Mexico Hits U.S. on Drug Ties, Immigration

The lower house of the National Congress adopted a resolution that condemns U.S. attacks on Mexican officials for alleged drug ties and criticizes the new U.S. immigration reform bill, officials said Friday.

The Chamber of Deputies, in a resolution passed Thursday, said U.S. allegations that senior Mexican officials were linked to drug trafficking were “slander” and that the new immigration bill will bring “repressive police action.”

The resolution, the latest shot in a war of words that has shaken U.S.-Mexican relations, said the United States is “trying to instrument a new phase in its pressure on Mexico.”

Nine parties are represented in the Chamber of Deputies, although it is dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico’s premier political force since 1929. The chamber approved the resolution unanimously Thursday and released the text Friday.

Earlier this year, Mexico filed a protest with the State Department over charges made by the director of the Customs Service during a Senate hearing that corruption of Mexican officials made it difficult to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States.

A Source of Drugs

Much of the marijuana and heroin that enters the United States each year flows across the Mexican border. President Miguel de la Madrid has called for new measures to combat drug trafficking.

The resolution came after reports in some U.S. newspapers that Defense Minister Juan Arevalo Gardoqui was implicated in the multimillion-dollar drug trade and that De la Madrid’s cousin, Edmundo de la Madrid, was a trafficker.

In February, 1985, U.S. drug agent Enrique S. Camarena was kidnaped and murdered in Mexico, and in August, a Drug Enforcement Administration official was allegedly beaten by Mexican police.