Mexico & Nafta - November 2006 ( ISSN 1741-444X)

President-elect Felipe Calderón Hinojosa accepted an invitation on 19 October from President George W Bush to visit him in Washington on 9 November. Calderón will be in Washington two days after the mid-term elections and three weeks before he takes office on 1 December. The list of issues that the White House said that the two leaders would discuss did not include immigration. On 26 October President Bush signed into law a bill mandating the construction of two walls along about a third of the US-Mexico border, despite objections from Mexico.

Calderón's first trip as president-elect was to Central and South America. The first fruit of that brief trip was an offer, on 23 October, by Argentina to sign a strategic alliance agreement next year. The Argentine government said that it wanted to put behind it the tensions created by President Vicente Fox's attendance at the Americas Summit in Argentina in 2005. Fox was insulted by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and took umbrage at Argentina. President Néstor Kirchner has invited Calderón to attend the South American summit on 9 December.

On this trip Calderón went first to Guatemala, before going on to El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica. From there he went on to Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina. His visit to Brazil was awkwardly timed, coming only two days before the first round of the Brazilian elections on 7 October. Calderón and his advisers clearly assumed that President Lula da Silva would be home and hosed by then: in fact he was forced into an unexpected second round, on 29 October, which he won easily.  

Partly as a consequence of Lula's anomalous position, Calderón talked mostly about neutral subjects such as biodiesel and alternative fuels. Calderón believes that Mexican sugar production can be used to produce ethanol which can then be exported to the US. Calderón also met the president of Petrobras, the state energy company, which has world-leading expertise in deep sea oil production. Mexico's state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, needs technological help if it is to develop its deepwater oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Calderón's foreign policy adviser Arturo Sarukhán said that Calderón has two main foreign policy objectives. Both were to repair damage done by the Fox administration. The first was to recover Mexico's leadership position in Latin American affairs. Sarukhán argued that if Mexico did not speak up for Latin America, Brazil would and by doing so would become the region's leader.The second was to restore Mexico's ability to lobby the US successfully. Sarukhán, who is in charge of foreign policy issues in Calderón's transition team, and therefore a front runner for the job of foreign minister in the next government, discussed the prospects for Mexican foreign policy at a seminar at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México on 20 October  

On Asia, Sarukhán, who worked with Fox's first foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, in the first two years of Fox's administration, Sarukhán argued that it was not enough for Mexico just to clinch trade agreements with Asian countries. He argued that there needed to be some real commercial cooperation: currently, he said, there is absolutely nothing of this sort.  

Calderón visited Canada from 25 to 27 October. Canada's newish prime minister, Stephen Harper, clearly got on with Calderón. Harper said that Calderón was a man of principles with a very realistic political and economic vision for Mexico. Harper, like Calderón, is on the right, politically.