The Difficult Triangle

Mexico, Central America, And The United States

H. Rodrigo Jauberth, Gilberto Castaneda, Jesus Hernandez, Pedro Vuskovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000315912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although relations with Central America dominated U.S. foreign policy with its southern neighbors during the 1980s, relations with Mexico will likely shape U.S. foreign policy in the next decade. This book examines the troubled nature of the triangular link between Mexico, Central America, and the United States in order to understand the implications of U.S. policy for peace and development in the Western Hemisphere. The book begins with an analysis of Mexico's foreign policy and its historical role in seeking diplomatic solutions to volatile situations in Central America. The authors then assess the probable impact on the region of increased economic integration, particularly the U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement, especially important in light of Mexico's enormous debt and immigration issues. Special attention is also given to diplomatic aspects of the relationship, with a focus on the process of negotiations to resolve conflicts in Central America. A lengthy epilogue offers critical commentary on key issues discussed in the text by such prominent figures as Jesse Jackson, Carlos Vilas, David Ibarra, and Guadalupe Gonzales.

Chapter 1
Mexican and U.S. Policy Toward Central America

JESÚS HERNÁNDEZ

THIS CHAPTER TRACES THE HISTORY of the Mexico—United States—Central America triangle, attempts to explain why Mexican and U.S. policies toward Central America have sometimes differed, and describes how these differences have hindered efforts to find lasting solutions to the region's problems. The analysis suggests that these differences, more out in the open during the 1980s, have been present throughout the history of inter American relations. Moreover, the divergent approaches of Mexico and the United States toward Central America can be traced to the history of their relations with each other.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to an exploration of the roots of the two countries' foreign policies on two levels. First, the historical world context at the start of their relations, and each country's particular development, is examined, with an emphasis on U.S. expansionism, the creation of the inter-American system, and their historical significance for Mexico. Second, the formation of a national consciousness that has evolved throughout the history of these two countries is looked at, with an attempt to determine its influence on the ongoing development of foreign policy.

The second part explores the evolution of the Central American foreign policy of each country since the nineteenth century, when the political geography of the region had scarcely been mapped, but when there were already signs of the problems that would induce both Mexico and the United States to adopt specific postures and conduct in line with their emerging foreign policies. This part also highlights the importance of the Pan American movement that developed under U.S. leadership and the nature of Mexican and U.S. foreign policy measures in response to the various Central American problems, from the early nineteenth century to the postwar era. In particular, it examines the foreign policies of these countries and their actions with respect to attempts at Central American union, the demarcation of the Guatemalan-Mexican border, the construction of the Panama Canal, and the conflicts of the twentieth century up to the 1970s.

The third part deals with the 1980s, discussing the historical significance of a century of underdevelopment and dependence for the triangular relationship. It examines the evolution of Mexican-U.S. relations in response to the Central American situation of the 1980s and discusses the Contadora process, though analysis of the Contadora and Esquipulas negotiations is covered more fully in Chapter 2. Finally, it analyzes the regional problem in light of recent events.

We have attempted to employ the triangular methodology of the book, understanding the triangularity to be part of the historical processes involved. Here, a grasp of the structural nature and features of the relationship of dominance and subordination between the United States and the other two parties to the triangle is essential for an understanding of the topic at hand.

Whatever modest advances we may have made, our handling of this subject is still inadequate because the topic is inexhaustible, owing to its breadth and its profound implications for the wide assortment of national, regional, inter-American, Latin American, and world problems. Our intent, therefore, is simply to stimulate debate over the current reality of the relationship between Mexico, the United States, and Central America.¹

Historic Roots of Foreign Policy Differences Between Mexico and the United States

A variety of historical events set the stage for the development of foreign policy in the individual countries of the triangle. Each nation's need to define its borders and forge relations with others, and the historical point when its material and spiritual foundations and real development possibilities began to converge, must be taken into account if its positions and conduct in the world context are to be understood.

Also critical over the passage of time is a nation's collective consciousness of problems, dangers, and the outlook for the future, which help determine a people's unique way of thinking. While this consciousness comes from a people's aspirations and concerns, it also reflects a determination among the groups in power to preserve and extend their rule.

