By Gwynne Dyer - There’s no point in talking about who’s going to win the Mexican presidential election on July 1. Enrique Peña Nieto is going to win it. What’s more interesting is why he’s going to win it.
The leading countries of Latin America’s Pacific Rim with the exception of Ecuador and a few Central American countries, agreed to conform the Alliance of the Pacific an ambitious integration project which has good relations with Washington and is targeted to accompany the growing influence of the Asia-Pacific basin.
President Jose Mujica said on Sunday that his peer from Brazil Dilma Rousseff will make a strong declaration in support of Uruguay when the next G20 summit to counter French President Nicholas Sarkozy recent statements in Cannes describing one of Mercosur junior members as a “fiscal haven”
The Mexican president underlined the strategic importance of Uruguay since it is the only Mercosur member that has a free trade agreement with Mexico, thus making it the ‘strategic partner’ of Mexico in Mercosur.
Uruguayan president Jose Mujica said that Mercosur “is not moving forward or backwards” but is certainly working much better than the European Union where old experienced nations “made a mess of it”. Nevertheless, Uruguay will not stay put “licking its wounds”, it will look for other trade links.
Uruguayan president Jose Mujica arrived Tuesday in Mexico for a two day visit to promote bilateral trade and to address with his host Felipe Calderon issues related to recent discrepancies with the G20 that described Uruguay and Panama as “fiscal havens”.
US president Barack Obama defended his Latin American policy, praised Mexico’s resilience in the drugs war, criticized Cuban reforms as insufficient and emphasized the ‘equals-relation’ between countries in the region and Washington.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared three days of mourning Friday and demanded a crackdown on drugs in the United States after armed men torched a casino in northern Mexico, killing at least 65 people.
Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner ratified before Mexican businessmen that her government will continue to advance the current ‘development inclusion model’ with strong policies in support of the domestic market and exports with added value.