Los Angeles Times
By Kathleen Hennessey and Tracy Wilkinson
May 3, 2013
Mexico City -- President Obama painted a sunny picture of a modern, “emerging” Mexico in a speech before an audience of young people Friday, his second day of a three-day swing through Latin America.
Speaking at the National Museum of Anthropology, the president expressed optimism about the push for reforms led by the new administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto and called on young people to be persistent.
“You honor your heritage, thousands of years old, but you are also part of something new, a nation that’s in the process of remaking itself,” Obama said, speaking in a central courtyard of the iconic museum with Mexican and American flags hanging behind him. “And as our modern world changes around us, it is the spirit of young people, your optimism and idealism, that will drive the world forward.”
The president’s message of a rising Mexico serves both his and his counterpart’s domestic agendas. Obama is pushing for immigration reform, and is seeking to reassure skeptics at home that the root causes of illegal immigration – poverty, violence and corrupt institutions in Mexico – are easing under new leadership. Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
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