Shady Business in a Sunny Country : The dark side of NAFTA optimism : BORDERING ON CHAOS: Guerrillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians and Mexico’s Road to Prosperity,<i> By Andres Oppenheimer (Little Brown: $25.95, 367 pp.)</i>

Since the arrival of television, the national pastime in Mexico has been watching the telenovelas, soap operas. These days, however, Mexico is living one--the steamy plots and tawdry characters of its real-life drama far eclipsing those on the small screen.

Consider the current story line: Former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, once the darling of Wall Street and the White House, is now living like a fugitive--first in Cuba, now in Ireland--while his older brother and closest confidante, Raul Salinas, sits in jail accused of ordering the murder of a top ruling party official, who happened to be his former brother-in-law--never mind how $300 million dollars ended up in Raul’s foreign bank accounts when he never made more than $190,000 a year as a government official. All of which may be the good news compared to the claims of Raul’s mistress, who said she overheard him confessing to the murder of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio to a curandera (witch doctor). Finally, there are the cameo roles in this torrid drama featuring a beloved Roman Catholic bishop slain, gangland style, in the streets of Guadalajara, a Tijuana police chief gunned down while investigating the murder of Colosio, a handful of kidnapped billionaires and a charismatic rebel leader commanding an army of Indian peasants.

Only two years ago, Mexico seemed a model of reinvention, poised to enter the ranks of First World nations and economies led by the dapper Salinas and his coterie of Harvard-educated technocrats. Determined to close the biggest trade partnership in the hemisphere’s history, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a decision was made to ignore and deny a series of troubling indicators that clearly augured imminent calamity in both the Mexican economy and society.

Equally knowing and complicit were American business interests and presidents from Reagan and Bush to Clinton--all of whom had invested considerable political capital in the trade deal. Cleverly shrouded by the wizards of Madison Avenue and Wall Street was a country increasingly divided into the very rich and the many poor, an economy teetering on collapse and an Indian population armed and willing to die for change. Perhaps most damning were intelligence reports confirming that Mexico was the port of entry for 70% of the drugs coming into the United States and a de facto narcogobierno almost the equal of Colombia.

Within a year of NAFTA’s passage, a presidential candidate, a bishop, a police chief and the general secretary of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were assassinated, a half dozen kidnapped tycoons had doled out million-dollar ransoms for their release, the peso had collapsed, triggering a national panic that required $20 billion in loans from the United States, revolution had broken out in Chiapas and a seemingly anarchistic crime wave lashed the country. A petition signed by 70 of Mexico’s foremost intellectuals and sent to President Ernesto Zedillo last month alluded to the virtual impunity with which criminals (both street ones and white-collar ones) ply their trade: “Crime--organized and disorganized--has seized our streets, our highways, our business centers. We have become a magical country: Assassinations happen but with no assassins.”

At the root of this national disaster, Andres Oppenheimer argues persuasively in his opus, “Bordering on Chaos,” is a country in the steely, paternalistic grip of a corrupt and bloated ruling party. At a 1993 dinner hosted by then-President Salinas, Oppenheimer reports, the country’s 30 wealthiest men pledged a staggering $25 million each to the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party since 1929, to ensure that the status quo remained, well, the status quo. Emilio Azcarraga, the president of the television network Televisa and reportedly the richest man in Latin America, went even further, offering $50 million to his host. More gifts would follow: During the election, Televisa gave eight times more news coverage to the PRI than to the other parties.

Enveloped in the culture of the mordida (bribe) as securely as if in Saran Wrap, nearly every level of the government has been tainted. Sixty percent of the police admit to taking bribes and not a few have been known to commit robbery, mayhem and murder while in the pay of one of Mexico’s half-dozen drug barons. As Oppenheimer writes, Hector “El Guero” Palma, one of Mexico’s most famous drug lords (he was finally arrested last year) “made several payments of $40 million apiece to the top federal judicial police commanders in Guadalajara.” A single payment exceeded the country’s monthly budget for the entire federal police force.

