Where is Obama?

Surely Obama’s thoughts are far from Mexico at this moment in which his presidency is challenged by BP’s oil spill in the gulf. He could also be jousting with Brazil and Turkey, who decided to defy Washington, go off on their own and give a break to Iran in its confrontation with the U.S. and its allies—an action which has the resident and Secretary Clinton extremely annoyed. Or perhaps he is trying to neutralize Netanyahu’s extremist tendencies, lift the brutal blockade in Gaza and get Hamas and the rest of the players to make a decent effort at the peace process. Obama could be anywhere, taking care of the many pending items on his packed agenda. But does Mexico have any importance?

The murders of Hernández Rojas in San Diego and the young Sergio Hernández at the Ciudad Juarez border, which have soured relations in a very short time, have not merited a decisive gesture on the part of his political functionaries to reassure us that the border patrol will not be allowed to operate with impunity. Where is Ms. Napolitano, who is in charge of the police force that killed two of our co-nationals — one, apparently, on Mexican soil?

After the boundless optimism unleashed by the friendly relations between the Obamas and the Calderons and by Calderon’s well-crafted speech before Congress, the relationship quickly reached an impasse and seems to have stopped moving forward as diplomacy has lost the control it once had over the ordinary mechanisms of crisis prevention, contention and dissuasion. Since we do not yet have the result of the investigations by the FBI and other agencies, we have had to endure the insulting responses by the Border Patrol union, which accused the deceased adolescent of being a drug trafficker or insisted that, in the face of rocks thrown by teenagers, the officers opened fire to defend their lives. But where are the UN’s guiding principles about use of force and service weapons in law enforcement — in a U.S. government trash bin?

What is certain is that these two incidents which have us so concerned and outraged in Mexico have an importance which goes beyond their number; they break with all international protocol and with the diplomatic etiquette of a neighborly cooperation which is worth respecting and maintaining, not just because of the importance of our strategic and commercial alliance, but because of the grave state in which the health of the border finds itself today. The seriousness of the dispute should be, or already is, high, and represents a new political crisis between the two nations.

The question is if a handful of festering extremists in the border patrol will be able to destroy all bilateral dialogue. Today’s sparks may ignite tomorrow’s fires if we do not pursue active diplomacy, and Mexico does not act with the firmness that the case demands. To begin with, we can acknowledge that these incidents, and those to come until the November elections, are caused by an infection by the SB 1070 virus, developed by the government of Arizona and its criminal sheriffs and which has now contaminated other states of the union.

The displays of vicious racism against one’s own countrymen send a message of direct aggression against Obama, who has always gotten along well with the Latinos, his strategic allies in the 2008 and perhaps 2012 elections—it all depends on whether he comes through for them at their time of crisis. If the president does not step up and act against the anti-immigrant virus and destroy it via a constitutional measure, it is very probable that the resulting political defeat in 2010 will destroy his possibility for re-election in 2012. One might ask the location of Temo Figueroa, the key figure in the electoral triumph that Obama obtained among the Latinos, who is needed now more than ever in the White House to convince the president of the danger that his presidency is in if he does not act quickly.