Domestic Feuds Derail Bush-Fox Diplomacy

Days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Vicente Fox journeyed to Washington and challenged President Bush to quickly adopt Mexico’s ambitious proposals to legalize 3.5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States and expand guest worker programs.

The two men touted their friendship with easy bilingual banter. Mexico, Bush said, is “our most important ally.” A dramatic improvement in ties between often quarreling neighbors looked imminent, the fruit of a courtship between like-minded rancher-statesmen.

But their personal chemistry raised expectations here that have since been dashed--and not just by the terrorist attacks that shifted Bush’s focus away from Mexico. Fox’s American agenda is also stalled by domestic politics in both countries that have limited each president’s power to act and forced the Mexican leader to turn his attention homeward.

Fox’s surprise decision to cancel an Aug. 28 visit with his American counterpart at the Bush ranch in Texas--to protest that state’s execution Wednesday of a Mexican citizen convicted of murder--is the most recent example of how conflicting domestic priorities have pushed the two leaders apart.

Fox and Bush took office within weeks of each other, in December 2000 and January 2001, respectively. Over time, both have become hamstrung on key bilateral goals by their respective congresses.

Republican lawmakers in Washington, for example, oppose a bill that would give Fox part of what he wants by allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States while applying for permanent residency. There has been no significant progress in bilateral talks over Fox’s broad proposals for immigration reform.

Texas politicians during the spring obliged Bush to elevate a bitter dispute over scarce water in the Rio Grande basin--and Mexico’s multibillion-gallon debt to the state’s parched farmers--to the top of the U.S.-Mexico agenda. That dispute forced Fox to cancel an earlier visit to Texas, in June.

And the U.S. Supreme Court has irritated Mexico by ruling that employers who violate American labor law in their treatment of illegal immigrant workers cannot be required to pay back wages.

Fox, whose election two summers ago ended seven decades of one-party rule, is under criticism at home over his failure to create jobs and push through promised tax and energy reforms. Mexicans are divided almost evenly over whether closer ties to the United States will help pull their country out of poverty.

Opposition parties that dominate the Mexican Congress have accused Fox of investing too much time on better ties with the United States and have blocked his domestic reforms. The Mexican Senate registered its discontent with Washington’s flagging interest by preventing Fox’s scheduled visit in April to the U.S. and Canada.

“At first, when the U.S.-Mexico relationship was being handled president to president, the future looked better for some kind of immigration accord,” said Denise Dresser, a Mexican political scientist. “But now that political parties and other interests have jumped into the fray, it has become harder to negotiate.”

With midterm elections approaching in both countries, she added, “the window of opportunity may have closed.”

By snubbing Bush this week, Fox sacrificed a chance to reassert his proposals on immigration and to tackle contentious bilateral issues of water and trade. He would have been the only foreign leader granted an audience this month at the ranch near Crawford--a setting conducive to quality time.

But Fox calculated that he was unlikely to come back with any concessions, analysts in Mexico said, and staged his unusually vigorous protest against the execution in order to bolster his shaky standing at home.

Domestic politics on both sides of the border conspired to create an intractable conflict over the fate of Javier Suarez Medina, the 33-year-old convicted of killing a Dallas police officer in 1988.

In a slow summer news cycle, the countdown to Suarez’s death dominated headlines in Mexico. As it had done in similar cases, the Foreign Ministry protested the sentence, saying Suarez had been denied the legal aid guaranteed for foreigners under an international treaty.

But following the frenzied news coverage here--highlighting the prevailing view here that U.S. justice is often unfair to Latinos--Fox made telephone appeals to Bush and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The governor, running for reelection this fall, could ill afford to spare the life of a cop killer.

Fox, too, was facing a sensitive date on the political calendar: the president’s annual Sept. 1 state of the nation speech before Congress. In the more democratic Mexico that brought him to power, he risked disruptive jeers from opposition lawmakers if he had been wined and dined in Texas on the heels of Suarez’s lethal injection.

Fox’s decision to stay home won applause across Mexico’s political spectrum. Lorena Beauregard, a congresswoman from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which lost power in the 2000 elections, said Fox “finally understands that he must stand up against the United States for the interests of the country.”

“He showed sensitivity to the feeling among Mexicans that we need more dignity in our relations with the United States,” said Sen. Raymundo Cardenas of the opposition Democratic Revolution Party.

Some analysts here compared Fox’s move to a negotiator who walks away from the table, gambling that the other side will sweeten its offer to get him back. Asked about Fox’s decision, Bush told reporters Friday he was “confident that our friendship is strong, that we’ll be able to work together to resolve common problems.”

“The Bush administration has a huge investment in Fox, because it thinks he’s going to produce the kind of Mexico that, strategically, it is much more comfortable with,” said Daniel Lund, president of Mund Americas, a Mexico City company that surveys public opinion. “What happened this week may give the Bush people a real sense of his limits and prompt them to help him out.”

Others say Fox was foolish to pick a battle he couldn’t win abroad for the sake of a popularity boost at home that probably won’t last long.

“Fox’s objective is to tie the country more deeply to the United States, but he has undermined himself by playing to Mexicans who oppose that goal,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, a specialist here on U.S.-Mexican relations. “He has made himself the victim of a confessed killer.”