Obama in Mexico: The Dangers of Trusting Mexico's George W. Bush

By Al Giordano

DISTRITO FEDERAL, MEXICO; APRIL 16, 2009: Air Force One landed at 1:30 pm. CT at Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City, bringing with it President Obama’s first steps onto Latin American soil. At 1:40 he boarded the Marine One chopper and headed toward the Mexican presidential palace known as Los Pinos, where he landed at 1:54 p.m. Right now the presidents of the two nations have just concluded a joint ceremony together with florid cliché-filled speeches.

The official schedule will go like this: Obama now begins a private meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon (official photos only), followed by a 3:45 p.m. joint press conference, a 4:40 p.m. meeting with US Embassy employees at the Intercontinental Hotel in Mexico City, and an 8 p.m. “working dinner” with members of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the Mexican state at the National Museum of Anthropology. Obama will then spend the n ight in the city and tomorrow heads for Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas.

We will no doubt hear more of the same over-the-top statements of support for President Calderon from his US counterpart, who recently went so far as to compare Mexico’s illegitimate president with prohibition-era crime fighter Eliot Ness for his militarization of the drug war. (Then, as now, the prohibitionist policies that Ness was charged with enforcing backfired only to make a bad situation more violent and harmful to the citizenry; and the implied correlation – that somehow Calderon is honest and untouchable by drug war corruption – offers a dangerous leap of unsubstantiated faith.)

As Narco News correspondent Kristin Bricker reported yesterday, recent claims by officials of both countries that Mexico has not lost any part of national territory to organized crime have now been undercut with statements by top Mexican law enforcers basically admitting it to be the case.

One of the more honest perspectives on the dangers of trusting or becoming too closely associated with Calderon came this week from Jorge Castaneda, who served as Secretary of State under Calderon’s predecessor, President Vicente Fox (both presidents of the right wing National Action Party, or PAN). More often than not, I disagree with Castaneda’s pro-free market political positions, but on this one he scored a three point shot:

Barack Obama may not have realized it while in Iraq last week, but when he comes to Mexico on April 16, he will once again be confronting the consequences of a war of choice rushed into by an unprepared president—in this case Mexico's Felipe Calderón. Having been sworn into office in December 2006, under the lingering clouds of an uncomfortably close election that July—an electoral triumph the left considered tainted—Calderón boldly legitimized his government, and changed the subject, by declaring war on the nation's formidable drug cartels and mobilizing the army against them. It was a smart, though short-sighted, political move that turned out to be a national security blunder his administration has been trying to recover from ever since…

The parallels to the Iraq war are striking. For starters, the rationale behind Calderón's decision to take on the cartels shifts constantly—as did the Bush administration's reasoning for taking on Saddam Hussein—depending on the narrative being spun at any given moment and the speed with which past justifications started to ring hollow…

But organized crime is a long-festering problem, not (to go back to the Iraq analogy) an imminent "ticking bomb" threat to the Mexican state that requires all-out war. By pretending that it was, Calderón violated the so-called Powell Doctrine, whereby a nation commits forces only when it can count on overwhelming superiority, an exit strategy, a definition of victory, and the full and lasting support of the people. Calderón never had the first three and may be losing the fourth.

The 2006 electoral fraud through which Calderon and his allies accomplished a veritable coup d’etat in Mexico was not a matter of a few hundred votes (a la George Bush’s Florida 2000). At least 1.5 million votes were stolen from Calderon’s rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the center left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) or literally stuffed illegally into ballot boxes in PAN strongholds of Northern Mexico where in many documented cases he received more votes than there are registered voters in those municipalities.

Even by robbing or fabricating 1.5 million votes, Calderon barely made it to Los Pinos. And the considerable resentment among millions of Mexicans toward a president they consider illegitimate continues to place severe limits on any possible achievements he seeks, much less a challenge as daunting as the so-called “war on drugs.”

In an open letter, dated yesterday, to President Obama, the country’s “shadow president” López Obrador wrote:

“You should not ignore that the ruling oligarchy in Mexico has protected itself under the falsehoods of the neoliberal economic model that began with an illegitimate president, Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) who delivered to his allies – speculators, influence traffickers and corrupt politicians – public businesses, banks and other properties of the people and the Nation. With the passing of time, these personalities not only continued accumulating riches – at a rate that has not been seen in any other part of the world – but also accumulated political power to become a dominating elite that rules above the law and Constitutional institutions. They are also the owners of the mass media and were those who promoted the electoral fraud of 2006 to impede real change and impose a figurehead as President of the Republic."

López Obrador - who counts with a non-violent army of supporters and community organizers throughout the Republic who at times have engaged in Gandhian direct action - added an important warning regarding Calderon’s authoritarian tendencies as they pertain to the war on drugs:

“Our movement will not permit any ‘joint action’ that leads to the installation of martial law or the systematic violation of human rights. We believe that the relationship between our countries must be based on mutual respect and cooperation for development.

“Honorable President Obama: God willing, you have the virtue and luck that, in similar circumstances, that great statesman, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had; who knew how to return hope to the people and apply a good neighbor policy to the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, Mexico.

“Welcome to our country,

"Andrés Manuel López Obrador

"Legitimate President of Mexico"

López Obrador's movement is hardly the only pro-democracy counterweight to the Calderon regime in Mexico. As this newspaper has reported over nine years, Mexico's indigenous and non-electoral movements of the left are also lined up, from bottom to top, in resistance to the free-market model and government repression on its behalf. In the atmosphere of repression that Calderon and his predecessors have created from Chiapas to Oaxaca to Atenco and beyond, those movements are not so visible in the commercial media, but they are here, they are organized, and, as before, they tend to emerge overnight with surprising strength when provoked.

It may be that the US President sees no other option than to offer his full rhetorical support to the individual that occupies the Mexican presidency, whether he is legitimate or not.

But the US Community Organizer-in-Chief ought to be the first to recognize that his fellow and sister organizers in Mexico are precisely the ones frozen out of their democracy by an illegitimate regime, and are prepared to act to prevent a return to the dirty wars that wrought so much harm here in the 1960s and 1970s. Given Calderon's long-established proclivities toward authoritarian repression of social movements, political corruption and economic pillage of the many on behalf of the few, Obama may well find his Mexican counterpart will increasingly become a millstone around his neck.

If the US President or anyone is under the illusion that Calderon has the political support among the Mexican people to succeed in the failed war-on-drugs model when all leaders of all nations anywhere have not, he will end up feeling as defrauded as so many millions of Mexicans, as the death toll of that model continues rise, and with it a misery index unimaginable to most citizens of the United States.

One would hope that President Obama has an "exit strategy" from this debacle as well thought out as he does from George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

Lacking the foresight to have a "Plan B" ready to implement quickly when the current strategy falls apart, disaster looms.