With President Obama meeting with Mexico's president this week for the second time in four months to discuss guns, drugs and money laundering, the world ponders Mexico's future. To be sure, Mexico is not a "failed state," but as Latin American scholar Shannon O'Neil suggests, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, it may be "on the brink."
Mexico has a democratically elected government, and a relatively stable society, but the power of the drug cartels is formidable. In November in Mexico City, a suspicious crash of a Learjet, carrying nine passengers, claimed the lives of the powerful interior minister, Juan Camilo Mourino, No. 2 in the government, who spearheaded President Felipe Calderon's military crackdown on the drug gangs, and drug czar Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos who was behind Mexico's highest-profile operations against the cartels. In April, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration briefing on Mexico drug trafficking accused Mr. Vasconcelos of having taken bribes from the Beltran Levya drug cartel.
Since 1994 with the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has become one of our most important trading partners. America is responsible for some 85 percent of Mexico's legal exports -- well more than $200 billion -- and is after Canada our largest market.
American companies furnish more than 60 percent of all foreign direct investment. But the drug problem overshadows free trade. Ninety percent of U.S. cocaine and large quantities of other illegal drugs come from or through Mexico. And drugs are not the only form of contraband to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The overwhelming number of illegal guns seized from Mexican drug gangs have their origin in the United States. And drug money laundered through the United States lines the pockets of the Mexican drug lords to the annual tune of billions of dollars.
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