U.S., Mexico: A Borderline Relationship

The relationship of the United States with Mexico today is unique--and uniquely troubled. In the entire world, there is no border quite like this one, a porous frontier dividing the most economically advanced nation from a developing country, a line between riches and poverty.

That line separates two profoundly different national experiences. We have come to the late 20th Century by very different paths. Our colonial past made us different from the beginning. Our history as independent nations, our language, our religions, our national memories, our legends, our notions of what the world is about--all these are different, the one from the other. The geographic divisions between neighbors in Europe, Africa, Asia and the rest of Latin America are nowhere so sharp; the cultural and linguistic contrasts nowhere as marked as they are between the United States and Mexico.

And the relationship is particularly troubled today--perhaps more vexed than at any other time in the last half-century, since the disputes between the two countries in the 1930s over Mexico’s nationalization of U.S. oil concessions. There is a surface gloss of friendship between President Reagan and President Miguel de la Madrid; there is as well a sturdy rhetorical tradition of mutual regard. But behind these facades there are growing tensions with ominous implications for both nations.

Concern with drugs has exploded in the national consciousness in the United States in recent weeks. And because much of the import traffic finds its way here through Mexico, there is now an open season of Mexico-bashing among drug officials and politicians in this country. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III has gone so far as to link the drug issue with illegal border crossings, in an effort to persuade Congress to move ahead with immigration legislation. He failed, but he added a new dimension to the already bitter debate over immigration policy, and new weight behind those who favor drastic measures to cut back on the flow of people from Mexico.

Much of Mexico’s international debt of more than $100 billion is substantially on the books of American banks. That debt is an albatross around the necks of both countries, inhibiting Mexico’s growth and U.S. exports. Thousands of American jobs have been lost because Mexico can no longer buy here what it needs for its own economic development.

The debt bomb exploded first in Mexico. From there it set off a train of financial disaster for the other countries of Latin America. The $12-billion accord hammered out between Mexico, the commercial banks, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund last Tuesday is only a short bridge to the future, not a final solution. Heroic development efforts will be required by Mexico and its friends abroad for years to come to put the economy back on the tracks. The task will not be easier for the bitterness and anguish that marked the Mexican negotiations in Washington last week. This is one of the most exquisitely delicate and significant moments in modern world financial history; as it has been since 1982, Mexico is at center stage in the drama.

In short, in only a few years, drugs, immigration and economic crisis have each added new tension to a relationship that has been none too easy even in the best of times.

For the United States there is no escaping our tie with Mexico. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, former under secretary of state for political affairs, has made the point vividly. He has suggested that the discordances in U.S.-Mexican affairs will soon be so significant that the secretary of state, who has traditionally had to think about Mexico only rarely, will soon find himself spending half his time on that one nation.

It is impossible to build an Iron Curtain along the Rio Grande; the Soviets may do so in Europe. We are forced to a common search for ways to live together.

Mexican Sen. Hugo Margain and I are now undertaking to co-chair an independent Binational Commission on the Future of U.S.-Mexico Relations, to foster intellectual understanding and public awareness of such issues. With generous funding by the Ford Foundation, the commission, over a two-year period, will address the current nature and future potentials of the relationship--through hearings, interim reports and a final statement--and propose some practical measures for the two countries.

The commission members are an eminent collection of individuals from public and private life in the two countries: Hector Aguilar Camin, Gilberto Borja, Juan Jose Bremer, Fernando Canales Clariond, Ernesto Fernandez Hurtado, Carlos Fuentes, Socorro Diaz and Mario Ojeda on the Mexican side; Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Henry Cisneros, Eagleburger, Roger W. Heyns, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Robert S. McNamara, Charles W. Parry and Glenn E. Watts for the United States. The first hearings of the commission, appropriately enough, will straddle the vexed border at San Diego and Tijuana this week from Thursday through Saturday.

People in this country have a tendency to think that the rest of the world is much the same as the United States--or should be. This facile assumption has had a more pernicious effect in Mexico than almost anywhere else. Mexico is not the United States. It does neither Mexico nor the United States a service to pretend that it is. Our task for the rest of this century will be to learn to comprehend our differences and respect them, to moderate our abrasions and to understand the common necessity of Mexico’s economic modernization. The binational commission is one effort to that end.