Friday, January 15, 2010

Who's Running Mexico's Foreign Policy?

Bajo Reserva wonders about the hierarchy in practice versus the intended institutional hierarchy in Mexico's Secretariat of Foreign Relations:
The only thing missing was for Arturo Sarukhán to physically move Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa to one side with the palm of his hand. Although essentially did just that: he addressed the consuls as though he were the head of the Secretariat of Foreign Relations. They tells that in his urgency to sell Mexico as a safe and stable nation, he scolded representatives from diverse cities in the US. Some labeled it humiliating, others said they simply felt attacked by the Mexican ambassador in Washington. They assure that this isn't the first time. Sarukhán tends to act as though Espinosa didn't exist.
Sarukhán was last seen around here making declarations that, on second thought, were probably more appropriate coming from the foreign secretary. When Sarukhán was named the Ambassador to Washington, it was something of a surprise, because he had had a long foreign-policy résumé and had played a huge role in the Calderón campaign; everyone had assumed that the post would be his logical reward. But although he took a "lesser" role, he remains the foreign policy heavyweight in Calderón's cabinet, which you could argue is akin to literally centering the administration's foreign policy in Washington. That's probably putting too fine a point on it (after all, Sarukhán doesn't pop up a lot on questions that have nothing to do with US-Mexico relations), but the image presented by the status quo is not ideal, to say the least.

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