Among the themes and protocols that characterize international summits of world leaders, there are moments that go down in posterity because they do not harmonize with the solemn tone of the meetings.
Last Friday, one of these moments starred Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and American President Joe Biden.
As part of the bilateral meeting that North American leaders held this Friday in San Francisco, California, when Biden opened the dialogue with his opening speech, he jokingly admitted that the interaction between Obrador and his wife caused some concern during Thursday evening’s dinner for the leaders of the APEC 2023 Leaders Summit.
How nice to see you again. We had dinner last night. I told you, you were sitting next to my wife, you were so adorable I was worried she liked you more than me.
Joe Biden
And so that there is no pretense of bad translations, here are Joe Biden’s original words:
It’s nice to see you again. We had dinner last night. I told you, you were sitting next to my wife, you were so adorable, I was afraid that she liked you more than me now. I don’t know
Joe Biden
After the confession, the Mexican president gave a subtle smile as he stared at his interlocutor.
Obrador and Biden during their meeting last Friday in San Francisco.
Obrador-Biden meeting: What the presidents talked about
The meeting between the presidents of Mexico and the United States served to strengthen cooperative relations and reaffirm the commitment to cooperation between both nations.
During the meeting, they confirmed the commitment to develop a binational strategy to address immigration challenges and address the fight against drug trafficking as a priority.
At the same summit, López Obrador also met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, whom he invited to Mexico before the end of his mandate, with the aim of taking relations between Mexico and China to “another level.”