Governor ends trip to Mexico

MONTERREY, MEXICO —  Wrapping up a post-election visit to Mexico, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged national officials Friday to resume selling U.S. spinach, while a Los Angeles lawmaker traveling with him complained that the governor excluded her from promised meetings with Mexican political leaders.

Schwarzenegger visited Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon in Mexico City, urging him to drop a spinach prohibition imposed amid the recent E. coli scare. Calderon said he wasn’t familiar with the spinach issue but would look into it when he takes office in December, according to Schwarzenegger aides.

California exported $388,000 worth of spinach to Mexico last year -- out of a total of $581 million in agricultural products shipped to Mexico.

Schwarzenegger began his two-day trade mission Wednesday night, a day after his reelection victory. He traveled with a delegation of 63 business leaders and a trio of Latino lawmakers.

As the trip wound down, one of the lawmakers, Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles, said she was disappointed that she had not been invited to the governor’s meetings with Calderon and President Vicente Fox.

“We had been informed we would participate in these meetings, so we were all surprised when we ended up standing in the parking lot for hours at Los Pinos” -- the Mexican equivalent of the White House -- Romero said in an interview.

Though no lawmakers were part of the governor’s meetings with Fox and Calderon, Schwarzenegger did invite a Walt Disney executive and a California Chamber of Commerce official to join him in his meeting Thursday morning with Fox.

“I was disappointed that we were excluded from key meetings with Calderon and President Fox,” said Romero, the Senate majority leader. “This is significant to us -- not only as legislators but as Latinos -- at a time when sensitive issues of significance to the Latino community are being discussed.”

Margita Thompson, the governor’s press secretary, said of Romero’s complaint: “It’s too bad Sen. Romero felt that way. The governor enjoyed their time together and felt she was an important part of the delegation.”

In a gesture that Romero believed was a kind of apology, Schwarzenegger escorted her and the two other Latino lawmakers to see the California news media during a stop Friday afternoon at a convention center in this northern city.

In their conversation, the governor and Calderon also addressed illegal immigration, with Schwarzenegger reiterating his message that a border fence needs to be part of an overall solution that includes a guest worker program ensuring a steady supply of labor to U.S. farmers and other employers.

“It’s, like, insane ... not to have been able to accomplish that this year,” Schwarzenegger said of federal officials in Washington.

Part of the governor’s conversation with Calderon was tape-recorded and supplied to California reporters.

The governor chatted with Calderon about Schwarzenegger’s victory in Tuesday’s election. He told Calderon he got 40% of the Latino vote -- an unusually high margin for a GOP candidate. Schwarzenegger said he would have had an even larger total had he not vetoed bills that would have licensed illegal immigrants to drive in California.

The two came out of the building and posed for photos before Mexican photographers, who shouted “abrazo!” -- hug. The men just shook hands.

Schwarzenegger invited Calderon to visit California and gave him a double magnum of California wine and a bronze bear.

Calderon gave the governor a china plate and a coffee-table book of Mexican photography.

Schwarzenegger later flew to Monterrey, a major business center, for a meeting with Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras, governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. The two signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at promoting tourism and trade between the two states. Afterward, they took questions from reporters.

Asked about the Iraq war, Schwarzenegger said he thought frustration over progress in Iraq influenced Tuesday’s election, in which Democrats seized control of both houses of Congress. But he said it would be wrong for the U.S. to withdraw its troops abruptly.

“I don’t think we can change now and go and pull out of Iraq,” he said. “All of us want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible. But you have to get out of there with a winning formula, rather than getting stuck or just pulling out and turning our backs on our friends.”

Later, he looked in on a trade exposition that showcased California’s environmental technology and met privately with business leaders before heading home Friday night.

peter.nicholas@latimes.com