That Devil Jesse Helms Heads South

For decades, no American has gotten under Mexico’s skin quite like Sen. Jesse Helms. The conservative North Carolina Republican has frequently raked Mexico over the coals of drug smuggling, official corruption, financial crises, fraudulent elections and relations with communist Cuba, just to name an issue or two. Helms has been Washington’s premier Mexico-basher.

The nearly octogenarian senator dislikes travel and is wheelchair-bound. So how is it he is now heading south of the border to make nice with the neighbors?

Mexican politicos and the media have regarded the crotchety chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as their country’s chief international nemesis. But Helms and his entire committee are to go to Mexico City today--where we might expect he’d be no more welcome than in Havana or Beijing--for an unprecedented joint meeting with their Mexican counterparts. And both sides are looking forward to their meeting.

Among the unlikely elements in this curious turn of events is how the Helms visit to Mexico grew out of his first meeting with that country’s new secretary of foreign relations, Jorge G. Castaneda. Just a few months ago the conventional wisdom held that Castaneda--a “strident leftist” and “harsh critic” of U.S. policy in Latin America--had numerous enemies among congressional Republicans; prominent among them was Helms.

The senator “dismisses him as a communist,” one paper reported last December.

Castaneda himself had acknowledged “rumblings” that Helms might try to make an issue of his appointment. A prolific political writer and an intellectual, Castaneda was indeed a leader of Mexico’s long-defunct Communist Party decades ago. But he had “fun” when he finally met Helms earlier this year, or so Castaneda told a reporter. “We had a perfectly cordial, gentlemanly chat,” said the foreign minister, and it “put behind us 20 years of hostility between Helms and Mexico.”

A chuckling Helms said that when he suggested taking his Senate committee down for a joint meeting with its Mexican counterpart, Castaneda nearly fell out of his chair. Mexico’s new government plainly feels entitled to a honeymoon period both at home and abroad, but no one expected Helms to go along.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the senator was obstreperous in his view that Mexico was ruled by a bunch of bums. In the late 1980s, Castaneda wrote of “the anti-Mexican insults and latent racism present in many of Sen. Helm’s tirades.” But it would appear as if Castaneda and the Fox administration have managed to win Helms over, perhaps by giving the devil his due.

They all fundamentally agree on what sort of government Mexico had until Vicente Fox came to power last year: hopelessly corrupt and insufficiently democratic. Could the Foxistas be crediting Helms with having helped throw the bums out? At the very least, they appear willing to let him think so.

In 1986, Helms convened a series of special Senate hearings that capped a career of blistering Mexico. He took particular aim at the lack of full democracy and political freedoms. Some adventurous members of Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN--then in opposition--testified in the hearings, which fueled a raging backlash back home. The Mexican government responded to Helms by organizing a big street demonstration against the hearings, as well as by lodging a formal diplomatic protest with the State Department.

Overall, the world took little note of Helms’ words opening his hearings. “I would say to the Mexican government,” the senator declared, “open up your electoral process to review and inspection; let the press in Mexico speak with an open mind. Let all of the political parties in Mexico criticize the process and recommend reforms; give the Mexican people a chance to speak.” These remarks would be quoted, however, in a book co-authored by Castaneda.

Honeymoons, as everyone knows, cannot last forever. Fox has certainly set a new tone, but he has barely begun to clean out the Mexican government. The U.S.-Mexico relationship, for all its great strengths and even greater potential, remains as devilishly complex as ever. There are borders to deal with, illegal immigration, guest workers. It is in going over the details of that relationship, whether this week or next year, that Helms’ new attitude toward Mexico will be put to the test.