Bordering On Friends

By ANDREA DABROWSKI Jorge G. Castaneda

Q. The title of your new book is Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico. Just what are those limits?

A. The limits are the resistance in each country to integration between the two. You have more people going from Mexico to the U.S., and you get a Simpson-Rodino ((immigration)) law. You have more drugs going to the U.S., and you get ditches. The limits are the fears and the objective interests in both countries against closer ties with each other. They exist on both sides.

Q. The perception in Mexico is that the U.S. thinks about Mexico for short periods of time and then forgets it. But doesn't that work both ways?

A. Mexico can never afford to forget that the U.S. exists. It can never stop thinking for a single moment that the U.S. is there, on the border, next door. This is an inevitable consequence of the tremendous asymmetry that exists between Mexico and the U.S. We have to think obsessively, constantly, recurrently about the U.S. The U.S. only thinks about us every now and then, and most of the time for the wrong reasons.

Q. Is the U.S. sufficiently aware of the problems Mexico is facing?

A. I think the U.S. continues to take Mexico for granted, although less so than before. The people with decision-making powers in the U.S. still do not understand the gravity of the problems Mexico is facing. I do not think there is a real appreciation in the U.S. yet for what the tremendous drop in the standard of living of the Mexican people really means, what the drop in government spending on education, on health, on infrastructure really means for the country and the people. I do not think the U.S. understands how close Mexico is to the brink.

Q. Do Americans then have reason to view Mexico as a threat to their national security?

A. It's conceivable that Mexico could be a threat to the U.S. -- a Mexico in chaos, a Mexico where the basic institutions that have governed the country in the past 60 years begin to unravel, where you have a situation like the one you had in Venezuela last February ((riots broke out in response to austerity measures)). I don't think this is likely. But it's not something you can discard entirely. There is a limit to how much people can take. That limit is being approached now, too quickly. I know for a fact, and I think every Mexican knows, that an explosion in Mexico would make the Caracas riots look like child's play.

Q. What is the likely outcome for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's economic restructuring?

A. The bottom line of the government's economic policies is that their benefits have not yet appeared but their costs are already with us. A lot is said about how public spending and the state's role in the economy have been reduced in Mexico. The problem is that most of the adjustment has come in cutbacks in spending on education, on health, on infrastructure. Mexico in 1982 was spending 5.5% of gross domestic product on education. Today it's spending less than 3%. In 1982 Mexico spent 2.5% of GDP on health; today it's spending less than 1.5%. In 1982 an elementary school teacher -- in a country where half the population is under 15 and where there are 25 million children in school -- made six times the minimum wage. Today he makes 1 1/2 times the minimum wage. In 1982 a top-level university professor made about $2,000 a month; today that same professor makes about $500 a month. That's part of the bottom line.

Another part is the country's infrastructure. Ten years ago, Mexico had highways, phones, dams, an electrical grid, of perhaps the highest level in the so-called Third World. Today Mexico City's phones are possibly the worst in Latin America. The highways are falling apart, the electrical grid has not been maintained, oil installations are in poor shape, and oil production is now dropping.

Between now and the year 2000, we have to create a million jobs a year just . to accommodate the new entries into the labor market. For that to happen the economy has to grow at 4% or 5% a year. It's not happening. And those millions of people who do not find jobs are going to have one of two choices: being unemployed in the streets or going to the U.S. There is no other choice.

Q. Is Salinas in control?

A. He is in control. Through a series of spectacular coups, like the jailing of the oilworkers' leader and the owner of one of the most important brokerage houses in Mexico, he has clearly restored the image of strength and forcefulness of the Mexican presidency. But the main consideration for the working of the economy today is the foreign debt situation, and that's not in his hands.

