About every six months or so, the media provide a fleeting show of North American unity. Whether on the shores of the Mexican Caribbean, the forests of Quebec, or the hurricane-torn streets of New Orleans, the script is pretty much the same. It includes a lot of back-slapping and almost no public information. These encounters—the [...]
It’s rare for the junior partners of NAFTA—Mexico and Canada—to have a chance to sit down and discuss regional integration without the dominating influence of the United States. Even when they do, of course, the U.S. is the elephant in the room. The University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico hosted a conference recently on [...]
Even a year ago, few people would have predicted that a global food crisis would make headlines as one of the major concerns for the future of the world. Yes, critics of agrofuels warned that food shortages and price hikes would result from the headlong rush to divert land from food to fuel production. And [...]
On April 8, President Felipe Calderon dropped a political bomb on the Mexican political scene. The Senate received an executive initiative that would fundamentally change the structure and operations of the oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). Key operations of the state-owned enterprise would be taken over by private companies. In the reform proposal, Calderon and [...]
On June 30, President George W. Bush signed into law the “Merida Initiative”—better known as Plan Mexico—just days after it passed Congress as part of the Iraq supplemental funding bill. The measure had to go through several versions before finally being approved by both houses, as legislators went back and forth with the Bush administration and Mexico President Felipe Calderón’s government over human rights conditions.
On April 22, Presidents George W. Bush, Felipe Calderón, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper concluded a trilateral summit in New Orleans. The summit marked the fourth meeting of the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which has drawn fire in all three countries since its proceedings are not open to public participation or congressional [...]
Pedro Martin works on a chicken farm just outside the village of Pegueros, Jalisco. The state of Jalisco ranks among Mexico’s top chicken-producing states, providing the nation with 11% of all chicken meat produced. Many of Pedro’s friends and relatives have already left Pegueros, pushed up north by the bleak joblessness and poverty of their [...]
