The Battle of Toasts

Mexico's LOpez Portillo welcomes Carter with acid

As television cameras recorded the astonishing scene, Jimmy Carter's face alternately froze and flexed involuntarily into a taut grin. Mexico's President Jose LOpez Portillo, a sharp-tongued former law professor, was turning a luncheon toast into an emotional lecture on what he saw as the U.S. practice of viewing its neighbor with a "mixture of interest, disdain and fear." Referring to the highhanded way in which U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger had broken off negotiations to purchase more of Mexico's newly enlarged natural gas supply, LOpez Portillo waxed rhetorical: "Among permanent, not casual neighbors, surprise moves and sudden deceit or abuse are poisonous fruits that sooner or later have a reverse effect. No injustice can prevail without affronting decency and dignity."

Seemingly flustered by the attack, Carter ignored the criticism and gave a rambling response. Trying to be folksy, he slipped into personal irrelevancies. "We both have beautiful and interesting wives," he said. He claimed that he had first started jogging when visiting Mexico City in the 1960s. Then he made an appalling attempt to turn his running habit into a joke. The reason he had raced from the Palace of Fine Arts to his hotel room on that visit, he said, was because "in the midst of the FolklOrico performance, I discovered that I was afflicted with Montezuma's revenge." Instead of laughing, those present tittered nervously or remained in stony silence. Seated beside her husband, Rosalynn Carter blushed and covered her face in embarrassment.

That was the inauspicious start to a three-day trip on which Carter was trying to extend a friendlier hand across the border. His aides were angered at the Mexican President's attack. Scoffed one: "A certain amount of that is, I suppose, permissible for home consumption." Indeed, LOpez Portillo's outspokenness won wide praise in Mexico City. Declared the morning newspaper Novedades: "The President expressed the feelings of all Mexicans in a very accurate way." Out in the streets, several thousand leftist demonstrators shouted anti-Carter slogans and burned Uncle Sam in effigy.

But the two leaders had many serious issues to discuss -from oil prices to migrant labor and drug smuggling -and before one session of the talks formally began, Carter asked for ten minutes alone with LOpez Portillo. The President candidly told his host that it was "counterproductive if we overemphasized our differences, particularly our historical differences, as opposed to our commitment to efforts to resolve them."

Despite the tension at the beginning, both sides characterized the five hours of private talks as friendly, courteous and businesslike. The first bilateral session was held in the Spanish colonial Palacio Nacional, but it was just general and polite. The two Presidents got down to specifics the next day at Los Pinos, Lopez Portillo's official residence. Carter said he was ready to reopen negotiations over natural gas purchases in formal government-to-government bargaining sessions. Said LOpez Portillo: "Let's get on with it." As for buying more oil from Mexico, Carter did not press for a speedup of production, but did express U.S. willingness to increase its purchases whenever Mexico could deliver. "We got past all the recriminations," said a White House aide.

The two Presidents then formally agreed to start negotiations on both natural gas prices and on illegal immigration. The U.S. also signed scientific and technological agreements to help improve housing and crop development in Mexico. In his one excursion into the countryside, Carter visited a model farm (newly stocked and refurbished for the occasion) and joined in a public picnic.

But in a speech he made in Spanish to Mexico's Senate and Chamber of Deputies, Carter acknowledged that the problems between the two neighbors were difficult. Suggesting that the U.S. was not responsible for the high level of poverty in Mexico, he added that the immigration conflict will be eased only when Mexico's standard of living improves. Meanwhile, he said frankly, he intends to enforce U.S. immigration laws "as fairly and humanely as I can." Replying to a complaint from LOpez Portillo that Mexicans working in the U.S. often are mistreated, Carter promised to "protect the basic human rights of all people within the borders of my country."

Carter struck the same note at dinner on the trip's last night. He used his toast for a gentlemanly reply to the Mexican's first-day attack. North Americans, Carter insisted, "are fair and decent in dealing with people of other nations." But, he added pointedly, "it is also difficult to be the neighbor of a nation such as yours, whose new economic power obliges its leaders to make difficult choices and to accept expanded responsibilities."

Protocol demanded that at this reciprocal dinner, given by Carter, his guest would get the last word. LOpez Portillo made the most of it: "You are very right. It is difficult for us to live next to the most powerful country in the world. It must be very difficult for you also to live next to a poor and developing country." There was worse to come. Declared LOpez Portillo: "The most serious issue of our times is the fact that there are men who can buy men and that there are men who have to sell themselves. And this happens very frequently with our poor people who go to the United States."

Having indulged in these flourishes, LOpez Portillo turned milder at a concluding press conference. The Mexican leader, who is actually relatively conservative, admitted that "the cause of the problem is our own," and added that he was "deeply satisfied with the results of this meeting." It was hard to believe Jimmy Carter could qed

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