Why Mexico Is So Angry

It’s not surprising that the Drug Enforcement Administration would pull out all the stops to get the thugs who killed DEA agent Enrique Camarena near Guadalajara in 1985. But the latest indictments in that painful case are sure to put new stress on U.S.-Mexican relations.

The Justice Department revealed this week that a grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted, along with 17 other persons, the former head of Mexico’s equivalent to the FBI, Manuel Ibarra Herrera, and the former director of Interpol in Mexico, Miguel Aldana Ibarra, as accessories to the Camarena killing. This despite the fact that 12 key figures in the case have already been prosecuted and jailed in Mexico. The two former lawmen are the highest-ranking Mexicans to be charged with involvement in the murder--and that ups the ante in the long and often testy standoff between Washington and Mexico City over the Camarena case.

U.S. investigators have never made a secret of the fact that they believe the drug kingpins who murdered Camarena were linked to Mexican police officials. The controversy over a recent television movie that purported--in a fiction format--to document the Camarena killing was only the latest instance of the case’s causing a flap between the two governments. But by actually indicting former top Mexican cops, the U.S. government is putting its suspicions on the record. And handing over suspects as politically well-connected as Ibarra and Aldana may be asking too much of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is about as friendly a president as Washington has dealt with in Mexico for a long time. Surrendering car thieves is one thing; giving up appointees of a former Mexican president is quite another.

So maybe the best that can be hoped for now is that this festering sore in U.S.-Mexico relations does not infect trade relations, environmental issues and other important areas for the two countries. Ever since Salinas, a Harvard graduate, and George Bush, a Texan with close ties to Mexico, became presidents of their respective countries, people like U.S. Ambassador to Mexico John Negroponte have been talking about a “new maturity” in relations between the two nations. The latest development in the Camarena case will test just how mature that relationship really is.