Goodbye, Mister Marshall

Upon the announcement of President Calderon’s visit to Washington to meet with President Obama, word that the former had been called to report on the murder of a United States official in San Luis Potosi circulated quickly in Mexico. That idea is a disproportionate and elemental interpretation that is related little to the practices of a bilateral relationship and more related to the imperial neighbor’s way of addressing their own issues of state.

But one could instead think that it was Calderon who proposed a face-to-face meeting with Obama — an idea that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton might have quickly supported when she realized in Guanajuato that there was no way to “standardize” her role and mission in relation to her responsibilities to the Mexican secretary of foreign relations. Furthermore, the gravity of bilateral issues, exacerbated by the events of San Luis Potosi justified a test of the relationship at a high level.

After the visit, it should be clear that Obama did not “beckon” Calderon to account for anything; but what no one dares to explain is what this was to Potomac. No, we should suppose that Ambassador Pascual — to whom, according to the press, President Calderon did not wish to speak — asked for early withdrawal. This being the case, it should still be in the Mexican chancery call that he dares to explain to the president the various and expeditious ways to say goodbye to an undesirable diplomat.

Calderon went to Washington not, we should hope, to explore various Hamletian “alternatives” for protecting officials and American police or permitting them to walk armed through our national territory with a “license to kill”. This, if it is the case, has no room in the Mexican Congress and, based on the immediate reactions that provoked the Calderon meditation in the city of cherries, does not seem to have a better or longer future. We should also suppose that the idea was imposed by President Calderon before running off to the United States; and if not, we can imagine his ambassador, attorney or chancellor forwarding some humble suggestions on the sensitivity of the issue and discussing the impropriety of deliberating about it in public and in English.

Perhaps what Calderon wanted in his swift incursion was to enforce his version of Mexico and its future, and demonstrate the weakness or falsehood of the stories about the Aztec land that are woven daily in the academy and the American and international press, well fed by data, studies, and interpretations that circulate in that country by the radio, TV, written press or the internet, not to mention the thousand and one university colloquia. But he was not successful.

However much you seek to sweeten the ongoing economic and social statistics, or the 2010 Census itself recently released, the verdict is clear and convincing: despite the evolution of inertial society and its productive forces that document this information, the most intimate face and tissues of the nation are damaged and crossed by deep social scars that are unified in an iniquitous inequality and unjustifiable poverty, given the size of the economy and accumulated wealth in almost a century of growth, despite the recent, and the dozens of tragedies of the neo-liberal globalization experiment that just will not go.

The stable impasse has become unstable, because he has mandated the underemployment and employment of millions of young people, while those who are not but have to try to stay in the labor market, face grim prospects in terms of security and employment retribution, when they do obtain it.

Calderon could have spoken of this and more at the Wilson Center or the Brookings Institution, if instead of making bad jokes about the Ambassador Pascual or the basic academic reports, he had favored a direct and frank dialogue with the students and scholars gathered in his honor. The nourished complacency in delusion prevented such and Calderon lived a postmodern version of the famous Spanish movie Bienvenido Mister Marshall: he arrived to town, crossed the bolt and did not see anything or anyone. Traffic and dust was all that was left behind.