For Mexico, U.S. Election Politics Cross the Line

Few foreign diplomats are monitoring the 1996 American election campaign as closely as the Mexican ambassador, and few find it as upsetting.

What may be good for U.S. presidential politics, he lamented, is often bad for Mexico.

“On some occasions it is not what is right that prevails but what is convenient to the interests of our powerful neighbor,” Ambassador Jesus Silva Herzog said at the Mexican Embassy.

The Yale-educated Herzog, ambassador for the last two years, acknowledges that neither President Clinton nor Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole has engaged in overt “Mexico-bashing.” But he says Mexico’s reputation and interests have been hurt by what U.S. politicians have said on the issues of immigration and drugs and by their actions in other areas.

Although immigration has not been as critical an issue as Mexican officials had feared, Herzog said, the presidential campaign has created “an atmosphere that is anti-immigrant, with a certain flavor of racism and a certain flavor of being anti-Mexican.”

He said that, whenever Dole, California Gov. Pete Wilson and other Republicans advocate reduced benefits to legal immigrants or stringent measures to stop illegal immigration, voters conjure up Mexicans as the culprits.

When it comes to drugs, Herzog complained, candidates tend to denounce Mexico as a conduit rather than the United States as the main consumer. He said he finds it objectionable that Dole, even while castigating the Clinton administration as weak on the suppression of drug trafficking, still faults Mexico as the main channel for South American cocaine without making clear that Mexico is neither the producer nor the main consumer of the drug.

It is just as hard for Mexico as it is for the U.S. to prevent drugs from entering and crossing its territory, Herzog said. “If Mexico has not been able to stop the flow of drugs,” he said, “then Texas and California have not been able to do so either.”

Mexico believed that it had achieved one victory when the International Trade Commission, a U.S. agency independent of the Clinton administration, ruled in July that the sale of Mexican tomatoes was not causing substantial damage to the growers of winter tomatoes in Florida. But Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor, who managed the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, called the ruling a disappointment and moved to pressure Mexico into selling its tomatoes at higher prices.

Kantor began looking into accusations by Florida growers that Mexico was “dumping” its tomatoes on the U.S. market--selling them below cost to get rid of them.

The Commerce Department said it was not acting on the basis of election-year politics.

But Herzog denounced the accusations of Mexican dumping as unfair and described Kantor as “a highly biased person” more interested in attracting votes in Florida than in reaching a just decision.

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The Mexicans had another disappointment in July, when Congress failed to lift a ban on Mexican tuna imposed in 1990 because dolphins were dying in the nets of Mexican fishermen, even though Mexico has since devised new techniques to save the dolphins.

“If [the U.S.] had not been in an election year, the bill would have gone through,” he said.

Herzog is pleased that some of the harsh anti-Mexico rhetoric of the Republican primary contests, particularly by Patrick J. Buchanan, has not lingered for the general campaign.

“Dole has been more careful and respectful in that regard,” Herzog said. “Both candidates understand it is not a good idea to have a competition in Mexico-bashing.”