a n a l y s i s

Mexico's New Border Commission: A First Look
by David A. Shirk | April 2001

For years, Mexico's northern border region was regarded in Mexico City's corridors of power as a political and economic hinterlands of little or no significance. In recent years, with the growing economic importance of the maquiladora industry and cross-border trade, and the ability of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) to establish a political toehold in the north, this perception has begun to change. Now, Mexico's new government has created a commission to handle border affairs and has named ex-Baja California Governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel as its first "border czar." What can we expect from Ruffo and his commission?

The 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexican border holds numerous challenges, including rapid industrialization, a population explosion, scarce resources, and the complexities of governing such a culturally and economically bifurcated region. On February 8, 2001, Mexico’s interior secretary announced the formal creation of a new government Commission for Northern Border Affairs (Comisión para Asuntos de la Frontera Norte, CAFN) to deal with these and other border problems. Former Baja California Governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel has been appointed as head of the CAFN and will work with a permanent staff of approximately fifty people with office locations in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Monterrey.

When Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox Quesada, took office this December, he divided his cabinet and high-level appointees into three “branches” to reflect the policy priorities of his administration: equitable economic growth (crecimiento con calidad), social development (desarrollo humano), and security and order (orden y respeto). The CAFN is included under crecimiento con calidad—reflecting the importance that Fox assigns U.S.-Mexican relations and the border’s role in Mexico’s economic prosperity.

The CAFN is structured to function as a working group that will take responsibility for the creation, coordination, and promotion of initiatives by federal, state, and municipal government agencies to foster the border region’s further development. The commission incorporates the chiefs and high-level functionaries from Mexico’s secretariats of the Interior; International Relations; Treasury and Public Credit; Social Development; Environment and Natural Resources; Energy; Agriculture, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food; Communications and Transportation; and Tourism. The heads of the President’s Office for Public Policy, the Office for Attention to Migrants, and the National Water Commission will also be integrated into the CAFN.

On the one hand, this structure reflects Fox’s strategy of administrative organization, which involves the integration of different agencies with multiple policy jurisdictions under the umbrella of a coordinating commissioner. In this way, Fox hopes to promote interjurisdictional cooperation in addressing the border region’s multiple problems. Ideally, by coordinating infrastructure planning with programs for environmental protection, for example, this approach could enable the commission to actually make some progress in promoting sustainable development in the region.

On the other hand, the emphasis on the participation of multiple levels of government is illustrative of the new administration’s focus on building a more balanced federal system, where all three levels of government share appropriate levels of responsibility. This is a markedly different approach from Mexico’s traditional concentration of fiscal resources and decisionmaking in the hands of the federal government, particularly the executive branch. By facilitating intragovernmental cooperation across multiple policy jurisdictions, the CAFN could provide a useful point of contact to facilitate cross-border policy and communication. The lack of such a trigovernmental nexus has been a cause for frustration in the past for U.S. policymakers attempting to establish agreements with their state and local Mexican counterparts.

The fine points of CAFN’s role and agenda have yet to be defined. Indeed, the commission itself will be responsible for identifying and diagnosing key problems and goals for Mexico’s northern border. Still, there are a number of issues that are clearly within its mandate. Notably, the commission is charged with the task of generating proposals and initiatives to:

• Provide material and legal mechanisms to improve public services along the border.
• Ensure sustainable development and protection of the border’s environment.
• Reduce social inequalities along the border.
• Promote social development in the border region.
• Protect the rights and interests of Mexican border crossers.
• Attend to the social and economic needs of migrants to the northern border from the rest of the country.

The new commission’s formal mission appears to leave ample room for interpretation with regard to its actual function and role in policymaking. Two possible directions for the evolution of the commission include: 1) becoming a sort of federal envoy regarding non-security-related border affairs or 2) providing an active forum for coordinating government agencies, private sector interests, and border communities.

With regard to the second possibility, the past decade has seen increased activity on the U.S. side of the border by interagency government planning groups, cross-sectoral policy forums and advisory bodies, and academic and nonprofit think tanks directed toward resolving regional and transboundary problems. These efforts have helped spur research, dialogue, and governmental initiatives addressing issues of critical importance, and have been accompanied by a general increase in communication between different federal agencies as well as between federal, state, tribal, and local governments. Some initiatives promoting integrated associations of governments have even had considerable success at achieving consensus and intergovernmental cooperation on border-related concerns. Still, though there is increasing awareness on both sides of the border that cooperation is the key to resolving mutual problems, until now, there has been a lack of comparable initiatives on the Mexican side of the border.

