TransBorder Project Policy Report: Changing Perspectives on US-Mexico Relations Tom Barry - NACLA
go to original May 7, 2013

It’s unfortunate that the two presidents chose to hold their May 2-3 summit in Mexico City. Both nations and Presidents Barack Obama and Enrique Peña Nieto would have been better served by a meeting at the border - where the grim reality of neighborly relations would not be masked by the pomp and circumstance of the grand presidential residence of Los Pinos.

A meeting at the customs building in Ciudad Juárez - the site of the first Mexico-U.S. presidential meeting in 1909 between Porfirio Díaz and William Taft - would have likely resulted in a more memorable and productive summit of the current heads of state, Enrique Peña Nieto and Barack Obama. As it is, this meeting will likely be soon forgotten - lost in protocol, predictable rhetoric about interdependence, and the photogenic smiles of the two presidents.

A century ago the Rio Grande/Río Bravo clearly marked the divide between El Paso and Juárez, the border twins that were jointly known as El Paso del Norte - the pass to the north. Today, however, it’s unlikely that the presidential delegations and the accompanying media would now passes for a river - really just an alarmingly greenish trickle of pesticides, fertilizer runoff, and human waste.

Instead of news photos from the bilateral meeting depicting two smiling presidents, we would be witnessing images of the stark divide between the two neighbors: the formidable border security infrastructure, the smog rising from the long lines of vehicles waiting to cross, the beggars and street vendors taking advantage of the stalled south-north traffic, the ravages of the drug wars, the miles of low-slung factories called maquiladoras, the sprawling colonias of Mexico’s expanding, but still largely poor, middle class (those families earning at least $7,500 annually), and still-poorer squatter settlements that spread out into the Chihuahuan Desert.

The lead items of the Los Pinos meeting are ones that have long dominated U.S.-Mexico presidential meetings: immigration, border control, economic integration, and drug-related security. The presidents will achieve some camaraderie chatting about the domestic political obstacles that complicate their plans for national and international progress. In the pleasant, climate-controlled setting of Los Pinos, it’s unlikely that Peña Nieto and Obama will address in any depth, if at all, what will soon become the top agenda item of most binational and multilateral meetings: the scourge of climate change.

Read the rest at NACLA

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