Mexico Shaking Hands, Not Fists

By Pico Iyer

When Presidente Carranza, the Mexican President's Boeing 727, took off for Washington last week, the mood among the Mexican Cabinet members inside was decidedly buoyant. True, the last four meetings between Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado and Ronald Reagan had ended with both leaders, who enjoy warm personal relations, agreeing to disagree on most issues. True, since their last meeting in January, the collapse in the price of oil, the major export of Mexico, had pitched the country deeper into its worst economic plight in 50 years. True, the crisis had aggravated pressures on Mexico's northern border and brought tensions between the uneasy neighbors out into the open.

Still, even before last week's specially scheduled get-together between the two Presidents at the White House, Washington had agreed to mend fences by focusing on the bilateral issues that bind the two countries rather than on the problems that set them apart. "The Americans called and virtually asked us what we would like to have happen during the meetings," said a close aide to De la Madrid before the meeting. "We are very encouraged because they have never behaved in this way before."

The Mexican optimism was well founded. After a talk that lasted nearly three hours, Reagan and De la Madrid stepped onto the South Lawn of the White House eager to stress the positive. Applauding the "determined and valiant effort" of the Mexican government and people to reverse their economic misfortunes, Reagan said the "Government of the U.S. is ready to extend a hand whenever and wherever it is necessary." In response, an unusually relaxed De la Madrid extolled "an extraordinary effort to better the atmosphere of our relations." As a small symbol of their neighborly feelings, Reagan and De la Madrid announced the settlement of a six-year-old dispute over tuna-fishing rights.

Yet hardly had the assurances of goodwill been exchanged when another bitterly divisive issue surfaced that helped to explain why U.S. views of Mexico, as shown in the results of a Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman poll taken for TIME, tend to be so critical. One day after the presidential meeting, Washington officials reported that Victor Cortez Jr., 34, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, had been kidnaped in Guadalajara and brutally tortured by Mexican state officials before being released. An incensed Attorney General Edwin Meese responded to the news of the Cortez detention in a television interview by serving notice that the U.S. "is not going to stand for this kind of conduct."

The abduction cast a disturbing shadow over the Administration's announcement earlier that day of "Operation Alliance," an antidrug effort that will cost more than $266 million and is designed to tighten enforcement along the entire 2,000-mile border. Under the new policy, roughly 600 additional U.S. officials with more than $100 million in new equipment will join the border war against drugs. Indeed, said Meese, the effort was the "most widespread interdiction program on our land borders in law- enforcement history." In calling for invigorated efforts to crack down on drugs, President Reagan tactfully acknowledged the Mexican view of the problem by promising to fight consumption within the U.S. as well as production abroad.

De la Madrid remained optimistic and diplomatic throughout his 48-hour stay. On the issue of drugs, the 51-year-old technocrat pledged to keep fighting the illegal trade, while reminding his American listeners that 25,000 Mexican officials are working full time on the issue and that in the past three years, they have destroyed enough drug-growing plantations "to intoxicate a population twice the size of the U.S." He scotched reports that an agreement would be reached entitling U.S. planes to pursue drug traffickers across the border and into Mexico.

On the economic front, the Mexican President took pains to acknowledge Washington's assistance last month in securing for Mexico a $12 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund. The eleventh-hour breakthrough in the negotiations, helped by Treasury Secretary James Baker and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, saved Mexico from defaulting on its nearly $100 billion foreign debt, the largest in Latin America except for Brazil's.

Even when it came to the issue of Central America, the most stubborn bone of contention in previous meetings, De la Madrid tried to strike a tone at once understanding and independent. He conceded that little success had been met by the Contadora Group, in which Mexico joins Colombia, Venezuela and Panama to work for a negotiated settlement of the region's conflicts. But in a pointed criticism of Washington's support of the contras in Nicaragua, he stressed that "violence will not take care of the problems."

For all the supportive words in Washington, there were plenty of reminders in Mexico last week of the country's continuing problems. Just before the Presidents met, the price of gasoline went up, unannounced and overnight, by an average of 36%. The following day Mexican authorities seized almost half a ton of cocaine at the border, their third biggest haul in the country's history. A couple of days later the former chief of the federal judicial police in Guadalajara, Armando Pavon Reyes, was sentenced to four years in prison for having accepted $100,000 in bribes from Rafael Caro Quintero, an arrested drug trafficker.

The increased pace of drug smuggling across the border has intensified strains that have existed ever since the U.S. took over half of Mexico's territory in 1848. These days Mexico is producing roughly a third of all the heroin and marijuana consumed in the U.S. It has become a transshipment point for 30% of the cocaine flown into the U.S. from Colombia and further south. Unless De la Madrid acts soon, Washington fears, official corruption, already widespread, will become even more deeply rooted. "How long does it take for drug dealers to penetrate the government?" asks Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. "It doesn't take a month, but it doesn't take ten years either."

The sensitivity of the issue, as well as the disarray within the Administration on the subject, first came embarrassingly into public view last May during the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearings chaired by Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab began by indicting Mexico for massive official corruption and went on to allege that one provincial governor owned four opium and marijuana ranches. Later, one U.S. official after another described Mexico as if they were reciting the seven deadly sins. That moved Meese to take the extraordinary measure of apologizing to his Mexican counterpart.

At a second hearing three weeks later, John Gavin, who had just stepped down as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, rose to the defense of the slighted governor. Then, however, Gavin went on to reopen old wounds by adding that "at least two governors are up to their elbows in the drug trade." Once again Meese felt obliged to make amends. The Attorney General held a special news conference, broadcast simultaneously in Mexico City and Washington, to assure his Mexican colleagues that their efforts in the war against drugs had been "very extensive and very effective."

Such mixed signals from the U.S. have only compounded long-standing disputes between the two countries. "These sessions," Arizona Governor Bruce Babitt declared at the Helms hearings, "have had a profoundly destructive influence on the mutual relationship at just the time when the greatest care is required." Last week's unusually harmonious White House get-together between De la Madrid and Reagan showed that the two governments are intent on shaking hands instead of fists. But the cruel mistreatment of Cortez in Mexico last week underscored the pervasiveness of drug-related corruption south of the border. It emphasized that handshakes alone are insufficient to unravel the tangle of problems that still separate the distant neighbors.

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington and Laura Lopez traveling with De la Madrid