Mexico’s Human-Rights Image Taking a Beating : Reform: President Salinas’ economic progress has not been matched by a more open political system--and the whole world is watching.

Growing human-rights violations in Mexico have begun to alter foreign perceptions of the country and its political system. The abuses have touched many sectors of society. Observers and analysts of Mexican society--including this writer--have suddenly become unwilling participants in Mexican politics.

The highly favorable foreign view of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari rested on a credible--yet false--premise. His administration, it was believed, had undertaken a bold economic modernization program that, unfortunately, had not yet been matched by a similar drive to reform the country’s political system. In time, though, politics would open up.

Explanations in the foreign press for this unevenness varied. Some articles attributed it to the inertia common to an authoritarian system undergoing change. Others cited resistance within the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Still others blamed Salinas’ ambition and thirst for power. But whatever the reason for the political-economic imbalance, the consensus abroad was that it would be worked out with time.

In fact, the foreign applause for the Mexican administration’s economic policies was partly blind. If Salinas’ program were generating the expected results--price stability, economic growth, greater competitiveness reflected in rising exports--it should produce the liberalizing effects that successful economic policies bring. Thus the enigma: If, thanks to a widely praised economic program, the economic and social welfare of most Mexicans is improving, there is no reason to keep on fearing democracy. If the economy is working, why not open up the political system and win across-the-board? Why is Salinas stubbornly unwilling to carry out true political reform and banish, once and for all, electoral fraud from Mexico?

Because the economy has not been performing the way it was expected, and thus the awaited political effects have not materialized. Any political opening would pave the way for an electoral debacle for the ruling party. Therefore, there is no true democratization in sight.

The big problem with Salinas’ economic program is that its main justification lies more in the failure of previous policies than in its merits. The program requires huge amounts of external resources that are simply unavailable, a type of entrepreneurial elite that Mexico has never had and something that the Mexican president does not have--time. In the long run, his conservative economic program may work; in the short and medium terms, it doesn’t look like it will.

Not that all is gloom and doom. There is no economic crisis on the horizon. Indeed, the Salinas term is looking more and more like an improved version of his predecessor’s. Instead of the net zero economic growth during the administration of Miguel de la Madrid, the economy is expanding at a rate of 2% to 2.5%, roughly the equivalent of population growth. The Mexican economy can pay its foreign bills, but only keep pace with population increases. Or if it receives a much greater infusion of foreign funding to meet its debt service and trade gap, the economy can grow faster than the population.

In 1989, economic growth barely surpassed that of population growth. This year, it will probably fall behind--not because of error or accident but because of a deliberate cooling of the economy by the Salinas administration. It lacks the hard currency to finance a higher rate of expansion. The foreign trade figures for the first four months of this year were ominous: The trade deficit reached $874 million. At that rate, the yearly gap would be nearly $3 billion.

Meager economic growth and pressures to open up the political system have led to an atmosphere of domestic tension and external one-upmanship. The tension at home stems from continuing electoral fraud: In every vote, the PRI and the government, at all levels, do everything they can to win. They concede defeat only when faced with absolutely no alternative. The consequences: attrition, disenchantment and discredit not only for the government but also for the opposition, particularly the center-left.

The external one-upmanship is equally apparent. As the economy slows down and the influx of foreign funds tapers off, the Salinas administration feels forced to make greater concessions to and advances toward its chief benefactor--the United States. It proposes a free-trade agreement without weighing the consequences of using strategic economic policy instruments to solve short-term cash-flow problems. It pursues increasingly radical, supply-side economic policies that shift the government farther and farther from the political center. It launches an ill-conceived but much-vaunted war on drugs.

Tragically, anti-drug cooperation is one of the factors leading to the deteriorating human-rights situation in Mexico. As U.S. cooperation in obtaining funding becomes more and more decisive, Mexican cooperation in the war on drugs becomes ever more necessary.

In its terrifying report on human rights in Mexico for 1989-90, Americas Watch stated: “Disappearances, murder, torture and other violent abuses of human rights by the security forces have become institutionalized in Mexico . . . This pattern of excessive violence and abuses can only mean either that the Mexican government has adopted a policy that consists in tolerating this behavior, or that it has lost control over its security and law enforcement agencies.”

This is the result of cooperation with the United States at all costs: the emergence of security forces that are out of control because of demands made on them that they cannot fulfill. The Mexican judicial police--corrupt, violent and dramatically poorly trained--cannot be transformed overnight into Elliott Ness’ “Untouchables.”

In the end, the radicalization of the government’s program or the Salinas administration’s extremism has left a vacuum at the center of the political spectrum. Many sectors of the opposition and many independent intellectuals have begun to build an alternative to the government’s program.

This alternative rests on three premises. The first is the true democratization of Mexico in electoral matters and beyond--in labor unions, political parties and associations and, perhaps most of all, in the nation’s perversely controlled mass media.

The second is economic in nature. It involves a broad sum of nuances that, collectively, amount to a substantively different program. The point is not to close the Mexican economy again. Rather, it is, as former Finance Minister Jesus Silva Herzog has said, to open it less, more slowly, more selectively. Nor is the point to suspend payments on Mexico’s still overwhelming foreign debt. Rather, it is to negotiate less hurriedly and with other debtors. And no one wants to conserve an oversized state sector within the economy. But privatization because of ideological reasons or external pressure is not a sensible policy, either.

Then there is Mexico’s dramatic social crisis. Mexican society is only now beginning to grasp the magnitude of the extraordinary “social debt” contracted during the De la Madrid years. With children dying of measles on the streets of Mexico City because of lack of vaccine, with real spending on education nearly halved in a country where half the population is under age 18, the extent of the disaster that Salinas inherited becomes evident. Even today, more than 60% of the federal budget is devoted to servicing the domestic and foreign debt. Net social spending on the poor is barely being maintained. This is why the third leg of an alternative to Salinas’ program is social: It implies finding a remedy and putting an end to this shameful state of affairs.

A more balanced foreign view of Mexico will be better for Mexico. Closing one’s eyes to Mexico’s problems or prematurely celebrating fleeting or incomplete achievement helps no one. Entering the world means peering out over the horizon and being scrutinized from abroad. It’s the price of fame and fortune.