Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Dec 15 2000 (IPS) — Relations between Mexico and the United States, two countries that have long shared tensions as well as cooperative efforts, will embark on a new route in 2001, promise their respective presidents, elected this year. But analysts believe that, in practice, little will change.

Mexico’s President Vicente Fox took office Dec 1, and George W. Bush, who is to be inaugurated Jan 20, agree on the need to deepen bilateral relations but they differ on controversial matters like migration.

Bush stated that US-Mexican ties need to be relaunched because the United States is destined to always have close relations with its southern neighbour – they share a 3,200-km border – just as it has with Canada and Great Britain.

“We have coinciding statements made by Fox and Bush, but also differing visions. Their actions remain to be seen, but initially there will not be important changes in relations,” Jorge Chabat, an international relations expert at the Centre for Economic Instruction and Research (CIDE), told IPS.

Fox and Bush are receiving the reins of countries engaged in a dynamic that will remain basically the same, Chabat said. Perhaps trade relations will accelerate or some matters will take on new nuances, but everything will continue in the same direction.

Mexico, the source of two million immigrants to the United States each year, whether legal or not, is the second largest supplier of products to its northern neighbour and its leading destination for exports and origin of imports.

Fox, the first Mexican president in 71 years who is not of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), proposes opening the border with the United States for the free movement of citizens within 20 to 30 years.

Among his first actions as president, Fox implemented mechanisms to defend the rights of potential Mexican emigrants and of those who have already crossed the northern border into the United States.

From 1996 to the present, nearly 1,000 Mexicans have died in their attempts to reach US territory.

An estimated eight million Mexican-born people live in the United States, 2.5 million without legal immigration documents. Studies also show that the total jumps to more than 21 million people when immigrants’ children are included in the tally.

US president-elect Bush said that the border opening Fox proposes is an optimistic vision, but that he has doubts about its viability.

The Mexican president affirmed during his electoral campaign that he would insist on the proposal and stressed that the United States could never have grown or developed as it has without the labour provided by Mexican immigrants.

Bush, far from advocating potential border liberalisation, proposed instead to further boost the number of agents controlling the border shared with his country’s southern neighbour.

“We may have different points of view, but if we are able to build a relationship based on trust and forthrightness, I am sure will be able to find innovative, acceptable and fair solutions,” Fox said.

Differences with Mexico will be “inevitable, but they will be between family, not rivals,” Bush responded.

Mexico’s new foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, maintains that ties with the United States require revision.

Castañeda, who was a harsh critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has been called a communist by Jesse Helms, a powerful senator of the US Republican Party, the party of the president-elect.

Migration, the environment and human rights are the areas that need work, and progress must be sought through dialogue, Castañeda has stressed.

NAFTA, which was launched in January 1994 by Canada, Mexico and the United States, has allowed the Latin American nation to raise its foreign trade from 92 billion dollars annually to more than 270 billion.

But in parallel to that dynamic, the problems surrounding Mexican emigration and drug trafficking increased, and the disparity in development along the border only deepened.

In an attempt to underscore the Fox administration’s differences from the long line of previous PRI governments, presidential spokeswoman Martha Sahagún stressed that the Mexican leader will not simply rubber-stamp the political line the Bush administration develops.

The Fox administration is drafting a bill that would impose a 25-percent tax on the more than 6.0 billion dollars that are sent each year from Mexicans in the United States to their families in their country of origin. The funds would be earmarked for development at home, says the president.

“There won’t be any surprises in the relations between Mexico and the United States,” commented Chabat. “Everything will continue more or less the same, though perhaps things will speed up, because Bush knows a bit more about Mexico than most of the politicians in his country.”

The CIDE expert pointed out that, even if Fox and Bush wanted to make profound changes in the relations between the two nations, they would not have much luck because they are limited by their respective legislative branches.