Border-wall plan angers Mexico's Calderón

MEXICO CITY — Felipe Calderón on Friday took sides in the battle over immigration, blasting a U.S. congressional plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border while endorsing a U.S. Senate proposal that would offer a route to legal citizenship for millions of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States.

"The solution for migration is not to build walls," he said.

Calderón also called for a joint development fund among Mexico, the United States and Canada that would finance public-works construction in poor areas of Mexico.

"A kilometer of highway in Zacatecas or Michoacan can do more to reduce migration than 10 kilometers of wall in Texas or Arizona," he said.

He also ruled out reopening the agriculture provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994. Instead, he pledged a new government program focused on helping farmers hurt by imported U.S. corn.

Calderón's comments to foreign reporters were his first since the completion Thursday of the official ballot count that showed him the winner by a slim 0.58 percentage point. His leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has promised to challenge the result. Calderón had met with Mexican reporters on Wednesday.

But Calderón appeared as confident in his victory as if he had won the election by a landslide. In addition to criticizing proposals for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, he criticized China for its human-rights record and promised an aggressive foreign policy that would push Mexico into a leadership role in the Western Hemisphere.

He said a ballot-by-ballot recount demanded by López Obrador was unnecessary and predicted that the Federal Electoral Tribunal would quickly validate his win.

He made a point of bolstering his democratic credentials, pointing out that his National Action Party, or PAN, fought for decades to make Mexico democratic when it was ruled for 71 years by the oft-corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

And he questioned his opponent's democratic pedigree, noting that López Obrador's campaign coordinator, Manuel Camacho Solis, held the same job in 1988 for the PRI when it was largely seen as having stolen the presidential election from the founder of López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD.

"Let me remind you that I was fighting for democracy when my political adversaries were fighting against democracy," Calderón said.

Calderón will be only the second Mexican president not affiliated with the PRI since the 1920s. In 2000, the current president, Vicente Fox, also a PAN member, became the first. For the first time, the PAN will also control the largest number of seats in Congress, though not a majority.

But Calderón said he would quickly reach out to small splinter parties and the PRI to build a majority.

Calderón's apparent victory ends the streak of Latin American elections that put left-leaning governments in office. Mexico joins Colombia as the only other Latin nation with a conservative government.