BORDER DISPUTES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201580009-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 25, 2012
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: May 20, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201580009-0
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BORDER DISPUTES
NEW REPUBLIC
20 May 1985
Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans
by Alan Riding
(Knopf, 385 pp., $18.95)
Some of the Central Intelligence Agen-
cy's station chiefs in Latin enca use
to joke during President Reagan's first
term about "looking for the ayatollah."
There was a gung-ho attitude in the
agency, led by its director and abetted
by then-national intelligence officer
Constantine Menges. There was pres-
sure to report that Mexico was on its
way to becoming "an Iran-next-door,"
and even though there was nothing
substantial to support this contention,
agents and analysts had the choice
of proving a negative or-worst of
stigmas-appearing naive.
The weight of unreality grew so
heavy that last year Menges's succes-
sor, veteran intelligence officer John
Horton, resigned in protest rather than
adapt the National Intelligence Estimate
on Mexico to what he considered alarm-
ist standards. The estimate was sup-
posed to be the last, best word on what
was going on south of the border; and
Horton, it seems, did not think the
ayatollah had a role in it.
Fortunately, the public does not have
to rely on the CIA for its information. It
now has at hand an estimate as intelli-
Mexico's mix of oil riches, corruption,
poverty, population, and frequently re-
pressive politics, and by the proximity
of regional turmoil, are real enough.
(Consider the recent case of U.S. drug
enforcement agent Enrique Camarena,
murdered, it seems, by Mexican police
officials; they were themselves deeply
involved in narcotics trafficking, and
their confessions were apparently beat-
en out of them by their erstwhile col-
leagues. What better image of ruthless-
ness, lawlessness, and corruption?)
ing domestic and international political
currents. Traditionally it is ruthless, but
traditionally it also delivers what its
people want.
"Almost. instinctively," Riding re-
ports, the PRI "co-opts emergent oppo-
sition leaders, either giving them in-
fluential jobs in government or neutral-
izing them with money ... Opposition
groups that stray outside this context
are more vulnerable to direct repres-
sion." Riding mentions massacres of
leftist students in 1968 and 1971, and
the subsequent disappearances of other
dissidents. "But the government also
considers resort tc such tactics a poor
reflection on its bargaining talents: it
should be the fear-and not the fact-of
unrest and repression that makes nego-
tiations possible." What the PRI nor-
mally does with its opponents-in other
words, is make them offers they can't
refuse.
Mexico's notorious corruption be-
comes "a practical way of bridging the
gap between idealistic legislation and
the management of day-to-day living,"
and the concept of corruption "often
becomes indistinguishable from that of
influence, which flourishes among the
family and friends of leading politicians
and blends naturally into the old tradi-
tion of favor and patronage.... Today,
corruption enables the system to func-
tion, providing the 'oil' that makes the
wheels of the bureaucratic machine
turn and the 'glue' that seals political
alliances." From such contradictions
comes a synthesis that seems to work,
decade after decade, however strange
or unseemly it may be in North Ameri-
can eyes. And if Mexico's regime did
not presume to look outside its borders,
one presumes the Reagan administra-
tion would be content with it. It is au-
thoritarian; it is stable; it is basically, if
not slavishly, pro-American on most
issues.
Still, as Riding makes abundantly
clear, the danger of confused alarms
about the future of Mexico is that finally
they lead nowhere, except toward igno-
rant meddling by the United States that
can turn real problems into real disas-
ters. Riding has an especially sophisti-
'cated understanding of this dangerous
dynamic. He spent 13 years in Mexico,
most of the time as the correspondent
for The New York Times. Apart from his
perfect Spanish, he had a remarkable
level of cultural fluency. He was com-
fortable with many of the most influen-
tial figures in the Mexican government,
and generally they appear to have been
comfortable with him. Riding's access
and understanding allow him to exam-
ine Mexico's weaknesses in detail, and
gent as anyone is likely to find on
the condition of Mexico today. Alan
Riding's best-selling book is an elegant,
comprehensive essay on that nation
very much as it is, not as one might
want it-or fear it.
Mexico, so close and yet so foreign,
has always provided fertile ground for
the ambitions and the anxieties of Amer-
ican politicians, whether the Alamo is
under attack, the Zimmerman telegram
is on the wire, or illegal aliens are
massed for a silent invasion across the
border. It is easy to conjure the spectral
menace of a crazed and hostile world
that begins just south of Brownsville.
Most people in the United States (and
many Mexicans) are befuddled by the
labyrinths of Mexican society and gov-
ernment. And the problems created by
also to make the system's contradic-
tions comprehensible and to appreciate
its strengths.