Q. Will this latest debt deal bring any relief?

A. It is doubtful that the new debt agreement will bring either economic growth or an end to the danger of social conflict in Mexico. There is simply not enough money in it. If most of Mexico's creditor banks go the road of debt reduction, the resources that will be available will be very small. If most banks decide to provide new money, then there will be greater resources available but at the cost of piling new debt onto old debt. The new agreement is not a good one, but it is perhaps the best Mexico could have got. Under adverse circumstances, I think we'll have to come back to the negotiating table very soon.

Q. Salinas has certainly been greeted favorably in the U.S.

A. I think there are two reasons. The first is that traditionally Mexican Presidents have a honeymoon not only with Mexicans but also with U.S. public opinion. If one looks back at what the U.S. press said about President Miguel de la Madrid, or even about Lopez Portillo in the mid-'70s, one can see there was a true love affair going on, not terribly different from the one we are seeing today. This, of course, runs out of steam quickly. Frankly, I never believed Mexico would become a top priority for the U.S. This "We're going to pay a lot of attention to our neighbors to the south" is a lot of blah-blah. Every American President says it when he takes office and forgets it two weeks later.

Second, Salinas clearly is doing the sort of things that are viewed in the U.S. as the ones that are best for Mexico's interests and best for U.S. interests in Mexico. The question is whether the policies he is following are more in consonance with Mexico's interests or with American interests in Mexico. I'm sure that if he has to make the choice, he will eventually come down on the side of Mexico's interests.

Q. Does Salinas really intend to open the political system in Mexico?

A. I think Carlos Salinas personally wanted political reform in Mexico. Certainly up until the elections of July 6 last year, Salinas was profoundly convinced that he needed to open up the Mexican political system, clean up the electoral process and, in general, create a political opening in the country. Unfortunately, when faced with the choice of opening up the system and perhaps losing, or not opening it up and having the kind of electoral victory that would allow him to govern in the traditional fashion, he chose the second.

This year the ruling party lost two elections, in Baja California and Michoacan. It couldn't afford to recognize both defeats, and Salinas is thus facing the same dilemma his predecessors faced and the same dilemma he faced last year in his own election. In a clean election the Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) loses. The only way the P.R.I. can win is the old-fashioned way: by tampering. I think the prospects for something more than selective democracy in Mexico are dim as of now. We will continue to see what we've seen in the past seven months, the government and the P.R.I. tampering as much as they can and conceding only what they absolutely have to, nothing more. The problem with electoral fraud, even in its more modern version, is that it does enormous damage to the country and to its dignity. It becomes increasingly frustrating for Mexicans to face the fact that it is impossible to change other than through elections, but that through elections no change is really possible.

Q. Does the rise of a stronger leftist opposition in Mexico, led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, pose any threat to the U.S.?

A. I'm not sure I would agree with that adjective "leftist" attached to Cardenas or to what he represents in Mexico. I think "leftist" has a connotation in the U.S.: Communism, or anti-Americanism, which is not applicable to Cardenas. I would call Cardenas a left-of-center nationalist alternative to the present system. Does he represent a threat to the U.S.? I don't think so. I think most people in Mexico understand, as they have understood for years now, beginning with Cardenas' father ((President Lazaro Cardenas)) 50 years ago, that Mexico has to get along with the U.S. No government of Mexico can afford to fight endlessly, constantly, with the U.S. over every issue. Mexico cannot have an anti-American government.

Q. Does Cardenas' movement have a future?

A. It's clear that more democracy in Mexico does not mean a Mexico moving to the right but a Mexico moving to the left. There is a deep nationalism and a sense of social justice among Mexican people that Cardenas has identified with in a very mystical and mysterious way. He has become a symbol in a nation that has the most flagrant inequalities and injustices of any nation in Latin America, if not in the entire Third World. We are not the poorest country, but we are the most unequal. Cardenas has become a symbol of the desire for equality in Mexico, or less inequality, and a symbol of the defense of the nation in a country where this nationalism question has always been terribly important. If he runs, he will be a formidable candidate for the presidency in 1994: he will continue to have the quasi-religious attachment that he has with the Mexican people.

