Nationalist Outcry May Put Zedillo Up Against the Wall

WASHINGTON — The current debate over decertifying Mexico for its shaky performance in the drug war boggles the mind and defies common sense. As Congress considers whether or not it will overturn President Bill Clinton’s certification of Mexico, one congressional aide murmured, “it looks like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a corrupt Mexican.” It seems to be an open and shut case, and to return anything other than a guilty verdict would be hypocritical. But the question is not whether Mexico is infested with deep and widespread corruption of its law-enforcement agencies--it clearly is. The question is whether decertifying Mexico would help matters or backfire and make them worse.

How would you feel if you were Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and you took power only to find that you are commander in chief of a force infiltrated by Quislings and collaborators? You pull a string, nothing happens. You press a button, nothing happens. You don’t know who is a friend and who is an enemy in your military and federal police and, worse, you are likely surrounded by more enemies than friends. And, to top it off, the one ally he thought he could rely on blames him, undermining the already drooping morale among loyal troops.

Who is to blame for the mess? The single-party regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has controlled Mexico without accountability for more than 60 years is one culprit, of course. But that is a red herring. Traffickers are equally adept at infiltrating democracies in developing countries. The real issue is what happens when the multibillion-dollar U.S. market for illegal drugs collides with law enforcement in countries whose per-capita incomes are a fraction of our own.

If the United States is going to play the blame game, the whole picture must be taken in. If you were an honest Mexican, you just might be ticked off about the degenerate habits of your rich neighbors. Drug use is going up in the United States. The law-enforcement battle against drugs on America’s mean streets was lost a long time ago. When is the last time you read about the interdiction of a big shipment or the capture of any major capo--American or Mexican--in the United States? By the way, how is the eradication effort going in California?

The media have done their share of fingerprinting. Every year during certification season, when reporters eager for a sexy story link up with disgruntled agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration who are equally eager to vent their frustrations, the innocent and guilty alike get caught in the cross-fire. A rehash of rumors from raw DEA reports leaked to the big U.S newspapers is no substitute for hard intelligence or the sort of heroic police work that, done in secrecy, leads to real evidence and convictions in a court of law. Congress is about to make a very serious policy decision based on news clippings rather than evidence.

What would happen if all of Mexico’s narcotics producers and shippers were halted? Would U.S demand shrivel up and disappear? Probably not. The price of drugs would shoot up and the supply routes would shift elsewhere. In fact, something very much like that happened in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, when the Reagan White House shut down the shipment routes through the Caribbean and Florida. In one of the all-time great examples of unintended consequences, we destabilized a neighbor when trafficking routes moved overland to Mexico.

Since then, Washington has encouraged the Mexican military to occupy ever more strategic posts in law enforcement to fill the vacuum left by corrupt police, hoping that the generals are cleaner than the police chiefs. Generals now control every critical operational post at a time when Mexico is going through a delicate transition to democracy and when the government in Mexico City is not strong.

The question, then, is whether anyone has really thought about the consequences--intended and unintended--of decertifying Mexico. For example:

* Let no one believe that decertification with a national-interest waiver is different from full decertification in terms of the damage done to bilateral relations. Decertification with a waiver would be an asteroid hit to U.S.-Mexico friendship.

* Financial markets would react poorly to a rumble in bilateral relations, undermining the painstaking efforts that Mexico has made to stabilize its currency and strengthen its economy. The Mexican people, who would end up paying the economic price for decertification, should not suffer for the sins of the drug traffickers. The United States helped shore up the Mexican economy out of concern for the well-being of the millions of people next door. Mexico’s social fabric already is badly frayed from its 1995 financial crisis, and Zedillo is struggling to douse the flames of guerrilla and terrorist violence. It is courting social disaster if one of the unanticipated consequences of decertification is a Tequila Effect II that further shreds the incomes of the average working man and pushes Mexico closer to the brink of social collapse.

