Podcast: Mexico Rising (For Now) with Mexico's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Castañeda

Transcript

Listen: Mexico's new president is having a moment. Since his election last year, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO for short, has enjoyed sky-high approval ratings. But can he deliver on his lofty promises? And how will he handle his neighbor to the north? Ian will dig into it and then talk to Mexico's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Castañeda.

TRANSCRIPT: Mexico Rising (For Now) with Mexico's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Castañeda

Jorge Castañeda:

They have a name for these things in Europe. They're called concentration camps.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I am Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of little puppets. This week I sit down with Jorge Castañeda, who served as Mexico's foreign minister, knows Mexican politics better than pretty much anybody. Today, we'll talk about Mexico's new president and the full plate of problems facing his administration. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of surface, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

Jorge Castañeda. Professor at NYU, former foreign minister of Mexico. Delighted to be with you.

Jorge Castañeda:

Glad to be here, Ian. Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

Let's start with your home country, where you still live.

Jorge Castañeda:

Yes, absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

President López Obrador, his approval ratings are 86%. When's the last time that happened in Mexico?

Jorge Castañeda:

Well, let's put it a little bit in relative terms. He is much more popular than his two predecessors were at a similar time, but he's about the same levels as President Fox was back in the year 2000 or early 2001. In other words, Mexican presidents traditionally have a honeymoon. We didn't have polls before Fox, really, so it didn't mean a whole lot. But there's a tremendous willingness to give a new president the benefit of the doubt. And in addition, López Obrador has handled himself very well in terms of public opinion and image and everything for these first two months.

Jorge Castañeda:

The substance is a different story, but he's handled his image, his daily press conferences, his not using a private aircraft, his using a small car to go to work, living at home, all these things which don't make a whole lot of sense maybe substantively, but are very well seen by public opinion in Mexico.

Ian Bremmer:

Seen as leading by example.

Jorge Castañeda:

Leading by example, contrasting with the excesses of former presidents of his government, with former governments, doing things that people in Mexico like, not because they make sense, but because there's such a resentment in Mexico against all government figures that yes, let them live like us for a while, see what it feels like.

Ian Bremmer:

But we are talking about a leader, still, that before he won as president was seen as a real outsider, as a fairly strong partisan. In that context, someone who historically was seen as palling around with Hugo Chávez and with Castro, to have 86% approval in Mexico today-

Jorge Castañeda:

It is remarkable.

Ian Bremmer:

Is remarkable.

Jorge Castañeda:

It is remarkable, no question about it. And I think it's something that is very difficult for a lot of people, including myself to understand, so we're just going to have to get used to it for a while.

Ian Bremmer:

What does it say about what has happened over the past 10 years, 20 years in Mexico for the average Mexican?

Jorge Castañeda:

What it says basically is that the democratization of the country from, let's say 1997 onwards, a little bit more than 20 years, has not brought any significant benefits to the majority of the Mexican people. They are not better off. By the way, it also coincides almost exactly with NAFTA, so it cuts many ways, but people-

Ian Bremmer:

A lot of American workers say that kind of thing.

Jorge Castañeda:

They do, but unfortunately, I'm not sure they're right, but I'm sure the Mexican ones are right in the sense that NAFTA's been much more important for Mexico than it has been for the US. People have not seen the benefits of this democratization process. They don't make more money, they don't have more jobs, they don't have better schools, they don't have better healthcare. People are not necessarily better off today than they were 20 years ago when this whole process began, firstly.

Jorge Castañeda:

Secondly, they haven't really seen a drop in corruption. There was a significant drop, I think under the two PAN presidents, Fox and Calderón, but then it went way back up again with Peña Nieto, which was one of the most corrupt presidents we've had in recent times. That meant that people saw no improvement on that front either. Then finally, under Calderón and Peña Nieto, the last 12 years, you've had an incredible increase in violence. Mexico is now-

Ian Bremmer:

Which continues to be the case today.

Jorge Castañeda:

Oh, it's worse than ever. The last two months have been the worst ever. It's not López Obrador's fault, that's just inertia from before. But the fact is, the country is incredibly violent. It's not at the levels of Brazil or El Salvador or Honduras.

Ian Bremmer:

Honduras.

Jorge Castañeda:

But we've peaked at around 25 willful homicides per a hundred thousand inhabitants. That's three times what it was 20 years ago. It's about five times what the US level is, and the US is not exactly a nonviolent country.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, López Obrador says he has a plan. This new national guard that he's putting together, are they, are they not going to have military supervision and engagement? They've moved around on this. Does this strike you as credible progress?

Jorge Castañeda:

It depends what it actually turns out to be. We don't know that yet. The first worrisome factor is that it'd be located in the ministry of defense. If that is the case, and that's still up for discussion, if it is a case, it is very worrisome because it basically means you take part of the army, you change the color of the uniform, you keep them in the ministry of defense where we have always a general as minister of defense. Mexico's the only country in Latin America that doesn't have a civilian secretary of defense. You keep it in the army, you change the color of the uniform, they carry military weapons. You basically have militarized the police.

