As the Smoke Clears, New Attitude on Security Alliance Emerges in Mexico

One of the surprising consequences of the Sept. 11 terror attacks has been Mexico’s decisive shift toward a security alliance with the United States, overcoming its deep, historic fear of overly cozy U.S. relations.

The attacks set off a fierce debate within the Mexican political elite on how the country should respond to the U.S. call for a global campaign against terrorism. Should Mexico maintain its traditional distance, they asked, invoking the constitution’s nonintervention clause? Or was Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda right in saying that it wasn’t the time to stint on support for the United States?

The initial round of responses, in talk shows and newspaper columns, tended to fall back on the familiar, comfortable view that Mexico must remain wary of joining a U.S. crusade--a sense that this isn’t Mexico’s battle.

But as September waned and the debate intensified, the ground shifted steadily toward acknowledging Mexico’s interdependence with the United States. President Vicente Fox, after 10 days of relative silence on the issue, came out unequivocally Sept. 25 in support of the anti-terrorist campaign. “Mexico is a friend, a neighbor and a partner” of the United States, he said.

That view has been embraced by a surprisingly broad spectrum of political actors, including leaders of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who in the days after the attacks had urged more caution.

Some Mexican voices are suggesting that a North American alliance should now move well beyond economic integration, toward a security alliance that treats terrorism, like organized crime and drug trafficking, as a common threat that must be fought jointly.

National Security Advisor Adolfo Aguilar Zinser told U.S. correspondents Friday night that the shift to what he calls “interdependent security” with the U.S. began at the start of the Fox and Bush administrations with cooperation on tracking drug traffickers.

“So we are beginning to develop . . . the understanding and recognition that security is an interdependent matter, a complementary matter, and not strictly a national question anymore,” Aguilar Zinser said. “I think Mexican society is learning, as U.S. society is learning, that we live in a different world since these things happened.”

Historian Lorenzo Meyer said Mexicans in effect are recognizing a reality that first emerged after President Carlos Salinas de Gortari took office in 1988. Salinas launched a process of economic integration with the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which took effect in 1994.

At the same time, Salinas tried to retain the political independence from the U.S. that had characterized relations since the 1930s.

“A radical Islamic group’s attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon was the catalyst,” Meyer said. “Mexico had had a double standard. . . . The disappearance of the twin towers forced everyone in Mexico to abandon that ambiguity.”

What Castaneda and others in the government had intended to be a slow but steady recasting of the relationship had to change instantly because of the terror attacks, Meyer said.

“Our pride was to say, ‘We are small and poor, but more or less we can maintain a degree of independence in the face of the U.S.’ But that is gone, so how do we define Mexico?” he said. “Now who are we? We need a psychiatrist, a huge one. The whole country must be on the couch.”

Castaneda, speaking with correspondents last week, said the battle over Mexico’s attitude toward the United States has been “the first strategic debate of the sexenio,” or six-year presidential term.

The former leftist academic said the PRI had forced NAFTA through without real debate, so that people are acknowledging only now how dependent Mexico has grown on the United States. More than 85% of Mexican exports go to the U.S., he noted. And two-thirds of foreign investment is American, he said.

“Mexican public opinion has to come to terms with the costs and benefits of the type of relationship that has been constructed with the U.S. over the last century--and especially over the last 20 years,” Castaneda said.

“What this means is that the costs of disagreeing [with], combating, contradicting, opposing the United States are greater than they were in the past. They can be paid, and there will be occasions when we have to disagree, but it’s not the same as it was,” he said. “And when somebody gets up and says this, people go ballistic.”

Castaneda envisions an alliance balanced by a much more active Mexican involvement to help build a “new, rules-based international system.”

Still, some left-wing lawmakers have called for his resignation, accusing him of selling out to the United States. And Castaneda added that although Fox’s government won the first debate in favor of support for the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign, “it’s not a final victory, by any means. We’ll have problems if and when there’s a U.S. strike somewhere, and adopting a clear-cut position is going to be very difficult, unquestionably.”

But perhaps not as tough a battle as it would have been before Sept. 11. Columnists have begun to accept the logic of a U.S.-Mexican security alliance in ways that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago.

Columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez, writing Friday in the daily Milenio newspaper, said Mexico has no choice but to go beyond economic and social integration toward real North American integration on security issues in ways that would in practice “move the border from the Rio Grande toward the Suchiate River” that separates Mexico from Guatemala.

“Mexico in this situation has, paradoxically, an enormous opportunity to insert itself in the new international order,” Fernandez said. “But this implies a vast and full regional integration that goes from the economy to the migrant labor force, from security and interchange of intelligence and information to diplomatic commitments.”

Jorge Chabat, a political analyst at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, wrote in El Universal newspaper Friday that “what is coming, and what is already happening, is a total integration that allows no possibility of stinting. And for that you have to give credit to Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who accompany him.”