A FORGIVING RELATIONSHIP

Yet Drug Certification Process Does Highlight Simmering
Issues Between Mexico And United States

It's been a while since President Clinton was known to play the
saxophone. Yet, while dining with his Mexican counterpart, Ernesto
Zedillo, near the Yucatan city of Merida, Clinton sat in on a small
combo and laid down an impromptu rendition of the torch standard, "My
Funny Valentine." A paean to the two leaders' wives, no doubt, Clinton
might just as well have been playing to his host. A major theme of
Clinton's presidency, after all, has been the courtship of Mexico.

His whirlwind Merida summit with President Zedillo this month was
nothing less than a diplomatic love fest, meticulously scripted to
send the message that relations are fundamentally sound between two
very different countries that just happen to share a 2,000-mile-long
border. "We are more than neighbors," Clinton proclaimed in a speech.
"More and more, we belong to the same American family ... What binds
us together is far, far more important than what divides us."

Optimism has become a cornerstone of Clinton's foreign policy, whether
the goal is to press for democratic change in China, force a Balkans
truce or craft a lasting Mideast peace -- objectives that, to be sure,
require mountains of faith to even pursue.

Some analysts, though, are arguing for a bit less window dressing and
a lot more candor from the White House when it comes to U.S.-Mexico
relations, particularly in such thorny areas as trade, immigration and
drug trafficking.

Few had expected Clinton to change his tune in making his decision
announced Friday to certify to Congress that Mexico is cooperating
fully with U.S. efforts to combat the scourge of illegal drugs.

Mexico has patently failed to thwart a massive narco-crime industry
that U.S. authorities say will smuggle perhaps $30 billion worth of
drugs into the United States this year -- about 60 percent of all the
illicit drugs that will make their way onto the nation's streets. But
that wasn't enough to stop Clinton from giving Mexico's counter drug
efforts a passing grade; he signaled as much during the summit by
praising Zedillo's commitment to a U.S.- Mexico alliance against
drugs. Beyond his instincts to put the best possible face on a messy
problem, Clinton downplayed the failings in Mexico's anti-drug efforts
because to decertify would trigger painful sanctions against Mexico,
a key U.S. economic partner, and risk shattering the relationship
Clinton and Zedillo have met worked hard to forge.

"Clinton is clearly doing backflips to be able to send up
certification language to the Hill," said Mexico expert George
Grayson, professor of government at the college of William & Mary, in
Williamsburg, Va. To do otherwise, said Grayson, would "poison the
relationship." Every year at this time, that relationship is tested by
what has become a diplomatic rite of spring, when the White House
grades the counter-narcotics efforts of Mexico and some 30 other
countries that are major sources or distribution channels for drugs.

Under a 1986 law, the president must certify to Congress by March 1 of
each year whether these countries are cooperating fully with U.S.
anti-narcotics efforts. Countries whose programs are decertified face
immediate suspension of most U.S. aid -- humanitarian and
counter-narcotics assistance are excepted -- unless the president
decides to sustain assistance for national security reasons. Congress
has 30 days in which to overturn the president's certification recom-
mendations, through a joint resolution, or allow the White House
ruling to stand.

Frustration among congressional members -- and constituents angered by
the flood of drugs from Mexico -- has crested for the past two years
with vocal, if unsuccessful, legislative efforts to decertify Mexico.
More sound and fury is expected this time around, particularly if the
Clinton administration paints too rosy a picture of Mexico's failed
anti-drug policies.

"I just can't ratify, nor sanction, a concept that tells the people of
both republics that this is coming along," said Sen. Paul Coverdell,
R-Ga., a major player in the issue as chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. "They need to make
sure that it's absolutely clear that the progress has been limited."

Mexico detests the certification process and the annual criticism it
foments from its overbearing neighbor to the north. It is American
drug consumption, Mexicans are quick to point out, that provides the
rich incentives for narco-criminals, whose work undermines law and
order in Mexico. "We feel that it's a unilateral, subjective and
unfair process," Mexico's former ambassador to the United States,
Jesus Silva-Herzog, said in a telephone interview from Mexico City.
"It's difficult for us to understand how is it possible that the
largest consumer of drugs in the world becomes the judge."

Many in Washington recognize the Mexican government's frustration, and
Coverdell said Zedillo -- who a few weeks ago earmarked for counter-
narcotics efforts another $500 million -- deserves support for
devoting high-level attention to the drug problem.

