Do I hear crickets?

Mexico’s top diplomat said Tuesday that President Obama has promised an investigation into spying the US reportedly did on Mexico’s presidential email system.

Secretary of foreign affairs Jose Antonio Meade said Obama made the pledge during recent personal conversations by telephone and in person with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto.

“Mexico did not ask for an explanation. Mexico asked for an investigation,” Meade said when asked whether the US had apologized or offered any explanation about the reported National Security Agency spying.

“He said and he gave his word that there was going to be an investigation around this issue,” Meade said of Obama. “He said that he had not authorized any spying on Mexico.”

The Guardian

When has a U.S. president ever kept his word to Mexico? Even the best intentioned U.S. presidential promises are never followed through. FDR promised technology transfers in exchange for not selling oil to the Germans following the 1938 nationalization (when the British broke relations, and the U.S. majors tried to boycott Mexican oil, and Lazaro Cárdenas — playing hardball — offered to sell oil to Mussolini). Other than some film equipment, what technology was transferred was the result of private corporations that wanted to continue producing consumer goods during the war. Bush II, and Obama, claim to be “giving” Mexico something in the order of 60 million dollars for “anti-narcotics security” which Mexico wouldn’t need if it wasn’t for their own country’s insatiable appetite for narcotics… and that money doesn’t go to Mexico, but to U.S. suppliers and “consultants”.

I’m not going to hold my breath on this one, and — as one commentator on the Guardian article noted — with U.S. spying operations largely privatized (Edward Snowden worked for Booz-Allen, owned by the huge investment group, The Carlyle Fund) the revelation that the spying on Mexico was openly designed to gather economic intelligence, the “intelligence” may not have been for U.S. national security apparatchiks so much as for the benefit of the contracting agencies.