Mérida under Obama

Barack Obama has proposed a $310 million aid transfer to Mexico under the Mérida Initiative in his FY 2011 budget. A State Department spokesman said that the hardware portion of the agreement is done, and now it's time to focus on training and strengthening Mexico's agencies. That sounds good, and is certainly a nod to the primary criticisms of the agreement, but without any details, one wonders how true it is. (One also wishes to point out that hardware was never the key missing ingredient in Mexico, so the logic by which the nations are focusing more on institution-building was equally applicable three years ago.)

I'm by no means an expert on training programs, but $310 million on training and institution-building alone would seem to be quite a figure. Not that it wouldn't necessarily be money well spent, but it doesn't seem like such a huge chunk of change would be easily spent. (It's one of the many lessons Brewster's Millions provides for international aid agreements.) However, saying that it's time to change focus without actually adjusting the budgetary priorities a whole lot seems like a very easy thing to do, so we'll see how this plays out.