President Calderon statements at the end of his presidential term

By Adina Moloman

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, El Pais

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón, who will leave office in December, recently had an interview with the editors of The Wall Street Journal. The President addressed issues from the economy, immigration, Mexico’s labor force and border security with the USA. The relationship between US and Mexico is complicated especially in the area of migration and security.

President Calderon also met with other international press where the President stressed the idea that drug trafficking is strictly related to the fact that Mexico is living next to the largest consumer of drugs.

Since he started the battle against the drug organizations in 2006, more that 50,000 Mexicans have died, but he assures that this impressive large amount of killings is because of the brutality and the rivalries between the drug cartels and not because of any government action, most of the victims were participants in drug trafficking.

He mentioned a few strategies to fight crime such restructuring law enforcement and judicial institutions and repairing the social component of these in terms of strengthening the institutions and passing transparency laws. According to the president the country has gained a more solid rule-of-law foundation with stronger security.

Regarding immigration, he mentioned to the editors the dropped to 140,000 in 2010—while 1.4 million Mexicans living in the U.S. returned to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, most of them voluntarily basically because of the US recession economy.

President Calderon also talked about improvements in the qualified labor force where 113,000 engineers are graduating in Mexico every year, twice the rate of the American countries, most of them caring for the needs of the Maquiladora Industry.

In terms of economy he emphasized about a healthy economy with a great expansion of infrastructure projects, where Mexico’s unemployment rate has declined to just fewer than 5%, and has created 1.9 million new jobs.