What Kind of Partner <i> Is</i> Mexico? : Through NAFTA, the U.S. is entitled--obligated--to ask about peasants’ human rights.

During his debate with Ross Perot on the North American Free Trade Agreement, Vice President Al Gore conceded that “Mexico is not yet a full democracy,” and that “they do not yet have full protection for human rights.” But he assured his audience that “they’ve been making tremendous progress, and the progress has been associated with this new relationship with the United States.”

During his December trip to Mexico to meet with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Gore ducked questions about rigged elections in a country that has had one-party rule for 60 years by telling reporters, “The question is whether or not we will have the ability to influence what they and their government decide.”

OK, then why the deafening silence from the Clinton Administration about the Indian uprising in southern Mexico? Grave issues of human rights have been raised by reports of summary executions by the army, indiscriminate bombing of the countryside and the strafing of journalists. Has the President no words of caution on this?

The rebels also singled out NAFTA as potentially exacerbating their people’s troubles, so a response from President Clinton is in order. After all, he promised that NAFTA would usher in a bright new day for all on both sides of the border; shouldn’t he now respond to the fears of desperately poor people that their lot will only get worse?

The President is further obligated to speak out because the exploitation of indigenous people is widely recognized as a major source of human-rights violations worldwide. It is a cruel irony that during 1993, proclaimed as the Year of Indigenous Peoples, attacks on the earliest nurturers of the earth have accelerated.

Amnesty International reports that the estimated 300 million indigenous people who reside in 70 countries are the “most defenseless of all the victims of human-rights violations.”

These people have tended to suffer much from the rapid expansion of market forces, which all U.S. administrations celebrate as an unequivocal triumph of democracy. At best, as the Mexican case illustrates, they are left behind in pockets of extreme poverty; at worst, their resources are pillaged and their populations decimated.

That the destruction of indigenous peoples is a hemisphere-wide phenomenon is witnessed by the recent massacre of the Yanomami Indians in Venezuela, many of them children and women, at the hands of rapacious Brazilian gold miners.

In Brazil, Amnesty International reports, the abuse of indigenous people is widespread, the government is indifferent and one-third of the tribes have vanished.

But it is not only indigenous people who are the victims of economic “progress” that is measured by foreign investment dollars and growth in the aggregate GNP rather than the distribution of wealth among the general population.

Brazil, long the most robust economy in Latin America--a major magnet for international investors and much celebrated in the world media as a free-market success story--has 60 million people living in abject poverty. Anyone who has ventured into the shantytowns that abut the luxury hotels and gleaming new office towers of Rio and Sao Paulo knows that economic growth has very much enlarged the enormous chasm between rich and poor.

Simply put, it’s the class struggle, stupid. Whether it be in Mexico, where half of the people live in misery, or Brazil, the rising tide of foreign investment does not lift all boats. Those stuck in the muck of poverty can witness the success of others and, as with the peasant guerrillas of Chiapas, try to do something about it.

Far better the ballot than the gun. But throughout the hemisphere, political democracy is mocked by an ever-prosperous elite that can buy government favor and blot out the cries of the desperate.

The United States can do something about this. As the President has belatedly learned in regard to Russia, an economic policy that emphasizes the private market while excluding the needs of those who can’t effectively play in it is a prescription for disaster. Now the President will urge Boris Yeltsin to pay more attention to Russia’s social safety net and indeed will offer some financing toward that end. Ought we not do the same for countries in our own back yard?

The revolt of the Indians of Chiapas should be a wake-up call. Like it or not, the passage of NAFTA tied the Administration to the politics of the ruling party of Mexico. On Dec. 2, Gore told a gathering of Mexican businessmen that NAFTA represents “a starting point for dealing with the common challenges of the Americas.” Certainly closing the gap between rich and poor and between dominant and indigenous cultures should be at the top of the list.