By Juan Montes and José de Córdoba 

MEXICO CITY -- U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will hold their first face-to-face meeting on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., a potentially risky encounter for the Mexican leader who has entered into a useful marriage of convenience with Mr. Trump since being elected president two years ago.

On paper, the one-day visit to Washington -- the first trip abroad by the Mexican leader as president -- is partly to celebrate the United States--Mexico--Canada Agreement coming into force on July 1. The trade deal replaces the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. It is key for both the U.S. and Mexico, which traded goods and services for some $615 billion last year.

Hopes for a trilateral meeting on Thursday to mark the trade pact were scuttled when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declined to attend, citing previous commitments.

But the Mexican leader's trip to Washington was always much more about cementing a personal relationship between him and the U.S. president -- one that has defied expectations of trouble given that Mr. Trump's political rise was partly based on casting Mexico as a threat to the U.S., from illegal immigration to drug trafficking to trade that costs American jobs.

"This visit is not really about any asks," a senior U.S. administration official said, adding the visit has no specific agenda. "It's about two statesmen building on their relationship."

At first sight, the two presidents are an odd political couple. Mr. Trump is a flamboyant self-declared billionaire who loves to flaunt his wealth. His 2016 presidential campaign was fueled by inflammatory rhetoric against Mexican immigrants. Building a wall to stop migrants, for which he said Mexico would foot the bill, was Mr. Trump's fundamental electoral promise.

In contrast, Mr. López Obrador draws attention to his personal austerity and claims he doesn't even have a credit card. He has tried, unsuccessfully, to sell Mexico's presidential jet, which he refuses to use. He will arrive in Washington on a commercial flight. In 2017, Mr. Lopez Obrador criticized Mr. Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric as racist.

But things quickly changed after the Mexican president won a landslide victory in July 2018, and fearing the economic impact of a confrontation with the U.S., sought a political accommodation with Mr. Trump. Since then, each leader has given a hand to the other in issues of fundamental importance to both.

Last year, Mr. Trump threatened to place tariffs on Mexican exports, a move that would have devastated Mexico's export economy, unless the country acted to help stop surging illegal immigration from Central America to the U.S. Mr. López Obrador deployed some 27,000 soldiers across the country to help turn back migrants. Monthly apprehensions of migrants at the U.S. border plummeted from a 13-year record high of 133,000 in May 2019 to just 30,000 in February of this year. He also agreed to Mr. Trump's request that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while their judicial cases are reviewed in the U.S.

For his part, Mr. Trump agreed to omit a chapter on liberalizing Mexico's energy sector from the USMCA, a move requested by Mr. Lopez Obrador, who has long held that only Mexico's government should exploit the country's energy resources.

A top aide to Mr. Lopez Obrador said the two admire each other personally for being maverick outsiders who have upended corrupt political establishments in their respective countries.

Mr. Trump has said he likes Mr. López Obrador, even calling him in April "a very good friend of mine," and has publicly thanked Mexico for its immigration efforts. "He is a great guy," he said last month in Yuma, Ariz., during a trip to oversee the continuing work on the border wall.

Recently, Mexico's foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard called the relationship between the two presidents excellent and said the bilateral relation is "at its best moment in recent years."

Time and again, both sides have resolved conflicts. After cartel gunmen massacred nine American women and children in November in northern Mexico, Mr. Trump threatened to declare Mexican drug gangs to be terrorist organizations. The move could have given a green light to the U.S. to undertake military operations in Mexico, according to a Mexican security official. But Mr. Trump postponed the decision at Mr. López Obrador's request. In exchange, Mexico quickly boosted extraditions of drug traffickers and other criminals to the U.S., and increased joint anti-cartel actions, the official said.

This year, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump sent Mexico 1,000 ventilators. In April, Mr. Trump also said the U.S. would take on part of the oil production cut that Mexico should have implemented as part of a global deal among oil producers to shore up oil prices.

"I want to thank the U.S. government, and president Trump in particular, for the support we have received to face the pandemic," Mr. López Obrador said last month. "We have had a good relationship."

Beneath sharp differences in style, Mr. Trump and Mr. Lopez Obrador share many traits. They are populists who tend to offer simple solutions to complex problems, and economic nationalists who claim to put their countries first. They both have a pronounced authoritarian streak, thin skins and a seemingly insatiable itch for the spotlight, political analysts said. Both have been widely criticized for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"They appear to have really hit it off despite never meeting before and coming from quite different ideological backgrounds," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "They have found ways of helping each other politically at key moments despite their differences."

Mr. Trump lambastes the media, railing against "fake news." Mr. Lopez Obrador does the same, bashing what he calls the "prensa fifi," or "posh press," referring to what he sees as conservative and dishonest media.

Mr. Lopez Obrador's visit is a risky political gamble. It has already unleashed criticism in Mexico, where Mr. Trump is almost universally disliked for his views on immigrants and plans to build a wall, and by Democrats in the U.S., who fear the meeting could give Mr. Trump a pre-election boost.

"I hope [Mr. Lopez Obrador] asks the president of the U.S. if he thinks that Mexicans are still rapists and murderers," said Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic Party, in a videoconference press call last week.

The visit could be a political disaster for Mr. Lopez Obrador if Mr. Trump boasts about his immigration policy and decides to publicly thank Mr. López Obrador in person for his efforts to help detain and deport illegal Central American migrants, analysts say.

When former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invited Mr. Trump to Mexico City in 2016 as the Republican presidential candidate, the move was seen by most Mexicans as a historic mistake and Mr. Peña Nieto's popularity fell to record lows.

Also, with the U.S. presidential election four months away, some critics say Mr. López Obrador could be seen as meddling in the U.S. electoral process, and poison the well with Democrats, since a meeting with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden isn't scheduled.

The meeting with Mr. López Obrador "will not only be used as an electoral prop by Trump. It will confirm the prevailing view amongst the Biden campaign and many Democrats that both the current and previous Mexican governments have jumped on the Trump bandwagon," said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S.

Roberto Velasco, the general director for North America at Mexico's Foreign Ministry, acknowledged the risks added, "It would be riskier to enter a new economic era in our relation with the U.S. and not to have a high-level dialogue with the U.S. government."

--Gordon Lubold in Washington, D.C., contributed to this article.

Write to Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com and José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 07, 2020 18:34 ET (22:34 GMT)

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