Cleaning Up Mexico

Recent reports from Dan Williams, chief of The Times’ Mexico City bureau, illustrate how much remains to be done to eliminate official corruption in Mexico five years after President Miguel de la Madrid launched his “moral renovation” campaign.

There have been small but significant victories, to be sure. It is now reportedly possible to obtain a driver’s license in Mexico without bribing low-level clerks, for example. That must be considered an improvement even by Mexicans grown weary and cynical over the petty tyrannies of their nation’s bureaucrats and traffic cops. But the showpiece of De la Madrid’s renovacion moral , an effort to prosecute high-level officials suspected of corruption in previous Mexican administrations, is less impressive.

The corruption trial of Arturo Durazo, Mexico City’s police chief under former President Jose Lopez Portillo, drags along slowly because many witnesses who accused him of wrongdoing while he was a fugitive are now retracting their statements and are refusing to testify against him. And it now appears that Jorge Diaz Serrano, who headed the national oil monopoly PEMEX under Lopez Portillo and was convicted of accepting kickbacks on the purchase of oil tankers, may get out of jail within a couple of years on legal technicalities.

This is not to suggest that De la Madrid’s crackdown on corruption was insincere. By most accounts, the prosecutors whom he appointed are hard-working and courageous, and the president himself is widely believed to be a scrupulously honest man. The problem is that corruption is so widespread in the Mexican political system that it is hard to make corruption charges stick. Every dishonest official taints many others around him; they then are reluctant to help lock him up. “It is a government of accomplices,” a Mexican political commentator wrote recently.

Against that background, De la Madrid deserves credit for achieving one thing--making honesty in Mexico’s government an important issue for the first time since the 1950s. De la Madrid will name a successor in the next few months--a privilege accorded an all-powerful president under Mexico’s one-party political system. One minimum qualification should be that the man whom he selects will make moral renovation a continuing theme of the next six-year presidential term.

In the meantime, there is one more case of corruption on which De la Madrid should focus while he is still in office: the trial of notorious drug kingpin Rafael Caro-Quintero. U.S. officials believe that Caro-Quintero masterminded the murder of U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena in Guadalajara in 1985. While he has been in Mexican government custody for several months, Caro-Quintero has yet to be put on trial. Some observers believe that the Mexicans are dragging their feet because they resent the public pressure that the Reagan Administration has put on them to stem drug-trafficking in Mexico.

In fairness, it should be noted that the Mexicans are correct in pointing out that illegal drugs in their country are more a U.S. problem than a Mexican one. Drug-trafficking would not be nearly so profitable for Mexicans if there were not so many consumers in this country willing to buy their products. But men like Caro-Quintero could someday represent a threat to Mexico if their activities, and the corruption that they engender, are not controlled. De la Madrid need look no further than Colombia to see what can happen when drug lords have so much money and power that they can hold a national government and an entire society hostage. De la Madrid must see that Caro-Quintero is brought to justice if for no other reason than to make sure that other drug kingpins get the message that “moral renovation” applies as much to them as to the officials who cooperate with their brutal trade.