Calderon aims fury at U.S. diplomats
Leaked cables contain remarks that undermine relations, he says
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
MEXICO CITY — As officials from both countries vow to jointly avenge the murder of a U.S. federal agent, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has accused senior American diplomats of damaging the cross-border relationship with criticism of Mexico‘s public security forces.
In a wide-ranging interview published Tuesday in El Universal, one of Mexico City’s leading newspapers, Calderon charged that U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual‘s “ignorance has translated into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico” that has caused “an impact and an irritation in our own team.”
Calderon was reacting to a barrage of analytic cables – some signed by Pascual, others by senior embassy officials – that discuss the perceived shortcomings of Mexico’s intelligence services, the conduct of its army in Calderon’s anti-crime campaign and the inability of its security forces to work well with one another.
The U.S. Embassy offered no immediate reaction to the interview.
The cables, some classified secret, have been published by the website WikiLeaks, with still more appearing this week. Until Tuesday, Mexican officials have responded to the cables with shrugs and condemnations of WikiLeaks rather than the diplomats.
Not any more.
“They have done a lot of damage with the stories they tell and that, in truth, they distort,” Calderon said of the cables in the interview.
Frustration festering
Calderon’s remarks came just a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent Jaime Zapata, 32, was shot to death on a central Mexican highway, presumably by gangsters. ICE agent Victor Avila, was injured in the attack. Zapata was buried Tuesday in Brownsville.
U.S. and Mexican officials have continually stressed the two countries’ close cooperation in Calderon’s offensive on organized crime cartels, whose ensuing violence has claimed nearly 35,000 lives in little more than four years. The U.S. government has committed more than $1.4 billion in training, equipment and other assistance.
Now, with Calderon entering the final third of his six year term – and doubts growing whether his successor will continue the fight – neither the criminal gangs nor the violence seem close to being extinguished.
Frustration festers on both sides of the border.
Criminal ‘insurgency’
In addition to the U.S. diplomats, Calderon accused Mexico’s local and state governors of failing to do their part against the gangsters.
“If we all had assumed the task of confronting crime with the same integrity,” Calderon said, “we long ago would have been living a much more encouraging scenario in Mexico.”
Mexican officials were angered more than two years ago when a U.S. agency issued a report suggesting the country was on the verge of becoming a “failed state.” They were riled again a few weeks ago when a U.S. undersecretary of the Army publicly repeated concerns in Washington of a criminal “insurgency” threatening Mexico.
“Although operational cooperation is much better today than it was a decade or two ago, the same nationalist sentiments continue to bubble up to the top of the political debate in both countries,” said Andrew Selee, a Mexico specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
“We will see the relationship become more tense over the next year and a half as the Mexican election approaches and frustrations mount in the Calderon administration over lack of immediate progress in containing the violence.”
As he has in the past, Calderon complained to El Universal that the U.S. government has done little to curb either American demand for the drugs produced or smuggled through Mexico or the flow of weapons south across the border.
“The institutional cooperation ends up being notoriously insufficient,” Calderon said. He also complained that U.S. agencies have often failed to work together and in view one another as rivals.
Two years, 60 deaths
Still, scores of U.S. federal agents work with Mexican counterparts throughout the country in advisory and support roles. A U.S. Embassy cable from early 2009 revealed that more than 60 Mexican agents who had worked closely with the Americans had been killed in just the first two years of Calderon’s crackdown.
Zapata was the first U.S. agent slain by Mexican gangsters since Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985. But U.S. officials had feared such an attack as the ties with Mexican agencies grew closer.
“The threat to U.S. personnel could increase if the violence continues to escalate and more high-level government officials and political leaders are targeted,” the cable warned. “A reaction may be triggered if traffickers perceive their losses are due to U.S. support to the (Mexican government’s) counternarcotics efforts.”
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