How Mexicans see us

Paul K. writes:

Though many Americans were struck by President Calderon’s insufferable gall in criticizing Arizona’s immigration law from the front lawn of the White House, some of his countrymen felt his behavior entirely too conciliatory. In particular, they fault him for visiting Arlington National Cemetery, which, to Mexicans, was a faux pas comparable to Reagan’s visit to Germany’s Bitburg. We are, after all, the enemy.

The following editorial was published in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper on 5/21/10. It is quoted from the “M3 Report,” a daily roundup of news items from south of the border published by the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers.

Sovereignty, a looming surrender

Yesterday, in his official visit to the United States, President Calderon placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia, in homage to the Mexican-American soldiers killed in U.S. military campaigns. The president thus broke a tacit prohibition kept through all prior presidential terms that prevents the head of the Mexican State from visiting that place. The motive of that symbolic reservation was simply that the cemetery contains soldiers who were in wars against us and in which Mexico lost more than half its territory. We must not forget that for two centuries, the U.S. has been the main threat to the national security and the most responsible for affronts to Mexican sovereignty. A visit to Arlington is the equivalent to accepting the offenses for which they have never accepted blame or offered compensation. The president’s gesture was unnecessary. This act was so inappropriate. By giving homage to soldiers of Mexican origin who died in U.S. wars, the government of Mexico gives its approval of such wars, invariably against international rights, national sovereignty and human rights, as in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq in recent times. All have stains of atrocity and of plunder like the attacks by Washington against our country in the 19th and 20th centuries.

For these reasons, it is unavoidable to see the presence of Calderon at Arlington as a surrender of sovereignty, the most recent in a clearly defined line: the Merida Initiative, which gives authority to U.S. agencies to meddle in our internal affairs, and again, in Washington, Calderon asked the assistance of the DEA and FBI in an internal investigation, tacitly admitting our incapacity in the “war against organized crime.”

LA replies:

What can one say? The Mexicans have an unassuageable grievance against us for defeating them in 1848 and taking (with compensation) the Southwest from them. And they don’t just see us as having committed historic wrongs against them; they see us as “the main threat to the national security.” In short, they see us as an enemy power. Yet this simple, undeniable reality of Mexican attitudes to the U.S. is NEVER noted by the U.S. media.

In all of history, did a country ever do what we have done—open our borders to immigrants from a neighboring country to let them enter a part of our country which that other country sees as theirs and has an undying passionate desire to regain? It transcends anything in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. George III’s bull-headed idiocies which drove the American colonies into rebellion were nothing compared to our own idiocy in allowing Mexicans to immigrate en masse into the U.S.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 26, 2010 10:19 PM | Send