The Fromson File

It will be high on the news budget the next few days as the visit of the Secretary of State and her assemblage of experts are pursued by a horde of reporters. No doubt, the focus will be on the drug war and the misplaced notion that somehow Mexico is close to being a failed state.

It’s a nice comfortable cliché, but nonsense. With a population in excess of 110 million, 70 percent of it in the country’s major cities, the problem still is a relatively isolated one. Unquestionably. the situation still can get out of hand. But those of us who have spent any time south of the border know that the gut issue is north of it. That is the uncomfortable word hardly mentioned at all…consumption. Not just by the petty punks and gangs on the streets of our inner cities, but the drug users in our upscale offices and neighborhoods that seem immune to prosecution.

We can only hope that when Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon sit down in private with their experts some serious solutions to the burgeoning crisis will emerge. President Obama will undoubtedly experience the same reality check when he visits Mexico next month. But the truth is that until the widespread usage of drugs in the United States is curtailed sharply, there can be no realistic or substantive solution to the problem inside Mexico. The drug market has to be dried up from California to New York and wherever else the cartel can thrive on its American customers. Unfortunately, it raises all kinds of uncomfortable issues for the U.S. Congress having to do with crime and punishment, civil liberties and gun control that have been ignored politically year after year.

Washington and law enforcement agents on our side of the border must shut down the countless gun shops and their owners who arm the Mexican mafia. But it takes the will to do so and at a time when the United States is burdened with so many other priorities. It’s difficult to imagine how high the Mexican crisis can be placed on President Obama’s agenda.

The narcotraficantes, safely ensconced along the Mexican border and the country’s northern states, are bloodthirsty gangsters.They protect their deadly racket by terrorizing those Mexican police or drug enforcement agents who get in their way. Murder and torture are two of their favorite forms of coercion. They will use unemployed workers and gullible teenagers to help defend their turf no matter how many guns, helicopters and money the Obama Administration delivers to Mexico’s law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, there’s no escaping a historic reality. Mexico’s cops have always been grossly underpaid with salaries ranging from 10 thousand dollars a year in the rural parts of the country and somewhat higher but measly wages in the larger cities. The pay is hardly enough to support their large and economically-depressed families and the inevitable consequence is widespread corruption.

The cops’ collusion with the drug cartel is one of the problems the Mexican government knows it must address. But let’s not go overboard. There is a tendency to exaggerate our neighbor’s problem that unfortunately draws comparisons with Iraq, Afghanistan and a host of countries in Africa.

Writing in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy, journalist Sam Quinones says that “Mexico is wracked by a criminal-capitalist insurgency..that is fighting for its life and many Americans seem to have no idea of what’s happening right next door.”

That is not the Mexico I knew and which I saw as recently as four months ago during a visit. Nor is it the country that I became familiar with over many years as a professor and director of the University of Southern California’s Center for International Journalism when I escorted American and Mexican journalists on summer-long fact-finding semesters. I remember all too clearly my months, living in the home of Vicki and Miguel P. in Morelia, while I improved my knowledge of Spanish at a local language institute. I spent weekends with their children, flying kites or trying my imperfect skills at soccer with them in a nearby park. I have fond memories of playing baseball with a group of youngsters on a sandlot in the outskirts of the city. Memories of renting a room in the home of a retired ambassador in Mexico City and of other years when I lived in various apartments in the capitol and commuted by subway, bus and taxi without any concern for my safety.

Certainly Mexico is an imperfect democracy, but change is underway as anyone knows who has watched the country changed politically from a one party to multiparty state. There was a time when the Mexican press almost always skirted coverage of the drug plague. But that too is changing. Its newspapers and television networks still have a long way before investigative journalism takes hold. One sign of change occurred when a number of Mexican journalists who were fellows in my USC graduate program joined with other civic-minded Mexicans to persuade former president Vicente Fox and the National Assembly to pass the country’s first Freedom of Information Act. Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the rest of Latin America.

Mexico today is no longer the closed society it once was. At one point, the FOI’s website attracted one million hits, satisfying a growing desire for accountability from the government and the people’s right to know. It most assuredly is not the sign of a failed state that some Americans journalists are tempted to think of when they describe the country’s drug problem.

I have walked the streets of Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende and other cities, day or night. I have strolled the campuses of the capital’s major universities and visited the offices of Mexico’s corporate giants. I have brushed shoulders with urban Mexicans in their markets or watched them trying to eke out a living as hard-working entrepreneuers, Parents passed me by in my neighborhood, escorting their well-dressed children to school every morning. I rode shoulder to shoulder with Mexicans on the subways of the capitol. As I reflect on these vignettes of life in Mexico City, it is clear to me that the country has the desire to weather the drug storm that jeopardizes its stability. But it certainly needs American help, compassion and respect and a lot less cheap politicking about immigration. The ignorant notion that Mexicans “are taking our jobs” contradicts the reality of what makes the American economy tick. Until unions are restored to their rightful place, cheap labor will always energize our economy with workers who do not necessarily speak Spanish.

Those interested in the subject, should read an essay, entitled “The Mexican Evolution” in the New York Times (03-24-09) by the distinguished historian, Enrique Krauze. I had the privilege of having him lecture to one of my classes of working journalists at El Colegio de Mexico some years ago.

“Washington,” he says, “should support Mexico’s war against the drug lords, first and foremost by recognizing its complexity. The Obama Administration should recognize the considerable responsibility for Mexico’s problems….” As Krause points out, no one thinks of the United States as a failed state. “Nor, for that matter did anyone ever see Al Capone and the criminal gangs of Chicago as representative of the entire country. For Mexico, as well, let’s leave caricatures where they belong, in the hands of cartoonists.”

Tags:   barack obama · drugs · Enrique Krauze · Felipe Calderon · freedom of information act · Hillary Clinton · Mexico · Mexico City · Vicente FoxNo Comments