What’s that Texas millionaire doing in El Salvador with Hillary Clinton?

UPDATED: 2:10 p.m. June 1 with comment from the State Department (in which the press officer admits he doesn’t know why Cantu’s with Clinton).
UPDATED: 10:10 p.m. June 1 in a related post: The Monitor reaches Cantu by phone and he’s not talking.
When Hillary Clinton attends the inauguration of El Salvador President Mauricio Funes today, she will arrive with an entourage that includes one ambassador, two diplomats, three Congressmen, and Alonzo Cantu.
One of these things is not like the others.
The son of Mexican immigrants, Alonzo Cantu picked grapes as a youth in South Texas, expanded his father’s fledgling construction company, and built himself a political and financial empire. In 2008 he gave more than $90,000 to candidates, mostly Democrats, but he waited until late October to write a check to Barack Obama. His favorite has been Hillary Clinton, and his real clout has been not in the amount he gives, but in the amount he convinces others to give.
In the first nine months of 2007, Obama raised just over $2,000 in South Texas, according to the Washington Post, while Clinton collected $640,000. “Cantu persuaded more than 300 people in Hidalgo County, where the median household income in 2006 was $28,660, to write checks ranging from $500 to $2,300 to the senator from New York,” the Post reported. All told, he raised more than $1 million for Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Cantu has made no secret of his preference for the Clintons–his first national campaign contribution went to Bill’s 1992 campaign–nor of his gratitude to them for NAFTA, which Bill Clinton enacted over the objections of organized labor, and which enriched McAllen Texas, where Cantu develops property and owns interests in Lone Star National Bank and Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.
So what is he doing with the Secretary of State in El Salvador? The State Department has not mentioned his presence on the trip. He has appeared only on a list of members of the delegation released yesterday by the White House. State Department press officer Andy Laine was unable to explain his presence in the delegation.
“I saw that he was listed by the White House as being a member of the delegation. I believe really the only role is to attend the inauguration. I don’t think that there is anything more official than that,” Laine said.
Laine could not explain how Cantu was selected, but he said “it has happened in the past” that private citizens accompany the secretary to events overseas.
Cantu would seem to be an excellent fit for another stop on Clinton’s agenda for the trip: a ministerial meeting of Pathways to Prosperity, a Bush Administration initiative to promote free trade. According to Pathways’ Web site, which is hosted on the servers of Clinton’s own State Department:
Through Pathways, we affirm that trade has been an undeniable source of economic progress for our countries, but we acknowledge that the gains from trade have not been evenly shared and the promises of opportunity remain elusive for too many people in this hemisphere.”
Despite the rhetoric of shared opportunity, Pathways has been unabashedly free market in its orientation, so much so that Clinton won rare praise from the Heritage Foundation just for agreeing to attend the meeting:
Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas: The Market Way Is the Only Way
Last year, the Bush Administration launched a new initiative: Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas (PPA). The PPA marked an attempt to re-energize U.S. government and regional efforts to enlarge a free-trade area in the Western Hemisphere and create positive momentum for open-market policies. It offers a platform for a coalition of willing countries to advance freer trade, open investment markets, effect more efficient and less costly regulation, enhance regional competitiveness, and promote greater economic opportunity.
By agreeing to attend a ministerial meeting for the PPA in El Salvador, Secretary Clinton lends continuity to a key initiative of the previous Administration. Hopefully, follow-up actions will include kindling congressional movement on the free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.
Does that really say “coalition of the willing”? It really does. And perhaps Cantu’s presence in the delegation signals Clinton’s intent to make sure those Pathways lead in a decidedly more Clintonian direction.