Mexicans still in Mexico angry at Obama
Friday, 10/8/10
El Universal (Mexico City) 10/7/10
Obama forgot to look south [Full transl. of main editorial]
Yesterday the United States announced a new record of deportations: 392 thousand 863 persons during 2010. Those are bad news for Mexico, not so much due to the number, but because no other action or characteristic distinguishes Obama’s administration from its predecessors on the issue of immigration.
Mexico, like the rest of the world, had high expectations placed on the first African-American president of the power to the North. Being the son of an alien, a man of simple origins and “progressive” ideals – by American standards – it was hoped that he would innovate and confront the neighboring nation’s old problems with new vigor.
As presidential candidate of the Democrat Party, Barack Obama offered a migratory reform in his first year in office. President Calderon was the first one to be received by then President Elect Obama. Expectations were renewed when the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and then Obama himself visited this country in 2009 in response to Mexican complaints about his lack of involvement in the war against drugs. An unprecedented mea culpa! The government of the United States recognized for the first time its responsibility in the consumption of drugs and the traffic of weapons to the south. By 2010, the American drug czar announced a new social focus (read: effort) on the fight against narcotraffic, which again raised expectations in Mexico.
Up to now they have only been words.
Perhaps the only action of the Democrat in favor of the Mexicans in the United States was the legal onslaught against the Arizona SB1070 law, which criminalizes the undocumented. In defense of the President, it has to be said that the conservative current in the American Congress, including legislators from his own party, would never allow him a legalization of the undocumented, not even a partial one, as was the case with the failed “Dream Act” that aimed to legalize foreign students. Nor would he be allowed to relax the controls on the border with Mexico or to tolerate crossing without documents to the other side of the Bravo River (read: Rio Grande River) which represents a “crime” to the majority of Americans.
In any event, his administration in relation to Mexico must be considered a failure because our country was ignored, as was the rest of Latin America, in all bilateral issues and actions. The feeling remains that the President doesn’t have any idea of what to do with the countries to the south of its border.
During decades, Latin America lamented about American interventionism. Today we know that the opposite extreme doesn’t help either.