The ‘Mature’ Relationship Takes a Bruising : Mexico: The government lost its ‘modern’ face in reacting to the Camarena story on NBC. And for once, Mexicans aren’t all rallying around the flag.

The miniseries mini-crisis in U.S.-Mexican relations has been an exercise in predictability. An American television network broadcast a docudrama about the murder of a U.S. drug agent in Mexico, and the Mexican government disputed its accuracy--to put it mildly.

NBC’s “Drug Wars: The Camarena Story” was about the 1985 kidnaping and murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena in Guadalajara, based on journalist Elaine Shannon’s book “Desperados.” The series was in three parts, each accompanied by an update or explanation, in which the network’s news anchorman, Tom Brokaw, interviewed U.S. officials, journalists and other “experts”; one Mexican, who had been recommended by the government, also was interviewed.

The docudrama depicted widespread corruption and complicity with drug-traffickers within the Mexican government, police and military; it charged that Camarena’s murder was covered up or, more likely, ordered by the Mexican authorities. The postscripts only made things worse, from an official perspective. While some U.S. officials, like DEA director John C. Lawn, praised recent efforts by the Salinas administration in the field of drug-enforcement, the gist of the interviews was that the improvement was only marginal.

The Mexican government responded the way all Mexican regimes have reacted when accused of misdeeds by Americans: with indignation, rebuttal, suspicion and nationalistic outrage. The supposedly “modern” Salinas administration resorted to the same well-oiled, tired and mostly ineffective tactics of its predecessors: finding ulterior motives; accusing NBC, Brokaw and, implicitly at least, the DEA, of intervening in Mexican affairs; denouncing the accusations without actually denying them, and calling for national unity among all Mexicans in the face of U.S. aggression. The official newspaper, TV network and news agency all stated that Camarena, far from being an American hero, had been in collusion with the drug traffickers.

American hypocrisy and double standards have also been predictable. Many sectors of American opinion, from the DEA and Congress to academia and the media, have ceased denouncing Mexico’s Federal Police now that they are more cooperative with U.S. drug efforts and have stopped kidnaping, torturing and murdering Americans. But it seems of no interest to Americans that Mexicans are outraged by their own drug enforcers’ raping Mexican women, assaulting Central American migrants, terrorizing Mexican villages and in general extorting Mexican citizens.

The Salinas administration has been caught in a double bind. Its commitment (to the business sector and investors) to avoid frictions with the United States is unraveling. The Salinas thesis of a “new, mature” Mexican relationship with the United States, based on economic cooperation and devoid of politically motivated tensions, has been badly battered by Bush Administration policy, be it with regard to Panama or drugs. Forced either to appear weak and pro-American, or to once again pick fights with Washington over apparently minor issues, Carlos Salinas de Gortari has taken the latter course, albeit half-heartedly.

Now another problem, domestic and unforeseen, has arisen to confront the year-old Mexican administration. Indeed, this is perhaps the only unpredictable aspect of the whole affair, and it might be the most meaningful one in the long run. For the first time in memory, significant sectors of Mexican society have refused to rally around the government’s flag and support the regime against the United States. To the right and left of the political spectrum’s center--and most significantly in the left-of-center opposition led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas--there has been a clear-cut reluctance to denounce American intervention and take the government’s side.

The Cardenista Party of the Democratic Revolution refused to support a resolution in the Mexican Congress supporting the government. Pablo Gomez, its parliamentary leader, explained his party’s position in surprising terms: “We often criticize the U.S. government, and we would never agree that those criticisms be considered as a hostile act of Mexican interference in domestic U.S. affairs. . . . We’re not convinced that Mexican officials are not in collusion with the drug-traffickers.”

While the right-of-center PAN did back its new-found government-party allies in Congress, its leaders refused to make public statements supporting the government. Intellectuals like El Colegio de Mexico’s Lorenzo Meyer argued that the government’s main vulnerability lay in Mexico’s anti-democratic political system, and that only a truly democratic government could both combat drugs and resist excessive or unacceptable American pressures. Columnists like Miguel Angel Granadas Chapa of La Jornada wrote that Mexico could not defend that which was undefendable--that is to say, the Mexican police. Even ultranationalists like Heberto Castillo underlined the fact that the NBC program was criticizing the Mexican government, not the country or its people--in fact was only saying what everybody in Mexico had known or suspected for years.

Officials in Mexico City and Washington have been engaged in diplomatic damage control and in all likelihood will get the bilateral relationship back on its romantic rails soon enough. But in a sense, the honeymoon is over: The Salinas administration’s hopes of a businesslike, modern, “mature,” depoliticized relationship with the United States foundered on the shores of Panama and in (the NBC version of) the streets of Guadalajara.

It is just another paradox of today’s Mexico that self-styled modernizers resorted to the oldest, most anachronistic of defenses, while so-called old-hat nationalists took advantage of modern attitudes to criticize the government.