It's been announced that Obama and Peña Nieto will meet in Washington on January 6 "with the aim of continuing to strengthen the strategic alliance between the United States and Mexico and to continue to advance their mutual objectives," according to Josh Earnest, Obama's press secretary.
Obama appears to really, really like Peña Nieto. He just looks SO relaxed and smiling in photos of them together. If you click on the link you'll come to the page with even more photos.
You can scroll down the images page of Google for not just straightforward photos, but for cartoons like the one below. You can probably figure out a lot of them even if you don't know Spanish
Below you see Obama and Peña Nieto planting pine trees in China in what was called a "luxury park". It was a photo op to show the forum for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation supporting reforestation efforts.
It actually seems to me that Obama is more taken with Peña Nieto than vice versa. The Administration has not seen any reason to associate the murder of the Ayotzinapa students in Mexico with failure on the part of Peña Nieto's administration although finally he and Secretary of State John Kerry have said the crime has "no place in civilized society." The Administration has in a kind of friendly, condescending way offered US aid "to get to the bottom of exactly what happened" to the students. Obama went on to say, "we've got to make sure we strengthen the criminal justice system, the investigative capacities....Mexico is our friend and neighbor. We want them to thrive." As if the US on its own came up with how to define the problem and how to solve it.
Enrirque C. Ochoa and Gilda L. Ochoa have rightly brought up the fairly obvious fact that the roots of a lot of the problems of both Mexico and the US have to do "with corporate-driven economic transformations and policies such as NAFTA...." Mexico has the second most unequal and the US the 4th most unequal income distribution among the 34 members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
And Obama continues to see solutions in terms of justice systems and policing which now receive aid where social services, schools, health, etc. don't. Guns, NOT butter. If this is the best the US can do, they should just leave Mexico alone.
It appears that Obama is perfectly satisfied with his own ideas about Mexico and Mexico's president. And it never occurs to him not to condescend to Mexico, to see his own country's status as a failing democracy. Who is he to preach?