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April 12, 2006
Will Mexico Turn Against the U.S.?
By Carlos Alberto MontanerDick Morris, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, fears that the Mexicans will elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their next president on July 2.
AMLO, as he is popularly known, is a left-wing neopopulist, and he leads in all the polls in his country despite his mediocre performance as governor of the Federal District. Morris is concerned that AMLO might make common cause with Hugo Chávez to bring the United States to its knees on the matter of energy. Mexico and Venezuela supply about one third the amount of crude oil the U.S. imports daily.
This comes at a bad time. The danger of a major catastrophe in the Middle East is increasing, fueled by Iran's bellicose spasms and its aggressive anti-Semitism, and nobody can guarantee whether Saudi oil will continue to flow to the United States if such a conflict breaks out. Against this ominous background, an alliance between Chávez and AMLO would be terribly dangerous, no matter who occupies the White House.
So far, the Mexican media are full of accusations about Chávez's copious contributions to AMLO's political campaign, as if the Venezuelan's plans included bringing Mexico into his hallucinatory project for a Bolivarian revolution.
Common sense should tell any Mexican president that his most important priority is getting along well with the United States, its very powerful neighbor, principal trade partner and travel destination for tens of millions of Mexicans. But ideology usually is a bad counselor that distorts perceptions.
After all, Chávez should also be interested in maintaining good relations with the United States, the country that buys 80 percent of the oil Venezuela exports. Yet he engages systematically in trying to provoke a crisis between the two nations and does not hesitate to call President Bush ''murderer,'' ''coward,'' ''genocidal criminal'' and ``drunkard.''
What role does Mexico play in Chávez's fevered fantasies? Because he is a messianic person intent on reconstructing the Bolivarian history and geography of the 19th century, it is reasonable to predict that he dreams of regaining for Mexico the territories that country lost after the 1846-47 U.S.-Mexican War and that now constitute the southwestern United States.
Pessimists and optimists
Let us recall that in 1917 German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann offered Mexican President Venustiano Carranza the return of those territories if Mexico attacked the United States from the south and entered World War I on the German side. Discovery of this secret offer prompted President Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war against Berlin.
Will Mexico let itself be drawn in the direction plotted by Chávez? There are two answers.
Some believe that, yes, AMLO would not hesitate to truly endanger Mexico's relations with the United States if he thinks that such an act befits his image as a man of the left. Those people are the pessimists.
The optimists believe that the lion is not as fierce as he is depicted, and that he'll just be another Luis Echeverría, the populist Mexican president of the 1970s who practiced a kind of oral radicalism on the international stage but used an iron fist to squelch leftist protests at home. Either behavior will be disastrous.
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