Castaeda’s raw deal

Mexico’s most prominent former foreign minister has issued a call to “undertake the necessary ideological struggle to check” Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and the transitioning regime in Cuba.

It’s a near-surprise call from a onetime Marxist who, as his country’s top diplomat from 2000 to 2003, had aggressively challenged the United States and worked to dismantle the inter-American security system.

Commenting on President Bush’s “too little, too late” trip to Latin America, Jorge G. Castaeda writes in the Washington Post that momentum in the region has shifted away from the United States and toward America’s adversaries, and that it’s time to take action.

“The balance of forces in the region has shifted. Not only has the leftward tilt persisted – with electoral victories in Nicaragua and Ecuador, unprecedented near-misses in Mexico and Peru, unexpected advances in Colombia – but the Venezuelan president’s influence has expanded,” Castaeda writes. “Hugo Chavez has found his sea legs and assembled an impressive array of tools to seduce the region.”

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Castaeda (pictured) outlines concerns about the rise of the hard Left, adding that it’s one thing if Chavez wrecks his own country, “but if he seeks to extend his concentration of power in Venezuela or elsewhere, that is everyone’s business. It is time for others to say so and to undertake the necessary ideological and political struggle to check Chavez and Havana, both rebutting their populist fallacies and failures and vaunting the merits of the democratic alternative, a globalized market economy, imperfect as it may be.”

The former diplomat argues that US leadership against the Caracas-Havana axis would be counterproductive, and that Latin American leaders should mount the counteroffensive: “Mexico’s [President] Felipe Calderon is ideally suited to engage Chavez and the Castro brothers in the inevitable ideological fisticuffs.”

A wonderful suggestion! This author made a similar point two years ago, before Calderon’s election, in a Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper arguing that Latin American leaders must take the lead against Chavez.   

However, Jorge Castaeda doesn’t expect Mexico to challenge Chavez for free. He doesn’t think his country can stand on its own without crucial (if resented) support from Uncle Sam.

In his Washington Post article, the former foreign minister explains why he thinks Mexican President Felipe Calderon is the only Latin American leader suitable or able to take the lead. And here’s where he drops a poison pill: The Mexican president can’t be expected to assume his proper role against Chavez and the Castros unless the United States gives in on “comprehensive immigration reform.”

“Comprehensive immigration reform” is Castaedaspeak for uncontrolled Mexican emigration into the United States – his main agenda as foreign minister.

What Castaeda is really saying is that not a single democratic leader in Latin America is willing to stand up to Chavez on his own, or even capable of doing so, and that not even the president of Mexico will try unless he squeezes huge concessions from the United States first. And here is where Castaeda’s otherwise excellent ideological and political warfare idea flops.

Castaeda then hints at Mexican extortion to get its way: Calderon, he says, might cut a separate peace with Chavez. No surprise there. That’s how Castaeda has always operated.

He is reinforcing the stereotype of Mexican leaders: they might do the right thing – if you bribe them.

Back when he was foreign minister, Castaeda was more interested in dismantling the hemispheric security system, using the United Nations as a platform against the US, and running covert political operations inside the US to accommodate Mexican emigration. (For its part, Mexico has very tough immigration laws.)

This when President George W. Bush brought then-President Vicente Fox to the White House and proclaimed his goal of a “special relationship” with Mexico – a term we had only reserved for the United Kingdom. Then, after 9/11 hit, Foreign Minister Castaeda made sure that Mexico was one of the last countries in the world to issue condolences to the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

All this when Chavez was on the rise, Venezuela still had a viable opposition, and Mexico could have taken the lead.

Latin American democrats will have to push back Chavez on their own. They won’t do a thing if Washington takes the lead, and most would snipe at the US if it did. So Castaeda is floating his idea to extort bribes from the United States. He still seems more intent on intervening in the internal affairs of this country (where he lives) than helping his own country step out of its shell and solve bigger problems in the hemisphere.

A few years from now, he will probably say that Chavez’s campaign of hemispheric chaos was directly due to Washington’s failure to appease Mexican demands that the US change its immigration laws.