Mexico & Nafta - April 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The US State Department announced the resignation of the US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, on 19 March. Ostensibly, Pascual's resignation is a victory for President Felipe Calderón, who had made it clear, particularly during his recent (2-3 March) trip to meet President Barack Obama in Washington, that he had lost confidence in Pascual. But Calderón's victory could easily turn into a strategic defeat and leave Mexico with no conduit to the higher echelons of Washington policymakers during the next, crucial, few months. This is because, at the express request of the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Pascual is remaining in Mexico to ensure an “orderly transition".

Relations between Pascual and Calderón, though not between Pascual and   Patricia Espinosa, Mexico's foreign minister, had deteriorated so much that organisations such as American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico (Amcham) invited Calderón and Pascual to different bits of their annual meeting. Insiders say that this was to avoid awkwardness, though officially, “diary clashes" were cited. Calderón attended the opening and Pascual the closure of the annual get-together. Traditionally, both the president and the US ambassador would attend set-pieces such as the Amcham annual do together.

This sort of standoff is likely to continue for as a long as Pascual remains in the country. As President Obama took five months to settle on Pascual (after the previous ambassador, a political appointee, resigned after Obama came to power), Pascual is likely to be stalking the US embassy in Mexico City until at least the autumn, given the problems Obama may also have in getting his nominee confirmed by the Senate.

The next few months are likely to shape the next few years of US-Mexican relations. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that by October the runners for the Mexican presidency in the July 2012 elections should become clear.

Another is that by October Mexico will have to be clear about what sort of privileges it is prepared to give the US in Mexico. It is worth noting that President Calderón only recently commented on the scandal caused by a strange US plan, known as 'Operation Fast & Furious', to allow Mexican gangs to equip themselves with assault rifles from the US. He made his elliptical comments in a long interview with El Paí­s, a Spanish newspaper, published on 27 March.

Calderón & El Paí­s
President Felipe Calderón's sympathetic interview with Javier Moreno, the editor of El Paí­s, appeared designed to achieve two things. The first was to portray Calderón as a statesman. The second was to fix the US, and particularly President Barack Obama, with the blame for the upswing in the violence in Mexico. Calderón virtually called Obama a moral coward for failing even to attempt to reintroduce the controls on the sale of assault rifles in the US which had been introduced by President Bill Clinton but effectively abolished by President George Bush in 2004. As Calderón took umbrage at Pascual for questioning the bravery of Mexican security forces, the insult was calculated. Moreno wanted Calderon to say that he was disappointed with the US but Calderón adroitly dodged that admission. He implied that his lodestar was a realist insight from the founder of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), Manuel Gómez Morí­n, who said: “Que no haya ilusos para que no haya desilusionados [You can't have dreams without being disappointed]."

Calderón has not commented directly on the US use of unmanned drones over northern Mexico (though US and Mexican officials both claim that the Mexico asked the US to deploy the drones). Calderón also has to decide how far to push two US requests: one is for the extradition of a Mexican accused of killing a US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer to face prosecution in the US which could result in a death penalty sentence; the other is for US officials to be allowed to carry arms when on duty in Mexico.

There is a growing view in Latin America that the US relationship with Mexico (and some would say the Caribbean Basin) is different from its relationship with other countries in Latin America. Indeed Jorge Castañeda, President Vicente Fox's first foreign minister (2000-2003), recently suggested that Mexico's relationship with the US had more in common with the Caribbean Basin's relations with the US than with South America's US dealings. Castañeda argued that President Obama's recent trip to Latin America (with stops in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador) may be the last by a US president to Latin America. From now on, Castañeda argued, US presidents will deal separately with at least two Latin Americas: Mexico and the Caribbean Basin, and South America.

In Castañeda's view, each of these sub-regions has a completely different range of issues to discuss with the US. South America has joined the world economy thanks to the commodity boom and thus the US no longer dominates its economic relationships. For Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, however, the US looms over them and issues like trade, immigration and security all have a US dimension to them and are also politically important in the US. It will be fascinating to see if Castañeda's insight is acted on by the US. For Mexico, it has already become clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has as much influence on US policy towards Mexico as the State Department.  

The heating political pace in Mexico in the run-up to the 2012 elections had a bearing on Pascual's difficult relations with Calderón. One of Calderón's alleged (but unstated) problems with Pascual was that he is dating Gabriela Rojas, the daughter of Francisco Rojas, who leads Mexico's biggest party, the Partido Revolucionario Instituicional (PRI), in the lower chamber of congress. Rojas is a strong ally of a former president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). Salinas is widely assumed to be backing Enriqu Peña Nieto, the governor of the Estado de México, for the 2012 presidency. Calderón showed himself to be particularly annoyed last May, when Peña Nieto and Pascual winked at each other when all three were at an event in the Estado hosted by the Ford Motor Company.

Calderón's problems with Pascual officially began when the ambassador's comments about Mexico and the inefficiency and corruption of its police and army, as revealed in US State Department cables, were published by WikiLeaks in December 2010. According to WikiLeaks, Pascual also made some undiplomatic comments about Calderón.

