Obama knows the U.S. and Mexico are mutually dependent on each other

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 As he stood by the cash register of the restaurant he runs in this city’s historic district, Mario Garcia Calleja puffed from a cigarette and demanded respect.

President Barack Obama has struck the right tone toward Mexico, Garcia Calleja said, but he wondered whether Obama could muster support for Mexico from congressional conservatives who regard the nation as a problem and not a partner.

“They should not be looking at Mexico as a garbage dump but as a real country, as an entryway to North America,” the restaurateur said.

“Together, we have to deal with the problems of both countries,” he added. “Geographically, we have to understand each other.”

The next morning, U.S. officials learned that a rapidly spreading virus had originated in Mexico. Garcia Calleja’s frustration surely grew as immigration restrictionists added the health scare to their list of reasons to stop immigration from south of the border.

Mexico is in the bull’s-eye of conservatives who view Hispanic immigrants as a drain on the U.S. economy, national security, culture and, now, welfare. The H1N1 virus, first labeled “swine flu,” is called the “Mexican swine flu” by some conservatives.

But as conservative broadcasters and bloggers called for the U.S.-Mexico border to be closed, Obama underscored how mutually dependent both countries are, whether they are fighting terrorism or battling a possible pandemic.

“It’s not like we can just draw a moat around America and say, ‘I’m sorry, don’t bother us; keep your problems outside.’ It just doesn’t work that way,” Obama said last week during a town hall meeting in Missouri.

Mexicans in various walks of life argued that the entire continent would suffer unless the governments work together on issues that have no borders. 

They readily accept responsibility for their government’s failure to provide enough jobs for its own citizens, prompting many to go to the U.S. or to enter the illegal drug trade. Also, the long history of government corruption is not easily forgiven.

“Shameless, rats, imbeciles,” an angry Laura Pascual, who works for the San Luis Potosi state government, said of the Mexican administrations that preceded President Felipe Calderon’s.

Calderon remains popular for taking aim at the drug lords who have ignited a violent, bloody drug war along the Mexico-U.S. border. Residents in the cities of San Luis Potosi and Guadalajara maintain their only firsthand view of the crisis is in the form of daily military convoys that pass through their cities carrying young soldiers to the nation’s northern region.

 At the same time, residents hold the U.S. responsible for supplying the demand for the illegal narcotics and arms used by the drug cartel. And even in this deep economic recession, which has added to the unemployment rates in both countries, America’s appetite for Mexican laborers remains hearty. Standing in front of one of the city’s splendid 18th-century cathedrals, a local police officer appreciated the Spanish-influenced beauty of his hometown. But he longed for the money he once earned in the U.S.

For two years, the policeman lived in Birmingham, Ala., where he was a construction worker before working the cash register at a McDonald’s. Alabama needed his labor, and he needed its wages, even if Alabama seemed to him like an unfriendly place for Mexicans.

But he took the three-day drive back to San Luis Potosi because he did not have a Social Security card to remain employed — he was in the U.S. illegally. Now, this enforcer of the law is witnessing another co-dependency: the United States’ addiction to the drugs streaming in from Mexico’s drug cartel, which gets most of its weapons from the U.S.

Would he consider going back to the U.S. to work? “Sure, of course,” the police officer said.

In Guadalajara, Garcia Calleja said that while he welcomed Obama’s promise to help Mexico, he was more impressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Mexico, which preceded the president’s last month.

To him, Clinton more directly acknowledged “co-responsibility” for the weapons being smuggled across the border. “Clearly, what we have been doing has not worked, and it is unfair for our incapacity ... to be creating a situation where people are holding the Mexican government and people responsible,” she said.

After a long period of being blamed for all that is wrong with the region, Mexicans quickly remind visitors that their nation has been enriched by a beautiful history, culture and many other resources, including its workers.

What they want most of all for their nation from the United States and its people is what we all want: to be treated with respect.