Mexico Hear The Voices of the Exterior

Issues for U.S. Policy

Author: Pamela K. Starr
Council on Foreign Relations Press
June 2006

POSSIBLE MEXICAN FOREIGN POLICIES Of the three leading candidates for the presidency, PAN candidate Felipe Calderón is the least likely to make marked changes to Mexico’s current foreign policy approach. He would continue to prioritize national interests over policy principles, promote international trade, and participate actively in international institutions such as the UN Security Council. The difference Calderón would bring to foreign policy is one of tone. Unlike his predecessor, Calderón promises a Zedillo-like preference for close cooperation with the United States, but without a warm public embrace, and he is likely to renew Mexico’s courtship of its cultural cousins in Latin America. The PRI’s Roberto Madrazo calls for a return to Mexico’s historically nationalist and principled approach to foreign policy coupled with careful attention to the country’s fundamentally important relationship with the United States. Like Calderón, he would reprioritize Latin America in Mexican foreign policy, but would go further than Calderón and include improved ties with Cuba. A PRI administration would take Mexico out of the UN Security Council (but would otherwise continue Mexico’s active participation in international institutions), demand a revision of NAFTA’s agricultural chapter to prevent free trade in beans and corn, which is scheduled to begin on January 1, 2008, and end Mexico’s support for a free trade area of the Americas. His foreign policy promises to be a return to tradition, albeit adjusted to the realities of a new international context. The PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador has shown little interest in foreign affairs. What drives him as a politician is a lifelong desire to improve the lot of Mexico’s poor. Since the solutions to this problem typically lie in the domestic realm, foreign policy would take a low profile. His foreign policy would be based on the principles of self-determination, nonintervention, and the peaceful resolution of disputes, but without aggressively promoting these principles. Mexico would withdraw from the UN Security Council and reduce its overall profile in international organizations. López Obrador is also very unlikely to embrace Hugo Chávez. To the contrary, he is the only Mexican presidential candidate in memory from the left who has not employed anti-American rhetoric. He is likely to normalize relations with Venezuela and Cuba in order to placate the supporters of Chávez and Castro within his party. But given the fundamental
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importance of good relations with the United States to his domestic economic project, López Obrador will do little more. There is an exception to low-profile foreign policy, however: NAFTA. López Obrador has no interest in pulling Mexico out of NAFTA, but he does believe the treaty could be refined to better serve Mexican interests. He proposes expanding NAFTA to include a chapter on development assistance and promises to prevent the scheduled opening of the North American corn and bean market in 2008, due to the social and economic disruptions that it would cause in many rural communities. He would like to reopen discussions on trade in sugar, citrus, and brooms, and on land transport, and he is apt to use safeguards when required to protect Mexican national production. Although López Obrador is not a great fan of free trade treaties, he is unlikely to pull Mexico out of its existing trade agreements with the European Union, Japan, Chile, and other countries. But a López Obrador presidency is not likely to continue its predecessors’ support for a Free Trade Area for the Americas. Finally, López Obrador’s nationalism, his sensitivity to criticism, and his tendency to speak his mind freely will make him a prickly partner who is susceptible to perceived slights by the United States or its representatives, a historically common source of tension in the bilateral relationship