|
By John Barham (April, 13, 2006) A significant visit to Mexico City occurred in March 1947, when Harry S Truman became the first president of the United States to visit Mexico's capital city. A mere 100 years before, American troops were fighting their way west from Veracruz toward the capital. An important stop for President Truman during his visit was the monument to the military cadets who died under fire from the Americans at Chapultepec. There, the American president would honor those young Mexicans who fell defending their country in the conflict that U. S. Grant had called "the most unjust war in the history of the world." Later in the spring of the same year, President Miguel Alemán journeyed to Washington. No Mexican president had traveled to the American capital since General Antonio López de Santa Ana had been forcibly taken to Washington to be chastised by Andrew Jackson after his defeat at San Jacinto by Sam Houston. During his visit, President Alemán encouraged American entrepreneurs to consider investing their assets in projects inside Mexico; however, on the subject of oil, he was most explicit in stating that any foreign proprietary relationship in energy production was illegal and unconstitutional. In other words, Mexico would not care to return to a time when companies from the United States and other foreign lands had a free hand in exploiting Mexican natural resources. In 1962, President Adolfo López Mateos said with much conviction, "Mexico is not a neutral country. It is an independent country." Following a policy of nonalignment in its diplomacy, Mexico accentuated its affinity for Third-World nations emerging from colonialism. Regarding Cuba, Mexico showed its independence by declining to back a US-sponsored resolution to remove Cuba from the Organization of American States. During the missile crisis of 1963, Mexico was on record as favoring the removal of Soviet weaponry from Cuba but let it be known that it would not back a US invasion of the island nation. During the 1970s, Mexico favored the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and in the 1980s Mexican policy called for a hands-off approach to revolutionary groups in El Salvador. After winning the presidency of Mexico in 2000, Vicente Fox broke with the tradition of an independent course in foreign affairs to join with George Bush in condemning totalitarianism in Cuba and elsewhere in the world. It was a move that was unpopular with many Mexicans, who, because of their own historical experience, preferred a policy based on respect for national sovereignty and nonintervention in the affairs of other nations. Mexico's effort to follow an independent course in its foreign affairs has been a supreme balancing act, considering its shared border with the most powerful nation in the world and its history of having lost half of its territory to that power. Further complicating relations with the "Colossus of the North" are cultural and foreign policy differences, which lately have been highlighted by politicians, scholars and academicians on both sides of the border. Samuel P. Huntington, the celebrated American political scientist, wrote in 1996 in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order of a global clash that would come about between the Western world and Islam. More recently, Huntington has spoken out about what he sees as a collision between the traditional Anglo-Saxon underpinnings of the United States and the growing antithetical presence of Hispanics who, according to Huntington, represent a force that could change the United States into a land of two peoples, two languages and two cultures. On the other side of the border, Carlos Fuentes, the well-known Mexican novelist, essayist and scholar, has taken aim at the Bush administration's foreign policy, pointing out that the United States has fallen away from its tradition of multilateralism in foreign affairs. Mexico, says Fuentes, took 70 years to reach democracy. It was naïve on the part of the United States to invade Iraq on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction and then assume that it could impart democracy to a society that, in many respects, has not emerged from a medieval world view. Fuentes has also remarked on the US double-standard of condemning the totalitarianism of Cuba while accommodating totalitarian China in trade and international politics. At the end of last February, a diplomatic incident little noted in the United States occurred when US Treasury officials ordered the US-owned María-Isabel Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City not to house a delegation of Cuban officials, maintaining that such action would violate the US trade embargo against Cuba. In retaliation against what was construed as high-handed action against Mexican national sovereignty and a violation of antidiscrimination laws, federal district officials ordered the hotel temporarily closed. Following on the heels of this incident, leftist presidential front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador's rhetoric took on more of an anti-American flavor as the PRD candidate laid out his ideas on foreign affairs. In no uncertain terms, López Obrador asserted that as president he would return Mexico to its traditional policy of independence. With barbed comments that were obviously aimed at President Vicente Fox, López Obrador, speaking in Mexico City, proclaimed that, "The next president of Mexico is not going to be a puppet of any foreign government. We are not going to meddle in the internal life of other peoples and other governments, because we don't want them meddling in ours." Further complicating relations between the US and Mexico is the hot-button issue of immigration, an issue that both Fox and Bush seemed to side-step at the recent summit at Cancún. In response to questions from reporters, both presidents emphasized that Cancún would not be the place where any agreement would be forged on immigration. Rather, the Congress of the US would be the final authority on the matter. No matter the outcome on July 2, it is clear that Mexico may be expected to develop and implement a foreign policy characterized by more independence. Even PAN candidate Felipe Calderón has distanced himself in many respects from the foreign policy of Vicente Fox's government. And, in Foggy Bottom, there must be considerable concern among foreign policy wonks that, if López Obrador is the winner, Mexico will join left-leaning governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil whose sentiments and actions on the international scene will not be able to be taken for granted by the US. John Barham, who has been visiting San Miguel de Allende for more than 18 years, has served as an associate professor of history, dean and provost in colleges and universities in New York, Alabama, Texas, Saudi Arabia and Missouri. He is presently superintendent of the University of Missouri Forest and is eagerly anticipating an imminent retirement in San Miguel. |