War on Terrorism Draws U.S. and Mexico Closer

When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge mounted the stage for a news conference recently, he faced a blunt reminder of the troubled history of U.S.-Mexican relations -- rows of faded Mexican battle flags, including one flown by Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the outlaw revolutionary who raided New Mexico.

Yet Ridge’s joint appearance with his Mexican counterpart, Interior Minister Santiago Creel, reflected an unexpected dividend in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism: a significant improvement in Washington’s relations with its southern neighbor. On issues ranging from screening airline passengers to sharing intelligence at the border, the United States is gaining greater cooperation from the Mexican government.

Mexico, in turn, has seen the Bush administration embrace its top priority -- reform of U.S. immigration laws -- in part because of a growing network of relationships between Ridge, Creel and their senior aides.

The Department of Homeland Security has “developed a businesslike way of dealing with Mexico that has never existed before,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. “Any progress that has been made during the past year and a half in relations with Mexico has been made in the relationship between Ridge and Santiago Creel.”

Collaboration between the two security officials is credited with speeding a rapprochement between President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox, after Fox’s opposition to the Iraq war irked Bush. Fox is scheduled to visit Bush at the president’s ranch near Crawford, Texas, the first weekend in March.

In announcing his immigration reform plan, Bush embraced Ridge’s reasoning that the United States would be more secure if millions of illegal immigrants identified themselves to the government in exchange for work permits. Creel and other Mexican officials had been making the same argument for months.

What lies behind the unforeseen link between homeland security and better relations with Mexico is not idealism or ideology but practical necessity.

U.S. officials fear that the 2,000-mile border with Mexico could become an entry point for terrorists, just as it has been for drugs and migrants. For their part, Mexican officials worry that if terrorists use their country as a springboard for an attack, the angry backlash from the United States could cripple their economy and impede travel of their citizens who work in the north and send home badly needed funds.

What aides to Ridge call “the convergence of interests” has created a kind of negotiating parity and commonality between the two countries that often has been missing in the past.

Where previously one side could ignore the other’s views, that is not so true today. As a result, officials at all levels of the two governments feel increased pressure to solve problems and reach compromises.

“Without doubt, security is an area that has allowed us to draw closer,” Creel recently told an interviewer from Televisa, a Mexican network.

“We have been building a better atmosphere, not only at the level of the [Fox] administration, but [with] Mexican legislators visiting the United States. All of this is creating a new atmosphere, a different moment that we should try to take advantage of,” he said.

The Homeland Security Department is involved with Mexico on a broader range of issues than perhaps any other branch of the U.S. government, from clearing shipments of Mexican produce, to issuing green cards, to rescuing migrants who run out of water in the desert.

“We’ve got a huge portfolio,” Ridge said in an interview. “We worry about people dying in the desert. We worry about getting commerce across the border. We worry about sharing information on people flying commercial aircraft in and out of both countries. The issues that we are dealing with are very much at the heart of the relationship.”

Ridge has nudged other top Homeland Security officials to develop their own working relationships with Mexican counterparts.

Accompanying him on a two-day trip to Mexico this month were agency heads responsible for aviation security, investigations, U.S. Customs, the Border Patrol and security technology. Eduardo Aguirre, head of U.S. citizenship services and the administration’s point man on immigration reform, made the rounds on Mexican television.

Such contacts “eliminate months of back and forth,” U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza said. “You take the timeframes and compress them by working issues eyeball to eyeball. Our challenge now is to take this cooperation and move it from an individual level to an institutional level.”

The fruits of this cooperation can be seen in several areas:

* Ridge and Creel reached a tentative agreement recently allowing migrants caught illegally crossing the border to be returned to their home regions, a long-sought U.S. goal.

* A secure telephone -- the only such hotline in the Western hemisphere -- has just been installed linking the two officials.

* Before Ridge tells the U.S. public of a change in the threat level, he notifies two foreign governments -- Canada and Mexico. That might seem an obvious thing to do, because Mexico and Canada are the United States’ largest and closest neighbors, but it’s not how things have always worked.

Although the United States has a long history of working closely with Canada on security matters, mutual mistrust has hindered cooperation with Mexico. Mexican officials have often perceived their U.S. counterparts as overbearing, while U.S. officials have been frustrated by what they see as Mexican authorities’ tendency to evade problems rather than confront them.

Ridge is trying to get the Mexicans to reframe border control as a humanitarian issue: He argues that, by helping the United States interdict illegal immigrants, Mexico would save hundreds of its citizens from death each year in the deserts of the Southwest. So far, the Mexicans are mainly listening.

Ridge and Creel make an unlikely pair of partners.

The 58-year-old Ridge appears to be the more convivial of the two. Although his Spanish does not extend much beyond “muchas gracias,” he appeared relaxed in Mexico, fielding questions from local reporters with an interpreter’s help. He was up to date on such specific border problems as Mexicans being denied one-day visas for emergency medical care in the United States.

Creel, 49, comes across as more formal. He speaks excellent English and is at ease without an interpreter in private discussions with Ridge. But even when speaking to U.S. reporters at joint events, he relies on erudite, carefully enunciated Spanish.

Creel and Ridge kept working closely during the chill in relations between Bush and Fox over Iraq. “The State Department dealt with that,” Ridge said.

“They both understood it was in the interest of each country to keep up the cooperation and dialogue, so we didn’t suffer any kind of diminished cooperation,” said Gustavo Mohar, an advisor to Creel. “We have a joint interest in making sure that Mexico is not used by people who want to harm the United States, and I don’t think that has been understood by the American public.”

Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security, said the Mexican government actively supported U.S. border-tightening measures at the outset of the war.

“We were talking daily with the Mexican officials on commerce flowing through,” Hutchinson said. “At their offer, which has been very significant, they have helped us by beefing up enforcement on their side of the border when we go to an orange alert.”

From the U.S. side, the next key test of the relationship will take place this summer on the border. If Creel helps reduce the number of illegal immigrants trying to cross the desert, Hutchinson and others say, that will help the Bush administration convince Congress that the Mexican government can be a reliable partner in broader immigration reform.

For the Fox administration, the paramount objective remains the legalization of millions of undocumented Mexican workers in the U.S. But a large-scale immigration reform bill is unlikely to clear Congress before the November elections.