Mexico's new president to shift dialogue with U.S., from drugs to economy
From The Washington Post
By William Booth and Nick Miroff
MEXICO CITY - "On the eve of his inauguration and his party's return to power, Mexico's incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto has vowed to reshape his
country's education, business and energy sectors in ways that could have profound effects on the United States.
A dynamic politician, from an old autocratic political party, Peña Nieto has said he wants to change the conversation about Mexico in the United
States, away from headless torsos and drug cartels to trade and manufacturing.
Together with the United States, Peña Nieto and his top advisors say Mexico wants to drill more oil, assemble more cars and build "better, faster,
smarter bridges" to grow the $1 billion a day commerce across the the 2,000-mile border, already the busiest crossing in the world.
Peña Nieto, who takes office Saturday, and his team say they are ready to help the Obama administration and U.S. Congress implement a guest worker
program to regulate the flow of Mexican labor to the United States, where an estimated 6 million Mexicans live illegally.
But his top aides said Peña Nieto hoped to create an economy that was competitive enough to keep moreMexican workers at home.
"Some people joke that the fence should actually be higher, because, seriously, we are going to need all the workers we can get if the economy is
growing at 5 or 6 percent," said Emilio Lozoya, a former manager of a billion dollar investment fund in New York and now a top aide to Peña Nieto on
the transition team.
After meeting with Peña Nieto in Washington on Tuesday, President Obama called the plans "very ambitious" and promised that the bilateral relationship
would grow.
A life-long politician, Peña Nieto, 46, has pledged to lift 15 million Mexicans out of poverty, essentially reducing the ranks of the poor by a third.
He promised that half of all college-aged Mexicans would be enrolled in higher education, up from less than 30 percent today, one of the lowest
figures among developed Latin American countries.
And Peña Nieto said he would cut the murder rate by 50 percent during his six-year term, in a country that saw more than 100,000 homicides during the
last six years.
Peña Nieto won a bruising election with only 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race.
Many Mexicans remain suspicious that Peña Nieto's fresh face masks the darker ambitions of his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled
Mexico between 1929 and 2000 with a mix of corruption, vote-rigging, crony capitalism and coercion.
"Enrique Peña Nieto and his team are an enigma, no one knows what he really stands for," said political analyst Sergio Aguayo.
But Peña Nieto says past is not prologue. He has surrounded himself with a coterie of bright, ambitious aides, educated at top universities, including
MIT, Harvard and Oxford, and successful in business, government and academia.
"The economy is performing well. We need to keep economic stability, but it's not enough. We need to do things to enhance productivity," said Luis
Videgaray, a former investment banker and academic known as "El Doctor" who is Peña Nieto's chief strategist and also ran his presidential campaign."
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
\"Alea iacta est.\"
—Julius Caesar
|
![[*]](images/xmbforum/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
