Reforma, January 7, 2023
By Jorge Ramos Avalos*
When the US president, Joe Biden, arrives in Mexico in a few hours, he will find a polarized, very violent country -with many deaths and increasing control by the drug cartels- and with a strong and popular President who insists on imposing his agenda and who, in that process, is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
The recent arrest of Ovidio Guzmán in Sinaloa left dozens dead and injured, caused blockades in several cities, and provoked attacks on highways, on planes at the Culiacán airport, and on a military airbase. This is not normal. In any other country, this would have created a national emergency.
The security strategy has failed. With more than 133,000 murders so far in the six-year term, AMLO's is already the most violent government of the century. And the presidential resistance to a change in strategy forecasts a very difficult two years.
But Mexico is much more -and better- than its government.
Biden will also see a young democracy that refuses to stop being one, a creative, joyful, fighting and questioning nation that sees a partner in the United States and, also, an opportunity when things go wrong in Mexico. For decades, the United States has been for many Mexicans an aspiration, an escape valve, and the best option for a second life.
The ties between Mexico and the United States are very deep. Not only because of the obvious territorial proximity but, above all, because of the more than 37 million people of Mexican origin who live in the north.
And yet we are so different.
"Probably nowhere in the world do two countries as different as Mexico and the United States live side by side. Crossing the border, say, from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, the contrast is striking: from wealth to poverty, from organization to improvisation, from artificial flavors to hot spices. But the physical differences are less important. Probably nowhere in the world do two neighbors understand each other so little."
This paragraph from the book Distant Neighbors was written in 1984 by The New York Times correspondent Alan Riding. And it is still valid almost four decades later. Mexico and the United States still maintain huge differences in wages and economic growth. In addition, in the last four years, Mexico has become the wall of the United States, just as Trump wanted.
We are very different but the destinies of both countries are tied together.
The United States and Mexico share a border that is not a border. Millions have crossed it by swimming, walking through deserts and mountains, or overstaying tourist visas. For the first time since the records were kept, 2.7 million people crossed illegally into the United States, through the southern border, in the past fiscal year.
The border between Mexico and the United States is drawn with a pencil; it is porous by nature, by history, and by habit. It is full of gaps and holes. No one can seal it. It was created -invented?- after the war between the two countries (1846-1848) in which Mexico lost half of its territory, and all efforts to mark it, secure it, and close it have failed. It is a border imposed by force. It is bothersome and frequently violated.
And just as immigrants enter, drugs enter. The vast majority of heroin and methamphetamine consumed in the United States - the world's largest drug market - passes through Mexico. More than 80,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2021.
Distant neighbors? Sometimes we suffer one another, and other times we hug.
After 175 years with the same border, there are few things that surprise us about our neighbor. The permanent issues in the relationship between the two countries are:
- drugs,
- migration,
- the new trade agreement (together with Canada), and
- arms trafficking from the United States to Mexico.
In the end, Biden and AMLO know the essential: that Mexico and the United States are so tied to one another that the only solution is to learn to live together.
The border is just an arbitrary line.
* Jorge Ramos Avalos is a Mexican-American journalist and author. Regarded as the best-known Spanish-language news anchor in the United States of America, he has been referred to as "The Walter Cronkite of Latin America". Based in Miami, Florida, he anchors the Univision news television program Noticiero Univision, the Univision Sunday-morning political news program Al Punto, and the Fusion TV English-language program America with Jorge Ramos. He has won ten Emmy Awards and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in journalism.@jorgeramosnews