Mexico and Drugs
Mexico is rebuilding its corruptionridden federal antidrug
agency with tighter command and newly screened personnel. That's
good if it happens; the government must have an instrument worthy of
the task. The announcement no doubt has something to dowith
warming up the atmosphere for President Bill Clinton's imminent
Mexico trip. That's good, too: Americans need to know that Mexicans
understand how important it is to the United States to see Mexico
stepping up to this issue. In a complex relationship that draws Mexicans
and Americans into ever deeper interdependence, drugs have become
the most politically urgent item.
Much of the daily frazzle has arisen from Mexican resentment
of an American law requiring the president to certify annually that aid
recipients are "cooperating fully" against drugs. It is offensively
unilateral, and it ignores the 200deadcopsayear pace of Mexico's
own antidrug campaign. Further, it is a test that the United States
could not possibly pass itself. The ef fort alternately to enforce this test
for its antidrug leverage and to evade it in order to mauntain overall
comity makes for confusion and no little bitterness.
That is the starting point of efforts to find a new formula that
will stimulate governments to try harder without also angering them
and their publics to the point of leading them to diminish the battle.
The best way is to replace the current system of American dictate with,
in the hemisphere, a system of joint commitments, standards and
measurements. It should happen.
It should happen, however, with everyone understanding that
the whole certification row is largely a diversion. If it is done away with,
Latin sensibilities will have been stroked, but the hideous drug problem
will still be there. It is not just that the moreoverrun states will find it
hard to substitute self or groupdiscipline for the American lash. Look
at Mexico right now. It has an upright, virtuous leadership and, by
prevailing standards, an advanced society, but it still lacks the
institutional building blocks of an honest and apolitical security force, a
working criminal justice system and a reasonably secure social safety
net. Even the United States, which possesses those things in some
abundance, has proven unable to arrest the multibilliondollar drug
express.
Sell, drugs must be foughtfor the good of society and the
citizenry and to meet the requirements of international civility. This
must be done vigorously on both sides of a 2,000mile border that
makes any other course inconceivable. Drugs are but one item on the
rich agenda of neighborly cooperation that Bill Clinton takes to, and
will find in, Mexico. But drugs are the item whose careful tending will
make it possible to deal constructively on all the other items, such as
trade, investment and the environment.
THE WASHINGTON POST