Mexican Lawmakers Tell Zedillo to Divulge List of Alleged U.S. Abuses

In a rare multi-party accord, lawmakers in Mexico pushed the treatment of Mexican citizens in the United States to center stage in U.S.-Mexico relations Tuesday, demanding that President Ernesto Zedillo’s government make public a detailed list of “human rights violations” committed against Mexicans in the United States in the past five years.

The resolution was delivered to Zedillo’s foreign secretary after lawmakers from all four political parties in the Chamber of Deputies condemned the recent police beatings and fatal truck crash involving suspected illegal Mexican immigrants in California as symptomatic of a new era of “xenophobia,” “repression” and “racism” in U.S. immigration policy.

“There is a declaration of war--a low-intensity war--against Mexican citizens in the United States,” Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, the independent representative who sponsored the resolution, declared in the congressional debate that blamed both the U.S. and Mexican administrations for a new anti-immigration climate along the border. “These events were not isolated. . . . We must intervene, giving this the priority it deserves, to show the United States--at least on the legislative level--that the violations of the human rights of our nationals has a real political cost.”

Backers of Tuesday’s action--which is binding on the Zedillo administration--said the Mexican government has been compiling the list of violations since 1991, when the Mexican Embassy and its 40 or so consulates across the United States were instructed to keep a record of cases similar to last week’s incidents in South El Monte and Riverside County.

Zinser and other legislative critics in Mexico asserted that their government has kept the list secret to avoid tarnishing its relationship with its powerful northern neighbor, which bailed out the Mexican government and economy with a $20-billion loan package last year.

Analysts said Tuesday’s move by Mexico’s increasingly independent congress was an attempt to set a new agenda in the relationship, in which a succession of U.S. and Mexican administrations have focused more on economic cooperation and curbing cross-border drug trafficking than the potentially explosive issue of immigration.

“We systematically make as our priorities the issues the United States wants,” Zinser said. “Let’s concern ourselves with making the defense of the human rights of Mexicans in the United States a priority issue in the diplomatic policy agenda of our country. . . . We are allowing American authorities to conduct a systematic witch hunt of our countrymen, without making it a national issue--until it appears on television.”

Significantly, Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party--known by its Spanish acronym PRI--joined in the criticism and in signing the resolution. Zedillo is a member of the PRI, which holds an overwhelming majority in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate.

“We denounce the anti-immigrant activities that have generated a climate of violence all along the northern border of our country,” said Martina Montenegro, a PRI lawmaker. Mexicans, she said, “are treated inhumanely, blamed for the economic and social ills” of the United States, “which has led to the building of steel walls, the increase of police and military forces on the border and unilateral actions, going against the spirit of friendship and cooperation between the two neighbors.”

The debate was not without its veiled threats. Calling California Gov. Pete Wilson a “racist,” Ricardo Navarrete, a lawmaker from the National Action Party, said the recent incidents “prove the saying, ‘He who sows the winds, reaps the storms.’ ” Navarrete added that his centrist party plans to confront American lawmakers on the issue during a scheduled meeting with them in Mexico in early May.

Expressing the view of many Mexicans who blame their own government for failing to create enough jobs and to build a strong enough economy to deter illegal immigration, Navarrete added: “We call on the Mexican federal government to attack the structural causes of poverty, the inequality of educational opportunity . . . and formulate public policies that help put an end to immigration.”

Tuesday’s resolution was not put to a formal vote but was signed by the PRI, National Action Party, left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party and populist Workers Party. It also called for public hearings in Mexico to discuss “the human rights violations and anti-immigrant climate” in the United States. Those who allegedly have suffered abuses, human rights activists and Mexican consular officials will be invited to testify at the sessions.