INTERNATIONAL TRADE- NAFTA

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Comment by Cristina Flores on March 28, 2009 at 1:03pm

Speaking to reporters accompanying her to Mexico City, Mrs Clinton said: "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.

"Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.

"I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility."

She also acknowledged that US efforts to ban drugs had so far been unsuccessful in stopping the narcotics trade.

"Clearly, what we have been doing has not worked and it is unfair for our incapacity... to be creating a situation where people are holding the Mexican government and people responsible," she said.

The BBC's Stephen Gibbs in Mexico says these points have been repeatedly made by Mexico, which sometimes sees itself as the setting for an American-financed and -armed war.

Comment by Cristina Flores on March 28, 2009 at 1:02pm

Enrique Krauze, historian and editor of Letras Libres, Mexico
A widespread idea, especially in the US, is that Mexico is, or is on the verge of becoming, a "failed state". This is not only wrong but a caricature of reality.
It is true that Mexico has a serious problem now in the progress of the war, a just war, unleashed by the Calderon government against the well-armed, vicious and extremely wealthy drug lords of Mexico.

But Mexico is a country with very strong institutions, made even stronger by the birth of true democracy in 2000, when the 70-year one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party ended.

We're a country that has overcome a number of serious crises: financial, governmental and electoral, and we have emerged stronger in every case because of our effective responses.

This war can only be won by reducing the range of the drug gangs and the flow of illegal guns from, and demand for drugs within, the US.

Comment by Cristina Flores on March 28, 2009 at 1:01pm

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the US must take part of the blame for drug-related violence in Mexico.

Speaking as she arrived in Mexico, she said America's appetite for drugs and its inability to stop arms crossing the border were helping fuel the violence.

Comment by Cristina Flores on February 6, 2009 at 7:27pm

(Montreal, Ottawa, Washington and Mexico City / December 30, 2008) – January 1, 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which integrates the economies of Canada and Mexico with that of the United States. For civil society networks in the three North American signatory countries, this anniversary is no cause for celebration.

El 1º de enero de 2009 marca el 15º aniversario de la aplicación del Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC), que integra las economías de Canadá y México con la de los Estados Unidos. Para las redes de la sociedad civil en los tres países signatarios, este aniversario no es motivo de celebración.