Mexico Trucker Online

MERIDA, Mexico — Using international money to build highways in this country will keep more Mexicans home than will constructing walls along the U.S. border, a leading candidate for the presidency says.
Felípe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, is nearing the home stretch of a presidential race that is too close to call.

In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, he said that if elected July 2, he’ll seek to work with the Bush administration to find new ways to accelerate job growth and public works programs in Mexico to reduce the flow of millions of undocumented workers coming to the U.S. to work.

“The only way we can stop or reduce immigration is creating jobs in Mexico,” Calderon said Friday. “My point is it is more effective to stop immigration by building 1 kilometer of highway in Michoacan than 10 kilometers of wall in Texas.”

He spoke of his vision for a program in which funds from the United States, Mexico and Canada would be used to generate jobs in areas that traditionally send the most people north as undocumented immigrants.

“To create jobs here is a solution for Mexican and for American people,” he said.

As president, he said he would seek to renew U.S.-Mexican relations that have unraveled since the 9-11 attacks took Washington’s attention away from Mexico and put it squarely on the Middle East.

Almost forgotten is that just days before the attacks, President Bush had Mexican President Vicente Fox to the White House as his first visit by a foreign head of state.

Fox addressed the U.S. House and Senate, and he pressed lawmakers to reform immigration laws.

Calderon also said that as president, he would work to capture two Huichol Indian fugitives who were convicted of the 1998 murder of Express-News Mexico City Bureau Chief Philip True.

Calderon’s remarks came amid the first stage of a final campaign swing that took him over the weekend through Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, with stops in the colonial capital of Merida and in the resort Cancún, still rebuilding from the ravages of Hurricane Wilma in September.

Calderon, according to several opinion polls and political observers, is in a dead heat with populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, who’s campaigning on a platform meant to appeal to the country’s working poor.

López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party contends the Mexican government long has catered to the wealthy minority and turned its back on the impoverished masses.

Calderon and López Obrador are traveling the nation — hugging babies and squeezing hands in cities and villages — as they slug it out for popular support.

Calderon was hugged, kissed and grabbed as he made his way through a combination of a tunnel of love and a Secret Service agent’s nightmare: A 3-foot-wide, 100-yard-long corridor cutting through thousands of people hell-bent on touching him or taking his photograph.

“Felípe! Felípe! Felípe!” they chanted.

As Calderon made his way toward the stage, he was grabbed around the neck — almost like a clothesline tackle — by an elderly woman who simply wanted to hug him.

He later kicked soccer balls into the crowds to salute the Mexican national team’s efforts in the World Cup.

It was as close to being a rock star as it gets for a balding, bespectacled guy wearing a guayabera, khaki slacks and loafers.

Frenzied supporters armed with blue and white balloons, the National Action Party’s colors, spilled out of the town square in Merida and the bullring in Cancún, catapulting Calderon toward what are expected to be even bigger turnouts in Mexico’s larger cities in the coming days.

Not lost on Calderon or rival López Obrador is that the margin of victory could come from voters willing to abandon Roberto Madrazo, the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate who is third in the polls and seems to have the longest of shots of being elected.

About 71 million Mexicans are registered to vote and officials expect as many as 60 percent of them to go to the polls to elect a president who would take office the first week of December.

Calderon has sought to increase his appeal by casting López Obrador as a dangerous leftist and himself as being able to provide stability and carry on some reforms started by Fox, who is prohibited by the constitution from seeking re-election after serving a six-year term.

López Obrador contends Calderon will mean more of the same in a country where the minimum wage is about $5 a day and half the people live in extreme poverty.

During the interview, Calderon spoke of many changes he’d make as president, including calming some of the volatility of U.S.-Mexican relations along the 2,000-mile border, establishing a Mexican anti-drug police force — perhaps similar to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — and so-called “steel prosecutors” shielded from corruption and violence.

The Harvard-educated former energy minister said combating drug trafficking is the duty of the United States and Mexico, and that neither country can win working on its own.

He recognized Mexico’s faults, but said the United States has to do more to reduce American consumption of drugs and dismantle the drug pipeline north of the border — including exposing American capos in the United States.

“A good number of the criminals who operate in Nuevo Laredo live in Laredo,” he said of the sister cities on the Rio Grande. “A good number of the criminals in Tijuana live in San Diego,” Calif.

Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana are entangled in bloody wars — with more than 120 killings in Nuevo Laredo already this year — as gangsters battle for control of lucrative routes used to smuggle drugs into the United States.

The drug wars have caused some pointed exchanges between the Bush and Fox administrations, but nothing has shaped the relationship like the aftermath of 9-11. Prior to the attacks, the two former governors were working to construct a closer relationship. That initiative lost all momentum afterward.

“September 11 was five years ago and we need to try to start again. I think it is absolutely needed for the U.S. and Mexico to start a new, more cooperative, constructive and more visionary relationship,” Calderon said.