WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Barack Obama outlined national and international priorities and their effect on the domestic Hispanic and hemisphere populations in an Aug. 7 round-table press meeting with Hispanic Link News Service and nine other Latino-beat reporters.
El presidente Barack Obama esbozó
recientemente prioridades nacionales e internacionales y su efecto sobre las
poblaciones domésticas hispanas y hemisféricas en una rueda de prensa
con Hispanic Link News Service y nueve reporteros más que cubren temas
de interés a los latinos.
Now seven months into his administration, Obama reviewed his priorities to stabilize an economy that, he said, was worse than he expected when he took office. It was on the “brink of catastrophe,” he said, with the gross domestic product (GDP) worse than he had thought, at a 6.4 percent contraction but the decline had moderated to 1 percent at the end of the second quarter.
He recognized that Latinos have been particularly hard hit during this recession and said his administration is creating a “new foundation for future growth.” In that framework, he prioritized education, health care, energy and immigration reform. In particular, he drew attention to a triage of issue areas needing bipartisan attention beginning with health care and a bill likely to be taken up in early September, followed by more needed financial reform.
A couple days later, he made a similar statement in Guadalajara following a weekend summit with Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He repeated that an immigration reform framework is in preparation consisting of administrative measures, such as the FBI clearing a background-check backlog, greater use of advanced technologies for processing, and ending indiscriminate raids.
Bipartisan meetings will follow in the fall to craft legislation to introduce at the beginning of the new year. Republican buy-in is essential to achieve comprehensive reform, he said, and credited the Bush administration with trying, even though it was unable to rally its own ranks to support reform.
He noted wryly, “There are elements in the Republican Party who think I am an illegal immigrant.” He was referring to the “birthers,” who have questioned Obama’s own birth certificate.
In the freewheeling question and answer session that followed, Obama told Hispanic Link that his Aug. 8-9 trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, would focus on a “host of issues,” saying additional ones might come up with the other North American leaders, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He referred to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in this context as a trade agreement, and less of an instrument for other types of convergence between the three nations.
He reiterated that he favors refining the labor and environment provisions that have remained outside the treaty and incorporating them into it. He also referred to work taking place between involved U.S. parties and Congress to resolve the longstanding dispute over Mexican cargo trucks entering this country in the “coming months.”
Obama said he supported Calderón’s approach to curbing the drug cartels in Mexico by using the military, despite the hail of protests about human rights abuses in that operation. In a seeming cautionary note, he added that “the allegiance (of the people) erodes if you have human rights violations.”
The meeting of the North American heads of state is slated to focus an agenda on shared concerns about energy, the environment, and H1N1 flu epidemic preparations.
Other Obama statements:
• He wants to dispel any belief that he has authorized establishment of a base or U.S. troops for any base in Colombia. Reports of up to seven bases to be occupied by the U.S. to fight drug trafficking have received the opposition of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
• He will talk with Spain’s prime-minister, José Zapatero, who wants his country included in the G-20 economic summit, adding he favors fewer similar summits of overlapping issues and membership.
• He noted the irony of those calling for this country to work more actively toward the reinstatement of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Some of them are the same critical groups, he observed, who in the past have protested U.S. interference in the hemisphere.
• He emphasized the need for public awareness about the H1N1 virus and the government’s efforts to update the public through www.flu.gov.
[José de la Isla’s latest book is now available free in digital version at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at
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