Jorge Castañeda:

Now, that means that you're going to have the same problems that have been occurring the last 12 years because the people who have been policing the country defacto the last 12 years has been the army, and the navy to a much lesser extent. It's going to be the same thing except now it's going to be legal and enshrined in the constitution. That's a big problem because how do you get rid of them afterwards? Once you bring the military into doing all these things, how do you send them back to the barracks, so to speak? It's not that simple.

Ian Bremmer:

Is your view that the challenge has gotten so great that... just take a solution, whatever it happens to be, just use-

Jorge Castañeda:

The problem is, it's the same solution that Presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto used before, used the Army to fight the drug war, which then became a war on organized crime because you push the drug people out of drugs and into other areas. If you just let them do their job on drugs, which is what they do well, what they like to do, what they're competitive in, then that's fine. I have never seen a major problem with that.

Jorge Castañeda:

Well yeah, so you'll tell me maybe, well, what about the kids in Newark who are shooting up? I feel terribly sorry about that. I think it's a tragedy, and I hope you have fewer kids in Newark shooting up. Is that my problem as a Mexican? No.

Ian Bremmer:

Increasingly seeing these stories, extraordinary stories about localities in Mexico that have effectively gone off the grid from the Mexican government, in part because violence is so high, a couple taken over completely by local drug lords, some by a new local party that says, "We are the only ones that can police you." Do you see the ability of the Mexican government to control Mexico starting to actually erode?

Jorge Castañeda:

Mexico never had total control of its territory. We were chatting a little while ago about the Chiapas uprising in 1994, on New Year's Day of 1994. For the following six years, three Mexican governments, Salinas, Zedillo, and Fox allowed the Zapatista so-called army, in fact, to control broad stretches of territory in southern Mexico in Chiapas.

Ian Bremmer:

In the south.

Jorge Castañeda:

Why? Well, because it wasn't worth going in after them. They didn't represent a real threat to anybody. It would've been very costly and very bloody and terrible publicity to do it. Zedillo tried. It was a disaster. So you don't have total control. The Mexican state has never had total control over all parts of Mexico, going back to the 19th century.

Jorge Castañeda:

Is it worse today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? That's I think the question we have to ask ourselves in Mexico. My answer is it's not clear to me that it's any worse, but what is worse is the level of violence. That's much, much worse. We're paying an enormous price in blood and people missing, and I'm not sure we're getting more territorial control than we used to have.

Ian Bremmer:

Now on the economic side, certainly a lot of the solutions that are being put forward today by López Obrador seemed to be similar to what a lot of the Democrats in the US right now that are planning to run for 2020 are talking about. It's a lottery of redistribution. It's helping the farmers, it's giving them subsidies, getting them going, a lot of education, getting the minimum wage up, these sorts of things. Is this the right direction for Mexico to go?

Jorge Castañeda:

Well, I think he's right in terms of what's missing. In other words, what has happened in Mexico since, let's take NAFTA as a cutoff date, 1994, these past 25 years now, NAFTA and the structural reforms or the Washington consensus policies or whatever you want to call them, have not delivered the goods. If they haven't delivered the goods, that's 25 years that have gone by and people are not better off. You have to do something. He has, I think, made the right diagnosis. This has not worked.

Jorge Castañeda:

The next question is, now what do we do? That's where a lot of his policies are arguable, because either they're not exactly like what left of center Democrats in the US are suggesting, or because they're traditional Mexican clientelistic populist policies of giving money away to people. I'm in favor of a universal basic income and things like that. I always thought people like the Economist and others have the right idea about these things, but then do it properly. But giving money away to certain groups because you're going to turn them into your clients, young people with no jobs and not in school, the elderly, people with different capacities, select groups, and then give them money so that you little by little enroll them in your own clientelistic policies and machinery, I don't think is modern socialism. I have nothing against modern socialism, but that's not it, or I don't think it's it and I don't think it's going to work.

Ian Bremmer:

Before we move off of Mexico, let's talk at least a little bit about the US/Mexico relationship and this incredible fight over immigration. How do you see the Trump administration and generally speaking, US politics today affecting Mexico?

Jorge Castañeda:

It affects us very dramatically, on a daily basis, whether it's the wall, whether it's sending Honduran asylum seekers back to Mexico to await their hearings in Mexico, whether it's the deportations now of tens of thousands of Mexicans or Central Americans from the interior of the United States, not like Obama, who deported an enormous amount of people, but largely along the borders that were recently caught. Trump is deporting people who have been living in Chicago for 20 years, without papers granted, but so what? They have a family.

Ian Bremmer:

I know. Canada's closer. Wouldn't you just send them up there?