And yet, Coverdell said, Mexico has done far too little to combat
narco-traffickers, or to rid the country of the official corruption
that enables them to operate. "The data remains terribly disturbing,"
he said. "We've got a lot of work to do here."

The annual certification imbroglio gnaws at a relationship also
strained by immigration and economic issues.

Mexicans and Americans will make some 250 million legal border
crossings this year, one indicator of the growing economic and
cultural integration of the two countries.

"With each crossing," said Clinton, "we move beyond mere diplomacy,
closer to genuine friendship."

Again, though, Clinton sees a glass that's half full.

Roughly 150,000 Mexicans immigrate legally to the United States each
year, adding richly to the country's pool of some 15 million Americans
of Mexican descent, but also competing with native Americans for jobs
while taxing the services of state and local governments. At least as
many slip into the country illegally. But while numbers of illegal
entries are fuzzy, Mexicans make up the largest block of the
estimated 400,000 people of various nationalities who enter the
country illegally each year, according to the Center for Immigration
Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

What drives the mass movements is the vast disparity between living
standards in Mexico, a nation of 95 million people with an average per
capita income of $4,400 per year, and the United States, where, with
250 million people, per capita income averages seven times that
amount. That wage gap has also driven a major restructuring of
American industry, as thousands of U.S. manufacturers and suppliers
have set up shop in Mexico, aided by the low tariffs and investment
guarantees embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or
NAFTA.

Clinton, who ramrodded the NAFTA through a reluctant Congress in his
first major, and still most dramatic, legislative victory, hails the
integration of the two economies as a step forward for both countries.
NAFTA, said Clinton, has strengthened both economies, providing a
buffer from the ravages of the global economic crisis and a model for
broader trade agreements he hopes might one day link the entire
Western Hemisphere. Last year, as U.S. exports to hard-pressed
Pacific Rim nations plummeted by 19 percent, two-way trade between the
United States and Mexico grew 11 percent to nearly $175 billion. That
placed Mexico in third place, behind Canada and virtually
neck-and-neck with Japan, among U.S. trading partners. Mexico is on
track to eclipse Japan this year as this country's number-two trading
partner.

"We must expand this oasis of confidence and growth in our
hemisphere," Clinton said, reiterating his call for a Free Trade Area
of the Americas stretching from the Yukon to the southern tip of
Argentina. And yet, true to form, there's a flip side to the cheery
portrait Clinton paints of the cross-border economic ties.

NAFTA opponents complain bitterly that the agreement, which was
negotiated by the Bush administration, has put to flight hundreds of
American factories, large and small, which have invested some $30
billion building new plants in Mexico, sending good-paying jobs south
of the border. The trade picture, moreover, is grossly distorted,
these critics assert, because it counts as U.S. exports tens of
billions of dollars each year of relatively low-value parts and raw
materials that are shipped south and used to manufacture or assemble
finished goods that Mexico then exports to this country.

"They're processed in Mexico and sent right back here and the only
effect it has on U.S. employment is to reduce it and the only effect
it has on U.S. wages and incomes is to lower them," said trade expert
Alan Tonelson, research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry
Council, a trade association representing more than 1,000 small and
medium-sized manufacturing companies.

"This is simply a trade policy that's designed to encourage
outsourcing," said Tonelson, "to encourage U.S. corporations to move
to Mexico and take advantage of low wages, lax regulations, etcetera."
Adds Charles McMillion, chief economist for the Washington consulting
group, MBG Information Services, "It has the effect of squeezing
profits and squeezing wages in these companies and forcing them, if
they possibly can, to move at least some of their production to
Mexico. It's put incredible pricing pressure on them over the last
couple of years." Plenty of other experts disagree.

"I'm an unapologetic optimist on this," said Chandler Stolp, director
of the U.S.-Mexican Policy Studies Program at the University of Texas
in Austin. The shifts decried by NAFTA's critics, Stolp said, merely
represent the rational corporate response to a low-wage base on the
country's southern doorstep. That sort of integration, Stolp said,
helps U.S. companies compete favorably against their overseas rivals,
even as it offers Mexican workers a ladder up from poverty.

"If trade were just a matter of selling finished products to each
other, then Mexico and the United States really have very little to do
with each other," said Stolp. "We're not competing with Mexico, we're
partnering with Mexico."

Clinton, for his part, concedes that the U.S.-Mexico economic
relationship is imperfect, as are links on immigration and drugs.
What's important, he maintains, is not to curse the darkness, but
rather to light those candles that might be lit.

"Any complex relationship will have its ups and downs," Clinton said
in Merida. "But we know our differences cannot divide us."