Free trade with an unfree society: a commitment and its consequences

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In late January of this year I went to the Senate floor to speak of U.S. relations with Mexico, in the context of the new North American Free Trade Agreement. My theme was one I had touched upon repeatedly since NAFTA was first proposed during the administration of President Bush: free trade with an unfree society. I had been an enthusiastic supporter of the agreement with Canada, but was troubled by the thought of a similar arrangements with Mexico, and for the most elemental reason. The political and legal arrangements of the United States and Canada being essentially symmetrical, the vast involvement in one another's affairs, indeed the partial ceding of sovereignty implicit in such an agreement, would prove manageable. There would be no political loss and considerable economic gain. Optimality, as an economist might say. By contrast, our political and legal institutions were anything but symmetrical with those of Mexico. For Mexico maintained a Leninist state.

Apart from a gracious note from our distinguished treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin, there was no response from the executive branch to my statement. In any event, we were then, in January, caught up in an intense effort to save Mexico from defaulting on its foreign debt. This was the first of what is likely to be a sequence of such crises, and it seemed gratuitous to press the argument in that atmosphere. But now the first crisis has eased, thanks in large measure to what Alexander Hamilton, our first secretary of the treasury, termed "energy in the executive," and it may be time to return to the subject.

I begin by calling attention to an essay by William Pfaff, which appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 16. Mr. Pfaff, who writes from Paris, is a foreign policy analyst of exceptional range, depth, and experience. He would be such if he lived in Utica, but living abroad gives him a singular perspective on American affairs. His essay begins with this simple, chilling analogy:

The commitment the United States now

has made to Mexico bears a distinct

resemblance to the commitment it made to Vietnam

during the late 1950s and the early 1960s

when the troubles in that country were only

beginning.

That was war and this is peace.

Nonetheless, now, as then, with as little

reflection and a simplistic ideology, Washington has

taken on responsibility for the fortunes of

another nation that it scarcely knows and fails

to understand.

In Mexico this American assumption of

responsibility is primarily economic, but

Mexico's economic plight is inseparable from

the political afflicting the

seven-decade-long dictatorship in Mexico of the PRI, or

Institutional Revolutionary Party, historically

the vehicle of Mexican nationalism...

Even without the debt crisis a national

upheaval is under way in Mexico which not

even the Mexicans can be sure they can solve.

Washington's commitment to a solution is an

engagement with the uncontrollable and the

unforeseeable.

In my January statement I was unapologetic about discussing government in the abstract, maintaining that Speaker Newt Gingrich, by encouraging us to read or re-read The Federalist, was directing us to just such abstractions, which had very much engaged the founders of the nation. They had ransacked history for different "ideal types" of government to provide lessons to be learned and contrasts to be made with the new American republic which they had set about constructing. In their spirit, then, here is a definition of Leninism from the Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (the capitalized words are employed in the original for purposes of cross reference):

Leninism: The term refers to the version of

Marxist thought which accepts the validity of

the major theoretical contributions made by

Lenin to revolutionary Marxism. These

contributions fall into two main groups. Central to

the first was the conception of the

revolutionary party as the vanguard of the PROLETARIAT.

The workers, if left to their own devices,

would concentrate on purely economic issues

and not attain full political CLASS

consciousness, and therefore the revolutionary seizure of

power needed the leadership of committed

Marxist ACTIVISTS to provide the appropriate

theoretical and tactical guidelines. The role of

the party was thus to be a "vanguard" in the

revolutionary struggle...

The second major theoretical contribution

made by Lenin was to draw the political

consequences from an analysis of CAPITALISM as both

international and imperialist. The

phenomenon of IMPERIALISM divided the world between

advanced industrial nations and the colonies

they were exploiting. This situation was

inherently unstable and led to war between capitalist

nations thus creating favorable conditions for

Revolution. For Lenin, the "weakest link" in

the capitalist chain was to be found in

UNDERDEVELOPED regions of the world economy

such as Russia where the indigenous

BOURGEOISIE was comparatively weak, but where

there had been enough INDUSTRIALIZATION to

create a class-conscious proletariat. The idea of

worldwide SOClALIST revolution beginning in

relatively backward countries led to the

inclusion of the peasantry as important

revolutionary actors affording essential support to the

proletariat in establishing a socialist order...

As compared with the ideas of Marx and

Engels, Leninism gives more emphasis to the

leading role of the party, to backward or

semicolonial countries as the initial site of

revolution, and to the peasantry as potential

revolutionary agents...

Clearly, Leninist doctrine and Soviet example had considerable appeal to the revolutionary leaders and intellectuals who came to power in Mexico in the 1920s. It happens this was a time of great artistic energy, perhaps especially in the mural paintings of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfonso Siquieros. To this day one can see on the walls of government buildings in Mexico City vast scenes of revolutionary tumult. Amid a sea of yellow sombreros and silver machetes there is sure to be found an incongruously bearded Lenin, turned out in a starched collar and black necktie. That, and, of course, swarms of red flags.

If the Soviet "experiment" attracted sympathizers, even adherents, in the United States in those years, I would hazard that public opinion showed even greater sympathy for the goings-on in Mexico. A wonderful encounter came at the time of the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City in the early years of the Great Depression. Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint a fresco for the lobby of the central RCA building, as it then was. Word got out that it would include not only red flags, but Lenin himself Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was managing the enterprise, demurred. Much hullabaloo followed, leading in turn to a poem by E.B. White of The New Yorker, "I Paint What I See,, describing an imagined encounter between the youthful scion of great wealth and the revolutionary artist.

