MEXICO CITY — Billed as a way to strengthen bilateral ties, a proposed U.S. aid package for Mexican crime-fighting efforts has instead turned into a fresh reminder of the prickly dynamics that often drive the two nations apart.
At issue are human rights conditions that Congress attached to the so-called Merida Initiative, a three-year $1.4-billion proposal by the Bush administration to equip and train security forces in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean to combat drug trafficking.
Senior Mexican officials have called the provisions a form of U.S. interference and threatened to turn down the first-year installment if the conditions survive in a final version yet to be worked out by the House and Senate.
The two chambers approved different first-year sums for Mexico, $400 million in the House and $350 million in the Senate. But both imposed requirements to guard against human rights abuses and corruption by Mexican officials.
"The legislative initiatives approved in both chambers of the U.S. Congress incorporate some aspects that make them, in their current versions, unacceptable for our country," Juan Camilo Mourino, Mexico's second-highest-ranking official and a proxy for President Felipe Calderon, said this week.
Mexican Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, who leads the government's current crackdown on drug trafficking, said the money wouldn't make or break the effort. That campaign, which includes 45,000 troops and federal police, has come as violence has claimed more than 4,100 lives since Calderon took office in December 2006.
Garcia Luna suggested that the money might do more good on the U.S. side to quell arms-smuggling across the border into Mexico.
The Mexican comments are aimed, in part, at persuading the Democrat-controlled Congress to delete the human rights provisions. Congress required that alleged violations by soldiers be prosecuted by civilian authorities rather than the military and that assistance be barred for authorities involved in corruption.
The flap highlights the delicate political sensitivities that hover over the U.S.-Mexican relationship.
Mexicans, who haven't forgotten losing a war to the United States 160 years ago, are fiercely protective of their sovereignty. Officials here are quick to resist what they see as efforts by their northern neighbor to assert its will south of the border.