Jorge Castañeda:

Yeah, some of them would go, by the way, but then the Canadians get upset.

Ian Bremmer:

That's true.

Jorge Castañeda:

But these people, they've been living in the United States, have kids in the United States. Many of them have kids that are American citizens. They may be married to American citizens. They have a home, they have a car, they have a job, they have insurance. All of a sudden ICE comes around, throws them out the next day, sending them back to a country they don't know. It's not just the Dreamers. It's the Dreamers, but it's a lot of other people, so that affects us.

Ian Bremmer:

To be clear, living illegally in the United States.

Jorge Castañeda:

Living without papers in the United States. There is in general, most countries, I think United States has something like that called the statute of limitations on other stuff, but not on illegal immigration. You've been here for 20 years, no paper, you're just as illegal as the day you got here. If you did see you have a parking ticket, then 20 years later they won't get you.

Ian Bremmer:

Is there a statute of limitations on illegal immigrants into Mexico?

Jorge Castañeda:

There is a sort of amnesty, automatic amnesty.

Ian Bremmer:

After how long?

Jorge Castañeda:

I don't know exactly how much time. It must be about five or six years, but Mexico's not an immigrant country. It's only become one the last 30 years or something.

Ian Bremmer:

Though, increasingly...

Jorge Castañeda:

Increasingly. Oh, absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

... this is becoming a challenge.

Jorge Castañeda:

It started in the '80s and now it's a big deal.

Ian Bremmer:

Mexico is much more attractive. If you're in Central America today...

Jorge Castañeda:

Oh, it's much better.

Ian Bremmer:

... you want out.

Jorge Castañeda:

It's much better, but especially, what's more attractive is the US. That's the Honduran issue because Hondurans in particular have family in the United States, because of the former TPS arrangement, the temporary protection status, the hurricanes, climate change, all these things which drove the Hondurans to the US in the '90s and the early 2000s. A lot of Hondurans have family here. You tell them, "Why didn't you stay in Mexico?" First, because I want the American dream, but in addition, I got a cousin in New York.

Ian Bremmer:

Which helps.

Jorge Castañeda:

Or I have a brother in Chicago. Where do you want to go? You want to go to the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

How do Mexicans feel about the United States right now?

Jorge Castañeda:

Very upset, very unhappy, because of Trump, not because of the United States, but because of Trump. He's incredibly unpopular in Mexico.

Ian Bremmer:

Because there used to be a lot of anti-Americanism in Mexico, not so long ago.

Jorge Castañeda:

Even under Bush, who was actually a very pro-Mexican... Bush 43 was a very pro-Mexican president. I dealt with him very many times, but Mexicans disliked him profoundly, largely because of Iraq, which by the way, we had no skin in either way. But the fact is, Mexicans did not like Bush and consequently said they didn't like the United States. Obama was the exactly totally opposite situation. The government, the Mexican governments, the two of them didn't like Obama. Peña Nieto's people used to tell me it's the worst president the United States has ever had.

Ian Bremmer:

Other side ideologically, obviously.

Jorge Castañeda:

Totally. But conversely, the Mexican people had a great deal of affection for Obama. He went to Mexico several times. He would always say nice things. He did the right things in Latin America, just about everywhere. It changes a lot with the president. The American every Mexican knows is the President of the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

And now?

Jorge Castañeda:

Now they don't like Trump at all.

Ian Bremmer:

The government has managed to work with him so far reasonably well.

Jorge Castañeda:

López Obrador has made a huge effort to never respond to any of his provocations, whether they are rhetorical or in real policy. Like for example, taking back the Hondurans, which is something which is very humiliating for Mexico in many ways, and it's dangerous for the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

Especially since López Obrador was saying amnesty for everybody when he was running, right?

Jorge Castañeda:

He's actually sort of doing it in terms of the Hondurans entering Mexico. He's letting basically everybody in who wants to come in, but they all go to the northern border, they stay on the northern border. The Americans let them in 10 or 15 or a hundred at a time, depending on the city, and so they're all going to be sitting waiting at the border for six months, a year, two years. Then there's the problem, which is just in the Mexican newspapers these days, in the new place in Piedras Negras where they all are now, the Hondurans, which is that you want to keep them, so to speak, down on the farm. You don't want them to move away from the shelters that they are in on the Mexican side.

Jorge Castañeda:

Now, how do you keep people in a place? Well, you put them in a place that's enclosed. How do you enclose it? Well, you enclose it with walls and if people want to climb over the walls, you put some barbed wire around over the walls, and then if somebody gets out through a door or something, you want to have armed guards outside. You know what? They have a name for these things in Europe, or they used to have a name. They're called concentration camps. There's pictures of them in Piedras Negras today in Mexico.

Ian Bremmer:

Jorge Castañeda, thank you very much.

Jorge Castañeda:

Thank you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week, same place, same time, unless you're watching on social media, in which case it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of surface, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.