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Maduro
Looking for Help By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal ----------------------------------------------------------------- 10 January, 2002: President-elect of Honduras, Ricardo Maduro, is in Mexico for with Mexican President Vicente Fox, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda and other top officials. The matter of bilateral relations. is expected to be a major topic for discussion. Mr. Maduro will be inaugurated January 27, 2002. -------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't expect too much of economic substance from the presently ongoing meeting between Honduras presidente-elect Ricardo Maduro and the top of the Mexican political hierarchy. The get-together is more on the order of a neighborhood "block party", meant to give the various participants a chance to look each other over and size each other up. Regional social relationships aside, Vicente Fox's political orientation is pointed due north, across the Rio grande. He and George Bush have become veritable phone-pals, since their initial visits shortly after their respective inaugurations. The benefits are mutual and too obvious to require footnotes: Bush needs to strengthen his image among the large legal and illegal Mexican population fraction among American voters. Fox, in turn, desperately needs to curry favor with both U. S. politicians and outward-looking industrialists, in order to win increased operational freedom in the U. S. A. and attract more commercial transplanting to his industry-hungry south-of-the-border locations. On the negative side of the scale, Fox is very much aware of the tentative state of the U. S. - Honduras relationship. As long as Honduras chooses to provide safe haven for the former Haitian Chief of Police, who is seriously wanted in the U. S. to answer for importing tons of drugs thereto, and extends its protective hospitality to a variety of other international malefactors sought to answer substantial charges of wrongdoing, these sovereign associations are, at best, going to remain a chilly affair. Vicente Fox is much too canny an operator to run the risk of getting too chummy with anyone who, at best, can merit no more than arm's length suffrage from Mexico's preeminent current and potential benefactor. A major challenge facing Ricardo Maduro, as he picks up the reins of government in Honduras, is that of moving his nation out of the chilly purgatory of being - at best - a questionable, less-than-trustworthy hemispheric neighbor, and into the kind of friendly indulgence and visible cooperation that flourishes apace between Mexico and the United States of America. This will surely prove to be a tall order. Honduras begins from a long history of dismal disappointments, marginal performance or abject failure to meet the minimal requirements of signed and sealed covenants supposedly entered into in good faith. This must be deemed a shaky pedestal, indeed, for any substantial strengthening of international ties. Mexico under Vicente Fox, in stark contrast, has installed reliable rules that facilitate cross-border police cooperation, that accelerates identification, capture and extradition of mere felons, along with traffickers in the full gamut of contraband, from drugs to illegal aliens. The benefits are too obvious to require minute recapitulation: Beyond increasing U. S. trade and investment, Fox now actively seeks legalization of millions of now-illegal Mexican nationals presently residing in the United States. Had the "war against terror" not intervened, it is a virtual certainty that these Mexican illegals would have already been granted amnesty or otherwise afforded U. S. residential suffrage or full citizenship in their adopted country. Even so, in spite of bin Laden's distraction, it's the bet in town that this item will be high on the legislative calendar in 2002. Object lesson: Cooperation pays greater dividends than does the lonely pride of "sovereign" aloofness. This is especially pertinent in the case of Honduras, which is totally unequal to the task of standing on its own fiscal and operational feet and surviving by its own devices. In its role as one of the principal "beggar-men of the Third World", Honduras needs nothing quite as much as it needs affluent international friends. Topping the list of potential candidates for this dubious role, the world's sole superpower is a mere three air-hours removed from Tegucigalpa, but Honduras seems to have deliberately and gratuitously given the back of its hand to this potential ally, in favor of seeking to sustain its own tattered image of bankrupt sovereignty. Correcting this embarassing reality is the basic dimension of Ricardo Maduro's challenge in creative statesmanship. If he can bridge the confidence gulf that now separates Honduras and the United States of America, many if not most of the collateral difficulties he faces will melt away under the benevolent rays of a warming diplomatic climate. But the ball is definitely in his court. In the present circumstances, Honduras, at best represents a trifling and unknown quantity. At worst, a too-well-known nuisance and an unfortunate burden that seeks to implicate the largesse of America in its perennial impecuniosities. It will be rivetingly interesting to see how Ricardo Maduro addresses the loosening this Gordian knot. Friends of Honduras, wherever situated, must wish him well in his daunting task. In its convoluted details, his challenge involves undoing the compounded idiocies of a long parade of "strong men" and a few recently chosen and self-styled "democrats" who have – almost unanimously - merely augmented, microscopically refined and blindly perpetuated the inanities and political perversions of their feckless predecessors. This is an unimaginable piece of work to seek to address in the short space of time allotted to Don Ricardo's incumbency, but it is up to him, for better or worse. Shall we pray? Lorenzo Dee Belveal =================================== Copyright © June 16, 2000 Lorenzo Dee
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