Mexico Set on NAFTA as Is, Salinas Says : Trade: President asserts that if a ‘single line’ of pact is opened for revision, everything will be. Stand runs counter to call by new Canada government.

Mexico is determined that the North American Free Trade Agreement take effect Jan. 1 without modifications, despite the new Canadian government’s call for renegotiation, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said in a television interview to be broadcast today.

“We have stated that the negotiation is concluded,” Salinas said, in his first response to Canadian Prime Minister-elect Jean Chretien’s declaration that he will press for changes in the agreement. Salinas added, “If you open one single line of the 2,000-page text, you open everything else for negotiation.”

Salinas made the statements in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview with David Frost to be aired on PBS. The interview covered subjects from Mexican emigration to the war on drugs but concentrated on economic issues, especially NAFTA, which is scheduled for a U.S. congressional vote on Nov. 17.

The proposed agreement would gradually eliminate trade barriers among the United States, Canada and Mexico, creating a $7-trillion-a-year trading bloc--the world’s largest--with 360 million consumers.

However, NAFTA faces opposition from labor and environmental groups, as well as from billionaire Ross Perot. They warn that the accord will encourage industry to move manufacturing from the United States and Canada to Mexico in search of low wages and lax environmental enforcement.

With Chretien poised to assume office next month following the resounding defeat of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives on Monday, Salinas will be the only leader still in power among the three heads of government who negotiated the agreement.

Salinas said he has not received any request from Chretien about the agreement, “but we would say it’s a good agreement for Mexico. It’s a good agreement for the U.S., and we do believe it’s also a good agreement for Canada.”

Late in the interview, as Frost continued to quote from Perot’s book criticizing NAFTA, Salinas asked, “By the way, Mr. Frost, do you read some other books?”

Salinas challenged Perot’s assertions that NAFTA will spread throughout Mexico the environmental degradation and substandard living conditions associated with foreign-owned border assembly plants, known as maquiladoras.

“They have spread before NAFTA,” Salinas said. “What will spread after NAFTA is a more integrated industrial capacity around the country.

“Today, Mexicans have to migrate to where jobs are being created, the northern part of our country. With NAFTA, employment opportunities will move toward where the people live, reducing drastically migration, within the country and outside of the country.”

Salinas said NAFTA will help solve U.S. worries about immigration from his nation because “Mexicans prefer to live in their own country. And this is so when they find the proper economic and job conditions to do so.”

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As for narcotics, he said: “We are committed to fight drug traffickers because they are a threat to our own nation. And we are making progress.”

He noted that Mexican authorities have seized so much pure cocaine that its street value is double the country’s foreign debt. While Mexico does not produce cocaine, it is the major transit point for drug shipments between South America and the United States.

“No single country by itself will be able to defeat drug traffickers,” Salinas said. “We must get together.”