Slinging Mud at Mexico Will Solve No Problems

The late comedian Lenny Bruce used to say that when corruption and evil were eliminated in the world, he would be out of a job--along with J. Edgar Hoover, the former head of the FBI.

I often feel the same way in writing about Mexico. The day on which that country’s many problems are solved, I’ll be out of work. But then so will politicians like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who are only the latest officials in this country trying to make headlines by damning Mexico for a multitude of sins.

Helms sponsored Senate hearings two weeks ago that gave him the chance to say every nasty thing that he ever wanted to say about Mexico. He used the hearings to vent his spleen over the fact that drugs and illegal immigrants enter this country from Mexico, and that our neighbor owes U.S. banks something like $40 billion that may never be paid back, and that some Mexican officials are corrupt while others don’t agree with U.S. policy in Central America.

The controversy that Antonovich generated was smaller, but no less antagonistic. A fading candidate for the Republican Party’s Senate nomination, Antonovich went to the border near San Diego to film a campaign commercial. While the cameras rolled, Antonovich stood on a bluff overlooking a Tijuana slum where illegal aliens congregate before trying to sneak across the border. There he read a script citing the dubious claim that illegal immigrants cost taxpayers $35 billion per year.

At Helms’ hearings, Reagan Administration officials aired some unusually pointed criticisms of the Mexican government, which in turn protested, asking if the U.S. government was trying to interfere in Mexico’s internal affairs. Antonovich got a well-deserved scolding from Los Angeles’ Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, who pointed out that simplistic posturing about a complicated issue like immigration would contribute to anti-Latino feelings in this country. That good point could easily be applied to Helms’ hearings.

The worst thing that happens when U.S. politicians criticize Mexico so ignorantly is that they make it harder for that country and the United States to communicate at the very time both nations need to understand each other better. The relationship between Mexico and the United States is not nearly so simple as Helms, Antonovich and their ilk would have us believe. It is not a question of Mexican drugs and immigrants undermining U.S. society. Such things exist because of conditions on both sides of the border.

The flow of migrant workers from Mexico to the United States has gone on since a border was drawn across the Great American Desert after the Mexican-American War of 1848. The labor of Mexican workers supported the industries (mining, railroads and agriculture) that built the U.S. Southwest at the turn of the century. That migration continues because modern industries in the region still seek workers willing to toil at low wages.

The flow of drugs and other illicit goods across the border is also historic. In the 1930s it was bootleg liquor. The current flow of drugs will continue as long as people in this country are willing to buy marijuana, cocaine and heroin produced abroad, whether in Mexico or other countries from Peru to Pakistan. After all, the demand for illicit drugs was not createdin Mexico.

Mexico’s debt, $100 billion and growing by the day, is an overwhelming financial and political problem. But the Mexican officials and private business people who signed up for loans did not force foreign banks to lend them money. The heads of Bank of America, Citicorp and other lending institutions made the same mistake that the Mexicans did in assuming that the high oil prices of the 1970s would never come down. Now both sides must share the pain of rescheduling those loans.

Even corruption, admittedly a terrible problem in Mexico, is not unique to that country. It exists in almost every nation, even in the United States. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, for example, estimates that, between 1983 and 1985, 300 U.S. drug agents, judges and other public officials were arrested on suspicion of corruption stemming from drug-enforcement activities.

My point is not to help Mexicans sling mud back across the border, but merely to illustrate that none of the problems in U.S.-Mexico relations exist solely because of shortcomings in Mexican society. They exist because of conditions on both sides of the border, and solutions will have to be found on both sides of the border.

Helms and Antonovich may not like it, but Mexico and the United States are linked by geography and economics even more closely than they are by history and culture. That’s why it serves no good purpose to point accusatory fingers across the border, or to discuss issues like immigration in apocalyptic terms.

If rational answers are to be found to our mutual problems, they first have to be discussed rationally.