December 29, 2001
Mexico Lower on Bush's List Since Sept. 11
By TIM WEINER and GINGER THOMPSON
EXICO CITY, Dec. 28 — Not long ago, President Bush called Mexico America's most important friend among the world's nations.
He met with President Vicente Fox more often than with any other leader. He spoke of a "special relationship" with Mexico, a phrase traditionally reserved for Britain.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited "the special place Mexico holds in our national priorities." The two countries were forging agreements that would have forever altered their political and economic relations, and changed the lives of millions of migrants.
But for the moment, Mexico has fallen off Washington's foreign policy agenda.
Though President Bush has reiterated his commitment to Mexico, and President Fox has expressed support for the American campaign against terrorism, serious talks on every important issue uniting and dividing the two countries — trade, drug trafficking, immigration — have been all but suspended since Sept. 11.
And like a bride left standing at the altar, Mexico is starting to wonder how long it will have to wait.
"For us, Sept. 11 did not change the pace of our work," President Fox said in an interview. "We have kept our focus. The United States has changed. They have had to pause. For them the focus on terrorism has forced them to put less attention on our bilateral issues.
"I understand that necessity. But at the same time, I would like to see that once their work is done we can advance on our pending issues."
Mr. Fox said he hoped that the United States and Mexico could reach agreement on sweeping immigration reforms by next summer. Among other things, the Mexican government is pressing the United States to expand current guest worker programs and give legal status to some three million Mexicans staying illegally in the United States.
But "the events of Sept. 11 put things on hold," said Mexico's foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda.
Hopes for a more open border, freer immigration and new United States investment in Mexico have been buried under the weight of the attacks, the heightened interest in border security to weed out terrorists and the economic slump in the United States.
Mr. Fox's "dream of an open border between the United States and Mexico is counted among many of the losses caused by the attacks of Sept. 11," said Peter Andreas, a political scientist at Brown University.
Without concrete progress toward a common agenda between the two countries, and without a strong American economy to bolster Mexico's, much of what Mr. Fox hoped to achieve in his six years as president may become a distant vision.
"There is no country in the world that's suffered more from the eclipse of Sept. 11 and the laser focus of the Bush administration on bin Laden than Mexico," said Robert A. Pastor, a former National Security Council staff member and a longtime expert on Mexico, who is now at Emory University.
Before the attacks on New York and Virginia, the two neighbors were working on new safety plans for the 2,000-mile border, where hundreds of immigrants die each year from exposure to heat and cold crossing illegally into the United States through trackless deserts.
The two presidents even broached issues considered taboo by past governments, including United States investment in Mexico's energy industry and permission for American law enforcement officials to operate on Mexican soil. All remain on the to-do list.
Mr. Fox spoke of his desire to achieve new agreements with the United States during a trip to the border last week — the same border that Mr. Powell, in his first news conference as secretary of state, said was "no longer a line that divides us, but a region that unites our nations."
For now, the line once again is a wall. "The voices that once clamored for open borders have quieted," Mr. Andreas writes in a forthcoming edition of Foreign Affairs in Spanish. In Washington, he says, "anguished and somber conversations about perimeters of security and defense of national territory" have replaced animated conversations about a united frontier, and "defenders of an open border are ridiculed."
One million people still cross that line every day, Mr. Fox said. Foreign-owned factories generate millions of dollars in tax revenues and tens of thousands of jobs each year, and help drive what last year was a quarter-trillion-dollar economic engine of cross-border trade.
But some 300,000 Mexicans illegally enter the United States across that same border each year. Other foreigners can also cross it. And that is now, in many American eyes, a national security issue above all.
Senior Mexican government officials say the terrorist strikes should make it easier to win political support for the legalization of undocumented Mexican immigrants, a centerpiece of Mr. Fox's proposals.
The officials argue that giving the immigrants United States identification cards, Social Security numbers and driver's licenses would pull them out of society's shadows and into the light of governmental oversight.
That argument has not won any visible support at the White House. So President Fox struggles to keep his dream alive, to stay on the United States foreign policy radar by capitalizing on Washington's new national security priorities, with the aim of renewing American interest in Mexico's hopes.
He has pledged unconditional support for the campaign against terrorism, offering to freeze bank accounts of people or organizations suspected of supporting terrorists and placing new visa restrictions on travelers entering Mexico.
"Mexico will be neither a residence for terrorists nor a transit stop for terrorists to enter the United States," he said. "We will fulfill that commitment."
Not all of Washington has forgotten the first nine months of 2001, when Mr. Fox was a darling of politicians left and right, and the two nations' plans seemed so in sync.
The Democratic leaders in Congress, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri, visited Mexico last month to emphasize their support for President Fox's immigration proposals. Kenneth W. Dam, the United States deputy Treasury secretary, said during a visit to Mérida this month that Mexico remained a priority for Mr. Bush.
"Nothing is more important to President Bush than this partnership" with Mexico, Mr. Dam said. Though "the whole world changed" on Sept. 11, he said, "one thing did not change, and that is the importance to the U.S. of this partnership."
But the progress the two partners achieved in the last three months fell short of what once seemed possible. Mexico has "come back full force to the bilateral agenda," Mr. Fox said, even if the United States has not. And next year, he said, "we will have the advances we want."