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 Editorials | February 2006 
What Happened to "Los Dos Amigos"?
 Geri Smith - BusinessWeek
| | "Los Dos Amigos" and Mexican-U.S. relations are in the deep freeze, and there are few hopes for improvement during this election year. |
Five years ago this month, President George W. Bush paid a neighborly visit to the family ranch of Mexican President Vicente Fox. The newly inaugurated leaders, dubbed "Los Dos Amigos," gave each other custom-made cowboy boots and celebrated the beginning of what they pledged would be an unprecedented, close collaboration after nearly two centuries of mutual distrust. Mexico, Bush proclaimed, was Washington's most important foreign relationship.
Today, that relationship is in tatters, and it shows little promise of improving in the near term. Bush and Fox haven't sat down to talk face-to-face in nearly a year. Almost daily, the two countries' officials trade barbs on everything from drug trafficking to illegal immigration.
On Jan. 25, U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza said a sharp escalation in drug-related killings "highlights the inability of the Mexican government to police its own communities south of the border". In turn, Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez has blasted the U.S. House of Representatives for approving a "discriminatory" immigration bill that would brand illegal aliens as felons rather than give them the opportunity to apply for temporary-worker status.
"COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP." Such squabbling is counterproductive for two countries that have become as economically interdependent as the U.S. and Mexico have in the 12 years since NAFTA began. Hundreds of American companies are heavily invested in manufacturing facilities south of the 2,000-mile-long border, and Mexican multinationals are expanding in the U.S. Some $285 billion in two-way trade helps keep both economies competitive.
"It's an intense, complicated relationship, but trade and investment continue to flow in spite of the political noise," says Claudio Gonzalez, chairman of Kimberly Clark de México. "But we're worried because Mexico is viewed as so unimportant and gets so little attention from Washington nowadays," he says.
The terrorist attacks of September 11 understandably provoked an about-face in Bush's foreign policy priorities, but Washington should not have put Mexican relations into the deep freeze.
BADLY HANDLED. Indeed, at almost every turn, the U.S. seems to slap Mexico's hand: When Mexico recently joined the International Criminal Court, which Washington opposes for fear U.S. officials might face prosecution, the Bush Administration threatened to cut $11.5 million in drug-eradication aid. On Feb. 3, the Treasury Dept. forced a Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City to expel Cubans who were discussing oil drilling in Cuban waters with American oil executives, citing a law that bars U.S. subsidiaries from doing business with the communist island. Mexican officials were outraged at Washington's attempt to enforce its laws on foreign soil.
Mexico also has ineptly handled the bilateral relationship, starting with Fox's inexplicable failure to express Mexico's solidarity immediately following September 11. It didn't help when Mexico used its temporary seat on the U.N. Security Council to stridently oppose U.S. efforts to win a resolution backing an Iraq invasion. And surely Fox should realize that describing Mexican illegal migrants as "heroes" for the $20 billion in remittances they send home every year doesn't go over well in U.S. anti-immigrant circles.
"It's as if we've been transported back to the 1980s, before NAFTA, when the bilateral relationship was one of mutual recrimination," laments Rafael Fernandez de Castro, dean of international relations at ITAM, a leading university in Mexico City.
DIVIDED PARTY. What can be done? "Everybody should step back, take a deep breath, and try to lower the level of rhetoric," says Jeffrey Davidow, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 1998 to 2002 who's now president of the Institute of the Americas in San Diego. But damping the rhetoric may be difficult in a year that will see a presidential vote in Mexico in July and U.S. congressional mid-term contest in November.
Also, maintaining civility may be difficult as the U.S. Congress debates immigration reform. A House bill approved in December calls for the construction of 700 miles of new border walls but makes no provision for temporary work visas. Bush says he favors creation of a temporary-workers program to fill jobs that Americans don't want, and a Senate bill now under consideration calls for such a program, but the Republican anti-immigration faction is strongly opposed.
"The U.S. debate on migration doesn't include any discussion of how this legislation might affect our relations with Mexico or about how we could develop a stronger, more productive relationship with Mexico - and that shows how low relations have ebbed," says Pete Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.
REFORM FREEZE. Greater control over border crossings is desirable, given heightened concerns over security. But as long as American wages for unskilled labor are 10 times Mexican wages, it will be difficult to keep migrant workers away. And Mexico has become dependent on remittances, which are the country's largest single source of foreign revenue after exports of oil and manufactured goods.
What Mexico really needs to do is revamp its economy to boost economic growth, improve infrastructure, and create better-paying jobs in the poorer regions that tend to send the most migrants to the U.S. But such reforms are unlikely until well after Mexico's next President takes office in December. Under Mexican law, Fox is ineligible for re-election.
"Washington expected a lot out of Fox, but he has been unable to push through the second generation of reforms that Mexico needs so badly," says Fernandez de Castro. Mexico's lack of progress has made it less competitive - and thus less interesting to the U.S., he points out.
BORDER PROBLEMS. Mexico is still of vital importance as a low-cost manufacturing platform for U.S. businesses. And beneath the inflammatory rhetoric, Mexican officials are quietly cooperating with Washington to an unprecedented degree. They share intelligence information to track drug traffickers, and the Mexican Supreme Court recently approved extradition of criminals to the U.S. Also, Mexico provides the U.S. with real-time data on arriving and departing passengers and cargo.
But Mexico's failure to reduce drug-related violence on the Mexican side of the border, and the record numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border each year - around 450,000, by some estimates - pose a big challenge to both countries, and politicians in Washington don't believe Mexico is doing enough.
In the current, overwrought climate, it's difficult to imagine the two countries rationally discussing ways to solve their shared border woes. On Feb. 15, alarmed at the negative turn in relations, six Mexican legislators flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and try and mend fences.
CHANNELING THE FLOW. Sen. Silvia Hernández, president of the Foreign Relations Committee for North America, says Mexican legislators are willing to revamp and enforce the country's migration laws - which require citizens to leave the country only through legal crossing points run by the U.S. and Mexico - if the U.S. creates a temporary-worker program to deal with America's real demand for as many as 500,000 workers a year.
"We have to be realistic: North America has become a large labor market, with demand coming from one side of the border and willing workers coming from the other side," says Hernández. "It's a dynamic flow that cannot simply be brought to a halt - it must be legally channeled."
In a belated but promising sign that Washington realizes the war of words must stop, Presidents Bush and Fox spoke by telephone Feb. 20 and agreed to work on better communication between the governments. They also tentatively planned to meet with each other in late March or early April.
On Mar. 24, Mexican and American legislators will gather in the U.S. for their annual bi-national meeting. That would be a good time and place to set aside the rancor and start a productive dialogue to draft real solutions to their shared problems, from border violence to immigration. When the U.S. and Mexico joined to form NAFTA, they entered into an economic marriage. Now it's time for some serious counseling. |
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