Oppenheimer’s foremost achievement is in converting what could have been a starchy foreign policy tome into a riveting page-turner. He vividly describes the casual, awesome corruption of Mexico with its consequent resignation, apathy and dysfunctionality. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who is now the Miami Herald’s Latin American correspondent, he offers up a feast of investigative pearls and scoops, such as a secret meeting between Zedillo and Carlos Salinas, soon after the latter’s somewhat pathetic hunger strike and days before his hasty flight out of the country. Interestingly, no charges were ever filed against Salinas.

It has always been fashionable to blame Mexico’s troubles on its bad northern neighbor, but the author finds considerable evidence that most of the country’s woes are home-grown. These days the lament of former president Porfirio Diaz, “So far from God and so close to the United States,” seems far more apt, say, for Cuba than for Mexico. Oppenheimer is particularly astute in discussing the vast regional differences of Mexico: the industrial and technological sophistication of the north, where Mexicans enjoy the highest rate of education and affluence; the dynastic center of the country surrounding Mexico City, a region where 21 million people choke for breath as they scratch out a living from devalued pesos; and the poverty-wracked south, much of which has more in common with neighboring Guatemala than with the rest of Mexico.

Most problematic, of course, is Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost province and the stronghold of the Zapatistas’ fledgling revolution. Its Indian population is so marginalized that few speak or understand the national language of Spanish. In common with the majority of Mexico’s 15 million Indians, they communicate in one of more than a dozen indigenous tongues and often live without electricity, running water and medical facilities.

What’s remarkable about their plight is that Mexican culture and history reveres the Indian. Contrary to their North American counterparts, Mexico’s Indians have always been depicted as the “good guys” (e.g., Cuauhtemoc or Montezuma) with the white man (Cortes and the conquistadors) as the “bad guy.” Statues and names of the noble warrior Indians who resisted the Spanish grace every city in Mexico. However, the cult of the Indian that Mexico worships applies only to dead ones. The living are, at best, ignored; at worst, despised. They are Mexico’s “untouchables.” It is an alarming disposition for a mestizo nation.

With the PRI as shameful as Cortes in its relentless broken promises to the Indians, the Zapatistas and their savvy military leader, Subcommander Marcos, were able to seize the hearts of many, rivet national attention to their cause and maintain the moral high ground. Oppenheimer chronicles the history and divisions of the Zapatistas and the government’s unveiling of Marcos’ real identity as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, an upper-middle-class, 38-year-old former student radical. However, like many reporters, Oppenheimer finds it irresistible to deflate icons and feels compelled to saddle the intrepid Marcos, a leading contender for the mantle of Che Guevera, with “a colossal ego.” Would an ego-less man dare challenge the government with a ragtag, illiterate army of disaffected Indians? Oppenheimer also makes much of the Zapatistas’ left-wing origins, labeling them “white dominated Marxist guerrillas.” When, one might ask, has the political right ever championed the Indian? More to the point, no one who has had contact with the ironic, self-deprecating Marcos has lost any sleep wondering whether he’s a captive of Maoist ideology.

Nevertheless, my only serious qualm with this work is not with what is there but with what is not there--notably the stunning absence of Jose Maria Cordoba, a man whose power many believe was second only to Salinas’. It is somewhat baffling how Oppenheimer, whose research is usually thorough and exhaustive, could have ignored the enigmatic, shadowy Cordoba, long regarded as Salinas’ eminence grise and reputed to have played a central role in Salinas’ dubious 1988 victory. While Oppenheimer rightly makes much of the trail of phone calls between Raul Salinas and a congressman said to have ordered the hit on former attorney general Ruiz Massieu, he fails to mention that the same calls were also made to Cordoba. Moreover, Cordoba’s close relationship with Zedillo is still very much in place. In fact, it has been mischievously noted by some Los Pinos (Mexican White House) observers that Cordoba always preferred Zedillo to Colosio.

At times, Oppenheimer’s prose runs purple and hyperbolic, with such phrases as “one of the most brilliant minds in the Americas.” But his investigative skills are considerable and his story sense wonderful. “Bordering on Chaos” is not merely a “must read,” it’s a great read.