In Visit To Mexico, Vice President Joe Biden Praises ‘Historic' Reforms, Calls For More Trade At Border

As Vice President Joe Biden made his way to Los Pinos, the palace of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, he apparently spotted members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), one of Mexico's largest teachers' unions, as they continued to protest a sweeping series of educational reforms. "I was disappointed when I found out that the 15,000 out there weren't hollering 'Biden, Biden,'" joked the vice president, who later praised the educational reforms and several others which Peña Nieto has on deck as "historic changes" which would allow Mexico to "establish a new role in the 21st century."

Those changes, which aside from education deal with energy and the country's tax structure, among others, seek to expand the influence of Mexico's federal government and create a more unified national identity by standardizing measurements of educational quality, creating more social programs for the poor and allowing foreign oil firms to collaborate with Mexico's state oil company to access the nation's petroleum. On Friday morning in Mexico's Foreign Relations building, where Biden was kicking off the first of planned annual "High-Level Economic Dialogue" meetings between Mexican and US officials, the vice president expressed relief at the prospect. The relationship between the US and Mexico had gone, he said, from being "mostly about security issues - mostly about drugs, mostly about immigration" to more about cooperation on trade. "Finally -- finally -- we have reached the point we should have reached a long time ago, I think ... where we're looking at the relationship as partners, in a wholesome way." He added later, "We have a billion dollars a day in trade. Is there any businessman or woman here who can't rationally picture in 10 years that being $2 billion?"

The meeting comes just weeks after journalist Glenn Greenwald, a recipient of many of the classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, revealed on Brazilian television that the NSA had spied on Peña Nieto in the months before he was elected president - with it left unclear as to whether or not the spying had continued afterward. Shortly after the revelation, President Barack Obama called Peña Nieto and assured him that an investigation into the matter would be carried out. Biden sounded a similarly ameliorative note during his visit, saying, "There is no relationship that we value more, there is no economic relationship that we think holds the most promise and there is no part of the world that has the opportunity to do as much to generate economic growth over the next 20 or 30 years in the hemisphere."

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