Mexico-U.S.: A Damaged Relationship

During President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa’s trip to visit President Barack Obama, the first statements given in an interview with The Washington Post turned out to be much more significant than the official announcements. The leader from Michoacán told the newspaper that the bilateral relationship has been severely damaged in the wake of leaked cables from the Department of State by WikiLeaks. He criticized the negative assessments of the military formulated by U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual — which were recorded in one of the above mentioned documents — and also suggested that he will discuss, in his meeting with Obama, the loss of confidence of his government in the aforementioned diplomat.

Calderon’s condemnation of the source of the official leaks — whose documentary collection was given to this newspaper to be used for its journalistic production and dissemination — is unjust and unfounded. Public knowledge of these cables does not induce a crisis in the bilateral relationship, but instead allows citizens to observe the crisis that already exists and find its causes: the meddling of the United States in Mexico, the alarming weakness of the national authorities and the adulation for Washington’s aims to modulate aspects of institutional life that should be reserved for the exercise of sovereignty: the baton passing from Vicente Fox’s government to Calderon’s, control over the fight against organized crime, the design of the political economy and measures of national security and territorial control. And, according to the information available through reports elaborated on by American diplomats, on these and other issues, the current Mexican administration has permitted and even demanded the intervention of its neighbor country’s authorities. With that it has deepened the asymmetry that characterizes the relationship between the two governments, gravely weakenening national sovereignty, and has launched a war that only benefits American interests — those of the gun industry, the large financial circuits and the governmental agencies, always thirsty for excuses to increase their level of intervention south of the Rio Grande — and in which Mexico has everything to lose: lives, institutional strength, territorial integrity and independence.

With a similar way of operating in the political and diplomatic spheres, it seems inevitable that the bilateral relationship should culminate in a terrible imbalance. It is precisely that disparity that is described in the Mexican portion of the cables that WikiLeaks and La Jornada have been spreading.

A clear example of the level of distortion in the links between both countries is the way in which our own Calderon is trying to resolve the uneasiness of his government with Ambassador Pascual through indirect criticisms and hints of dissatisfaction expressed in the American press. International diplomatic norms establish the right of a host country to demand restraint and, in respect to representative officials in its territory, to request their return to their respective countries without presenting arguments for doing so. Those exercises of sovereignty, exercised in recent times by Latin American nations traditionally reviled by the Calderon administration, like Venezuela and Bolivia, constitute the correct way to confront the irreprehensible intervention of American delegations in the countries of the region. There is hope that the Mexican authorities understand, and now share, the reasons that these and other Latin American governments publicly and loudly voice their complaints against Washington.