WASHINGTON — Speaking just blocks from the White House, a Mexican populist who narrowly lost his country’s presidential election five years ago called Tuesday for a reboot of U.S.-Mexican relations, criticizing the Obama administration as failing to help immigrants and militarizing a historically strained bilateral relationship.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a former union leader and former mayor of Mexico City, called on Washington to “change priorities” and “substantially change” the way the two nations relate. He advocated direct economic development aid instead of the stepped-up military assistance the Obama administration has provided to combat drug trafficking.
Mexican presidents serve single six-year terms, and ahead of the 2012 elections, candidates for that office have been delivering high-profile speeches in Washington, in part because many Mexicans in the U.S. vote in these elections.
Lopez Obrador and his followers in the Party of the Democratic Revolution insist that he won the 2006 election, which his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon, was declared the winner of by just 236,000 votes in an outcome similar to the disputed U.S. election in 2000.
In his first speech in the U.S. capital, delivered at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Lopez Obrador blasted the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico’s embrace of globalization and Obama administration policies.
The U.S.-Mexico relationship has been characterized in recent years by joint efforts to combat increasingly violent drug cartels. Lopez Obrador charged that the rise of such cartels results from U.S.-backed free-market policies that have impoverished Mexicans and thwarted internal development in favor of an industrialized north near the U.S. border.
“In few words, the violence in Mexico (stems) fundamentally from the lack of development,” he said.
Almost all U.S. aid to Mexico goes to supporting military modernization to combat cartels, he said. The U.S. should “amplify and reorient” its aid to Mexico to focus on developing the poorer southern states, from where many illegal immigrants hail.
