City workers prepare to hang Mexico and U.S. flags from street lights in Mexico City's main Reforma avenue on Wednesday in preparation for the upcoming visit of President Barack Obama in Mexico City. President Obama will travel to Mexico on Thursdy for an official visit to meet with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon.
MEXICO CITY – When President Obama lands Thursday in Mexico City, there will be one main subject on Mexican officials’ minds.
“For Mexico, the No. 1 priority is guns. The No. 2 priority is guns. The No. 3 priority is guns,” Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told USA TODAY in a recent interview.
The Mexican government wants Obama to take more steps to stop arms sold in the United States from flowing across the border, where they are frequently used by cartels in Mexico’s drug war. That issue and a number of other contentious subjects, including a brewing trade dispute, will be on the agenda as Obama makes his first official trip south.
Ties between the United States and Mexico are generally friendly, and the countries have pledged to work together to combat drug-related violence, some of which has spilled onto U.S. soil. But Mexican President Felipe Calderón and other officials have expressed frustration over several topics including:
• The slow pace of promised U.S. anti-drug aid. Medina Mora has called for the United States to speed up disbursement of a $1.4 billion anti-drug aid package first discussed by Calderón and President George W. Bush at a summit in March 2007.
Congress cut the first installment of aid to Mexico from $450 million to $300 million, and about $7 million of that has been spent. The package also includes aid for Central American countries.
Obama is aware of Mexican concerns and is pushing to get the aid to Mexico as soon as possible, Denis McDonough, one of Obama’s national security advisers, said Monday.
• Concerns over protectionism. In March, Obama signed a budget bill that cuts funding for a pilot program allowing Mexican long-haul trucks to operate on U.S. highways. Mexico says that violates the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, and it retaliated by imposing tariffs of 20 percent to 45 percent on about $2.4 billion worth of U.S. exports.
“We are convinced that always, and particularly in difficult times, protectionism is not the right response,” Calderón told American businessmen last month.
McDonough said Obama was working on a trucking program “that lives up to our obligations under the (NAFTA) agreement.”
• American gun sales. Cartel members buy hundreds of assault-style rifles, handguns and even .50-caliber sniper rifles – some capable of downing helicopters from a mile away – at U.S. stores and gun shows, Medina Mora said.
Mexico’s murder rate has soared as the cartels fight each other and the army for control of smuggling corridors. About 1,960 people died this year in drug violence as of Sunday, said Monte Alejandro Rubido, an analyst with Mexico’s National Security Council.
Some of the turf wars have spilled over to U.S. cities, including Phoenix, Atlanta and Houston, the U.S. Justice Department said. Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor, was named the Obama administration’s “border czar” Wednesday.
Medina Mora has called for the United States to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban, which prohibited sales of semiautomatic weapons with certain combinations of military features such as folding stocks, flash suppressors and large magazines. The ban expired in 2004.
During a visit to Mexico last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said reviving the ban would face “a very big hurdle in our Congress.”
Obama will depart Friday for the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. There he will meet with 33 other heads of state, including U.S. antagonists Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia.