‘Mexico-Bashing’ Clears the Air : Helms’ Excesses Prod U.S. to Adopt a Stable Bilateral Policy

During May and June, Washington indulged in a particularly intemperate round of “Mexico-bashing.” While the immediate effect was extremely damaging to the bilateral relationship, the vetting of ill feelings on both sides may be a blessing in disguise. For, in the diplomatic rubble, Washington at last seems to see the need for a comprehensive, long-term and evenhanded policy toward our neighbor.

The U.S.-Mexican relationship has been on an erratic but continuously downward spiral since the rupture of the Mexican economy in August, 1982. The antagonism broke into the open on May 13, when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) held the first of four public subcommittee hearings on Mexico. The timing was especially hard for Mexico: The government of President Miguel de la Madrid was looking for $5 million to $7 million in new loans to cover just part of the interest on its $97-billion foreign debt. Popular discontent was widespread as the country, in its fifth year of dire austerity, headed toward potentially troublesome state and local elections.

The Helms hearing, with its allegations of official connivance in drug trafficking, struck Mexico as trial by innuendo. Reaction was swift and heated. Mexico’s ambassador questioned the propriety of congressional hearings into his country’s affairs, and returned home “for consultations.” Leading Mexican newspapers decried a loss of national dignity; editorial writers asked, “Have we no pride?” About 60,000 demonstrators turned out for a march to protest the insult.

In the United States, Mexico’s reaction was considered somewhat overblown. After all, Helms clearly does not represent the majority of views in Congress. And internal developments in Mexico that have immediate repercussions for the United States do seem appropriate for congressional attention.

Mexico’s current high profile has grown apace with its disagreements with the Reagan Administration--over Mexico’s policies toward Central America, the pace and structure of its economic and political liberalization programs, migration, drug traffic, corruption and so on. For the last two years, U.S. policy-makers have grown frustrated and cynical, and Mexico’s popular image here has steadily declined. The Helms hearings made public what many in the Reagan Administration and Congress have been expressing privately for some time, and they underscored the tendency to view problems in the bilateral relationship as residing at the Mexican end.

Public criticism can be an effective tool of U.S. foreign policy, but there is a threshold at which public pressure quickly turns counterproductive. Helms crossed that threshold early on. The Administration felt compelled to embark on some damage control, first by correcting erroneous statements made by one of Helms’ witnesses. Retraction of a drug-trafficking charge against a Mexican governor was a setback for the credibility of U.S. efforts to press Mexico on narcotics and corruption. The lesson, applicable to domestic politics as well as foreign policy, is that public charges should be carefully researched and accompanied by public disclosure of evidence. The gaffe found some “get tough on Mexico” policy-makers suddenly having to defend the country. The result was a public perception of an Administration in disarray, bouncing between brinkmanship and damage control.

The Helms hearings shed light on the dangers of allowing a policy-making process to become fragmented. As issues become increasingly interwoven, with higher stakes, more actors demand a say in policy formulation. As each agency pursues its own interests with regard to Mexico, certain domestic constituent interests may be served, but the body of our national interests is not. Relatively minor actors within the Administration have been able to draw the entire bureaucracy behind them, particularly at moments when there is little enthusiasm for Mexico in policy circles in Washington or in financial circles in New York. As a result, the overall relationship becomes hostage to parochial concerns, and policy-makers become prisoners of the popular imagination, as stirred by sensationalist news reports.

Also, if there is no central coordination of U.S. policy toward Mexico, there is no entity to evaluate problems as they arise, anticipate problems further ahead, assign priorities or regulate the flow of demands that Washington places on the Mexican system. The cumulative effect of these ad hoc pressures is tremendous, and potentially harmful to our long-term interests.

For all the damage done by the Helms hearings, they did generate considerable momentum for the establishment of formal mechanisms favoring the coordination of U.S. policy toward Mexico. Talk of a “special relationship” has resurfaced, and there is less concern expressed about “favoritism” setting precedents that could bedevil U.S. relationships with other developing countries. Immediately the hearings galvanized the moderates. Suddenly it was not quite so fashionable, nor especially smart, to be hard-line on Mexico. There was a barrage of editorials in influential U.S. papers stressing the need to reassess Administration policies and expressing thoughtful concern for the ravaged Mexican economy and polity. Moderates who in the past two years had become censorious about Mexico’s institutional sins--its inequitable distribution of wealth, repression of political dissent, electoral fraud--suddenly were wondering aloud if perhaps the Administration had gone too far in pressuring Mexico.