An understanding of the historical underpinnings of the national consciousness created by events over time, as well as the subsequent foreign policies developed by both Mexico and the United States, permits a keener insight into the positions of each with respect to Central America.²

Origins of Mexican and U.S. Foreign Policy

Mexico and the United States discovered each other as neighbors at the dawn of the nineteenth century, just when the world was radically changing—when Spanish and French power was on the wane in the Americas and free-trade relations, championed by England, already played a dominant role in the international picture. The conflict between Spain and England, with its roots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was a contest between crumbling feudalism and burgeoning capitalism, Spain was forced to seek new maritime routes to expand its markets, leading to the discovery of a new continent in 1492. There, the country encountered well-established societies that resisted conquest, but were in the end subjugated and annihilated both militarily and culturally.

From then on, Spain, losing ground to England and overwhelmed by financial need, exported little to the new continent but the mercantilism it had mastered so well. Imbued with a tremendous desire to acquire wealth that would allow it to compete, it plundered the precious metals and other riches of its colonies. England, for its part, needed to expand its capital throughout the world and sought to accomplish this through the colonization of North America, beginning in the seventeenth century. In contrast to Spain, which impoverished its colonies, England encouraged capital accumulation in its colonies in order to reap the benefits.

Thus, the role of the Thirteen Colonies in the subsequent development of North America was determined not just by the progressive spirit of the European colonists but also by the objective needs of an expanding free market in the New World, under specific historical conditions. The simple growth of the population in the colonies encouraged territorial expansion unanticipated by the English themselves, who witnessed the development of an economy far more self-reliant than the simple supplier of raw materials they had planned, an economy that was instrumental in helping the new nation achieve independence. From that point on, a vigorous social structure evolved in the United States with the labor of its people, within a free market whose distinguishing characteristic was the ambitious search for new territories to fuel the necessary expansion.

The market that was also beginning to emerge in other countries of the continent in the nineteenth century did so in the context of this North American situation, although the peculiarities of Spanish rule stamped different features on the local accumulation process, highly influenced by mercantilism. Thus, the Spanish American nations developed under the plundering legacy of the Conquest, with inadequate local investment and internal wars that sapped national potential.

Here, there was no sudden emergence of the market as a mere outgrowth of economic development in North America or the rest of the world. Instead, the market developed in a restrictive setting, shaped by European and U.S. investment. Because of these peculiar conditions, the countries of the region turned out to be underdeveloped, lacking industry of their own, subject to and dependent upon other industrialized nations, and dominated from the first by the monopoly power of foreign enterprises that was to become the overriding feature of economic relations.

In fact, it is during the era when the free market began to emerge in many Latin American countries that the system on a worldwide scale began to move toward the monopolistic phase of development. According to some experts, this is why the region's market emerged as "a crippled capitalism, lacking its own engine of growth, lacking an organic capacity to make use of . . . the productive potential that it generated. ... It was a counterfeit and subordinate capitalism that henceforth would develop both as an integral part and yet on the tail of an unstable world market."³

This is the context in which the initial relations between Mexico and the United States evolved, promising many decades of silent and open conflict.

The History of Mexican-U.S. Relations

After centuries of Spanish rule, Mexico obtained its independence through a bloody civil war—a reflection of the conditions that demanded the liberation of all America from the yoke of colonialism. Mexico's libertarian ideals, like those of others in Central and South America, were also Ibero-American: hemispheric, not simply national.

Mexico determined its constitutional path and became a unified nation only after what are acknowledged as the three greatest moments in its history: Independence from Spain in the second decade of the nineteenth century; the Reform, which nourished local capital accumulation during the 1850s, and the Revolution of 1910-1917, which established the legal and political foundations for modern Mexico.

The Independence of 1810-1821 was a very complex phenomenon, with origins in the Spanish conquest and the colonial era. At the root of the independence movement was the emergence of a new society of native-born Spaniards (Creoles) and people of mixed blood (mestizos), which clashed with the colonial regime.

When the armed conflict was over, Mexico was defenseless, with only fragile institutions, at a time when it had to confront other powers—chiefly the United States, which was advancing south and west in the quest for new territories.⁴ At the same time, Mexico had to deal with the designs of France, which, in an attempt to exploit the country's weakness in 1862, intervened militarily and imposed the rule of Emperor Maximilian of Hapsburg.

The Reform of the 1850s was the culmination of a long stage in the development of an independent Mexico. During this time, in the apparent chaos of incessant coups and internal power struggles, a complex and paradoxical social and economic process was evolving against the backdrop of a changing international picture, in which the Industrial Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and U.S. independence acted as stimuli to the world market.⁵ English capital advanced inexorably in the form of investment and the search for raw materials toward an independent Latin America endowed with enormous resources and an important potential market for manufactures that began to clash with U.S. interests.

