The Bilateral Relationship Is Dead

Donald Trump has been able to speak out and tell lies without a firm official response on the part of Mexico.

I don’t remember a time in the past five decades when Mexico-U.S. relations were at such a low level as they are today.

Miguel Basáñez spent less than two months in the embassy in Washington, after five months during which an acting ambassador was in charge, following the resignation of Eduardo Medina Mora who returned to Mexico to be confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court.

And on the U.S. side, Washington has still not been able to send Roberta Jacobson as ambassador to our country; the U.S. Senate has postponed her confirmation on two occasions.

The bilateral relationship is regrettably at a very low point at a time when the grating businessman, Donald Trump, is in the spotlight, continually denigrating Mexicans in his attempt to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency.

Who responds to Trump, or how do you find an appropriate communications channel to respond to him? Until now, outside of a complaint by former Chancellor José Antonio Meade, Trump has been able to speak out and tell lies without a firm official response on the part of Mexico.

And now, in addition, because of our indefensible human rights record, the Mérida Initiative funds sent by the U.S. each year to Mexico are being cut.

In purely numerical terms, the cut in funding will be minor — amounting to $5 million out of the $148 million received this year to cover the assistance that the U.S. has been providing to the Mexican government since the agreement reached by Felipe Calderón and George W. Bush at the Mérida Summit in 2008.

Nonetheless, this is the first year the U.S. State Department has decided not to submit the letter required by Congress for the approval of funding for the fight against organized crime.

In other years, the State Department has at least looked for positive signs to report so that the flow of funds could continue, as has been the case since 2010. Congress is delaying funding while the Mexican government decides whether to take action, such as passing a human rights law or putting limits, however slight, on the military.

Now, those funds have been unequivocally diverted to the coca eradication program in Peru.

And since there is nobody in the two embassies responsible for addressing this new situation, Mexico’s image, already bad, keeps getting worse without anyone to defend it. This is over a mere $5 million: not enough to fill the gas tanks for one morning for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

In addition to that, it is worth noting that an account of the history of the funding of this program appeared in The Washington Post. The article noted increasing concern on the part of the U.S. with respect to events in Ayotzinapa, Tlatlaya and Apatzingán, clear examples of Mexico’s poor record on human rights.

If we look at previous articles by Joshua Partlow, the Post’s bureau chief in Mexico, it doesn’t seem that the U.S. government’s concern is only with that country. Before Mexico, Partlow was bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, and before that, a correspondent in Iraq.