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

Hezbollah: On 12 October it emerged that the US government had asked Mexico's Procuradurí­a General de la República to investigate whether a Hezbollah cell was operating in Mexico. According to a report in El Universal, the PGR has been investigating the US's evidence for the past three months. It is not clear whether it has substantiated the US claims from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US State Department. Mexico has investigated about 30 claims by the US that Middle Eastern terrorists are operating from Mexico and found insufficient evidence to make any arrests or to bring charges. The US allegations are, apparently, that Hezbollah is raising finance for its operations in Mexico. 

The current investigation seems better founded: the PGR is investigating specific (but unnamed) individuals and companies. The only recent terrorist cell found in Mexico was an ETA cell which was dismantled in 2003 when six presumed ETA terrorists were arrested. They were charged with financing ETA leaders in Spain.

Whither Nafta: US academics are considering what President Vicente Fox's government has achieved and what President-elect Felipe Calderón Hinojosa might do. One of the most pungent analyses of the state of Mexico was made by J Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at Berkeley. DeLong was US Assistant Treasury Secretary during the presidency of Bill Clinton. DeLong wrote, in an article syndicated in the second week of October, that six years ago he was convinced that Nafta had been a success. Now he was not so sure. As a self-confessed neo-liberal, DeLong said that he was no longer sure that neo-liberal economic policies were the right ones for Mexico. He pointed out that since 1994 Mexico's GDP had grown at an average rate of 3.6%. As its population had grown by 2.5%, the average Mexican was now only 15% richer than he was in 1993. Furthermore the difference between average earnings in the US and Mexico had widened since Nafta came into force in 1994. He noted that although Mexican economic policymaking had achieved great things since 1994 (lowering inflation, increasing exports from a little over 10% of GDP to 28% and providing a long period of economic stability) productivity and wages in Mexico had not risen much. Crime, corruption and emigration had continued, DeLong pointed out. 

Lettuce and spinach: Mexico banned imports of US lettuce and spinach because of fears about the cleanliness of the product. On 9 October a US company, Nunes, in California warned that some of its lettuces had been irrigated with contaminated water. An investigation by the Mexican federal health commission found dangerous levels of E.Coli in some lettuces. The health commission said that Mexican-produced lettuces posed no dangers. On 20 September spinach imports from the US were also banned, after they were found to have dangerously high levels of E.Coli after been irrigated with waste water.