Mexico & Nafta - June 2008 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The Mexican government is far from happy with the Iniciativa Mérida, as modified by both houses of the US congress. At a meeting of US and Mexican border governors at Los Pinos in Mexico City on 29 May, President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa said that the key fact in the gang war was that the US was the biggest drugs market in the world. He all but accused the US of forcing his government to wage a war against drug gangs which cost the lives of Mexican policemen every day, while the US does little to curb drug consumption.

On 2 June the interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño, went further. He said that US Congressional monitoring of the Iniciativa Mérida was “unacceptable". Mouriño's strong language will exasperate legislators in the US (and ambassador Garza) who have gone out of their way to explain that their requirement for the government to report back to congress on how it spends public money is entirely normal. US senators and congressmen argue that to do anything else would be to write a blank cheque. The senators and congressmen had emphasised that the reason why they have set conditions to the aid envisaged by the Iniciativa Mérida package is to control the US executive, not to interfere in Mexican affairs.

Mouriño said that the incorporation of “measures or unilateral evaluations which aim to set conditions on the developing of the Iniciativa would be profoundly contrary to the spirit [of the agreement] and counterproductive and for that reason unacceptable." Mouriño said that the various versions of the Iniciativa Mérida, which have been approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate, are all “unacceptable" to Mexico.

Mouriño objects to the detailed conditions on issues such as the rule of law, human rights, the role of NGOs and anti-corruption policies, which he says stretch well beyond the narrower objectives of the Iniciativa. Mouriño argues that the Mexican government has signed up to international agreements on all these big issues, so the US congress need not involve itself with them as part of the Iniciativa Mérida.

Mouriño wants this conditionality to be revised at the joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate which will reconcile the two Iniciativa Mérida proposals.