U.S., Mexico to Seek Ban on Abduction of Suspects : Justice: Operations like DEA’s 1990 seizure of doctor in Mexico would be outlawed. Negotiations remain.

The United States and Mexico have agreed to negotiate a formal agreement prohibiting the two countries from abducting criminal suspects on each other’s territory, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said Monday.

The proposed pact would permanently ban U.S. law enforcement agencies from operations like the 1990 kidnaping of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was grabbed in Mexico by bounty hunters working for the Drug Enforcement Administration and smuggled into the United States.

After Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari furiously protested the action, then-President George Bush promised to prohibit the practice, a pledge repeated by President Clinton.

But the Mexicans asked for a formal ban that would prohibit any succeeding Administration from changing that policy, and Clinton agreed.

“We have agreed to negotiate the extradition issue to find a legally binding way to prohibit extraterritorial abductions,” Christopher said after meeting with Mexican Foreign Minister Fernando Solana Morales.

“We have asked our negotiators to proceed as quickly as possible on this very sensitive and important issue,” he told reporters with Solana at his side.

DEA agents arranged Alvarez’s abduction because they believed he had participated in the torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique S. Camarena in Mexico in 1985. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that nothing in the existing U.S.-Mexican extradition treaty prohibited the action.

After a series of preliminary hearings in the case, a federal district judge in Los Angeles ruled last year that the evidence against Alvarez was insufficient to present to a jury. Alvarez was released and flown back to Mexico.

Nevertheless, Mexico’s Salinas has continued to press for a formal ban on any further abductions. Solana said Mexico proposed that the issue could be resolved in a protocol attached to the extradition treaty, but he said that the precise solution has been left up to U.S. and Mexican negotiators.

Christopher and Solana met as part of an annual high-level conference between U.S. and Mexican officials, covering the full range of the two countries’ relations.

Both Christopher and Clinton, who met with Solana and other Mexican officials at the White House, seized the opportunity to urge Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement when the Administration submits it this fall.

The United States and Mexico are still negotiating environmental and labor practices agreements to go along with the treaty, which would join the United States, Mexico and Canada in a free trade zone.

In an interview with KABC radio in Los Angeles, Clinton said the agreement would not increase the transfer of U.S. manufacturing jobs to Mexico and argued that the treaty could reduce illegal immigration into California.

“I believe that a country like ours, if we want to generate more jobs, we’re going to have to increase the volume of trade,” Clinton told interviewer Michael Jackson.

“I understand what the concern is with Mexico, but I would say to everyone in California today two things: No. 1, something you know perhaps better than other Americans, anyone who wants to shut a plant down and go to Mexico today for low wages can do it--and they’ll be able to do it just as well today or tomorrow as they could after NAFTA is ratified.

“No. 2, as you have seen in California, as long as incomes are very depressed in Mexico, you’re going to have a bigger and bigger problem with immigration. . . . And what I see happening with NAFTA is a Mexico that can buy more American products, where more Mexicans will want to stay home and be near their families because they’ll be able to make a living.”

Later at the White House, Clinton expressed confidence that he can win Senate ratification of the treaty this year--although “everything takes a little longer around here than I think it should,” he said, laughing.

Christopher strongly endorsed the treaty, calling it “an historic opportunity that must not be lost.”

“The vote of the Congress on NAFTA will be the most important signal the United States sends to Mexico and all of Latin America, the most important signal of this decade,” he said.