PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : The Sunny Forecast Is a Snow Job : The danger in the effusive Clinton-Zedillo partnership is that they may really believe all is well.

It has been said, in light of the past 20 years, that Mexico does not learn from its mistakes. True, probably, but everyone else also seems to have trouble learning from Mexico’s errors. Witness Bill Clinton, in his lavish embrace of visiting President Ernesto Zedillo in Washington last week.

In 1993, Clinton proclaimed then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to be “one of the world’s great leaders” and extolled the strengths and virtues of the Mexican economy in order to obtain passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Justly or not, Salinas is today the most unpopular former chief executive in the history of modern Mexico; he lives in exile, and on several occasions in the past few months has come close to being charged with complicity (at the very least) in one or both of the two assassinations that rocked Mexico in 1994.

Whatever else one may say about NAFTA and its advantages for the United States, the vitality and stability of the Mexican economy were not among them: 6% negative growth in 1995 and a foreign debt of more than $170 billion are not exactly signs of health.

Nonetheless, the Clinton Administration seems bent on persuading Americans (and Mexicans) that the Mexican economy is well on the way to recovery and that Zedillo is a true democrat, an honest man and an effective ruler able to lead Mexico out of the woods.

While the praise heaped on Zedillo for his honesty seems deserved, and however sincere his intentions regarding the country’s democratization may be, there are scant grounds for any optimism regarding Mexico in the short and medium term. The economy has ground to a halt, and the fragile equilibrium that has returned to the financial markets can be upset overnight by any succession of political or social surprises. More than $2 billion left Mexico during the last two weeks of September simply because former presidents began criticizing each other, a group of university students staged a protest and a smattering of price hikes drew predictable grumbling from labor. Then, in the beginning of October, the stock market and the peso were sent reeling by new political in-fighting and revelations that suggested animosity by Salinas toward his successor candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in the days before his murder.

Not even under Salinas has the cheerleading view from official Washington (and on occasion from the U.S. press) been so at variance with the gloomy assessments and sentiments of the overwhelming majority of the population of Mexico. Where the Clinton Administration sees financial stability and a debtor meeting its short-term commitments, Mexicans lament a return to the over-indebtedness of the 1980s. Where American analysts hail a surge in Mexican exports, Mexicans see a dramatic drop in domestic demand. Where Washington praises the Mexican people’s patience and stoicism, they are agonized by millions of layoffs in a nation that has had an explosively increasing job deficit for 15 years.

Mexicans--the elites and pundits, the students and magnates, the indigenous communities and urban workers--have not often agreed on anything in the recent past. Today, they do: on the truly calamitous nature of the economic, political, social and even psychological crisis the country has fallen into. And yet the United States, for reasons having more to do with President Clinton’s electoral fortunes than with any rational evaluation, says exactly the contrary.

So politicians subordinate foreign policy to their reelection; what else is new, and what, if anything, is terribly wrong with it? The answer is twofold and serious. While Clinton and Zedillo, their aides and advisers, undoubtedly are fully aware of the dangers and gravity of the situation in Mexico, sometimes people end up believing their own stories. Besieged as he is by unending domestic travails and subject to unmerciful and sometimes devastating criticism by a newly assertive Mexican press, Zedillo could fall victim to the temptation that comes with high office: to listen to the praise and ignore the negative, regardless of the motives of the former and the accuracy of the latter.

A related problem is that presidential awareness of the truth can by definition not be shared. What Clinton and Zedillo and their immediate circles know, no one else really does. If the current official U.S. optimism about Mexico proves unwarranted, as has been the case for more than two decades, disenchantment, resentment and plain simple anger will be the outcome--and not just in Mexico.

It would seem unreasonable to brave once again the fires of disillusion; it seems naive to hope it will not happen.