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Mexican President Felipe Calderón addresses a joint session of the U.S. Congress May 20, 2010

Mexican President Felipe Calderón has been invited to give the commencement address at Stanford University in June, but an editorial in this week’s El Mensajero calls it the “wrong choice.”

El Mensajero editor María Mejía writes that the point of a commencement address is to inspire students, adding that if she were a student, she wouldn’t feel inspired by Calderón.

“I don’t admire his war against drug trafficking,” she writes. “Maybe his motives are legitimate and his intentions are good. But the reality is that it has left a terrible trail of dead bodies. I can’t believe that more than 30,000 dead during his administration due to violence stemming from narcotrafficking is something that could inspire me.”

Miguel Robles, a Mexican-American immigration activist in San Francisco, is calling on Stanford students to protest, reports El Mensajero.

Robles, who directs the Latin American Alliance for the Rights of Immigrants, or ALIADI in Spanish, said he was offended to hear that Calderón would be delivering the graduation speech. He asked how it was possible that Stanford could choose a president who has "generated so much social disorder, so much death."

"I believe the community should protest and I believe that primarily Mexicans who have a social conscience and are studying at Stanford should write a letter of protest," Robles told El Mensajero. "And not just Stanford students, but students from different universities like Berkeley and UCLA, have to write a letter and send it to this committee that made the decision to invite Calderón," in an effort to convince Stanford to choose a different speaker, he said.

Robles said the invitation “is an insult to all the millions of Mexicans who have left the country in the last four years, for all the thousands of people who are suffering terror in the streets, in their families, and is offensive to everyone who has left the country as a result of PAN's [the National Action Party's] economic policies."

The Mexican president has deployed troops to drug trafficking hot spots across Mexico, resulting in an escalation of violence. Since 2006, more than 34,000 people in Mexico have been killed in acts related to drug trafficking. According to figures from the Mexican authorities, in 2010 alone, more than 15,000 people died as a result of the war on drugs, El Mensajero reports.

Calderón was nominated by a group of Stanford students, according to Lisa Lapin, Stanford's assistant vice president for university communications. When asked by El Mensajero about the possibility that the invitation might offend some Mexicans who disagree with Calderón's politics, Lapin reportedly said that Stanford University "doesn't get involved in politics."

Calderón is expected to visit Stanford June 10-12.