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

President Felipe Calderón is due in Washington on 2 and 3 March. The climax of his trip will be a meeting with President Barack Obama on 3 March. Calderón's fifth bilateral meeting with Obama comes at an awkward time for US-Mexico relations.

One sign of the awkwardness is that the Mexican media is making a meal of the issue of whether President Calderón invited himself to the White House, as part of his Washington trip, or was asked to stop in by President Obama. What is clear is that both sides are finding it increasingly hard to keep their cool with each other and their policies in step.

Roberta Jackson, the US State Department's Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere affairs (and so the number two policymaker on Latin America), denied on 28 February that Calderón's visit was a crisis meeting. “There is a lot to talk about," she admitted, “and lots of things are going on."

The clearest sign of US irritation with Mexico came on 23 February, when Janet Napolitano, the US Homeland Security Secretary, criticised President Calderón for his harsh comments about the lack of coordination between US security agencies. Napolitano's strong comments (“disappointed" is officialese for angry) overshadowed the news that the Mexican army had arrested a gang member who conveniently confessed to murdering Jaime Zapata, an Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent killed in Mexico on 15 February.

Napolitano stressed that Calderón was wrong to say that there was little coordination between US agencies. She noted that there was good coordination between Mexico and US and that the US and Mexico were “all together in this_ and that coordination on border issues had never been better."

Mexico did not directly respond to Napolitano's comments and the emotionalism of Zapata's requiem Mass on 22 February, where there were eulogies of Zapata from Napolitano herself, John Morton, the head of the ICE and Eric Holder, the US attorney general.  

Zapata was the first US official to have been killed in Mexico since Enrique Camarena, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, who was kidnapped and killed in 1985. The DEA claimed that corrupt Mexican police officers and several influential figures, including a cousin of a former Mexican president, Luis Echeverrí­a, were involved in Camarena's killing. The US infuriated Mexico by allowing DEA agents to kidnap at least one suspect from Mexico and putting him on trial in the US. The highhanded US action made successive Mexican governments unwilling to cooperate with the US.

Current Mexican officials are also unhappy at what they see as provocative statements from US politicians (such as Representative Michael McCaul, R-Texas) demanding that Zapata's killers be extradited to the US to face prosecution there. Such demands are all too easily perceived by sensitive Mexicans as allegations that the Mexican justice system is not capable of trying Zapata's alleged killers. It is worth noting, however, that the US courts threw out the case against one of the Camarena suspects US officials had lured from Mexico before arresting him.

Calderón's outspoken comments on the lack of coordination between US security agencies (he named the DEA, FBI and CIA) were unfortunately timed: they were published in Mexico on the day of Zapata's funeral in Brownsville, Texas. In the interview, Calderón was scathing about the behaviour of the US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, as revealed by US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks.

What is not clear is whether Calderón intended to be so outspoken in the El Universal interview, which started with some gentle lobbed questions about the peaks and troughs of his presidency and a discussion of how he would like to be remembered. Calderón suddenly flared off into criticism of the US for failing to help Mexico enough against the violent drug trafficking gangs and this then led him to make some unflattering comments about Pascual.

Pascual, who was sent to Mexico by Obama, arrived with a questionmark against him, at least in the eyes of some Mexican officials, because of his professional expertise in dealing with failed states. Calderón, in his videoed interview with El Universal accused Pascual of “ignorance [that] has translated into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico_ [which has caused] an impact and an irritation in our own team." Calderón was referring to the WikiLeaks publication of US State Department cables which discuss the perceived shortcomings of Mexico's intelligence services, the conduct of its army in Calderón's anti-crime campaign and the inability of its security forces to work well with one another. Calderón's comments were the first official Mexican response to the WikiLeaks revelations.

Calderón's clear unhappiness at what Pascual has been reporting to the US suggests that over the final 18 months of his administration relations with the US are likely to be bumpy. Policymakers in both the US and Mexico are now beginning to think about what may happen in 2012 when a new Mexican (and perhaps also a new US) government will take office.

Calderón accused Pascual and other US officials of “exaggerating" (literally, 'over-saucing their tacos') for their own reasons the situation in Mexico. Calderón's language in his El Universal interview was unusually demotic. He also claimed that Pascual had never put to him (or to his security cabinet) the points he made in the leaked cables. Rather perplexingly, Calderón then added that Pascual had not included his answers in the [leaked] cables. This suggests that Pascual had at least put the questions to Calderón in their regular meetings.

Calderón argued that what was actually happening was that Mexican officials saw a deep lack of coordination on the US side. Calderón described US policy towards Mexico as 'Borondongo le dio a Bernabé' which is a line from a song by Celia Cruz, the famous Cuban singer. Calderón appeared to be suggesting that no-one is in overall charge or knows what they are (or should be) doing.

Calderón got into all this through a remark in which he accused the US of not doing enough to help Mexico in its war against the gangs. He noted that the US's main contribution was to try to reduce its domestic drug consumption but, he said, this had not been achieved. The second US policy goal was to reduce the flow of weapons from the US to Mexican gangs. Calderón said that the US had also failed to deliver on this.

