New Treaty Idea Draws Positive Reaction

After two days of courting the United States, Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday shifted his gaze to the whole Western Hemisphere, drawing generally positive reactions for his call to create a new regional security structure to confront threats such as drug trafficking and natural disasters.

In a speech before the 35-nation Organization of American States, Fox called for the abandonment of a half-century-old defense treaty that he called “a serious case of obsolescence and uselessness.”

“There’s no doubt that he’s right,” said Luigi Einaudi, the assistant secretary-general of the OAS and a retired U.S. career diplomat. “People have been talking about that behind the scenes for 10 years, and nobody’s had the guts to come out and say it.”

Fox said Mexico would decide within 60 days whether it would withdraw unilaterally from the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. The treaty focuses on traditional military threats and has been virtually ignored in recent years as the OAS has sought to shift the debate from Cold War-style confrontation to a definition of security that is driven more by human rights.

The OAS speech rounded out Fox’s three-day trip to Washington, which focused on U.S.-Mexican relations and the issue of migration in particular. Fox traveled to Miami on Friday afternoon to take part in a conference and to meet with Gov. Jeb Bush. He was to fly home Friday night.

Fox’s address to the OAS reflected his country’s resolve to play a more prominent role in global affairs on the strength of enhanced democratic legitimacy stemming from his defeat last year of the party that had ruled Mexico for 71 years.

“Mexico proposes to be a principal actor in the discussion of a new system of security that strengthens the unity of our region, and at the same time permits us to identify and confront the true threats that face us,” Fox said.

“We don’t confront an extracontinental enemy that obliges us to defend ourselves through a military alliance. We have, rather, common adversaries: . . . economic backwardness and extreme poverty, organized transnational crime, the rupture of democratic legality and the systemic violation of human rights, the destruction of the environment, and helplessness in the face of calamities and natural disasters.”

Fox offered Mexico as the venue for a planned OAS security conference in 2004 that is intended to conclude a review of hemispheric security policy.

Einaudi said afterward that one reason for the failure to tackle the existing outmoded security framework is that “nobody’s come up with a substitute. The problem lies with the definition of security, and this is obviously on everybody’s minds.”

In addition, “there are people who are afraid that [a new framework] will either take away all authority from military institutions, or be a secret way of letting them back in the kitchen door when they’ve just been put out the front door in many countries,” he said, referring to the end of military dictatorships in several Latin American countries.

Although there is no obvious consensus on the extent of military involvement in regional security, several diplomats agreed that the issue needs to be debated.

Argentina’s ambassador to the OAS, Raul Alberto Ricardes, said the idea of revamping the security architecture in the Western Hemisphere has been on the agenda for several years.

Argentina has special reason to be concerned. As Fox noted, the Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance was ignored by the United States during the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina over the islands that the British call the Falklands and Argentines call the Malvinas. Despite the hemispheric security pact, the United States supported Britain in that brief conflict. Argentina did invoke the treaty to secure support from some Latin American countries.

Fox, whose first trip abroad after taking office was to South America, appeared to want to stress to the OAS gathering that he would not abandon the region in his eagerness to reach a range of accords with the United States. Fox noted that his government was putting heavy emphasis on an economic development program that would build highways, energy pipelines and other infrastructure from southern Mexico to the nations of Central America.