Yet despite CAFN’s promise, a high degree of ambiguity with regard to its role, functioning, and influence on policy also hints at a troubling lack of substance behind the initiative. Although the CAFN makes rhetorical appeals to such noble objectives as sustainable development and social development, it is fairly clear that the commission itself will neither have the decisionmaking capacity nor the resources to realize these goals for the border on its own. Thus, unless careful steps are taken to develop firm policy prescriptions through interagency and intergovernmental collaboration, Ruffo and the CAFN may ultimately serve as little more than a direct link to Mexico City on border affairs.

This, in itself, would not be entirely insignificant. As noted above, Mexico’s political system has historically been quite centralized, with all roads leading to Mexico City and with very few direct efforts to deal with the pressing issues facing the peripheral provinces. The fact that Fox has institutionalized his willingness to keep an open ear to the problems of the border region represents a substantial change on this front.

In the end, the direction of the new commission probably depends on two factors: Ernesto Ruffo’s own personal style of management and organization, and the availability of other high-level officials to intensively participate in coordinated deliberative efforts addressing border issues. So far, the outlook for these two factors suggests that the tendency will be toward a more streamlined approach, with Ruffo acting as the federal government’s border liaison rather than developing a broad-based body for dialogue and collaboration.

Anatomy of a Border Czar

Fox’s appointment of Ernesto Ruffo Appel as head of the CAFN makes sense. As the first opposition governor in modern Mexican history (PAN, Baja California, 1989-1995), Ruffo is practically a household name for many Mexicans. His 1989 electoral victory paved the way for other PAN gains in Baja and elsewhere during the 1990s, which eventually helped set the stage for last year’s historic presidential election. First as mayor of the seaside city of Ensenada and later as governor, Ruffo championed the causes of democratization, fiscal decentralization, and local autonomy.

Like Mexico’s new president, Ruffo was one of many businessmen who became involved in politics in reaction to economic mismanagement by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—particularly in the wake of the peso devaluation and bank nationalizations of the early 1980s. Young professionals like Ruffo breathed new life into the National Action Party (PAN), which had languished in semianonymity for forty years under PRI hegemony. In 1986, partly thanks to PRI divisions and disaffected voters, Ruffo ran for and won the mayorship of Ensenada, marking the PAN’s first officially recognized victory in Baja. As mayor, Ruffo suffered harassment by the state government, which delayed or denied fiscal transfers, and even encouraged municipal government employees to go on strike. Ironically, such abuses actually helped catapult him into the governorship. Ruffo’s conflicts with the state government generated high levels of public sympathy for the PAN mayor, which snowballed into statewide “Ruffomania” when he launched his candidacy for governor. In 1989, with the recognition of his victory by President Carlos Salinas, Ruffo became the first opposition governor since the rise of the PRI.

During his six-year term as governor, Ruffo revamped public administration and instigated major improvements in infrastructure and public services in Baja California. Moreover, in a system where PRI governors traditionally cowered before Mexico’s all-powerful president, Ruffo instead pressured Mexico City for a more equitable distribution of federal revenue to state governments. He also promoted increases in self-generated revenue for Baja California’s state and municipal governments, partly through anticorruption measures, administrative reforms, and improved tax collection. Finally, within the state, Ruffo encouraged greater decentralization in certain aspects of city planning and services, including regulation of construction and housing developments, transit and transport, and water and drainage services.

On the flip side of the coin, Ruffo struggled without much success with the difficult challenges of border crime. During much of his administration, Baja California experienced a troubling crime wave, and, like prior PRI governments, the Ruffo administration was weakened by internal corruption. In 1994, for example, a state attorney general stepped down amid charges that Baja officials were protecting members of the Arellano Felix cartel.

After his term as governor, Ruffo ran for the PAN’s national leadership. But after a defeat by the party’s more traditional, ideological wing, he withdrew from the political arena and started offering consulting services to investors in Baja California and throughout Mexico.

When given the opportunity to support Fox’s presidential campaign, Ruffo suited up to become head of the Amigos de Fox organization in Baja California. His selection to head the CAFN is a natural choice and is one of only a few high-level political links to the PAN in Fox’s administration. Ruffo’s experiences in government have made him well aware of the need for binational collaboration in dealing with the border’s many challenges. As a frequent participant in regional and binational forums in the San Diego-Tijuana region, Ruffo has first-hand experience collaborating on a variety of complicated issues in one of the most populous, heavily trafficked, and economically diverse regions on the border.

Numerous Challenges Await New Border Commission

Despite inequalities and some serious quality-of-life issues, economic growth rates, employment rates, levels of education, and average standards of living along the border are among the highest in Mexico. Yet over the past decade, the region’s governments, businesses, and local communities have struggled to deal with the many problems sparked by the border’s industrial boom. The list of challenges is extensive: steady population increases, continuous inflows of poor and uneducated migrants from southern and central Mexico, unbridled industrialization, unprotected natural resources, haphazard planning, inadequate physical infrastructure, meager government services, inadequate public and private finance mechanisms, and intractable problems of narco-related corruption and violence.

