MEXICO CITY — President Obama, seeking to send a strong signal that he is committed to stopping the rising tide of cross-border drug violence, will announce on Thursday that he is pressing the Senate to ratify a decade-old arms treaty intended to curb the flow of guns and ammunition to drug cartels, a senior administration official said.
Mr. Obama, on his first trip to Latin America as president, landed in Mexico City on Thursday afternoon. His agenda will include the economy, immigration and a trade-related dispute between the two countries over whether Mexican trucks can travel American roads, but the dominating issue is drug violence.
The treaty was negotiated by the Organization of American States and signed by former President Bill Clinton, but was never ratified by the Congress. In announcing his support for it, Mr. Obama is seeking to strengthen the efforts of Mexico President Felipe Calderón, who has made fighting drug cartels a centerpiece of his domestic policy. “The president felt it was important to push now for the ratification of the treaty because the question of illegal arms trafficking is of great concern,” the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Mr. Obama had not yet made the announcement. “The president believes that taking the necessary steps to ratify conveys our commitment to addressing this challenge.”
The treaty, which went into effect in 1998 after two dozen other nations ratified it, seeks to crack down on illicit firearms by, among other things, establishing a system for the import, export and transfer of firearms, and by fostering cooperation between law enforcement agencies investigating illegal trafficking. The official said Mr. Obama would announce his backing of the treaty after meeting with Mr. Calderón. News of the pending announcement first appeared on The Washington Post Web site.
It remained unclear what type of reception the treaty would now receive in Washington, analysts said. Previously, the treaty did not face any enormous opposition in the Senate — where a two-thirds vote is required for ratification — but rather seemed to languish, according to Peter DeShazo, a former senior State Department official. At the time, relations with Mexico revolved more around the issue of immigration, whereas the drug war has now taken center stage.
“It makes good policy sense,” Mr. DeShazo said. “It’s very hard for the United States to call on other countries to cooperate on controlling the flow of illegal arms if we haven’t ratified a major inter-American convention.”
But one senior Democratic official said that despite the president’s urging, it would be difficult to move forward on the long-stalled treaty given the Senate’s already crowded agenda, as well as a continuing Democratic reluctance to engage in a politically charged debate over guns.
Since taking office, Mr. Obama and his aides have been working assiduously to carve out a Mexico policy that talks of “shared responsibility” in combating the drug problem. On Wednesday, the Obama administration announced stiff financial sanctions against members of three more Mexican drug cartels, designating them “kingpins” under a law that allows the American government to seize their assets.
The president is likely to use his visit here to acknowledge that illicit drug consumption by Americans plays a role — an admission that experts predict will go a long way toward building goodwill on this side of the border.
In words that resounded on both sides of the border, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Mexico City last month that America’s “insatiable demand” for illegal drugs fueled the trade and that America “inability” to stop weapons from being smuggled south fed the violence. It is a marked shift in tone from previous administrations.
“For the last 30 years the United States has come down with the big sticks of eradication and helicopters, and the elephant in the room of our own consumption, and the tough proliferation of arms, were just never addressed,” said Julia E. Sweig, director of the Latin America program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think just beginning to talk about those things is going to buy him a lot of space down there.”
The drug violence is so intense here that in December, a Pentagon report warned that Mexico could be on the verge of becoming a failed state. Mr. Calderón dismissed that assertion in an interview with the ABC News program “Nightline” on Wednesday in which he also put some of the blame for Mexico’s problem on gun sales in the United States and demand for drugs there.
Mr. Obama comes here fresh from a much-publicized swing through Europe that put him squarely on the world stage. The Latin America trip, which will include a visit to Trinidad and Tobago, may not be as high profile; for one thing, First Lady Michelle Obama, who added a touch of pizzazz to the Europe trip, stayed back in Washington. But the president has made repairing relations with world leaders a signature of his foreign policy, and the visit is designed to give him a chance to do that in a region with which he is less familiar.
Mr. Obama will spend the night in Mexico before leaving for Port of Spain, Trinidad, to attend a gathering of leaders of Western Hemisphere nations.
Cuba is likely to be high on the agenda there. The White House announced earlier this week that Mr. Obama is lifting longstanding restrictions on travel and remittances to the island, but some Latin American leaders want him to do more.
In Mexico, Mr. Obama hopes to spotlight the historically close ties between the two nations. His visit comes at a difficult time for Mexico; in addition to being racked by drug violence, the nation is reeling from the effects of the worldwide economic downtown. Mexico is a major trading partner of the United States, especially since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and is feeling powerful ripples from the American recession.
The trip comes on the heels of a string of high-profile visits by administration officials. Along with Mrs. Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano have all been to Mexico since Mr. Obama took office. Ms. Napolitano, who is with the president, announced that the administration would move hundreds of federal agents to the 2,000-mile border, and pledged to focus more efforts on stopping the flow of money and weapons from the United States into Mexico.
The president’s visit, though, takes the effort to a new level. That Mr. Obama is visiting the capital is particularly significant, said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a policy organization in Washington. Other leaders have visited Mexican resort communities, but Mr. Selee said Mr. Obama “really wanted to be seen going to the heart of the country, where the people are.”
This will not be Mr. Obama’s first meeting with Mr. Calderón; the two met in Washington shortly before Mr. Obama’s inauguration. Thursday’s visit will no doubt include a discussion of a sore point between their two nations: the refusal by the United States to allow Mexican trucks to travel inside the United States. That kind of truck traffic is supposed to be permitted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, but Congress has long objected, contending Mexican trucks pose a safety hazard — a contention that critics say stems from pressure by the Teamsters’ Union.
A pilot project allowing some Mexican trucks to make cross-border deliveries was recently suspended by Congress. An international arbitrator has ruled in Mexico’s favor, and Mr. Obama has acknowledged that the United States is in violation of its NAFTA obligations.
But whether the issue will be resolved while Mr. Obama is here remains unclear. “I’m not promising an agreement, I’m not suggesting there won’t be an agreement,” Denis McDonough, senior director for strategic communications on the National Security Council, told reporters Tuesday evening, while the president was still in Washington He added: “We’re aggressively working it and when we get an agreement we’ll announce it.”
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