Don't Disturb the Neighbors: The Us and Democracy in Mexico, 1980-1995 by Jacqueline Mazza

Author:Jacqueline Mazza [Mazza, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Caribbean & Latin American, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781135961336
Google: tmWTAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17530378
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mexican Intellectuals Try to Inject Political Conditions in U.S. Debate

An interesting new dynamic arose in early 1993, triggered not by a minority voice in the U.S. Congress or NGO community but by a few Mexican intellectuals who were seeking to have congressional consideration of NAFTA include political conditions. Given historical Mexican sensitivities, this was an unusual move. It was not, however, so different from what opposition figures from other countries might ask of U.S. officials. Jorge Castañeda and Adolfo Aguilar Zinser visited the State Department and Democratic congressmen, specifically seeking support for the conditioning of the NAFTA agreement on international observation of the upcoming 1994 Mexican presidential elections.

Castañeda explained that he “received different sets of negative responses, but no positive ones.”12 The Clinton administration, he reported, was totally opposed to political conditions and would not consider it. They told him he was being interventionist. In Congress, Castañeda recalled his conversations with Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT). He maintained that most senators held simplistic views of Mexican politics, with Senator Dodd arguing that the Mexican left was communist and was merely trying to kill the agreement.

Castañeda’s and Aguilar’s conversations with U.S. leaders were not typical of the Mexican opposition during the NAFTA period. The PAN had not ventured back into activism in U.S. policy circles since its decidedly mixed experience in the mid-1980s. Ricardo Pascoe, a chief aide to the leader of the PRD, Cuáuhtemoc Cárdenas, explains that for its own reasons the PRD tried to distance itself from the U.S. debate over NAFTA. Many of the PRD’s obvious allies in the United States (e.g., unions, environmental groups) were engaging in “Mexico-bashing arguments,” he pointed out, accusing the Mexicans of trying to take jobs away from the United States. Many in the PRD did agree with some of the things NAFTA opponents were saying about Mexico on human rights and electoral fraud, but they didn’t want the U.S. Congress intervening in Mexico’s internal politics. Pascoe explains that “because of the way the U.S. uses those criticisms against you, to try and extract concessions. . . . [Y]ou can’t become allies of these people criticizing Mexico.”13 The PRD was not entirely handsoff, though. PRD allies in the United States were actively expressing disagreement with NAFTA, and some had informal relationships with NAFTA congressional opponents.14 Ironically, it was the Mexican government—not the opposition—who most tried to influence the U.S. debate through sustained lobbying and Salinas’s public appearances in the United States.

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