A Man of Lofty Ideas --and Power

For nearly two decades, leftist academic Jorge Castaneda was one of the most influential analysts of power in Mexico. Now, as foreign minister, he’s putting his theories to work as he exercises power himself.

“I’m a person of ideas--that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years,” said the longtime columnist, prolific author and political advisor. “I write stuff and I say, ‘This is what should be done, blah, blah, blah.’ And all of a sudden, I have a chance to put them into practice. That satisfaction is immense, despite all the constraints.”

Castaneda was one of the architects of conservative President Vicente Fox’s victory July 2 of last year, framing the vote as a referendum on change.

The bearded 48-year-old is a walking example of the vastly more complex ways in which power is being wielded in the changed Mexico that is emerging from that balloting. Democracy, sometimes riotous, is the norm. Congress, the media, fractious political parties and civic groups are all jockeying with Fox for influence as Mexico remakes itself. The old rules of power are being recast.

So are the politicians. Castaneda is a strident man with a lightning intellect, a former professor who speaks fluent English and French. Even friends describe him as toweringly arrogant in his political certitudes. Impatient with those who dither, he can at times be abrasive; Castaneda hardly calls to mind the word “diplomatic.” The Mexican media love to bait him, and occasionally he rises to it.

And some think that a dose of confrontation is healthy.

Denise Dresser, a political scientist and friend of Castaneda, said: “His style of extremely active, firebrand, against-the-grain diplomacy is what Mexico needs now to shake things up. In the past, Mexican diplomacy was too cautious. It was extremely legalistic and narrow. . . . For the first time, we have a foreign minister who wants to get things done, to rock the boat rather than preserve the status quo, who is willing to take risks and go out on a limb to make his case.

“His Achilles’ heel,” she added, “is his arrogance, his vanity, his ego. But they seem almost integral to him personally. You can’t get the brilliance without the other. There’s something almost Clintonesque about him.”

For the United States, a Mexico where Castaneda sets foreign policy presents new opportunities. He is far more determined to engage the United States on the toughest issues--immigration, border problems, regional inequalities--than his predecessors. At the same time, Castaneda’s Mexico is messier; more power players are taking an active role, especially in Congress. That will make everyday issues more difficult to resolve than in the past, when an authoritarian president simply gave an order.

Castaneda’s goals are those of a Latin American social democrat: fairer distribution of wealth, faster economic growth and public institutions that work effectively. He is already making human rights in Mexico a far more prominent issue, allowing foreign observers in without restrictions to visit and report on restive Chiapas state and other areas where rights violations were widespread.

No one disputes that Castaneda has dramatically raised the profile of a newly legitimate Mexico on the international stage, to the extent that the country appears poised to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council for the 2002-03 period, for the first time in 20 years.

Castaneda, who has begun a reform of the Foreign Ministry, already has made tough decisions. He broke new ground by agreeing to extradite to Spain an Argentine accused of torture and murder of Spaniards during the 1976-83 military dictatorship in Argentina.

And he has relentlessly pushed onto the U.S.-Mexican agenda several touchy issues that were taboo in the past. At considerable political risk, he has made migration a major negotiating point. He hopes for a comprehensive deal this year that would sharply increase the flow of legal migrants to the United States and ultimately reduce the number of illegal crossings.

He has moved easily in this new world. During a trip to Mexico this spring, even hawkish Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised Castaneda warmly.

“Everybody looks at him very highly in the U.S. All the question marks are gone,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, an expert on U.S.-Mexican relations at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “The only thing is, he might be too successful too soon, since that has some political liabilities. But there’s no doubt he’s getting Fox to focus on his issues.”

It would be easy to portray Castaneda as the leftist outsider, the conscience in Fox’s center-right government. Too easy.

In Castaneda’s Case, It’s Like Father, Like Son

In fact, Castaneda is no stranger to power. His late father, also named Jorge Castaneda, was a respected foreign minister, from 1979 to 1982, the last career diplomat to have held the post. The foreign minister recalls a dinner where Fox told author Carlos Fuentes that he had the impression that the younger Castaneda was born in the Foreign Ministry, to which Fuentes replied: “It’s not an impression. He was.”

Castaneda’s membership in the Communist Party while he was a youth prompted some grumbling in Washington when he was named to the post. But the reality is that for nearly all his career, Castaneda has cared more about being close to power than about the label of the party.

He says he always wanted “to be able to push and pull the levers, and I didn’t really care too much with whom . . . because, quite honestly, I’m convinced that the program I’ve been espousing is pretty much the same since I wrote in Foreign Affairs [magazine] in 1985.”

He may even want to champion that program from a higher office. In the past, even mentioning interest in the Mexican presidency was unthinkable. Now, asked if he wants to be president one day, Castaneda pauses only slightly before answering: He doesn’t want to think about it but doesn’t rule it out either. He’ll decide in three or four years.

It makes sense that this politician defines himself not by campaign platforms but by articles and books he has written. Castaneda, who graduated from Princeton in 1973 and received his doctorate in political economy from the University of Paris in 1978, built his career on cutting-edge books, such as “Utopia Unarmed” in 1993, an analysis of the challenges facing the Latin American left, as well as wide-ranging opinion pieces.

