What Obama's Visit Can Accomplish

Via Mexfiles, I see that Proceso columnist John Ackerman has a column in today's LA Times about Obama can support Mexico. I agree with the thrust of the column's first half, that the focus on security should be devoted less to hardware and more to an organic rebuilding of the criminal justice system, from trials to prisons. However, like Richard Crabman, two paragraphs toward the end are problematic, mostly for the reasons Grabman mentions:

I may disagree with him, but John Ackerman, a Processo and Jornada columnist feels comfortable telling Barack Obama what Mexico really needs in the Los Angeles Times:

… Calderon’s most important failing has been his political isolation. Instead of reaching out to former allies on the political left — whom he joined with only a decade ago to end the rule of the old-guard Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI — he has depleted his political capital by relying exclusively on loyalists from his right-wing National Action Party. The result has been a dangerous resurgence of the PRI, as Calderon increasingly depends on cutting political deals with the old authoritarian party to get laws through Congress and assure stable governance. This is a worrisome trend because the neglect and complicity of PRI governments of the past are directly responsible for the current strength of Mexico’s drug cartels.

The Obama administration seems to be unaware of these deeper institutional issues. During her recent trip to Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t push Calderon on corruption control, human rights, freedom of the press, institutional reform or political reconciliation. She also went out of her way to cater to conservative constituencies. Her visit to Mexico’s principal basilica implied a nod to Calderon’s efforts to narrow the traditional separation between church and state. Her choice to travel to the city of Monterrey, home to the most powerful members of Mexico’s corporate oligarchy, also sent a clear signal about the priorities of the U.S. government.

Two thoughts:

1. I’m not sure I would say it was “dangerous” to see a resurgence of the PRI, nor do I think the PRI was responsible for the growth of the cartels (which had a lot more to do with consumption north of the border,and pressure on Colombian cartels than the PRI). I expect the largest party (the PRI-Green coalition) will sweep the 2010 Congressional elections, and I’m not sure that’s so bad. The left-left (as opposed to the sorta-left PRI) dismisses PRI and PAN as two sides of the same neo-liberal coin, with the same tendency to rely on clientage and calling them PRIAN. Be that as it may, the transfer of power between two relatively similar political parties is normal in democratic states.

2. It’s worthwhile to remind the U.S. administration that Mexico is not “all drugs, all the time” and that there are several more pressing concerns in Mexico, and that Mexican policy issues are more than those expressed by Felipe Calderon. But, Ackerman still seems to be of the mindset that its the U.S. perogative to drive the Mexican agenda, which it certainly isn’t.

I'd also add that it's quite a leap to say that simply by virtue of Clinton visiting Monterrey, the Obama administration is throwing its lot in with Mexico's wealthy. Monterrey may be home to some powerful corporate titans (although Mexico City is home to many, many more, including the most prominent monopolists), but it's also Mexico's third largest city, the North's (which is to say, the region most economically interconnected with the US) largest city, and one of the nation's most advanced cities. To say that simply by virtue of visiting Monterrey, Clinton and co. are blessing Mexican inequality is to say that by having a photo op with Mayor Daley, a foreign leader would be condoning Chicago's machine politics.

Second, Ackerman is unfair in assigning all the blame for Calderón's isolation. Calderón didn't reach out to the political left because they were unwilling to work with him after 2006. Or has he forgotten that the second largest party in the nation has largely refused any negotiation with him, tarred his administration as illigitimate, and mounted a competitor government? Calderón can rightfully be criticized for shrinking his presidency around a hard core of close collaborators as the years have gone by, but he did include a priista in his original cabinet (Luis Téllez), and he has aggressively made deals with the PRI that have resulted in landmark legislation. That's not quite a self-imposed isolation. 

Lastly, I second Grabman's bewildered reaction to the characterization of the PRI's resurgence as dangerous, and I think it's indicative of the contradiction in Ackerman's argument. How could Calderón have isolated himself if his collaboration with the PRI was so significant as to have led to a dangerous resurgence of the party? And what is so fundamentally dangerous about the PRI? It's a legal, legitimate party with a wide base of support that has by and large played by the rules of the democratic game for a generation now (which is more than one can say of the PRD), not a fascist sleeper cell. I'm not great fan of the PRI, but to blithely label it dangerous without any supporting information or broader hypothesis is unfair.