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After Comments on Assault Weapon Ban, No Standing Ovation for Calderón Back Home

Posted May 24, 2010 by Leslie Josephs

Through May and June, LIW news reporting fellow Leslie Josephs will be covering U.S. immigration issues from her temporary base in Mexico City.

During his visit to Washington last week, Mexican President Felipe Calderón made headlines by blasting Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070.

But in addition to his criticism of the Arizona law, which he said would promote racial profiling, the president also roiled Republicans by urging U.S. lawmakers to ban assault weapons, which he said have increased gang violence in his country.

Reuters reports:

“There is one issue where Mexico needs your cooperation. And that is stopping the flow of assault weapons and other deadly arms across the border,” Calderon said to a standing ovation from U.S. lawmakers.

Calderon said the increase in violence in Mexico had coincided with the 2004 lifting of a U.S. assault weapons ban.

The 10-year ban on the sale of assault weapons to civilians expired without being extended by Congress. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the administration favors reinstituting the ban, though guns rights groups oppose it.

In the U.S. media, Calderón’s support for the assault weapon ban took a backseat to his jabs at SB 1070. In Mexico, however, newspapers across the country dissected his comments on the ban.

The scathing reactions from Republican lawmakers—who largely cited Second Amendment concerns—were on the front page of every Mexican newspaper on Friday, with headlines such as “Republicans clash with FCH” (Felipe Calderón Hinojosa) and “Calderon Makes Demands in the US, Republicans Angered.”

While U.S. newspapers showed support for Calderón’s call for a ban—The Washington Post wrote that Obama “should take a lesson in principle from his Mexican counterpart”—back home some Mexicans countered that Calderón should look inward.

“We can’t keep blaming the United Status for Mexico’s problems,” wrote Marcario Schettino, a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, a university in northeastern Mexico, in the daily El Universal. “It’s true that drug-trafficking depends fundamentally on US consumption and arms that are gotten there, but the scale of organized crime in our country is due to as much if not more to the corruption of our authorities, police, and politicians.”

Pablo Gómez wrote in the independent newspaper La Jornada: “There is is an almost free sale of arms in the United Status, but it doesn’t have the level of organized crime violence we observe here in Mexico. It’s true that the gun problem in the United States is expressed here in Mexico, but what’s more evident is that the corrupt Mexican state is one of the two causes of violence in Mexico; Social crisis is the other.”

Although Calderón’s call for U.S. lawmakers to reinstate the assault weapons ban was met with thunderous applause—one of more than two dozen times he stopped his address for praise from lawmakers—some Mexicans don’t expect anything to come of it.

“For as much as they interrupted him with applause and standing ovations,” wrote columnist Katia D´ Artigues in El Universal, “Lawmakers don’t vote the way they applaud.”


Image courtesy of the White House website, whitehouse.gov.