On both counts, the data is difficult to interpret. There is some strong US evidence to suggest that its domestic drug consumption has changed over the past 10 years and may well have levelled off. On weapons, it is far from clear how big a source of weapons the US is for Mexican gangs. The Mexican government, however, has played up the fact that the gun that killed Jaime Zapata was traced back, by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), to a known arms dealer in Lancaster, Texas.

• What happened to Zapata?
  On 15 February a vehicle transporting two US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents was attacked and one of the agents, Jaime Zapata, was killed. The other, Ví­ctor Avila, was shot twice in the leg. The agents, who were based at the US embassy in Mexico City, were ambushed (though some investigators claim that they were stopped at a checkpoint because they wound down a window) in the increasingly violent state of San Luis Potosí­, as they drove to Monterrey, in Nuevo León, one of the most violent places in Mexico. On 23 February the army nabbed Julián Zapata Espinosa (no relation) who conveniently confessed to killing Jaime Zapata “by mistake." Zapata Espinosa and his colleagues, who claim to be members of Los Zetas, thought that they were attacking rival gangsters. The US Secretary for Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano, was outspoken in her condemnation of the attack. “Let me be clear: Any act of violence against our ICE personnel - or any DHS personnel - is an attack against all those who serve our nation and put their lives at risk for our safety," she said.  

Pascual's view of the incompetence of Mexican security agencies has clearly fed through from the State Department into other parts of the Washington administrative machine. On 10 February, James Clapper, the director of US National Intelligence, had warned, presciently, in his annual assessment of threats to the US that although there was no evidence that the drug trafficking gangs in Mexico had targeted US officials, he suggested that this could change if the Mexican government appears to be winning its battles against the gangs as a result of US support.

Mexico accounted for the biggest part of Clapper's assessment of Latin American threats. Clapper declared bluntly that Mexico's “military and police capabilities remain inadequate to break the trafficking organisations and contain criminal violence." Clapper stated that “the overwhelming majority of drugs now consumed in the US are produced in Mexico, Colombia, Canada and the US". This statement reflects changes in US drug consumption patterns (particularly the growing popularity of methamphetamines).  

Mexico under Calderón has become increasingly touchy about how the US perceives it. On 8 February, Joseph Westphal, the US Army undersecretary, retracted statements strongly critical of Mexico he had made a day earlier (7 February).

The furious reaction from Mexico and the speed with which Westphal retracted show how sensitive the issue of security in Mexico is on both sides of the border. Westphal initially claimed that he had said that the violence in Mexico was an insurgency and that US troops might be needed on or across the border. Westphal added that he had discussed these issues with the White House and that Latin America was a “blind spot" for US policymakers.

Westphal, who made his comment at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, said that his comments “were not and never have been the policy of the Department of Defense of the US towards Latin America." It is worth noting that the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had referred to an insurgency in Mexico in September 2010, which triggered an equally strong response from the Mexican government.

Mexico's interior ministry issued a strong but brief statement criticising Westphal's Hinckley comments and said that there was no evidence that any of the gangs in Mexico have a political agenda.

The US has yet to react to clear signs from the main opposition party in Mexico, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), that it would abandon Calderón's security policies. The first sign of a PRI policy change intentions came on 15 February when senior figures in the PRI, which opinion polls show winning next year's presidential election, called for Mexico to pull out of the US-backed Merida Initiative.

The Prií­stas making the call are level-headed: Francisco Labastida, now a senator, was governor of Sinaloa (1987-1992), interior minister and secretary of agriculture during the Ernesto Zedillo administration (1994-2000) and the PRI's (losing) presidential candidate in 2000. He argues that that the Merida Initiative puts Mexico at the mercy of the US Senate yet does not ensure that Mexico gets the resources needed to defeat the drug-trafficking gangs.

Labastida's statement is a reaction to the US announcement of major budget cuts in aid to Mexico and Colombia. Aid to Mexico will drop by US$250m in the 2012 financial year to US$334m, of which US$282m is Merida Initiative money, according to US administration plans. What Labastida objects to is the conditionality of the Merida Initiative; he would prefer a joint commitment, by the US and Mexico, to combat violence in the two countries.

The PRI's call was backed by Carlos Navarrete, the leader of the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in the senate. He said that the Merida Initiative, launched by President George W. Bush in 2008, has not worked.

The second PRI shoe to drop fell on 23 February, when Socrates Rizzo Garcí­a, a former governor of Nuevo León (1991-1996), whose state is now one of the main battlegrounds between drug gangs, said that when (his party) the PRI ran Mexico (until 2000), “a strong presidency and a strong [federal] government" assigned the routes each drug gang could use so that there was no fighting between the gangs and ordinary people could live in peace.

Rizzo's comments suggest that if the PRI were to recover the presidency in 2012, it might revert to this former policy, which at least kept the death toll down in Mexico. Since President Calderón took office in December 2006, 35,000 people have been killed by drug gangs.

Rizzo's comments, made at a conference held at Coahuila state university's law faculty, were also aimed at Calderón. In his 22 February interview Calderón accused Mexico's state governors of failing to help the federal government. Rizzo's argument was that in his day the federal government handled the whole issue of the drug trade and kept state governments out of the loop.