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president on diplomatic affairs as well as providing citizens with information and access to
foreign countries. However, the missions led by the Cancillería are often hampered by the
intervention of other bureaucracies. Indeed, since the economic liberalization process began in
the early 1980s, the Mexican Cancillería has lost control over three issue complexes: economic,
intelligence and security. The negotiation of Mexico’s huge foreign debt relief program and
NAFTA meant that the responsibility for foreign trade policy and international economic affairs
lies with a separate Ministry of Economy and Ministry of International Economics (formerly the
Ministry of Trade and Industry.) This has created serious institutional challenges, not only
because there are competing bureaucracies dealing with compatible issues, struggling for scarce
resources and budgets, but because there is an absolute lack of coordination between offices and
specialized units, leading to contradictory and at times divergent policies. In other words,
functions and responsibilities have been diffused to different agencies, without properly
identifying a principal that will monitor the implementation of policies. Hence, diffused
decision-making processes have created a principal-agent problem, with weak monitoring
techniques, moral hazard (principals cannot observe the behavior of their bureaucratic
subordinates) and adverse selection problems (bureaucratic agents know more than their political
principals do.) (Huber and Shipan 1999) As Andrés Rozental, former deputy Secretary for
Foreign Affairs argues:
Frequent differences arise between trade negotiators and foreign policy
operators which cannot be resolved within a single ministerial structure
and require arbitration form a higher level. The problem is more acute
in the field, where trade offices separate from the embassies have a
tendency to operate in their own, rather than under the overall
supervision of the Foreign Ministry. (Rozental 1999, 137)
A similar pattern of diffusion has occurred in the intelligence sector. In this case, the
implementation of the so-called “new security issues”, such as drug trafficking and border patrol,
have been partially delegated to the Ministry of the Interior and the General Attorney’s office, at
Convention