Pointless U.S.-Mexico Spat

The rift between Mexico and the United States on how best to combat drug traffic threatens to further damage already strained relations between the two countries.

Mexico is quixotically seeking extradition of U.S. narcotics agents who carried out a money-laundering sting operation named Casablanca on Mexican soil. President Clinton has countered with a soothing call for an end to accusations among countries damaged by the production, transit or consumption of drugs.

An annual conference of U.S. and Mexican officials this week in Washington can help heal the rift. In the longer run, Mexican officials fed up with drug-sting operations by foreign agents must deal with the fact that drug-related corruption has reached intolerable heights in Mexico, posing a threat to the nation’s security. If Washington is angered by Mexico’s complaints, it should consider how Americans would feel if the situation were reversed.

It was the U.S. Congress that began the finger pointing with an ill-conceived annual certification process grading Latin American countries on their effort to combat the drug trade, with penalties for countries found wanting. What justifiably irks Latin American governments is that the certification process seeks to set the United States above the fray, an improbable position for a country whose own record on combating the drug menace is a flop.

In the war on drugs “no country can become the judge of others,” Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo has properly observed. There is enough blame to go around.

Zedillo has been under heavy pressure from the Mexican public and a Congress dominated by opposition parties to strongly and openly protest the so-called Casablanca sting, in which U.S. agents working in the United States and Mexico nabbed Mexican bankers in a drug-money laundering scheme. Tit-for-tat squabbling over the sting and the extradition request will lead nowhere and could do harm to last year’s bilateral extradition agreements between the United States and Mexico, which greatly improved cooperation in criminal cases.

The search for answers goes on in a number of Latin American countries. “We need international resources to fight drug traffickers,” says Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori. “We need money to change to alternative crops,” adds Hugo Banzer, the Bolivian president.

Beneath all the questions, rhetoric and politicking, however, lies the dismal fact that the world is losing the battle against illegal drug use and trafficking. President Clinton is correct when he says that blaming the U.S. drug market diverts attention from the surging power of the narcotics cartels. Bickering about who is at fault won’t resolve the problem.

This is far from the first time that high officials of Mexico and the United States have spoken with acrimony about bilateral problems. But the issue of drugs should not become the rock on which the relationship founders. Mexico and the United States should be trading in goods and cooperation, not insults.