* Decertification hurts our friends and helps our enemies. Mexico’s historic phobias about the United States, reinforced by centuries of trauma at the hands of foreigners, are being revived just when we thought they were dead. Decertification plays into the hands of our enemies and weakens the fragile political consensus in favor of deepening ties with the United States. A nationalist hysteria is already taking hold in the newspaper headlines of Mexico City, and it will not be long before we see hundreds of thousands demonstrating on the streets against the United States, warming the hearts of the anti-Yankee demagogues.

* Common sense should tell us that trust and cooperation do not prosper in an atmosphere of recrimination. Zedillo’s ability to make the case for a cooperative drug strategy with the United States is being undermined rapidly as the nationalist frenzy grows. He will almost certainly feel that he must get out in front of the nationalist backlash that would accompany decertification, if only to save his own skin at home. That will mean a reduction in drug-cooperation programs with the United States, not an increase. Zedillo’s back is against the wall and there is no telling what may happen in a fit of pique--a cancellation of Clinton’s first historic visit to Mexico is not inconceivable, the expulsion of the DEA, the end of our joint eradication and law enforcement training programs, military-to-military cooperation, the high-level contact group. We may only appreciate just how hard Mexico has been trying to work with us once they decide to go it on their own.

* Doomsday scenarios of political instability cannot be ruled out as the weak hand of Zedillo is further weakened by Washington. Things can get worse in Mexico, and the Zhirinovskys and Lebeds are waiting in the wings to take charge. We should remember that, after the peso crisis, Mexico City was awash in sinister rumors calling for Zedillo’s resignation. Zedillo never was the favorite candidate of the PRI’s traditional political class after the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio. The rumors that Zedillo could be forced out of office were fueled by Mexico’s Constitution, which holds that if a president leaves office after the second year of his term, Congress appoints a successor to serve out the remaining four years. Political hard-liners, fearful that the PRI might lose its majority control in the upcoming July midterm elections, murmur that it may be better to give Zedillo the heave-ho while they still control the Congress. The kind of political transition that Mexico needs is one that emerges out of a peaceful ballot box and leads to democracy, not some accidental implosion precipitated by Washington. Pulling the plug on Zedillo does not guarantee that nice, Yankee-loving democrats will take his place in the abyss. Our spat over drugs could end in a national-security crisis of unimaginable proportions.

* Mexico is only four months away from its midterm elections for Congress, the mayor of Mexico City and five governorships. A move to decertify would unify all of Mexico’s bitterly divided political parties--against the United States. We will be left with precious few friends as the contending parties vie to burnish their nationalist credentials at our expense.

* The ill will that would accompany decertification would contaminate cooperation on every other item on the bilateral agenda, from trade to investment to border management. There is no country in the world with which we have such a dense and detailed relationship in need of daily management.

* We will exchange a domestic scuffle for a foreign-policy disaster. If Mexico is decertified, the press soon will shift from writing stories about allegedly corrupt Mexicans to writing about how the United States went from being respected throughout this hemisphere to being reviled.

Fingerpointing works both ways, and we are all pointing in the wrong direction. The drug traffickers must be laughing themselves all the way to some money-laundering bank while we tear ourselves and the bilateral relationship to pieces. We could not do a better job at helping our enemies in this war if we tried. We cannot afford the risk of inaction or the further weakening of bilateral cooperation, which is exactly what a congressional vote to overturn Clinton’s certification of Mexico would produce. Mexico desperately needs our cooperation to rebuild its hollowed-out institutions. It needs to overcome vestiges of mistrust and misguided nationalism, the product of centuries of trauma at the hands of foreigners, that cramp its conduct against the war against drug traffickers. A U.S. temper tantrum, thrown because Mexican law enforcement is a casualty of our appetite for drugs, does not move us in the right direction. The more spectacular the reports of our neighbor’s failings, the greater the need for level heads. Rome is burning while Washington is fiddling around with whether or not to decertify Mexico. Real solutions anyone?