He complemented that written output with surprisingly varied roles as political advisor, first with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 and later with Mexico’s then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, during the 1988 presidential campaign of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Castaneda says now that he would have worked in Salinas’ government if the 1988 election had not been discredited by fraud. Instead, he split bitterly from Salinas days after the election.

In 1994, he worked with losing leftist presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. From 1995, when Fox was elected governor of Guanajuato state, Castaneda grew steadily closer to the leader, writing speeches for him and accompanying him on foreign trips where they studied other political transitions. He remained coy about openly supporting Fox until well into the campaign. But finally he jumped in.

Even though Fox is from the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, Castaneda helped forge an alliance of leftist supporters for Fox. Castaneda argued that what mattered most was to end the PRI’s 71-year rule and let real democracy flourish--and that Fox was the only opposition candidate with a realistic chance to win.

The strategy worked, and in return Castaneda landed the foreign minister’s job.

His fellow leftist intellectual in the Cabinet and boyhood friend, National Security Advisor Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, said of Castaneda: “Obviously, he’s for the first time in real action, exposed to the consequences of his responsibilities. Before, he was an intellectual, an outsider, a volunteer helping others. Now he’s fully in the ring. Obviously that has an impact on him. He has to show more the temperament of a man of action.”

In reshaping foreign policy, Castaneda wants a more active Mexican voice that promotes human rights abroad, and he wants a healthier image for the nation. His goal is to end Mexico’s traditional invisibility on the world stage. Critics complain that the old policy was designed to hide the former regime’s own human rights abuses and lack of democracy at home.

To achieve these goals, he is consciously exploiting his own acerbic tongue. But the notion of an undiplomatic Castaneda getting himself into trouble for blurting out controversial statements is misguided.

“I think I rein in whatever has to be reined in,” he said. “There’s a lot less spontaneity in all of this than a lot of people in Mexico sometimes seem to believe. . . . When I make noise, I want to make noise. There is very little that is not thought through, not calculated, not reflected on previously. I am not a very spontaneous person.

“What I have to do, first of all, is have a high profile. If not, I can’t get my job done. And in this country, to have a strong profile you have to be strident, you have to be controversial. This is how Fox got himself elected. And I have to shake things up.”

But he acknowledges that the Fox administration’s lack of coherent relations with the political parties is a major obstacle to getting things done. The Congress is flexing its muscles in a system where the president no longer dominates utterly. Yet the old party system remains intact, as does the traditional media--albeit without the controls the presidency once could impose over the press.

A Confrontation With the Media

Castaneda’s biggest confrontation followed his complaint last year during a U.S. trip that Mexican reporters were too lazy to read and learn English. The media have never forgiven him. Castaneda in turn complains that one of his frustrations is his inability to get a clear message across in the Mexican media.

Castaneda says his political independence is an asset to Fox in a Cabinet dominated by the PAN. “For Fox, I imagine it’s important because he needs to have people who are not carrying other people’s water. . . . I have no debts of a partisan or political nature,” he said.

While there is much bluster against Castaneda in Congress, he has won all 61 votes there approving his ambassadorial nominations and presidential trips abroad.

Castaneda learned about power at the family dinner table. “We talked politics endlessly, ever since I can remember,” he said, “since I was 10 or even younger.”

The books on the crowded shelves of his wood-beamed study in the handsome San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City form an impressive bibliography of power: “Hard Choices” by Cyrus R. Vance, “The Power Game” by Hedrick Smith and an eight-volume set of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Sharing space on the shelves is a photo dating from the 1970s of Jorge and his father with Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Cuba remains a delicate issue for Mexico. Castaneda has openly spoken out against human rights abuses there, and in April he was fiercely criticized by Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque. Castaneda chose to make light of it rather than fight back, and the issue subsided. Last month, Castro endorsed Mexico’s bid for the U.N. Security Council seat.

Much of Castaneda’s literary output has focused on U.S.-Mexican relations, now one of his central responsibilities. Those writings outline the evolution of his thinking about the United States.

While teaching from 1982 onward at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he also served as visiting professor at numerous U.S. universities, including UC Berkeley. He collaborated with Emory University professor Robert A. Pastor on a 1988 book called “Limits to Friendship.”

In that book, Castaneda argued that the only way for Mexico to improve its ties with the U.S. “is to make [the relations] less important” and to work more on cementing Latin American relations. And he bluntly wrote about the widespread anti-U.S. sentiments in Mexican society. He cited a Mexican aphorism for dealing with the U.S., attributed to Benito Juarez, a 19th century president: “Say yes, but never say when.”

Castaneda said he expects that a more forceful, more democratic Mexico may have more confrontations with the United States in the years ahead. At the same time, he added, Mexico “will be more reliable, more trustworthy, a more solid partner on the things it does together with the U.S. because the government will have the legitimacy to deliver on the deals it makes.”

Castaneda has immense energy and never seems to slow down. He has the capacity to talk with a reporter, keep up a cellular-phone conversation and simultaneously sign papers thrust at him by an aide.

Yet he gets home to his Chilean-born wife, Miriam, and his 15-year-old son by 7 most nights and has ended the practice of keeping the Foreign Ministry staff working until 9 or 10 p.m.

His son, also named Jorge, already shares his addiction to politics. “He’s terribly well informed and curious but also terribly contrarian,” Castaneda said. “Like me.”

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