VANCOUVER—While “timing and opportunity” are the likeliest reasons Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada rather than Mexico, icy relations between Mexico and the U.S. and rhetoric around the “migrant caravan” may have sealed Canada’s fate, according to analysts.

The high-profile tech executive was captured by law enforcement in Vancouver International Airport on her way to Mexico in December. At the time, U.S. authorities had been seeking her arrest for months, said Joseph V. Moreno, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, now a partner with Cadwalader in Wash., D.C.

“Most likely authorities leapt at this first chance they had to request Canadian authorities take her into custody,” Moreno told the Star Vancouver in an email. “Odds are it was first and foremost a matter of timing and opportunity.”

The decision to request Meng’s extradition has catapulted Canada into an escalating dispute with an outraged Beijing. After her arrest on Dec. 1, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested in China, apparently in retaliation. A third Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, was handed a death sentence in January after a one-day retrial on drug-related offences for which he’d already been tried and sentenced to prison.

Meng, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit against the RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency and Government of Canada on Friday, alleging her rights had been violated during the course of her arrest in December.

Moreno said it’s also possible U.S. authorities had a backup plan to make an extradition request to their Mexican counterparts in the event Meng eluded Canadian law enforcement. The U.S. and Mexico maintain an extradition treaty very similar in form and language to the bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Canada.

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But Canada’s deep historical ties to the U.S., both in terms of security goals and intelligence-sharing, virtually assured an extradition through the Canadian system was preferable for U.S authorities, said Christian Leuprecht, professor of political science at Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada.

“If you’re going to pick the path of least resistance, where you’re likely going to have the best chance of a successful outcome, then Canada would have been the next best jurisdiction if (the U.S.) can’t detain the individual on U.S. jurisdiction itself,” he told the Star Vancouver.

Since the establishment of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence in 1940, the security, intelligence and defence partnership between Canada and the U.S. has been extremely intimate, Leuprecht said. And not only does the Canadian judiciary represent a consistent and predictable mechanism for the treatment of extradition, Ottawa and the White House have a “very close, trusted relationship.”

Such trust, he added, is essential to an extradition case surrounding a figure as high-profile as Meng, whose arrest Leuprecht said is “a little bit like arresting the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.”

Even outside of the pressures particular to Meng’s case, extradition is an extraordinarily sensitive, time-consuming and resource-intensive undertaking, he said. Simply sharing an arrest warrant with another country risks a tip-off being leaked to the person of interest — or in Meng’s case, to Huawei or Beijing.

“So, I think the other issue that played into this is that the Americans knew they could trust the Canadian intelligence law enforcement and political executive system that this arrest warrant would not become public, and the Chinese would not get wind of it,” Leuprecht said.

“There’s simply not the trust with Mexico, I think, to share that kind of high-level intelligence if you have the option of sharing it with Canada.”

But the domestic political landscape within Mexico leading up to Meng’s arrest may very well have cemented the American decision to lean on its bilateral agreement with Canada, rather than Mexico, said Emily Edmonds-Poli, associate professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was inaugurated on Dec. 1 — the same day Meng was arrested, Edmonds-Poli pointed out. And leading up to his election, López Obrador had played the nationalist card heavily, she said, which may have unsettled U.S. authorities, given the tension already simmering between the U.S. and Mexico following the election of President Donald Trump.

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“In many ways, I think people thought (López Obrador) was going to be this attack dog that used the anti-Trump, anti-American rhetoric as a basis for drumming up electoral support,” Edmonds-Poli told the Star Vancouver.

“And that really didn’t happen on the level that people were expecting, especially given his rhetoric before the campaign.”

The so-called “migrant caravan” was also being mobilized as a political device in the U.S. in the weeks and months leading up to Meng’s arrest, she said. And a changing Mexican administration may have spurred further uncertainty as to whether Mexico would assist the U.S. in keeping asylum seekers on the south side of the border.

Moreno, the former federal prosecutor, agreed turmoil between the White House and Mexico City could have influenced the U.S. plan for Meng’s arrest.

“We’re ... at a time when our U.S. relations with Mexico are a little strained, because of the immigration issue at the southern border,” he told the Star Vancouver in a second telephone interview. “So it’s certainly possible that these were strategic decisions made by the (U.S.) Justice Department as to which foreign country to work with to try to apprehend her.”

Edmonds-Poli noted that in Mexico, although extradition is nominally granted by the foreign minister, it’s the president who truly makes the final call.

“So there’s a lot of discretion that comes from the executive office, and they can essentially instruct their foreign ministers to go ahead or to block things at any point,” she added.

Amidst all the political and operational ambiguity roiling between the U.S. and Mexico, Meng’s arrest in Canada likely not only represented a “bird in hand,” she said, but a procedure with far fewer unknowns surrounding it.

Edmonds-Poli also noted that extradition between the U.S. and Canada or Mexico is primarily used for drug offences such as trafficking. But for cases between the U.S. and Mexico, the second most common reason for extradition requests is violent crimes, such as homicide and human trafficking.

White collar crimes, on the other hand — such as the charges which have been levelled against Meng and Huawei — are a more common motivation for the U.S. in seeking extradition from Canada, she said.

“In other words, it could be that the processes for handling white collar crime ... are just better established between the United States and Canada.”

Whether Meng is ultimately committed to extradition by the courts — and whether the extradition request is ultimately granted by Canada’s Justice Minster David Lametti — remains to be seen. Meng is due back in court in Vancouver on March 6, at which point the judge is expected to set future hearing dates.

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