Despite Calderón's hostile comments about Pascual during the March trip to Washington, the US backed Pascual strongly in briefings. Indeed, Clinton's statement accepting Pascual's resignation was also strongly supportive of Pascual's term as ambassador to Mexico. She called him the “architect and advocate for the US-Mexican relationship, effectively advancing the policies of the US on behalf of the President and this administration."   Interestingly, Clinton enumerated Pascual's successes as energy and trade, especially promoting US exports, and only in passing commented on the security problems which are the biggest problem Mexico faces.

Pascual himself, however, recognised, according to a State Department statement, that he had become a distraction in US-Mexico relations and therefore made the personal decision to resign.

The vetting of a successor to Pascual by the US Senate is likely to be excruciating for Calderón and his government. A growing number of US policymakers believe that Mexico is well on the way to becoming a failed state and poses a major security threat to the US. These points are certain to be aired in the vetting process.

Pascual's resignation comes at a particularly awkward time in bilateral relations, with politicians on both sides of the border trying to gain domestic popularity by taking swipes at their neighbour.

On 17 March senators from all parties, including the ruling PAN, criticised the Mexican government's policy towards the US. The Mexican senate's unhappiness with what the US has been doing in and over Mexico bodes ill for US attempts to allow its officials to bear weapons in Mexico and for the US attempts to extradite a Mexican suspect for the murder of the US ICE agent to face a death-penalty trial in the US.

On 16 March Mexico did extradite a national, Emilio Samyn Gonzáles Arenazas, to California, where he faces prosecution for the murder of a US Border Patrol agent in 2009. California, however, has a de facto suspension of executions.

On 17 March Mexican senators from all parties were questioning the foreign minister, Patricia Espinosa, over recent US operations in Mexico. The two most notable were the aforementioned 'Operation Fast & Furious', in which the US deliberately allowed Mexican gangs to equip themselves with supposedly tracked assault rifles, and the use of US drones in Mexican airspace.

A former foreign minister, Rosario Green, from the PRI, said that never had a Mexican government handed over so much for so little and with such poor results. She said that Mexico's foreign policy was in a critical situation, with the government concealing information and making dangerous miscalculations in a confrontation with the US over Pascual. Green's questioning of Espinosa was particularly pointed, because Green had been one of the supporters of Espinosa, a professional diplomat, during her time as foreign minister. When Green was foreign minister, Espinosa was responsible for Mexico's relations with Latin America.

Green said that it was “unacceptable" for the Mexican government to rely on “investigations on the other side of the border" over both 'Fast & Furious' and the use of drones.

What the Mexican senate can do the US House Representatives can do even better. On 18 March, a Republican congressman from Texas, Michael McCaul, who chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations & Management, announced a 31 March hearing on “The US Homeland Security Role in the Mexican War Against Drug Cartels" to consider “the failed" 'Fast & Furious' operation.

The Mexican government itself stoked the fire on 23 March when Alejandro Poiré, a senior security official, let it be known that Mexico would seek to extradite US officials who had approved 'Fast & Furious'. Mexico's decision to go for extradition raises the stakes in the growing row between the US and Mexico over 'Fast & Furious'. The US is highly unlikely to allow its officials to face Mexico's courts, yet influential US Republican congressmen, such as McCaul, want the Mexican suspect accused of killing the ICE agent, Jaime Zapata, on duty in Mexico, extradited to the US to face a possible execution.

The plot thickens over 'Fast & Furious'
Mexico's Procuradurí­a General de la República (PGR) said that it would investigate further allegations, emanating from the US, that senior US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials knew about Fast & Furious but deliberately concealed the information from their Mexican counterparts.

The PGR, which liaises with the DoJ, said that it was investigating whether crimes had been committed on Mexican territory. The PGR pointed out that US government officials had again admitted that Mexico knew nothing about Fast & Furious. The latest revelations came from Darren Gil, a former ATF representative in Mexico. He said that his superiors ordered him to keep the operation secret from his Mexican counterparts but also confirmed that not only the director of the ATF, Ken Melson, but also US Department of Justice officials knew about the operation. He said that an interception of weapons in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010 has triggered his suspicions that something was going on but he had been denied background information.

The statement that Mexico would seek extraditions came from the outgoing and incoming chairmen of the joint security committee in Mexico's congress, Gustavo González, a PAN deputy, and René Arce, a PRD senator, respectively. They were reporting on a joint meeting with Poiré. The committee chairmen both said that the federal Procuradurí­a General de la República (PGR) was working on securing the extradition of the US officials.

The chairmen added that Poiré had confirmed to them that no Mexican official had known about 'Fast & Furious'. In the US, the ATF was not working alone.   Documents show that the ATF had conference calls with the Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). An ICE agent, officially answerable to the DHS, was on the ATF's 'Fast & Furious' team. This team was also advised by an assistant US attorney from the Justice Department.

• Pascual's comments on Mexico, via WikiLeaks:
  The Mexican army did not respond quickly or effective to intelligence provided by the US, unlike the Mexican marines, which the US thought were efficient.
  That there were splits and feuds in the Mexican security agencies.
  That all the ruling PAN's candidates to succeed President Calderón were dull.
  That Calderón was not sure how to strengthen either his own position or that of the PAN.