Key challenges facing the new commission include:

Deepening development. Much of the border’s growth has come via the maquiladora program, which allows manufacturing plants to import and assemble foreign-made components for export. Fox and Ruffo hope to promote actual nonimported manufacturing and high-tech industries in the border zone while providing incentives for businesses to locate low-tech assembly plants to less-developed areas in central and southern Mexico. In short, their goal is to create better jobs and a better quality of life by moving the border to a higher stage of industrial development.

This strategy is not entirely new or misdirected. Except in the northeastern borderlands—where automotive-related production has been strong—the electronics subsector has accounted for the most significant growth among maquilas in recent years. Still, the shift in the makeup of the industry hasn’t necessarily implied significant improvements in wages for workers or higher rates of skills transfer. Indeed, industry promoters argue that growth of the so-called second-generation maquiladoras remains dependent largely on low wages.

Moreover, it is not clear how the new government will provide the necessary supporting infrastructure and educated work force to meet its increased expectations. It would take years to match the potential of Guadalajara—Mexico’s “Silicon Valley”—which benefits from a highly educated population, several universities and technological institutes, and a critical mass of established high-tech industries. At best, the CAFN will serve as a promoter for the border region but will not have the resources or decisionmaking authority to achieve larger development-related goals. The big question, of course, is how well CAFN will actually manage balancing development objectives with sustainability goals.

Managing population growth. How can you provide quality water, housing, sewage treatment, and education on a shoestring budget for a population that grows at a rate of over 5% a year? For most Mexican state and local governments along the border, the answer is simple: you can’t. Though official population estimates are highly unreliable due to constant flows of migration from poorer regions of Mexico, there is universal agreement that the metropolitan centers along the border are experiencing a population explosion. The region’s rapid demographic growth puts a tremendous strain on available resources, infrastructure, and public services. Access to decent, affordable housing is a critical problem, given the lack of credit and financing mechanisms and the difficulty of enforcing zoning regulations. Meanwhile, providing other essential services—like sewage and waste disposal, education, and electric power—remains extremely problematic, especially in the ever-expanding shantytowns that are home to much of the border’s low-paid work force.

Fox has proposed expanding the role of NAFTA institutions—particularly the North American Development Bank (NADB), created to assist local governments with environmental infrastructure projects—to address these issues, and recently the bank decided to begin looking at some of these new priority areas. However, given the inadequate credit worthiness and scant loan seeking experience of local and regional public entities in Mexico, the NADB has had difficulty finding eligible projects—a problem it’s not certain the expanded mandate will resolve.

The CAFN will have its hands full as it attempts to coordinate multiple agencies and different levels of government in dealing with growth-related problems. At the very least, Ruffo and his commission might help restructure public financing in Mexico, so that local governments can better meet priority needs.

Developing and protecting scarce resources. Economic interdependence along the border has led to shared problems regarding environmental management and sustainability. Growth patterns of low-density sprawl on both sides of the line contribute to a heavy dependence on automobile transportation, which complicates environmental problems and quality-of-life issues such as air quality and traffic congestion. The Mexican side suffers from additional problems, such as weak regulation of hazardous industrial waste, inadequate treatment of sewage waste, and the proliferation of unplanned communities. The border region also faces severe problems of water supply and quality, both of which are sure to worsen as communities in the southwestern U.S. scramble to redirect and control flows of the precious liquid to meet their own needs.

Mexico’s new border commission has an explicit mission to promote sustainable development to better manage the increasing human impact on the region’s environment. Thus, the CAFN may help to address environmental problems by acting preemptively to foster greater coordination in planning the region’s transportation infrastructure, land use, energy use, water treatment, and air quality control. Still, the commission’s mission seems to be primarily an economic one, and references to environmental protection may prove to be mere rhetoric. As a first step, the CAFN could demonstrate a credible commitment to its green agenda by bringing interested environmental groups on both sides of the border to the table to foster policy recommendations and deliberation.

Reducing social inequality. The benefits of economic growth in Mexico’s borderlands have failed to materialize for many of the region’s inhabitants. According to Fox, this is due in part to the continual flows of migrants from the poorest regions of the country who put a drag on wages and living conditions in northern states and prevent them from reaching their potential. The president has pledged that the CAFN will work to promote equitable growth in the border region, saying that Mexico’s North should be a model, not a magnet, for the rest of the country. Though low wages and poor living conditions may, unfortunately, be precisely the factors that facilitate border economic growth rates, Fox’s stated concern for equity issues speaks to one of the most important and difficult challenges of embracing the global economy.

