Trying to Get Mexicans to Be Like Us Is Foolish

Somehow I can’t get very worked up about the latest problem in U.S.-Mexico relations resulting from the kidnaping of an American drug agent in that country, and the slowness with which Mexican authorities moved to do anything about it.

It is not that the abduction wasn’t shocking. When Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique S. Camarena was seized by gunmen on Feb. 7, he became the first American lawman to fall victim to drug traffickers abroad in two years. I hope that he can be rescued alive, but, given the brutality of drug traffickers, the odds of that happening don’t look good.

Certainly the Reagan Administration’s reaction to the corruption and slowness of the Mexican legal system was understandable and effective, at least in getting Mexico’s attention. U.S. border agents from San Ysidro to Brownsville brought incoming traffic to a standstill by thoroughly checking every vehicle. A few days after the start of the slowdown, dubbed Operation Intercept, Mexican authorities detained three men for questioning. They have since been released.

What troubles me is a frustrating sense of deja vu, the feeling that we’ve seen this all before. That feeling is especially strong now because I recently finished a new book about Mexico, Alan Riding’s “Distant Neighbors” (Knopf), which reminded me of how often similar flare-ups have happened in the past.

Riding was the New York Times correspondent in Mexico from 1971 to 1983, and was a most astute observer of that country. In his book he argues that one of the most profound issues that Mexico will face in the coming years is not an obvious problem such as widespread poverty, overpopulation or the lack of sufficient water resources. The crucial question, as Riding puts it, is whether Mexico can develop and modernize “in harmony with the majority of its population.”

Like other Mexico specialists, Riding argues that many of the problems that the country is having today date from the 1940s, when a series of governments began trying to meet the needs and expectations of the country’s urbanized upper and middle classes rather than its many rural poor. In trying to satisfy the desires of a small group that was materialistic and increasingly Americanized, political leaders began to lose touch with the vast majority of “ordinary Mexicans,” according to Riding.

It is a provocative thesis that is sure to stir emotional debate on both sides of the border. But Riding is onto something. Mexican political leaders and intellectuals won’t say it publicly, but many of them admit privately that their country is indeed profoundly torn between remaining genuinely Mexican and becoming a Spanish-speaking version of the United States.

How does this fit into the dispute over the Camarena case and Operation Intercept? Because U.S. officials are once again expecting the Mexican system to react as ours would, when it is not the same thing. And this has been a persistent cause of the often rocky relations between our two countries.

Does anyone remember the first Operation Intercept in 1969? It was carried out by the Nixon Administration to stop drug smuggling across the border, lasted three weeks and also forced the Mexicans to cooperate with U.S. drug agents. They did so aggressively, and within a few years 600 U.S. citizens were languishing in Mexican prisons on drug-related charges.

And then Mexico faced a new problem with the United States: the alleged mistreatment of U.S. citizens in Mexican jails. The hue and cry over that issue forced the State Department to negotiate a prisoner-exchange treaty with Mexico that is in effect to this day.

When the first prisoners who were exchanged under the treaty flew to San Diego from Mexico City in 1976, they were met by a large contingent of the news media and cheering relatives. A Mexican federal agent commented bitterly to me that it looked more like a welcome for returning heroes than for convicted felons. He reminded me why the anti-drug crackdown happened in the first place, and asked ruefully, “What do we have to do to please you people?”

I didn’t know quite what to tell him. But I know what many other U.S. citizens would have said: We want you to be like us. We want Mexico’s political system to be “democratic,” we want Mexican business to be efficient and we want Mexicans to disapprove of the things that we disapprove of--from drug abuse to communist influence in Central America.

The problem with this point of view is that it overlooks the fact that Mexico is not the United States, and that most Mexicans are not like us. And as long as we try to force them to adopt our view of the world, flare-ups such as this most recent one are inevitable.

So commonplace and pervasive is the view in this country that something is “wrong” with Mexico that I am not sure that things would change even if many people read Riding’s book. But if he makes more of us appreciate how different we “distant neighbors” really are, it might make our periodic disputes easier to understand--if not easier to live with.