Q. Why were Mexicans angry about the ditch that the U.S. has said it will build on the border near San Diego? Doesn't the U.S. have the right to protect its borders against illegal immigrants?

A. Mexico's attitude toward the entire phenomenon of undocumented migration to the U.S. is very contradictory. Whatever the U.S. does is unacceptable and useless. Those are contradictory statements, but we have an ambivalent and contradictory attitude. There is an obvious element of humiliation in the fact that we are not able to provide jobs for our own people. The only way many Mexicans can find a decent job is to go to the U.S. On the other hand, it's a fact that we feel we have a certain right to do that, because nobody is forcing American employers to give Mexican workers a job, and a lot of Mexican immigrants do jobs that Americans would not do, at a lower wage and under conditions that Americans would not accept.

The reaction toward the ditch is simply one more episode in this very contradictory and ambivalent attitude. Every reasonable Mexican knows that the U.S. can dig as many ditches as it wants and that it has the right to do so. On the other hand, there is an aggressive, arrogant touch to the idea of a ditch. A ditch has water; it has crocodiles, piranhas, or sharks. The idea of a ditch to stop emigration from Mexico is one that shakes Mexicans because it reminds us that so many of our people have to go, and it shows how vulnerable we are to a closing off of the border. But it ignores the fact that there is as much of a demand for Mexican labor in the U.S. as there is a supply of it in Mexico.

There was an uproar in Mexico over the appointment of John Dimitri Negroponte as U.S. Ambassador. What is it that Mexicans don't like about him?

A. They don't like his role in Central America, his proconsular, interventionist, pro-contra role as Ambassador in Honduras. They don't like his Viet Nam background and his national security, intelligence-community background. Nonetheless, it is possible that he'll become the first U.S. ambassador in many years to establish channels of communication with all sectors of the political spectrum, in which case he might even become a good ambassador.

Q. Americans are often angered by what appears to be Mexican complacency in combatting the flow of illegal drugs across the border. How do Mexicans view the U.S. drug problem?

A. The difference in perception stems from one very basic fact: Mexico does not have a drug-addiction problem. Some drugs have been consumed in Mexico for many years -- marijuana has been smoked in Mexican army barracks for well over a century now -- but there is no major drug problem here in terms of Mexican youth, in terms of addiction and consumption. There is a drug-production problem and a drug-trafficking problem, but addiction is not affecting broad sectors of Mexican society, as of today. So inevitably that leads everyone in Mexico to view the problem of drugs as less important, and less directly relevant to Mexico, than the way the U.S. perceives the problem. Whether this is fair or not fair, nice or not nice, is irrelevant. To a certain extent this perception is changing in certain parts of the country, not because there is a drug-addiction problem emerging but because there is a level of criminality associated with drug trafficking that is reaching alarming proportions.

Q. What does Mexico want from the U.S.?

A. There was a real hope on the part of the Salinas administration that the new White House team would very quickly have debt, drug and trade policies in place and that all the decisions regarding Mexico would be made rationally and coherently, that Mexico would have somebody to deal with in the U.S. who is both in charge and thoroughly knowledgeable on the subject. There is a tendency in Mexico to project its own centralized, omnipotent presidency onto the U.S. side, where things do not work that way.

Q. Are Mexico-U.S. relations at a high or low point?

A. A critical point. Never has the U.S. role in Mexico been so important to Mexico. Many of the solutions to Mexico's problems lie in Washington. This is particularly the case with regard to debt. The U.S. has had the luxury over the past 60 years, as a superpower, of not having to worry about its borders, either north or south. In the case of Mexico that is no longer true -- not because the Soviet Union is establishing a beachhead in Veracruz but because in order to maintain the type of relationship with Mexico that the U.S. has had over the past 60 years, the U.S. is going to have to do much more. The U.S. is going to have to pay a higher price in every sense of the word: more money, more attention, more time, more effort for the luxury of having a stable and friendly neighbor.