Mexico’s Fox Woos Washington at Great Cost
The current spat between Venezuela and Mexico will soon pass, yet it should be seen as far more than a trivial matter,
springing as it does from deep roots in the collective psyche of each country. Even more importantly, it also reflects
the depth of the disagreement in Latin America over Washington’s controversial free trade proposals. The dispute also
reveals how far President Fox’s star has fallen, along with those of other Latin American leaders who have allowed
themselves to be docilely tethered to Washington’s dock.
Shortly after the Summit of the Americas gathering in Mar del Plata concluded in disagreement over Washington’s FTAA
proposal early this month, Mexico’s President Vicente Fox publicly decried the meeting’s “failure.” Fox, who has begun
to trump even Washington’s Central American satrapies in emoting fawning acquiescence to Washington’s game plan, went on
to blame the breakup on the narrow opposition of a few hemispheric leaders. Fox’s broadside was clearly targeting his
Mercosur counterparts – among them Brazil and Venezuela – but he specifically blasted the meeting’s host, Argentina’s
President Néstor Kirchner, whom Fox accused of being more interested in courting public opinion than making the summit a
success.
Perhaps the Mexican president might have done well to follow Kirchner’s lead in defending his own citizenry rather than
supinely adopting the U.S. Treasury’s view on the issue as well as that of the Washington-based international lending
agencies. The Fox presidency has been harmed by his never having been a man for the streets, and has consistently
ignored the weight of popular public sentiment – both in his own country and in the region – and this obstinacy has
grieviously weakened his presidency and most likely has irreversibly tarnished his legacy as Mexico’s first presidential
democratic reformer. His recent decision to champion the FTAA and almost obsequiously bend his knee to Washington’s
grand economic design for the region puzzled many observers, since the only possible motivation for such servility was
the forlorn hope of encouraging an otherwise elusive immigration agreement with the U.S. But such a strategy represents
a gross distortion of reality, and a wide-of-the-mark miscalculation, since given his own domestic pains, President Bush
is in no position to tender a credible offer on the subject at the present time. For Bush to try and fail at this would
be one thing; for him to come forth with lame excuses while sitting on is hands is quite another.
Furthermore, it is a matter of ongoing contention by Mexican authorities that free trade of the variety Washington
continues to hawk has been a boon to the country, as was the claim of former President Carlos Salinas, who oversold
NAFTA to the Mexican public by using deceptive figures, only to leave office in the midst of an economic meltdown of his
own making. For a majority of Mexicans, poverty and inequality have only increased since NAFTA was signed in 1994, and
as a result, popular sentiment certainly hadn’t favored Fox’s ardent backing of the White House’s latest self-serving
trade concoction. What his behavior did suggest is that Fox was content to get one more round of smiling photo-ops with
President Bush when he should have been working to gain hard concessions from the U.S., which would mean more jobs in
Mexico, legalization of Mexican immigrants already in the U.S., and the sanctioning of the guest workers program that
would stabilize this supplementary U.S. work force.
So when Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez retaliated against Fox by lambasting him as a “puppy of imperialism” for his
ebullient pro-U.S. script at the summit, few Mexicans – or for that matter, few Latin Americans – really disagreed with
that churlish description, as they inwardly chuckled over the right-on accuracy of the remark. Rather than try to paper
over the dispute, which eventually will produce no winners, bumbling diplomacy was allowed to take over, with the rift
ending up escalating throughout the region and on to the front pages. Furthermore, few of Fox’s countrymen actually
perceived any slight – despite the leader’s claim of a grievous national insult – beyond the mordant, but bulls-eye,
shot at Fox’s widely known personal weaknesses of indecision, disloyalty to his aides, and a predilection for rhetorical
flights from tough decisions.
The Fox-Chávez sparring has been played out along predictable lines. This is not the first time that Fox has publicly
served a higher authority on the international stage: one can remember the recall of Mexico’s envoy to Cuba, the flap
with Fidel Castro at the Monterrey Millennium conference, and his dastardly firing of Mexico’s spirited ambassador to
the U.N., the late Adolfo Aguilar (who recently tragically died in an auto crash), as a result of pressuring by
Secretary of State Powell over the highly regarded Mexican diplomat’s opposition to the Iraq war. At the same time, this
is not the first time that Chávez’s infuriating bons mots have led to a diplomatic incident – Chile briefly recalled its
ambassador in 2004 after the Venezuelan leader puckishly declared his desire to “bathe on a Bolivian beach,” a clear
reference to Chile’s refusal to grant Bolivia a corridor to the sea.
While this episode may be more about Fox’s typical obduracy and Chávez’s proclivity for grandiloquence, it nevertheless
reveals that Washington, and what regional critics perhaps unkindly would describe as the hemisphere’s malinches who
faultily back it, no longer necessarily prevail in Latin America. The feud appears to be ongoing, as Chávez refuses to
back down from his comments, and Fox insists on proclaiming that the FTAA is the “vision of the future.” Yet repetition
does not always make for truth, and Fox’s comments have hardly resonated well throughout the region. Rather, he has
become a figure for vilification.
As the Andean countries of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador commence another round of negotiations of a free trade agreement
with the U.S., they will not be taking their cues necessarily from such Washington facilitators as Fox, but rather from
the perhaps less than fully dignified caudillo in Caracas, along with his counterparts in the Southern Cone trade bloc,
who staunchly have resisted attempts to impose unbalanced FTAA measures on their people. While this verbal jousting most
likely will turn out to be simply a temporary quarrel, the widening bifurcation of the two streams of opposing ideology
that it reflects is both profound and lasting. The submission to, or defiance of Washington’s bringing to bear its
asymmetrical power regarding the FTAA could register as the hemisphere’s defining battle of the century.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns and Research Associate Michael Lettieri.
November 21, 2005