Mexico and US relations tense in run-up to summit
The US is becoming jumpy about Mexico's political stability. First the US ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, said at the end of January that the country's law and order system was in danger of breaking down. Then on 16 February Porter Goss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, warned that Mexico could be unstable in the run up to the presidential elections in 2006. On 28 February, the State Department's annual report of Human Rights around the world had some harsh words for Mexico.
The State Department's report categorised Mexico as one of the countries which was lagging behind on human rights, highlighting the thousands (at least 3,000, the State Department claimed) of kidnappings and the shortcoming of the police and judiciary. The State Department claimed that torture was still widespread and that the police and judiciary were often corrupt, inefficient and, in effect, a law to themselves.
Mexico's foreign ministry said that the report was one-eyed and contrasted it with more balanced reports from both the UN and the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. The independent Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos went further: it said that the US "lacked the moral authority to judge other countries' human rights' records".
The criticism by the State Department over human rights was the third time this year that the US has upset Mexicans. Mexico is not used to being lumped in with such US bugbears as Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba, as Porter Goss did. Nor is it used to being classified as a potential risk to US security. Porter Goss, a former CIA agent in Latin America, now Director of Central Intelligence at the CIA, made the claim that all five countries were potentially unstable when he was testifying before the Senate intelligence committee, in an open session on Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States, on 16 February.
To be fair to Goss, Mexico was only mentioned almost in passing. Goss noted that eight countries were holding elections in 2006: he picked out only Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela as possibilities for instability in the run-up to those elections. Santiago Creel, the interior minister, and the 2006 presidential candidate the US would probably most like to see in Los Pinos, the presidential residence, dismissed Goss's fear. He said that the CIA analysis was wrong, muddled and false. He added: "It is wrong that an arm of a foreign government gives its opinions on Mexican issues. That is unacceptable."
The US first offended Mexican sensibilities in 2005 when the State Department and US ambassador to Mexico issued warnings about the law and order situation, especially along the border with the US, on 26 January. It took a telephone call from President George W Bush to President Vicente Fox on 1 February to calm the Mexicans down. President Bush promised to hold a summit with President Vicente Fox in "early March." In the event the summit was delayed until 23 March. It will take place at President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Another invitee is the Canadian prime minister, Paul Martin.
On 8 March President Fox showed that the US comments on Mexico's stability still rankled. He told a radio programme in Mexico that the US comments were "shameful". Fox said "I do not know whether they do these things intentionally or they can't keep control of their people, but anyway they are shameful. I rejected them completely and if they think they can have a partnership with Mexico on this basis, they've got things very wrong."
Creel had earlier taken a similar line. He said: "we know that the CIA frequently gets it wrong and triggers wrong decisions by the US. We're not talking about an armed conflict, as the CIA seems to be, but about an election campaign. Perhaps there was an error in translation. But here we're not going to have conflict but a democratic election campaign."
The leaders of the two main political parties in congress, Francisco Barrio from the Partido Acción Nacional and Emilio Chuayffet from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional both dismissed Goss's fears. Barrio said that there was no risk at all of destabilisation, though he admitted that the election would be hard fought. Chuayffet claimed that Goss's claim was self-serving: "Sometimes you have to realise that these are coded messages and reply: we're aware. But you also have to be aware that the claims are self-seeking."
Other politicians point out, that unlike 1982, 1988 and 1994, there was almost no chance of the country running into a financial and economic crisis before the new government takes office at the end of 2006. Gustavo Madero, the (PAN) president of the lower chamber's finance committee, said that the Americans were too speculative and alarmist and that they were inclined to make something out of nothing.
President Fox is hopeful that his meeting with Bush and Martin in Texas will produce results. "We're going to put down in black and white a vision of where we are going with integration and we're going to deal with issues on which we must advance," he said. Fox stressed that any US involvement in developing Mexican oil would have to be on Mexico's terms. Fox added that it seemed that the US was prepared to present a proposal to congress very shortly to improve the status of Mexican immigrants in the US and he said that the proposal should be in line with what he had discussed with President Bush.
President Fox said that the US's idea was first to regulate the flow of [new]migrants to the US and then "make official" (documentar, was the word Fox actually used) the status of the thousands of Mexican men and women who are working hard, honourably and productively in the US.