Getting On with the Middle East

Mexico and the Arab Middle East have had a happy 2010, according to the former:

Over the course of this year Mexico strengthened in a significant way diplomatic relations with Arab nations, the foreign ministry stated.

In a summary of its activities completed in 2010 with regard to nations in that region, the department detailed that its work will be the base for the further enrichment of bilateral agendas, the identification of areas of cooperation, and fostering inversion and commercial flows.

During this year, the prime minister of Kuwait, Sheikh Nasser Nasser Al-Mohammed Al-Ahmed Al Sabah, and the president of Lebanon, Michel Sleiman; similarly, Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa traveled to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

The foreign minister traveled to the headquarters of the Arab League, located in Cairo, Egypt in May, in search of new perspectives for cooperation in this international forum.

The foreign ministry emphasized that as a show of the excellent link with Arab nations, over the course of the present year Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates opened embassies in Mexico.

This may be more window dressing than a substantial embrace of the Arab world, and indeed it's hard to conceive of many significant areas of common interest between Mexico and the Arab world, but it also comes within a wider recent embrace of the Palestinian cause in Latin America.

Patricia Espinosa as Conquering Hero

For each of the past two Januaries, there has been an article or two about the intrigues in Mexico's foreign policy apparatus, more specifically about Arturo Sarukhán's unsuccessful attempts to unseat Patricia Espinosa and turn himself into either the de jure or de facto quarterback of Calderón's foreign policy. Here's Carlos Loret in 2009 on how her deft performance as secretary of foreign relations had forced him to scale back his ambition, and here's Bajo Reserva in 2010 about how he had seemed to step on her toes and overstep his role as ambassador to Washington.

This January, however, the budding trend has faded, presumably because of her vital role in making the Cancún climate change conference a success. In contrast to years past, Espinosa is being hailed in the international media:

An essential goal in Cancun was for the parties to maintain sensible expectations and develop effective plans. That they met this challenge owes in good measure to the careful and methodical planning by the Mexican government, and to the tremendous skill of Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa in presiding over the talks.

For example, at a critical moment she took note of objections from Bolivia and a few other leftist states, and then ruled that the support of the 193 other countries meant that consensus had been achieved and the Cancun Agreements had been adopted. She pointed out that “consensus does not mean unanimity.” Compare that with Copenhagen, where the Danish prime minister allowed objections by five small countries to derail the talks.

Mexico’s adept leadership also made sure smaller countries were able to contribute fully and join any meetings they wanted, avoiding the sense of exclusivity that alienated some parties in Copenhagen. That’s a sign that Mexico is one of the key “bridging states” that have credibility in both worlds. Another is South Korea. They will need to play key roles going forward.

(H/T) This from a piece on why Cancún was a success by Robert Stavins, a Harvard expert on climate agreements. I'm not qualified to properly place Espinosa in the broader context of Mexican history, but this seems quite likely to remain the crowning achievement of her tenure, and it's difficult to call to mind a more memorable and potentially significant performance on an international stage by a Mexican diplomat.

Update: Historian Michael Lettieri says in comments that Gilberto Bosques, who served in Vichy France, takes the cake.

Knee-Jerk Reactions to Privatizations

Leo Zuckermann was depressed by the swiftness with which Calderón shot down any talk of a privatization of LyFC:

In countries where the privatization was accompanied by greater competition (or better regulation in the case of natural monopolies) it continues being used as a public policy to benefit society. Not only in governments of the right, but also of the left. There is, for example, the case of the Labor Party in Great Britain. Gordon Brown is thinking about privatizing various state activities to cut the public debt of the nation. The prime minister will put up for sale the railroad network of the English Channel, several highways, a gambling house, a uranium-enrichment company and government land.

This would be unthinkable in Mexico. Here privatization is an evil verb that can't even be mentioned. The most pathetic case is oil, where, for the sake of not opening the industry to private investment, Mexico is running out of oil. We didn't allow private oil platforms even though these could extract a lot of oil and the state could charge a right of exploitation as high as the one leveled at Pemex today. We don't want capitalists that make money and produce oil. We prefer the exclusivity of the state although oil production is plummeting.

What can you say: in Mexico privatization has turned into a myth as diabolical as that of the chupacabras.

Good point. Thanks Salinas!

PRI on the Rise

Marco Rascón argues that the coming rise of the PRI is nothing of the sort, but rather a descent of the PAN and the PRD. I think there's a lot of truth to that, and (as Rascón suggests) there's a good chance that after a series of wins in 2009, Mexicans will be reminded why they weren't that crazy about PRI governments.

He also mentions what seems to me to be a hair-brained scheme from the PRI:

From the PRI's standpoint, it is seeking to become without allies the primary force in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies and from their drive the cabinet reform so that the secretary of the interior, as with a prime minister, is named by the Congress, which would mean an advance in the PRI's takeover of the executive branch, taking without a doubt Manlio Fabio Beltrones to Interior.

The chances of this happening don't seem too great (it is a blatantly horrible, horrible idea), but what is all this mania about changing structures? Every week someone is proposing fairly significant changes to the government, as if the all that makes Mexico hard to run is ill-planned agencies. Any government's institutions are imperfect, and perhaps Mexico's more than most, but I always find myself asking why people jump to replacement without taking a longer look at improvement. This scheme is a most egregious (and self-interested) example of "changeism" that I've seen in Mexico, in Rascón's telling nothing less than a smoke-and-mirrors change from a presidential to a parliamentary system (and a naked grab for power). Whatever the case, there's something to be said for not looking for a magic bullet with structural changes (and all the inevitable surprises that come along with major modifications), but rather making the existing bodies work as best as they can. How about it Mexico?

Also, in case it is unclear from the rest of the post, I think this is just a plainly awful idea from the priístas, both in its essence and its proposed implementation. May they suffer nightmares as punishment for their devious schemes.

Good Idea Although the Public Disagrees

The PRI has a proposal to link the president's cabinet on the approval of the senate. According to an Excelsior/Grupo Imagen online poll, 82 percent of Mexicans are against said plan.

At the risk of lazily thinking that more similarity to the US system implies greater effectiveness, I think the broad strokes of the PRI's scheme are sound. I suppose a lot would depend on how, along the continuum from perfunctory consent on one side to raking nominees over the coals as a matter of course on the other, the senate actually practiced its prerogative, but I like the fact that the senatorial approval in the States offers potential cabinet officers an incentive to stay clean. Such a mechanism could also serve as a filter of conflicted cabinet officers, as many people alleged that Juan Camilo Mouriño was after his family's contracts with Pemex were discovered last year. In that sense, senatorial approval would be a baby step in the direction of cleaner government, one of thousands needed in Mexico. Plus, this PRI plan not as unwieldy or as underhanded as the past scheme to superimpose a prime minister on the presidential system.