According to the editorial board of Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Mexican President Felipe Calderon badly mishandled his first meeting with President-elect Obama on Monday, by offering to cooperate in a ‘war on terror’ that has little to do with Mexico, and that Obama is unlikely to espouse in the first place. According to the daily, this once more reveals the ineptness and vulnerability of Mexico in the way it interacts with the United States. Furthermore, the editorial says, to the degree that the two nations share a security problem, it is for the most part coming from U.S. demand for narcotics and the steady supply of weapons smuggled from the United States into Mexico.
In regard to the ‘war on terror,’ the editorial says in part:
“To take up the ‘war on terror’ pursued by Bush Administration as our own, and to make matters worse, offer Obama the drafting of Mexican society into the enterprise, is a dual mistake … why involve Mexico in a ‘war on terror’ that has been completely alien to Obama?’
“The political class in Washington seems to equate the level of danger from undocumented immigrants with that from drug trafficking, and although it has made considerable investments in combating and persecuting the first, who are largely Mexican, it has been more than indolent in combating narco-trafficking. While Latin American nations like Mexico and Colombia bleed themselves to death fighting ‘wars on drugs’ driven by the United States, the U.S. strives to deny the criminal problem on its own territory, and, despite its high-tech systems and powerful military and police, the illicit narcotics continue to pass through its borders on a massive scale. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities have been invariably slow to combat the voluminous trafficking in weapons toward the south of the Rio Bravo – benefiting one of its principal industries.”
EDITORIAL
Translated By Paula van de Werken
January 13, 2008
Mexico – La Jornada – Original Article (Spanish)
The interest President-elect Barack Obama has shown in Mexico and its affairs is encouraging – interest that was expressed yesterday during a meeting held with the chief of the federal executive [President], Felipe Calderon Hinojosa. Certainly, there are reasons to believe that relations with our northern neighbor will see an improvement, especially if a less destructive foreign policy is established toward the rest of the world, our country included, than the one supported during the eight years of George W. Bush’s government. The change, even if only nuanced, offers a valuable opportunity that Mexican authorities must take full advantage of, in order to introduce factors of rationality and mutual benefit to a bilateral relationship that is invariably dominated by the geostrategic and electoral interests of Washington’s political class and the transnational conglomerates of our neighboring nation.
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