Mexico

North American country / Official visit (9 March 2009)

Following an invitation from Felipe Calderón, the presidential couple visited the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country. This first visit by a French Head of State in ten years aimed to re-launch political and economic relations with the world’s 8th-largest trading power, with a backdrop of negotiations over the case of Florence Cassez, a young Frenchwoman sentenced to 60 years’ imprisonment for “kidnapping and possession of weapons” — she continues to claim she is innocent. Lunch with the Mexican president and his wife, visit to the Teotihuacan, the “Birthplace of the Gods” site, former capital of the pre-Colombian empire that sheltered the Zapotec, Mixtec and Maya peoples and the Mayor temple, the site’s impressive pyramid structure, destroyed following the Spanish conquest. Its foundations were dug out in 1978. It was in Mexico, while the French and Mexican presidents signed a series of agreements with French companies and a joint statement marking their “strong convergence” on global warming, that Carla Bruni visited the Casa de la Sal (“The Salt House”), a center for child AIDS victims. Mexico is the second-most affected country in Latin America after Brazil.