Following up on Karen’s post regarding the “Three Amigos” summit, there were a number of things that President Joe Biden seemed to ignore or simply whitewash while trying to score political points at home. One of the more inconvenient moments came at the very beginning of the summit. As NPR pointed out this morning, the summit got off to what they described as “a bumpy start.” During the introductions, when everyone was supposed to act all sunny and positive about what they hoped to accomplish, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador instead decided to deliver an unsubtle critique of the United States and say that we haven’t done enough for his country and that American policy has long been to “ignore” Mexico and all of Latin America. Awkward! (And more than a little ungrateful.)

López Obrador told Biden that the United States had done little to support development in Latin America since President John F. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress” spending in the early 1960s.

“This has been the only important thing, really, that has been done in terms of cooperation for development in our continent in more than half a century,” said López Obrador.

“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,” he said.

So AMLO is accusing the United States of “abandonment, disdain, and forgetfulness,” eh? Perhaps the Mexican president is forgetting that the United States is and long has been Mexico’s largest and most important trading partner. American companies operating in Mexico account for more than half of all foreign investment in his country. We purchase four-fifths of Mexico’s exports. To borrow a phrase from our previous president, AMLO’s “s***hole country” wouldn’t even have an economy if it wasn’t for us.

Further, much like Canada, Mexico doesn’t have to invest very much in its military because they live under the umbrella of its superpower neighbor to the north. That’s a pretty shocking lack of gratitude coming from this guy.

I will also bring up another of AMLO’s comments that Karen already touched on, but it bears a bit of a deeper examination. He thanked Joe Biden for being the first president “in a very long time that has not built not even one meter of wall.” First of all, as Karen already pointed out, Biden recently signed an agreement to resume some (though not enough by a massive margin) construction on the wall, so AMLO’s statement is factually challenged.

But the more important aspect of this part of the story is the fact that AMLO wanted to “thank” Biden for not working on the wall. Let that sink in for a moment. The President of Mexico doesn’t want the border to be secured. And it’s not as if he does more than pay occasional lip service to the idea that he should be doing more, or even anything to halt the flow of illegal drugs and human trafficking into our country from his side of the border.

His country is in the middle of an actual shooting war with one of his nation’s largest drug cartels at the moment, right across the border from us. The Mexican government is infamously corrupt and the cartels probably run more of the country than the government does. But AMLO wants to throw stones at the United States? We’ve already had more than enough reason to finish building the damn wall and the day may come when we’ll need an AUMF to take out the cartels ourselves, as Mike Waltz recently requested. This probably isn’t the ideal time for Lopez Obrador to be hurling insults and making demands.