Im-Potential impasse

What Mexican President Calderón called “discriminatory” and U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed as “having the potential for being applied in a discriminatory fashion,” Arizona’s white-supremacist inspired SB 1070 dominated the state visit between the two North American Presidents.  That and narcotics exports from Mexico (not the guns and money exports from the United States) are all that apparently is being talked out.

Shannon O’Neill, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, when asked by Robert McMahon of the Council on Foreign Relations “What would be a signal that this visit from Calderón was successful?” replied:

If the outcome of Calderón’s time in DC reinforces ongoing U.S.-Mexico cooperation across many areas–including security, trade, economic growth, climate change–and avoids getting bogged down in contentious debates surrounding immigration, then this trip will be a success for President Calderón.

Obviously, it already has bogged down in “contentious debates” —  although “debate” may not be the right word when there is no agreement on even the definition of basic words like “discrimination.”

Dr. O’Neill is one of the only U.S. think-thank types who sees U.S.-Mexican relations in terms of more than narcotics exports and immigration.  Those two issues important to Mexican observers, but not to the exclusion of climate change, agriculture and trucking issues (not to mention oil imports and that huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico) — which got mentioned in passing in the “joint statement”, but not in any detail.  More emphasis was put on “intellectual property rights” (i.e., U.S. companies carping on losing money on pirata C.D.s and generic drug sales of patent medicines) than on climate change.

In a speech to the United States Chamber of Commerce, FeCal gave his usual spiel about a growing Mexican economy and better opportunities for U.S. businesses:  that was, like the Obama meeting reported in the press here, but nothing is new, and nothing that has been said is likely to change anything (other than increase Mexican economic subordination to the interests of the United States), so none of it is seen here as worth much ink, bandwidth or air time.

The lack of interest in Mexican press about Calderón’s visit to Washington — is not, as Ganchoblog thinks, due to the Jefe Diego mystery so much as to a clear understanding that the U.S. Administration has not changed its overall attitudes and policies towards Latin America on the one hand, and that FeCal’s policies are not particularly effective, or seen in the best interest of Mexico on the other.