The CAFN’s efforts could be complemented by Fox’s Program for Regional Development (Programa de Desarrollo Regional), which he says will invest in Mexico’s underdeveloped center, south, and southeast to provide the economic development necessary to reduce the northbound migration of people in search of better opportunities. Nonetheless, this goal clearly presents one of the most difficult hurdles for the border region and the new commission.

Protecting migrants on both sides of the border. The number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States is estimated at over 20 million persons, and represents about two-thirds of the U.S. latino population. An estimated 1.5 million Mexicans are arrested annually for attempting to cross the border without documentation. Hundreds die in the process, as they are pushed to ever-greater extremes to avoid capture by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) or harassment by vigilante groups, and as they place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous human smugglers.

Such migrants make important contributions to the Mexican economy by sending billions of dollars each year back to their families. Fox himself is politically indebted to Mexicans abroad, many of whom supported his presidential campaign by contributing money, by urging relatives back home to vote for him, or by travelling back to Mexico to vote for him in the July 2000 elections.

Eventually, Fox hopes to stem the exodus to the U.S. by providing all Mexicans with greater employment opportunities, better wages, and a higher quality of life in Mexico. Meanwhile, Fox has said that the new commission will work actively to advocate for the rights of Mexicans travelling to and working in the United States. What the CAFN can do that will be different from past efforts, however, remains to be seen.

Working with northern neighbors. The border region faces problems that cross both political and jurisdictional boundaries with ease, and that affect numerous policy domains—such as the environment, transportation infrastructure, health services, and the economy. Collaboration with U.S. officials will be critical to addressing many of the new commission’s challenges. The recent meeting between presidents Fox and Bush seemed to set a positive tone for future collaboration. Despite Bush’s simultaneous use of big-stick diplomacy against Iraq, the two nations signaled a willingness to negotiate as equal partners on issues of shared strategic interest, such as addressing migration, establishing a cross-border energy market, bolstering antinarcotics efforts, and expanding the terms of trade under NAFTA. For the CAFN, the challenge will be to foster collaborations at the regional and local level that move beyond mere good faith efforts, as admirable as these are, and aim at real, measurable results.

Facilitating cross-border synergy. The artificial barriers created by the U.S.-Mexico border region seem anachronistic in today’s globalized age. Government officials and agencies on both sides of the border are limited in the extent to which they can cooperate with their neighbors to remove those impediments because of traditionally centralized frameworks for decisionmaking. For example, federal control of customs and immigration means that local communities are not empowered to reduce border-related inefficiencies that prevent stronger economic linkages between U.S. and Mexican communities. Though the border region could ultimately benefit from the creation of a fully empowered, joint decisionmaking body for handling such problems, the creation of the CAFN may help to provide some coordination of policy on the Mexican side. The CAFN may thus serve as a useful point of contact for the multiple agencies and governmental associations in U.S. border states.

Crime is the most obvious policy area omitted from the CAFN’s ample agenda. In late December, the newly inaugurated President Fox visited key northern states and outlined his priorities for the region, with particular emphasis on security and crime prevention. Actually, recent opinion polls indicate that crime and violence are less of a concern along the border than in other parts of Mexico (particularly in the large metropolitan areas of Mexico City and Guadalajara). Still, Fox’s emphasis on security plays well in the region, which in recent years has been plagued by the murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez and has experienced extreme but targeted acts of violence related to migrant smuggling and narcotrafficking. Ostensibly, keeping intractable problems such as narcocorruption and violence off the CAFN’s plate should enable the commission to focus on planning for economic prosperity.

The real key to the CAFN’s success will lie in the role it takes in promoting deliberation, collaboration, and concerted efforts to resolve problems affecting both sides of the border. At the very least, the formation of the new commission acknowledges the importance of Mexico’s industrialized North, and its ties to the United States. Ruffo and the CAFN can potentially meet the federal government’s goal of strengthening the border economy while providing border governments greater access to policymaking in Mexico City. One hopes that, over time, the new commission will evolve into a forum for dialogue and a unifying force across different policy jurisdictions, multiple levels of government, diverse business interests, and heterogeneous communities.

David A. Shirk teaches in the Departamento Académico de Ciencia Política at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. He has written extensively about politics, economy, and public policy in Mexico and the border region, and has analyzed the organizational development of the National Action Party (PAN). Shirk has authored chapters on the PAN in edited volumes by Wayne Cornelius (1999), Kevin Middlebrook (forthcoming), and Victor Espinoza (forthcoming) and has also produced briefing papers on border affairs for the San Diego Dialogue. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Published by the Interhemispheric Resource Center's Americas Program. All rights reserved.

Recommended citation: "Mexico's New Border Commission: A First Look," Americas Program Analysis (Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, April 2001).

Web location: http://www.americaspolicy.org/briefs/2001/bl77.html