During the three decades prior to the promulgation of the Reform Laws and the Constitution of 1857, an incipient domestic market evolved in spite of serious domestic difficulties—for example, the armed intervention of France, British trade (which literally invaded all the new markets), and U.S. expansionism that by midcentury had already stripped Mexico of over half its territory. From then on, the weak and unstable Mexican economy developed in the suffocating presence of these great powers, under conditions that gave rise to the structural dependence and underdevelopment that characterize it to this day.⁶ Nonetheless, the country developed a growing capacity to defend itself, which Benito Juarez did with singular patriotism, after which new governmental institutions took shape, based on the Reform Laws that Juarez himself had promoted several years previously, and which established the legal foundations for the country's development.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 was an outgrowth of the need for greater national development arising from the social, economic, and even cultural changes of the mid- to late nineteenth century. These changes created unsalvageable political differences and at the same time stimulated long-cherished popular aspirations, unrealized after a century of independence. The armed phase of the Mexican Revolution culminated in the drawing up and ratification of the Constitution of 1917. At that point, Mexico entered a new phase in which the state was transformed into the most important guarantor of national development, albeit within the country's underdeveloped state.

Subsequently, until the mid-1920s, Mexico was caught up in a variety of struggles with local or national factions that were attempting to gain power. Nevertheless, following the creation of the National Revolutionary Party in 1928 (the earliest ancestor of the current PRI, later reformed by Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938, when its name was changed to the Mexican Revolutionary Party), the country began to enjoy a long period of political calm, except for some minor conflicts.

From here until the 1970s, development in Mexico occurred within the context of a worldwide market boom, particularly in the United States. Specifically, the Mexican and Latin American economies evolved under conditions that led to a slight growth during the first half of the century. After World War II, however, there was considerable development of the productive forces, plus major changes in social relations—the result of a rise in U.S. investment during the expansive postwar period and the development strategies applied in the region.

We turn now to the United States; its need for territorial expansion began with the independence of the Thirteen Colonies. A new nation was formed whose people, imbued with Puritan doctrines, subscribed to myths that they had a divine mission in the world. Under the mantle of a constitution influenced by the European currents of the day but derived from collective popular needs and with ideals that encouraged a belief in a new type of man in a promised land for the colonizer, it was a nation that created expectations for itself that were unusual for that era. From that moment on it steadfastly began to expand.

After the Louisiana Purchase, and with the Atlantic border secured and the boundaries with Canada defined, the only avenues for expansion open were to the west and the south, to regions formerly belonging to Spain and now to an independent Mexico.

According to a number of U.S. historians, expansionism was spurred on by the same colonizing population, motivated among other things by the attractiveness of the lands to the west.⁷ In this respect, the important thing to remember is not, of course, the legitimate aspirations of the colonizers to seek better living conditions for their families, much less an awareness of the need to forge a new nation with everbetter prospects for guaranteeing its own identity and the common good. Rather, it is the specific responsibility of the dominant governing classes in these processes—above all the slave-owners of the South and the successive U.S. administrations—who collaborated in the sweeping takeovers that characterized U.S. expansion, at the cost of other nations like Spain, and eventually, Mexico.

The two Floridas are an example of the expansionist pattern: North American colonists settled on these lands, consolidating themselves socially and economically until they formed a government and demanded independence from Spain, This created a conflict in which the U.S. government, in alleged defense of its own citizenry, ended up annexing the new territory. This pattern was repeated in Texas, but this time it was used against an independent Mexico whose viability as a nation was still precarious; thus, the annexation served as the gateway to the takeover of a much vaster territory, with the declaratio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 MEXICAN AND U.S. POLICY TOWARD CENTRAL AMERICA
• 2 THE MEXICO-CENTRAL AMERICA-UNITED STATES TRIANGLE AND THE NEGOTIATIONS PROCESS
• 3 CENTRAL AMERICA: REGIONAL CRISIS AND ALTERNATIVES FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT
• 4 CENTRAL AMERICAN-MEXICAN-U.S. RELATIONS: PRESENT AND FUTURE
• 5 THE FUTURE OF MEXICAN-U.S.-CENTRAL AMERICAN RELATIONS: FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
• About the Book and Authors
• Index