Baker, Gigantic U.S. Team Begin Visit to Mexico

Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrived in Mexico on Sunday, hailing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari for leading “a historic revolution” and declaring that U.S.-Mexican relations “have never been closer or better.”

Baker led a gigantic U.S. delegation of five Cabinet-level officials and more than 100 aides for talks with their Mexican counterparts on subjects including a proposed free-trade agreement, anti-drug efforts and relations with Cuba.

The meeting, an annual event that once could have been counted on to produce fireworks, has turned instead into a celebration of U.S.-Mexican cooperation. The major reason has been the policies of Salinas, who has enthusiastically embraced U.S.-style economic privatization and replaced Mexico’s historic suspicion of the United States with a deliberate drive for warm relations.

Baker reflected the Bush Administration’s view of that process on Sunday when he told reporters, with unusual effusiveness: “Even while everyone is focused on the revolution in the Soviet Union . . . there has been a quiet but perhaps equally historic revolution going on in Mexico.

“The Salinas administration inherited an economy which was in deep crisis, had had negative growth for over a decade, runaway inflation, capital flight and massive debt,” he said. It “has courageously adopted some free-market economic reforms, the kinds of reforms, quite frankly, we hope we see in the Soviet Union.”

And Baker pointed to Mexico’s recent midterm congressional elections, which were marred in some areas by charges of fraud against Salinas’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, as proof of the Mexican president’s success. “I think the general consensus among the experts is that this election recently concluded was much freer, much fairer than many other elections that have been conducted in the past,” he said.