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 Editorials | Issues | June 2008 
Mexico May Reject U.S. Aid Package to Fight Drugs
 Mexico May Reject U.S. Aid Package to Fight Drugs
 |  | We want to liberate our country of this tragedy of violence — but as equals. We see these conditions as an excuse for intervening in Mexican sovereignty.
- Sen. Ulises Ramirez |  | | | |
Mexico City - Even though Mexico has just endured an especially deadly month, top Mexican officials said this week that they are ready to walk away from a historic U.S. aid package to help combat drug-related violence.
Mexican officials said they will not accept the Bush administration's proposed Merida Initiative if it includes requirements to overhaul their country's human-rights institutions as a growing number of U.S. lawmakers insist.
The proposal would offer as much as $400 million in military equipment and technical assistance this year to help Mexico in an intensifying war against drug traffickers that has spilled into U.S. territory. Mexico reported nearly 500 drug-related killings in May, the highest total since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.
But while the Merida Initiative was initially touted as a new chapter in U.S.-Mexico cooperation, it has instead revived historic concerns about so-called meddling by the U.S. in Mexican internal politics. For years, Mexico considered it an insult when the U.S. unilaterally "certified" nations as being reliable partners in combating illicit drugs, a requirement dropped in 2003.
"We want to liberate our country of this tragedy of violence — but as equals," Sen. Ulises Ramirez, chairman of the Public Security Committee, said in an interview. "We see [these conditions] as an excuse for intervening in Mexican sovereignty."
A U.S. congressional conference committee will soon meet to reconcile a House version of the program with a Senate proposal that requires Mexico to create an independent body to investigate human rights violations by its military.
The new measures are being pushed primarily by Democratic lawmakers, which has led the Bush administration to complain that the plan is being sabotaged.
Mexican human-rights organizations sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers Thursday urging them to preserve other provisions to the Merida Initiative that would also ban torture by the Mexican military.
"With [Calderon's] strategy, the cost has been very high because of the military abuses," said Luis Arriaga Valenzuela, director of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center and co-author of the letter. "We think that, in our bilateral relationship, a fundamental crux should be respect for human rights."
Calderon has dispatched 25,000 federal police and troops to quell violence in the deadliest trouble spots, especially along the U.S. border.
But the violence has gotten worse, with the death toll on pace to shatter last year's total of about 2,500 drug-related slayings. A poll by the newspaper Reforma, released Sunday, found that 53 percent of Mexicans believe that drug traffickers are winning the conflict with the federal government.
The Merida Initiative, which Bush originally proposed at $1.5 billion over 3 years, would include equipment and canine teams to inspect cargo, vehicles such as helicopters and funds for police training.
Even though Mexico would welcome that sort of aid, the reaction was harsh this week from Calderon's Cabinet over the strings that might be attached.
Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said Mexico must reject a plan that doesn't place it "on equal footing." Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino called the changes "unacceptable."
The Bush administration was equally critical about the provisions gaining momentum in Congress. White House drug czar John Walters told reporters Tuesday that the requirements threatened to "sabotage" the agreement.
"These provisions are counterproductive and self-defeating," Walters said.
Renata Rendon, advocacy director for the Americas for Amnesty International USA, said the resistance shows that human rights organizations are right to be wary. Amnesty International has not taken a formal position on the bill but has said there are risks in militarization and helped lead the push for stricter human-rights safeguards.
"If human rights do sabotage this agreement, we should think twice about who exactly we are trying to work with," Rendon said.
The proposed requirements are nothing new. The U.S. has insisted that Colombia be certified as protecting human rights before receiving military and anti-drug assistance under its Plan Colombia. But that plan has a stronger military focus because Colombia is also doing battle with leftist FARC rebels.
Even those safeguards have proved controversial as several human rights advocates say Colombia has not done enough to earn certification by the U.S. State Department.
Observers and elected officials in Mexico are unsure whether the Calderon administration would reject the aid package in the end. Mexican lawmakers will meet with U.S. counterparts Friday in Monterrey to push the Mexican position.
The violence shows no sign of waning as disrupted drug rings fight bloody battles for control of unclaimed territory. Organized crime rings are targeting police and elected officials in a strategy to shift public opinion against Calderon, analysts say.
Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, released a statement stressing that the deliberations by Congress are not a path to restarting the kind of unilateral "certification" process that so irritated the Mexican government..
Still, the hostility to U.S. intervention might trump Mexico's desire to cooperate, some analysts say. Leaders of all three major parties in Mexico have expressed support in recent days for Calderon's hard line against the Merida Initiative conditions.
Congressman Cuauhtemoc Sandoval, chairman of the Foreign Relations Commitee, said he thinks the U.S. demands are hypocritical because of the way the American military has conducted itself at its prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
Still, Sandoval, of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party, said he thinks Calderon will eventually accept the stipulations because conditions are so dire.
John Bailey, director of the Mexico Project at Georgetown University, said he is not so sure, given that such hard feelings still exist in Mexico from the 1980s and 1990s.
Still, Bailey said he was surprised that the Merida Initiative is at risk, given the consensus that seems to exist in Mexico and the U.S. for increased cooperation in law enforcement. He said a compromise could be having a multilateral group, such as the Organization of American States, monitor human rights.
"Maybe it is inevitable that Calderon's government has to take that line: no strings attached. But now it's difficult to see a face-saving way to move forward," Bailey said. "The problem is that it's like a bicycle. If you are moving forward and something stops you, it's hard to move it forward again."
oavila(at)tribune.com |
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