U.S., Mexico: No Monopolies on Virtue, Vice

The New World--the Americas, our New World, about to celebrate five centuries of existence--was founded on the promise of Utopia, the happy society, the virtuous nation.

When virtue is associated with success, wealth and power, it can easily lead to arrogance and ignorance. We can become experts in virtue--what is good and bad, and ignoramuses in values--the relationship between my reason and that of my opponent. North Americans, especially, love to have reliable villains, white hats and black hats. Sometimes it is too complicated to admit that others may have values just as important as our own, even if, or precisely because, they are different from our own.

This is currently apparent in relations between the United States and my country: Mexico is officially accused of corruption, to a degree that would make us seem to have a corner on that dubious commodity. But Mexico does not have a monopoly on vice, just as the United States does not have a monopoly on virtue.

Mexico is accused, for example, of laxity in suppressing the flow of drugs supplied to the United States. Yet the dozens of Mexican agents killed while combating drug traffic silently deny this. And if the Mexicans are lax, what is to be said of the airstrips in the United States that serve the drug trade, and which no one closes down; of the U.S. banks that launder drug money, and above all, of the fact that if Mexico supplies, it is because the United States demands?

We will not solve this, or indeed any of our international problems, by attributing all vice to one side, and all virtue to the other, by hurling epithets and accusations in an irresponsible manner and by violating the elementary norms of diplomatic concourse.

The United States is the only great power that can secure borders, to the north and to the south. Mexico contributes to the basic security of the United States through this fact. Let not the United States, a country so enamored of the self-fulfilling prophesy, be the unwitting agent of a dramatic loss of stability in Mexico. We would both be victims of such a turn of events.

The tensions on our common border can be solved peacefully: But this requires that motives on both sides not be irreparably separated.

The center of world history is quickly shifting from the North Atlantic, which has reigned supreme since the 15th Century, to the Pacific Rim, where the bulk of international trade and technological advancement now occurs.

To trade and technology, I would like to add a third fundamental factor: culture, the cultural development around the immense Pacific Basin, including the United States and Canada, China and Japan, the islands and archipelagoes of what was once called “the Far East” (but which happens to be our Near West), and Mexico, as the natural bridge toward the Latin American Pacific.

But again, if this extraordinary community is to come into being--and I think it shall become the most active community of the 21st Century--no one nation, no one race, no one philosophy, can impose itself on the others. The very concept of a Pacific Basin community means accepting diversity--extraordinary diversity--of ethnos and ethos, of language, desires, forms, memories, dreams.

This is our challenge, and it begins right here at this frontier we share between California and Mexico, between the United States and Latin America.

We must be capable of proving that we can live together, acknowledging our differences and dealing with them in constructive ways, not through insult and scorn, but rather, through an understanding that our interdependence is a fruit of our independence and that no fruitful cooperation can exist when the weaker nation is consigned to inferior, client or satellite status.

We all want to participate as responsible partners in the rising community of the Pacific Ocean, which, after all, is fueled by extremely old civilizations.

We must set our own houses in order and renew our priorities to bring forth our domestic potential. But we must also rid our relations from house to house, of unwarranted interventions, insults hurled over fences and even of arson, pillage and murder.

The United States refers to Latin America as its own backyard. But for us, Latin America is not a backyard: It is our front lawn, our porch, our living room, our home. Finally, only we know how to order our house so that we can live next to you in mutual respect. Good relations between the United States and Latin America start with good relations between Mexico and the United States.

Mexico represents a healthy challenge to the United States. Mexico permits the United States to see and feel and understand what is different from itself. It reminds North Americans that their strength is based less on uniformity than on homogeneity, tempered and toughened by the presence of the heterogeneous--ethnic and cultural diversity.

And beyond Mexico, Latin America confronts the United States with the responsibility of acting in this hemisphere, in consonance with its internal democratic values. The Soviet Union is an empire within and without. The United States cannot be a democracy within and an empire without, for it then runs the risk of achieving coherence, only by ceasing to be a democracy within.

Mexico and Latin America offer you the opportunity to be a democracy active as a democracy in this hemisphere, and this means respecting the independence, the dignity and the diversity of all Latin American countries, large or small.

A brilliant day or a gloomy night awaits relations between the two protagonists of the history of this hemisphere: the United States and Latin America.

Let us no longer forget our common problems and then exacerbate them, thinking we have solved them by force, then finding out that we have only postponed them before exacerbating once more, in an endless round of desperation.

Let us deal constructively with the host of problems we now face: drug traffic, immigration, trade, war or peace in Central America, the debt burden, the renovation from within.

Every one these issues can be solved through dialogue, diplomacy, common sense, mutual need and the supremacy of the two principles of our common and often dramatic hemispheric coexistence: nonintervention and self-determination.