As Brazil rises, Mexico tries to amp up its own clout

The old lament about Mexico is that it’s “so far from God, so close to the United States.” These days it might be more apt to say that Mexico looks so far from Latin America. Mexico was once the region’s vocero, its spokesman. But in the past decade the country’s diplomatic role seems to have fallen aside – apparent in Mexico’s failure to engage the coup crisis in Honduras last year – and has been assumed by its South American rival, Brazil. In fact, says one senior Mexican official, President Felipe CalderÓn and his countrymen are all too aware that the foreign policy spotlight in the Americas today “is shining over Brazil.”

If so, Mexico’s absence has left a critical leadership hole in the hemisphere’s midsection. But as CalderÓn gets set to host U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, he looks determined to fill that void again. Last month he convened a summit in CancÚn to create a multilateral organization promoting regional unity – a body that includes all 32 Latin American and Caribbean nations but pointedly excludes the U.S. and Canada. The Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) “makes possible an old desire that [we] have [our] own space for dialogue and political resolutions,” says Salvador BeltrÁn del RÍo, Mexico’s Foreign Relations Undersecretary for Latin America & the Caribbean. Calderon has also announced that Mexico will host the next U.N. global climate change conference, starting November 30, also in CancÚn. Says Shannon O’Neil a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, “Mexico seems anxious to look outward again.” (See a story about the U.S.-Mexican border.)

Since democracy took hold in Mexico in 2000, say many Latin America analysts, the country hasn’t looked much beyond its northern border. “There’s a sense that Mexico has decided its future depends on the U.S. and it’s not paying much attention to what other countries are doing,” says Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a former advisor to the Mexican government. But Mexico has paid a price for focusing so much on its relationship with Washington. It sends an inordinate 80% of its exports to the U.S., for example. As a result, it has been hit by the recession harder than many other Latin American countries.

O’Neil says that even if CalderÓn initiatives like CELAC do snub Washington, they “can actually be a good thing for the U.S.” That’s because they signal Mexico’s renewed desire to do the heavy lifting in its main sphere of influence, Central America and the Caribbean, so that Washington – which suffered a diplomatic debacle last year when it tried to mediate the Honduras crisis – won’t have to.

CELAC does reflect the U.S.’s declining hegemony in the western hemisphere. (For its part, the Obama Administration says it wants more of a “partnership” with Latin America instead of the traditional U.S. dominance.) But if history is any guide, it’s doubtful that the situation will lead to anything like a Latin version of the European Union (EU). The Latin American landscape is littered with the acronyms of failed attempts to realize Simon Bolivar’s dream of regional unity; and CELAC may well turn out to be little more than CalderÓn’s attempt to make Mexico regionally and globally relevant again alongside Brazil (which, not coincidentally, sends less than a fifth of its exports to the U.S.).

Still, Diaz-Cayeros thinks the CELAC idea may have arrived at a propitious moment. “What’s different this time is the threat Latin American economies face from China,” he says. “They have to figure out how to better insert themselves in the world community.” More regional economic integration is essential. Susan Segal, president and CEO of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas in New York, says “we don’t know yet if we should be taking [CELAC] seriously.” But she too points to fledgling “cross-Latin investment” as a key trend that the organization could further. “Even three or four years ago, Latin American businesses were nervous about investing in each other’s countries,” Segal notes. “Now they see they need to cross each other’s borders” to create enough growth to compete with blocs like the EU.

Mexico first needs to relocate its diplomatic mojo. In the 20th century it was known for being the interlocutor between the U.S. and Cuba, and for heading the Contadora Group of Latin nations that helped broker peace during the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. Many point to former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s 2002 falling out with Cuba as a cause of Mexico’s foreign policy retrenchment. But ironically, says O’Neil, a major factor has been democratization. When Mexico was under the dictatorial rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from 1929 to 2000, the government could worry less about domestic disputes and focus more on the rest of the world’s problems. But after the PRI was toppled a decade ago, “all of a sudden learning how to deal with [domestic legislative politics] mattered,” says O’Neil, “and there was not a lot of bandwidth left for foreign policy.”

NAFTA is another reason. The giant sucking sound Ross Perot warned about has worked in reverse: since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, it has drawn Mexico ever more tightly to the U.S. and Canada. That’s been especially true under CalderÓn’s more conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has ruled Mexico since 2000 and whose voter base resides in the country’s more U.S.-friendly north. And then, perhaps most important, Mexico for the past decade has been waging an increasingly horrific war against its drug cartels, a narco-insurgency that has afforded the government little time and energy to deal with coups in Central America or human rights violations in Cuba.

That security crisis will top the agenda when CalderÓn meets this week in Mexico City with Clinton and other officials from the U.S., which is funneling some $1.5 billion in anti-drug aid to Mexico. CalderÓn will also be the guest of honor at a White House state dinner on May 19. Mexico will probably always be “so close to the United States” – but for the sake of its future as well as Latin America’s, it’s a good thing that it’s decided to get closer again to the world beyond its other borders.