Published: January 7, 2012
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Andrés Manuel López Obrador: The candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.).
Texas
politicians are paying close attention, too - to whether the trade,
security and energy policies of President Felipe Calderón's successor
will affect illegal immigration or the state's robust trade relationship with Mexico.
Three Texas customs districts, Laredo,El Paso and Houston,
rank among Mexico's top four trading partners. Collectively, they
accounted for roughly $235 billion in trade between Texas and Mexico
from January to September 2011, according to United States Census data
analyzed by WorldCity, which tracks global trade patterns. The figures show an increase over 2010 despite the American recession and unprecedented violence in Mexico because of warring drug cartels.
Gerardo Schwebel,
the executive vice president of International Bank of Commerce's
international division in Laredo, said the future of this booming trade
relationship partly depends on what investors anticipate for the peso.
Though Mr. Schwebel and other analysts speculate that Mexico will not
see a major devaluation similar to what it experienced three
presidential elections ago, when political, social and economic factors
plunged the country into a financial crisis, he warned that its currency
is still volatile.
"The
reason behind that is, the uncertainty of Europe and the U.S. economy
have added pressures to the Mexican peso," Mr. Schwebel said. He added
that the Mexican customer must constantly measure whether to make
payments in dollars, or whether to wait and see if the peso gets weaker
or stronger, depending on what the transaction is.
Major
reforms carried out in Mexico since 1994, the last year the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., won the presidency, have
prevented the peso from plummeting as it did that year.
"Today
it's a completely different scenario in the sense that Mexico's central
bank has very deep national reserves," said Roberto A. Coronado, an
economist at the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Mr. Coronado said that as of December, Mexico had $140 billion in
foreign exchange reserves, plus a line of credit with the International
Monetary Fund worth $72 billion.
"You're
talking about access to more than $200 billion under their disposal in
case they have to react to something," Mr. Coronado said.
That something could be the ongoing European debt crisis, a deepening recession in the United States - or even a shift in which a new political party takes the helm.
The
P.R.I.'s Enrique Peña Nieto, the former governor of the State of
Mexico, is the presumed front-runner. The leftist Party of the
Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., will field Andrés Manuel López Obrador
of Tabasco, who in 2006 lost the presidential election to Mr. Calderón.
Mr. Calderón's own National Action Party, or P.A.N., is choosing from
Santiago Creel, a Mexican senator and former minister of the interior;
Josefina Vázquez Mota, a former member of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies;
and Ernesto Cordero, the country's former finance minister.
Ms.
Vázquez Mota, a former campaign manager for Mr. Calderón who is vying
to be the country's first female president, will most likely be named
the party's nominee in February.
Mr.
Schwebel said it is important to Texas businesses that the winner
maintain Mr. Calderón's economic policies and a consistent plan to
combat organized crime, which has contributed to more than 50,000
homicides in Mexico in under six years.
"The
North American economy is 25 percent of the global economy, and we want
that to grow," he said. "The P.R.I. and the P.A.N. and even the P.R.D.
do not want to disrupt that as they try to set up their strategy in
combating the wave of violence."
Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
in Washington, D.C., said that all of the candidates have vowed, in
varying ways, to rein in the military's role in the drug war and to
instead rely on civilian police forces.
But
it is unclear how quickly that can happen, Mr. Olson said. The
relatively small ranks of the federal police force and the inherent
weaknesses of the local and state police forces - and the government's
limited ability to bolster them with honest officers - could delay the
shift.
"I
think there's just bound to be a transition period, and the question is
how soon that takes place," Mr. Olson said. "My hunch is that it will
be a slow process."
Immigration rates, both legal and illegal, will depend on more than just violence in Mexico, experts said.
Demetrios Papademetriou, the president and co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute,
based in Washington, D.C., said that if the economic policy of a new
administration dramatically improved the quality of life for Mexicans -
by taking on tough monopolies, for example, or providing energy
incentives - more Mexicans might be inspired to stay.
"That
will make the middle class in Mexico perhaps a bit better off;
therefore, they spend less money on basic services," he said. "Then,
presumably, over four or five or seven years, the pressure for
immigration from Mexico will subside further."
He
said that this is especially likely if Mexico's economy continues to
grow at a faster rate than the United States', which he said is only
"sputtering forward."
Mr.
Papademetriou does not think changes in American immigration policy
will significantly hinge on who becomes the next Mexican president. He
said the party that wins would most likely pursue the existing strategy
of trying to protect the economic ties between the United States and
Mexico from immigration trends.
"They
will want to protect the interest of the Mexicans living in the United
States," he said. "Just like the P.A.N. or any other party in Mexico,
the P.R.I. will be trying to make sure that they inoculate the broader
economic relationship from being impacted too much by the migration
situation."
While
Texas business and policy experts keep their eyes on Mexico's
presidential contest, some Mexico City election officials are looking
back at Texas, working overtime to try to increase turnout among Mexican
expatriates living in the United States.
This presidential election is only the second in Mexican history in which expatriates can cast a ballot from abroad. The Federal Electoral Institute, or I.F.E., which has a separate site
encouraging voting from abroad, estimates that the population of
native-born Mexicans living in the United States reached 11.4 million in
2010. Those who are at least 18 are eligible to vote in the country's
elections.
In
2006, the first year Mexico collected ballots from abroad, the I.F.E.
received about 53,000 applications for placement on the foreign voters
list and accepted about 41,000; 33,111 cast ballots.
jaguilar@texastribune.org