TOO BIG TO FAIL

Mexico's corrupt, but decertifying it has consequences.

In fairness, it must be said that not all Mexican police
officials are corrupt. Maybe only 95 percent of them.
Police corruption is a tradition with deep, tenacious
roots.

The latest evidence of rottenness came last month when
Mexico's drug czar was himself busted for aiding and
abetting drug traffickers. Mexican President Ernest Zedillo
has actually proved quite bold about removing corrupt narcs
and compromised police units _ only to replace them with
men who are just as corrupt or who soon become so when drug
dealers start flashing bankrolls.

But Bill Clinton decided on Friday that Mexico deserves
to be recertified as a full ally in the war on drugs _
meaning it will not suffer the economic sanctions applied
to such 'decertified' nations as Afghanistan and Colombia.

Mr. Clinton stated in his Saturday radio address: "We
must do whatever we can to give (Mexico) the means to
succeed. Stamping out the drug trade is a longterm
battle."

In the same speech, Mr. Clinton vowed to force states to
drugtest prisoners and parolees and to keep them jailed if
they come up dirty. One wonders whether Mr. Clinton detects
some irony here. If we cannot keep drugs out of a maximum
security prison surrounded by a quarter mile of walls and
wire, that provides some idea of the magnitude of trying to
stop them from permeating America's thousands of miles of
open land and water borders.

As the president says, this drug war is a longterm
thing. Several stubborn facts remain. As Mexico (and
decertified Colombia) never fail to point out, it is demand
for drugs by U.S. citizens that drives the trade.

Is our newly certified drugwar partner, Mexico, any
less corrupt than decertified Colombia? Doubtful.

The fact is that, just as some American companies are
deemed by the government to be 'too big to fail,' so some
countries are considered too important to decertify _ no
matter how corrupt. Mexico fits that bill. Even the
discussion last week that Mexico might be decertified
caused the peso to lose more than 2 percent of its value _
a circumstance that augurs a renewed financial crisis and
hundreds of thousands of additional illegal aliens pouring
into the United States in search of work.

The Clinton administration must realize the dangers of
laying the big decertification insult at Mexico's doorstep:
What if a decertified and angry Mexico simply quit even
trying to fight the drug trade, kicked out our DEA agents
and called it quits? What if it simply decided to legalize
heroin for export to the United States? At any rate, a move
is afoot in Congress to overrule the Clinton
administration's decision and to proceed with
decertification of Mexico. If Congress chooses that route,
it had better be prepared to deal with the iron law of
unintended consequences.