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Page 17 of 82
What to Make of FCH and BHO in DC
January 21, 2009
Mexico is where US foreign policy meets Main Street. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans represent 9% of the US population and they are the fastest-growing demographic group (in terms of numbers). More than 3/4 are either legal immigrants, or citizens, representing more than 40% of the population of New Mexico, for example. All of these figures are for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, not for Latinos (or "Hispanics") as a whole.
In international terms, the US will never be safe if Mexico is not institutionally strong. North America as a whole cannot be competitive vis-a-vis Asia without North American trade. Your correspondent has been pointing out the dangers of Mexican instability for over a decade but it hasn't been until the past year that Washington has realized them. Now, the departing CIA director has just said that Mexican stability will be a bigger concern for the incoming president than Iraq. This comes after the Justice Department named our drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) the biggest criminal threat to the US, after the Pentagon compared Mexico to Pakistan and General McCaffrey highlighted the need to take Mexico's violence most seriously. During her confirmation hearings, Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton nodded in that direction by pointing out the urgent need to engage much more profoundly with Mexico regarding our "shared" problems.
All of this comes at a time when the US media is stuck in an inane rut regarding Mexico, where the message is very simple: "violence everywhere!". The flavor of this past week was: "Mexico's narco-violences spreads to every major city in the US" (NBC Nightly News, January 13). Apparently, wily Mexicans have managed to sidestep both Homeland Security, the National Guard (at the border), the DEA, the FBI, as well as state and local law enforcement, infiltrating unsuspecting US communities everywhere. The disingenuos implication is that no Americans are, or have ever been, involved. Mexico's image in the US is probably at its lowest point in the last 50 years.
This was the backdrop to President Calderón's meeting with President-elect Obama. They had a private lunch at the Mexican Cultural Institute on 16th Street in Washington, a building that used to be the Mexican Embassy before the move to Pennsylvania Avenue at 19th Street, three blocks from the White House, in 1991. The visit was coordinated by Armenian-Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan. 15 years ago, he was the Chief of Staff to then-ambassador Jorge Montaño, so his contacts in DC run deep.
It would have been hard for both the incoming and the outgoing American presidents to have been nicer to Felipe Calderón. Obama said he "admired" him. President Bush said it had been a "pleasure" to work together. The President-elect avoided mentioning anything in public about renegotiating NAFTA. Silence will probably only get him so far, however, so a face-saving measure will be necessary. A joint declaration by both presidents promising to work together to improve labor and environmental security for Mexican workers would do nicely. This seems to be what Calderón is moving towards with his latest statements.
President Calderón reportedly left very satisfied. Rumor has it that he gave Sarukhan a hearty hug when boarding TP-01 (Mexico's 757 version of Air Force One) at Andrews Air Force Base. Barack Obama and his team successfully sidestepped the issue of which neighbor to visit first by giving the Mexican president the honor of being the only foreign leader to meet with the President-elect before inauguration, but visiting Ottawa first as President.
Official Washington has always been aware of the fact that the relationship between the two countries is, over the long haul, the most intense and intricate between two countries anywhere. As has been mentioned previously, the DF is the only place outside of DC where every single US government dependency is represented. President Obama, a pensive, intelligent and practical man looks to have his eye very much on the ball with respect to this country. Nevertheless, the current orgy of negative coverage on all things Mexican (violence, narcotics traffic, corruption and all of those nasty illegal immigrants) is desensitizing the American public. Mexico is portrayed as being so awful as to be alien and unsalvageable, an image that is both wrong and dangerous because it makes our relations with the all-important US Congress unwieldy.
Independent of the thousands of issues that need to be resolved by both countries, we ignore US public opinion at our peril. When both governments work together to "sell" an idea to Americans they can be very effective. That was the case in 1993 when they organized a successful public and private PR and lobbying effort to sell NAFTA. If we are to serve the interests of both nations effectively, something similar needs to happen today.
For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page
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