In the conversations I had with President Bush at Camp David [in December], we emphasized our commitment to continue the negotiations. It’s on time, on track, and we hope to have a text in the coming weeks. The agreement is good for Mexico and good for the U.S. So whatever the results of your own political system, I’m convinced it will be welcome.
Certainly the U.S. economy looked better then, and this is not the best of possible times to negotiate such a thing during a recession. But, on the other hand, independent forecasts state that by the middle of the year the U.S. economy will be in recovery, and that will create a different environment for the agreement … You have to look at the shortterm circumstances, but this is a negotiation that has to do with medium- and longterm views. We are talking here of facing the tremendous competition from Europe and from Japan and Asia. If we were to look only to specific short-term situations, we would lose the main argument of the negotiations, which is having the capacity to cope and compete with the regional blocs that are being formed around the world.
Cars being made for GM in Mexico are helping GM as a whole become more competitive in the face of other companies. But you have to look at the whole picture: without a regional market of the size we’re proposing and the advantages that each country will provide, the U.S. alone, in spite of being the world’s largest economy, will not be able to face a united Europe and Asia and the Pacific. This GM worker and many more will not maintain their jobs unless we get together.
We continue to move on political reform: the different political parties are represented now in Congress, and five of them approved the new electoral code with respect to new rules that now govern elections. The PRI [ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party] is in a process of reform and made many great strides toward that end in its most recent assembly. And we’re going beyond that. This is the first time in 70 years or more that two state governors belong to opposition parties in Mexico, or that almost 40 percent of Congress is in the hands of the opposition.
I would say that he has enormous problems, enormous troubles … but I wouldn’t be in a position to make any prediction. We are very respectful of their sovereignty, but we also certainly watch their domestic situation with great interest, because we worry about what will happen with instability there … The last time I spoke with Castro was last fall on the island of Cozumel. He explained his internal economic situation and how they are trying to reverse it. He was confident he could overcome it, but we were not.
Each one responds to his own circumstances. When we decided to privatize, it was because we had members of the private sector ready to buy. That is, you can privatize when you have a private sector. And when we decided to allow more costs to be determined by market forces, it was because there were companies to compete amongst themselves. But when we have a situation in which something is controlled by a monopoly, then we do not allow freemarket forces because then prices would be decided by just one company.
I am fully convinced that as an institution, the Army is not involved. But if we were to find any individual member involved in it, we have proved that there’s no impunity for anyone. [The crackdown after Veracruz] was the first time ever in Mexican history that an active three-star general was put in jail.
The last big wall was torn down a short time ago in Europe, so considering a new one doesn’t seem to be a very good vision of things. If a free-trade agreement is not reached between Mexico, the United States and Canada, it would send the signal that the U.S. is retreating within itself at the very moment when you’ve won the cold war and are the only remaining superpower … We do worry a lot that this attitude could become a general tendency of the U.S. electorate: to support people who propose a retrenchment of the U.S. That would be like a defeat for you-and a very bad sign for the rest of the world.
