.

Feeble rule of law?  Where have we heard that before?

The U.S. has not forgotten Latin America.  U.S. companies do business with all countries, and U.S. tourists keep the resorts going.  So don't let AMLO get away with telling anyone to remember the continent.

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Image: RawPixel.