Global IssuesUS-MEXICO: State Visit Highlights Ties, Frustrations
With no major new initiatives on the agenda, President Felipe Calderón's state visit here this week appeared designed primarily to highlight increasingly close ties between the United States and Mexico despite growing frustrations on both sides of the border over immigration, economics and security cooperation.
The summit, which got underway with Calderón's welcome by President Barack Obama at the White House Wednesday morning, has been somewhat overshadowed by anger - shared by both presidents - over draconian anti-immigrant legislation approved last month by the state of Arizona.
Indeed, in remarks to the press after the presidents' first meeting, Obama criticised the new law, which authorises police to demand proof of legal residency of anyone they reasonably suspect of a legal violation, as 'misdirected' and stressed that his Justice Department was exploring a constitutional challenge.
At the same time, however, he suggested that Mexican hopes for a comprehensive immigration reform that would legalise the status of millions of Mexicans living in the United States was unlikely to be fulfilled soon given growing Republican opposition.
'(While) I have confidence that I can get the majority of Democrats, both in the House and the Senate, to support...legislation ...I don't have 60 votes in the Senate. I've got to have some support from Republicans,' he noted.
The summit, which was to be capped by Calderón's speech to a joint session of Congress Thursday morning, in which he also assailed the Arizona law as a 'terrible idea' that will result in racial profiling, marked only the second state visit - Indian President Manmohan Singh was the first - by a foreign leader here since Obama took office in January 2009.
'That demonstrates the symbolic importance of the relationship which is itself an important message to convey to both populations, particularly given these more recent tensions in Arizona and the ongoing violence in Mexico,' said Maureen Meyer of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
'Unfortunately, both leaders don't have a lot to really tout at the moment,' she said. 'The U.S. can't praise much that they're doing in curbing arms trafficking or dealing with immigration, while, in Mexico's case, they can talk about high-level arrests and seizures of guns and drugs, but they also have a record level of drug-related killings and increasing reports of infiltration of organised crime into state institutions.'
In many ways, the current relationship between the two neighbours has never been as close, according to analysts here.
'The bureaucracies on both sides are working better than ever, and the day-to-day management of relations has improved a lot,' noted Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a hemispheric think tank. 'But domestic politics on both sides of the border stands in the way and complicates the agenda.'
That is particularly true of Calderón's ongoing war against the drug cartels in Mexico to which Washington has so far contributed some 1.3 billion dollars in lethal and non-lethal assistance under the three-year-old Plan Merida aid package. The Obama administration has asked Congress for another 310 million dollars for the programme for next year.
But while Mexican officials claim to see light at the end of the tunnel, the violence has appeared only to worsen, with some 6,500 people killed last year alone.
And the apparent abduction earlier this month of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a kingmaker and former presidential candidate of Calderón's National Action Party (PAN), on the eve of the president's visit here has underlined how little progress has been made and renewed questions here and in Mexico about the wisdom of his approach.
'In order to justify continued U.S. support, they have to show advances, but it's a difficult case to make,' said Shifter.
'The politics don't help. In Mexico, they ask, 'Why can't Obama be more serious about controlling the flow of arms (to the cartels),' and on the U.S. side, people ask, 'why don't we do what we did in Plan Colombia and send in U.S. personnel and contractors?' But here you can't touch the flow of arms (because of the power of the gun lobby), and there you can't bring in U.S. advisers. So both Calderón and Obama have to tread pretty carefully,' according to Shifter.
In his remarks to Congress, Calderón made clear some of his frustrations with the United States. He said Arizona's law 'ignores a reality that cannot be erased by decree' and called for comprehensive immigration reform, insisting that both countries had a shared responsibility to repair a 'broken, inefficient' immigration system.
At the same time, he touted the creation of more than 400,000 new jobs in Mexico since January, stressing that his government was doing its part to discourage economic immigration to the U.S.
While he praised recent moves by the Obama administration to put greater stress in U.S. drug policy on reducing demand through prevention and treatment programmes, Calderón also urged Congress to re-impose a ban on the sale of assault weapons, noting that violence in Mexico skyrocketed after the ban was lifted in 2004.
While insisting that he respected the U.S. constitutional right to bear arms,' he noted that, 'Today these weapons are aimed by the criminals ...at Mexican and civilians and authorities.'
But even as he was calling for greater U.S. support and understanding for his war against the cartels, some groups here stressed that additional U.S. aid should be directed less at the military effort and more at building stronger law-enforcement institutions that could protect against corruption by the cartels and human rights abuses by the army, including torture, extrajudicial executions, and disappearances, that have risen sharply over the last several years.
'While Calderón's remarks on counter-drug efforts received accolades from Congress today, the Mexican government's military offensive has led to a startling ten-fold increase in human rights violations,' WOLA's Meyer said. Currently 15 percent of the Plan Merida aid is subject to human rights conditions.
WOLA, the Washington-based Latin America Working Group (LAWG), and three Mexican human rights groups issued a joint statement Wednesday calling on both Obama and Calderón to work together to support long-term and sustained police and judicial reform in Mexico, including steps to ensure that abuses by the Mexican military against civilians were tried in civil courts.
'These issues are definitely on the agenda, noted Eric Olson, a Mexico specialist at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars here. 'The question is how quickly and deeply they're going to follow through on them.'
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service