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Posted on 08/23/2002 5:38:30 PM PDT by It'salmosttolate
Fox hopes to reschedule Texas visit
Staff and wire reports
MEXICO CITY -- A day after Mexico's leader said his cancellation of an August visit to Houston and other Texas cities signaled his willingness to defend his countrymen's human rights, President Vicente Fox hopes to reschedule the visit, according to a spokeswoman.
Fox called off the visit Aug. 14 in protest of that day's execution of Mexican citizen Javier Suarez Medina, 33, who had been condemned for the 1988 murder of a Dallas undercover police officer.
"When you have commitments, when you believe in values, you live by them," Fox told the Chronicle and journalists from three other Texas newspapers.
"Human rights is a key issue for this government," Fox said. "We've been promoting the respect for human rights in Mexico and outside of Mexico. To be coherent, we did have to take the position we took."
Today, however, Fox said he hopes to reschedule his trip to Texas, spokeswoman Alicia Buenrostro said. Because of Texas' importance to Mexico, Fox wants to meet with state politicians and business officials, she said.
Buenrostro said Fox believes Mexico has a better chance of reaching a migration accord with the United States after U.S. elections in November. Fox has been pushing the United States to allow more legal migration from Mexico since taking office in December 2000, ending 71 years of single-party rule.
Fox, conducting much of Wednesday's newspaper interview in English, said he had been in contact with President Bush and Texas Gov. Rick Perry before Suarez's execution in an effort to delay or cancel it.
Mexico maintains that the legal rights of Suarez, who had moved to the United States when he was 3 years old, were violated because he was prevented from contacting a Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest. An international treaty, which the United States signed, provides for such contacts.
Fox said that in attempting to forestall Suarez's execution, his government was trying to set a precedent for the treatment of Mexicans abroad.
"Under these considerations I could not have come to Texas," Fox said.
"Many Mexicans live in the United States, many of them are indigenous people," Fox said. "So ... we want to make sure that any who are held because of a criminal act have the opportunity to call the consulate or the embassy."
Fox said appellate judges in other cases have reduced Mexicans' death sentences on grounds that local authorities failed to allow them access to Mexican officials. Dozens of Mexicans are now awaiting execution on death rows across the United States, many of them in Texas.
Fox, whose July 2000 election ended seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico, said his government would actively support efforts to reduce the death sentences faced by Mexicans.
"We will always be asking for mercy or clemency because of our convictions," Fox said.
Both Perry and Tony Sanchez, his Democratic challenger in November's gubernatorial election, said last week that while they respected Fox's position, executing convicted murders was Texas' prerogative.
The Mexican Constitution provides the death penalty in cases of treason and other military offenses. But there have been no official executions for many decades. Fox said Wednesday that he recognized Texas' sovereign right to the death penalty but would continue to protest it.
"To our efforts were added those of the European Community, of the United Nations and all of those institutions that don't believe the death penalty is the way to go," Fox said of his government's protests in favor of Suarez.
Fox had been scheduled to meet with business leaders and Mexican residents in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin during his Aug. 26-29 visit. He was also to visit the Crawford ranch where Bush is spending August.
Fox said he would visit Texas early next year and would meet with Bush in Baja California in October.
Fox said his countrymen in Texas should be encouraged by his decision to cancel the visit.
"There are millions and millions of Mexicans living in the United States," Fox said, "and if each one of them is going to find themselves in a similar situation in which their rights are violated, I must protest."
Fox called off another trip to Texas in early June amid binational squabbling over Mexico's failure to live up to a 1944 treaty that divides the water in the Rio Grande Basin.
Mexicans have argued that nearly a decade of drought in the basin has hampered their ability to live up to the treaty and have called for it to be rewritten. Texas farmers along the river, as well as state and U.S. officials, insisted that Mexico had enough water to at least partially repay its debt.
An agreement was reached later in June under which Mexico would pay a fraction of the water it owed and the United States would help finance improved irrigation and other water systems in the Mexican borderlands.
A planned April trip to the United States and Canada was canceled when the Mexican Congress refused to grant Fox permission to leave the country.
Required by the constitution, such approval was a formality during the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Now it is another tool used by the opposition-controlled Congress in its wrangling with Fox.
In a visit last September, Fox addressed the U.S. Congress and stumped in Ohio with Bush, urging the legalization of an estimated 3 million undocumented Mexicans living north of the border. Hopes for immigration reform and other U.S. concessions were battered by the Sept. 11 attacks, Fox acknowledged Wednesday.
But the increased commerce under the 8-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement requires the United States to take Mexico more seriously than it has in the past, Fox said.
"The United States has to understand that we are partners," Fox said, "We are not asking for charity."
Fox emphasized the important and growing trade ties between Mexico, the United States and Canada in making his appeal for greater cooperation in the future. He pointed out that Mexico alone buys more from the United States than Spain, France, Germany and Italy together.
Chronicle staffer Dudley Althaus and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Am I stupid? Not asking? for Charity?
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