Monday, November 17, 2008

Will President Obama in fact have an Interest in Mexico?

By Patrick Corcoran

Issue by issue, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s positions could leave Mexicans underwhelmed, even worried. The biggest bilateral issue south of the border is immigration, and despite coming from the more migrant-friendly party and enjoying overwhelming Latino support, Obama has not made reform legislation a major part of his domestic agenda. In contrast, were John McCain to be inaugurated with a Democratic congress, immigration legislation would be an obvious area where the executive and the legislature coincide.

Other areas are likewise a bit discouraging. On trade, Obama’s comments on the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, are irresponsible if you write them off as campaign rhetoric, and a bit scary if you think they will lead to policy changes.

Obama hasn’t shown a particularly nuanced understanding of Mexico’s security woes (although, in fairness, the campaign never forced him to offer an opinion). Whereas McCain went out of his way to support Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and even visited him in July, Obama’s has kept Calderón and Mexico at arm’s length. Unless there’s a heretofore hidden interest in the region, there’s no reason to think that Latin America will be more than a fourth-tier issue in an Obama administration.

But despite the inconvenient positions mentioned above, Mexicans were as charmed by the senator’s charisma and moved by his story as were Americans. According to one pre-election poll by Excelsior, Obama beat McCain in the race for support among Mexicans by a margin of 63 percent to 10. Other polling was not quite so overwhelming, but Obama was consistently the favorite as the race election neared.

After his victory, Mexican commentators were almost universally laudatory. For an unusually eloquent but basically representative example, I offer César Cansino, writing in El Universal: “That Barack Obama … is to arrive at the White House through a majority vote constitutes a lesson in civility, wisdom, and tolerance that until now other equally advanced nations haven't shown.”

Beyond the general good will, pundits also euphorically noted that Obama represents clear repudiation of George W. Bush (and, less directly, of the military-first foreign policy that irritates the rest of the world). Furthermore, he was elected with a clear mandate to lead, whereas the popular impression is that Bush’s leadership failure has left the world drifting rudderless through the worst financial crisis in seven decades.

Obama also offers a glimmer of hope for a more enlightened approach on drug policy. In addition to being labeled post-partisan and post-racial, Obama could also break the paradigm for drug-war doctrine. He’s the first president to be elected while neither hiding nor repudiating past drug use. Obama’s frank admission to having used cocaine and marijuana as a young man (and the public’s disinclination to punish him for it) suggests that Obama could be free enough (and the nation could be mature enough) to deemphasize law enforcement, instead looking to curtail drug use by focusing on demand.

Given the dependence of many governmental agencies on the war on drugs for budget dollars, and given the power of inertia in the federal bureaucracy, a radical change is unlikely, but Obama is temperamentally and circumstantially better suited to initiate a new approach than any of his predecessors. That alone should be enough to grant Mexicans some optimism.

A coda: Academics talk a lot about different “determinisms” in charting the course of a nation: cultural determinism, geographical determinism, political determinism, et cetera. In doing so, it always seems to me that they understate the importance of sheer chance (providential determinism?). To take but one example, if Abe Lincoln’s candidacy had been filled by another unfamiliar moderate in 1860, a man less capable, wise, and determined, would the United States today be an example for the rest of the world? In all likelihood, no, despite the country’s enormous advantages in geography and culture.

If there ever was a more poignant illustration of Mexico's poor luck than that fateful Tuesday I can't think of it.

While the United States and the world settled down to celebrate Obama’s historic victory, the crash of a Learjet carrying seven government officials thrust upon the government one of the greatest crises in a decade. Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño, a 37-year-old father of three, was an intimate friend of the president and the lynchpin of his domestic agenda. José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos was not only among the respected drug warriors in Mexico, he was a symbol of hope and integrity in a nation where cynicism and corruption are words all-too-readily applied to government officials.

Mexico will surely rebound, but its path has become a great deal more difficult.

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Patrick Corcoran is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila.  He blogs at Gancho.