T HE essential accomplishment of
modern Mexico has been to main-
tain stability, wringing a functional
peace from the bloody tumult of its
past. Neither a democracy in conven-
tional terms nor a dictatorship, Mexi-
co's political system under the all-
powerful PRI, or Institutionalized Revo-
lutionary Party, bears less resemblance
to the ayatollah's Iran than to Mario
Puzo's Mafia. It is not the product of
fanaticism, but of cold-blooded pragma-
tism. Its ideology is survival, and it has
been flexible enough to bend with shift-
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201580009-0
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201580009-0
a.
And yet administration officials look
for the ayatollah.
It is reasonable to be wary of develop-
ing dangers, certainly. Riding carefully
points out that while "nothing has
proven more wrong than predicting the
demise of Mexico's political system,"
there "is little room for complacency.
Beneath the surface calm, the repercus-
sions of change, growth, urbanization
are subjecting society to unprecedented
strain." But the peculiar alarmism evi-
dent in Washington seems to go be-
yond that. Sometimes it appears less
protective than vindictive. Mexico has
crossed the United States recently, and
the attitude of many members of the
administration is, plainly, that it has no
right.
WASHINGTON is intent on bring-
ing the Caribbean basin firmly
back under its control, now going so far
as to push openly for the overthrow of
Nicaragua's government; and Mexico,
with legalisms and peace initiatives,
keeps getting in the way. The adminis-
tration sees the contagion of communist
revolution sweeping up from the south
toward the biggest domino of all-Mex-
ico itself-but the Mexicans are some-
how blind to it. They may not embrace
the Sandinistas as they once did, but
they seem congenitally ill-disposed to-
ward efforts to oust them.
In this context Mexico's diplomatic
initiatives become, as a leaked White
House document put it, something to
be "trumped." And looking for the aya-
tollah, even in a figurative sense, is a
way of insinuating that Mexico is inca-
pable of keeping its own house in or-
der, much less making suggestions
about anyone else's.
M EANWHILE Washington has
come to define "democracy" as
the way our friends govern themselves.
And from such a standpoint, if Mexico
looks less than friendly on certain is-
sues, it is deemed less than democratic.
Even as the administration helps Mexi-
co with its disastrous finances, behind-
the-scenes administration officials en-
courage criticism of Mexico's political
abuses and fuel the enthusiasm for its
right-wing, business-ort-tnted opposi-
tion parties. The opposition, in turn,
criticizes the PRI for not supporting
U.S. policy in Central America.
On this difficult juncture between
foreign and domestic policy, Riding's
analysis is clear and dispassionate. He
outlines the complicated relations be-
tween successive Mexican presidents
and Fidel Castro, the history of Mexican
aid to Nicaragua's Sandinistas, and
Mexican cooperation with El Salvador's
insurgents. He presents the divisions
within President Miguel de la Madrid's
own cabinet over these issues. And
then he presents the problems as de la
Madrid would have to see them. "A
more conservative foreign policy alone
would not appease domestic conserva-
tives, but it would alienate liberals
and leftists who give relatively more
importance to foreign affairs." De la
Madrid might distance himself from
Cuba and Nicaragua and El Salvador's
revolutionaries
without gaining credibility and influence
in Washington. Mexico clearly cannot af-
ford to withdraw from Central America,
to allow the fate of a strategic region to
be defined entirely by others. It also can-
not endorse a U.S. strategy that appears to
feed instability. Its only remaining op-
tion, therefore, was to remain politi-
cally aligned with revolutionary forces in
the region. As in the past, the new gov-
ernment looked for alternatives, but
found that Washington-and history-
permitted none.
Riding concludes with a warning
that, thus far, has been little heeded
by the administration. He has tried
throughout the book to draw a contrast
between the upwardly mobile, highly
Americanized middle classes, the part
of the Mexican population to which
Washington pays the most attention,
and "the ordinary Mexicans," most of
them peasants or the children of peas-
ants, whose roots have more spiritual
depth-in the mysticism of the Catholic
church and the Aztec Temple-and
whose patience, unless sorely tested,
has much greater endurance than most
Western cultures have seen. "By trying
to make the country more superficially
democratic, more Western, more 'pre-
sentable' abroad," Riding cautions,
"the system's roots in the population
have weakened. It has become less tru-
ly democratic because it is less repre-
sentative of real Mexicans. The more
the system responds to the American-
ized minority, the more blatant will be
the contradictions within the country."
The greater the chance, one might say,
that there will be an ayatollah to look
for.
Christopher Dickey's book on the
United States and Nicaragua will be
published in the fall by Simon and
Schuster.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201580009-0