"Whose is that head that I see on my wall?"

Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.

"Is it anyone's head whom we know, at all?

A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?

Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?

Or is it the head of a Russian?"

"For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks

You painted a radical. I say shucks..."

"For this, as you know, is a public hall

And the people want doves, or a tree in fall,

And though your art I dislike to hamper,

I owe a little to God and Gramper,

And after all,

It's my wall..."

"We'll see if it is," said Rivera.

It was, then, no accident (!) that when Leon Trotsky fled the Soviet Union, having lost out to Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin, he did not settle in Paris, as failed revolutionaries were supposed to do. He went instead to Mexico City, where he set up in considerable style, surrounded often as not by American acolytes.

Two things are to be said about the coming to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico in First -- and the great English historian Sir John Plumb has made this point -- it was a blessing for the Mexican people who for decades had lived through indescribably bloody and agonizing turmoil. Of a sudden, stability was achieved. (Sir John makes the point that revolutions are easy; it is the onset of stability that is rare in human experience.) The second point is that nothing like ihe Leninist terror followed the coming to power of the PRI. Diplomatic relations with the Papacy -- severed since 1867 when Benito Juarez implemented strict controls of Church power -- had become particularly hostile in 1926, with the strict enforcement of the anticlerical provisions of the Constitution. Now, in 1929, the Mexican government and the Church reached a modus vivendi, and after that Catholicism, the religion of the people, was generally not suppressed. (Though one should not fail to bear in mind Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.)

Even so, one-party control, and the corruption that so quickly follows, settled on the Republic of Mexico. As the 1994-95 edition of Freedom in the World, the authoritative annual survey published by Freedom House, states:

Since its founding in 1929, the PRI has

dominated the state through a top-down

corporatist structure that is authoritarian in nature

and held together through co-optation,

patronage, corruption and, when all else fails,

repression. The formal business of government

takes place secretly and with little legal

foundation.

In correct Leninist practice, the party controlled not only the state, but an the private institutions that might seem to be arrayed against the state, most importantly the trade unions.

Of late, however, the Leninist state in Mexico appears to have entered a time of troubles, possibly of disintegration. As Pfaff writes, "a national upheaval is underway." Tim Golden of the New York Times gives this account of the May Day celebrations in Mexico City this year:

Defying the pro-Government union leaders

who have dominated Mexican labor since the

1930s, independent unions and leftist political

groups turned the celebration of Labor Day

today into an outpouring of anger at the

economic policies of President Ernesto

Zedillo...[F]or the first time in decades, May

Day's main political act was something other

than a loyal tribute to the Government and its

long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Leaders of the pro-Government unions have

canceled their traditional parade through the

square weeks ago, apparently out of fear that

they would be unable to control the critics in

their ranks.

Trade union subservience to the PRI has been a settled fact for half a century, one that hardly escaped the notice of the American labor movement. More recently the party seems to have begun parceling out hugely profitable state enterprises or resources to favored business leaders, who have evidently become fabulously wealthy. A dacha outside of Moscow is one thing@ the PRI elite have shown the world the way things might have been. On February 23, 1993, as the NAFTA negotiations were wrapping up, President Carlos Salinas de party fundraising dinner with tickets at $25,000,000 each. This occasioned some raised eyebrows. President Salinas forthwith endorsed campaign contribution limits and the head of the governing party, Genaro Borrego, announced that it would no longer accept donations of more than one million pesos, or about $325,000.

Mr. Borrego further explained that "It was some businessmen who proposed the quantities to contribute, to the party. This explanation may not immediately recommend itself, and yet there would be a certain oligopolistic logic in keeping up the price of admission to a monopolistic party! The twentieth century seems to be demonstrating, however, that such arrangements are not stable. The problem of accession has returned.

On March 23, 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the PRI, was assassinated in Tijuana. One Mario Aburto Martinez was arrested at the scene, convicted and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. The administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had chosen Colosio as his successor, maintained that the assassination was the work of this lone gunman. However, on February 25, 1995, the new Mexican Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of a second suspected gunman, Othon Cortes Vazquez, a PRI security guard.

A second political assassination occurred on September 28, 1994, when Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the secretary-general of the PRI, was killed in Mexico City. On February 28, 1995, Attorney General Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former President Salinas, in connection with Ruiz Massieu's assassination. The investigation into this assassination had previously been carried out by the victim, brother, Mario, who was soon after arrested in the Newark, New Jersey airport with $46,000 in undeclared cash. The Mexican attorney general has since located $10 million in U.S. bank accounts linked to Mario Ruiz Massieu, money he apparently obtained while in charge of Mexico's counter-narcotics program.

Add a further twist to the tale. Former President Salinas, whom the United States hoped would be the first president of the World Trade Organization until this story was revealed, is now living in the United States in virtual exile.

Now another political murder would seem to have occurred. On May 10, 1994 the former Jalisco state attorney general, Leonardo Larios, who previously had been responsible for investigating the 1993 killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posidas Ocampo, was assassinated in Guadalajara. At the time of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's assassination, the first official explanation of the killing was that he had been accidentally killed in the crossfire between two rival drug cartels. When the autopsy later revealed, however, that he had been shot fourteen times at close range, Leobardo Larios postulated that the Cardinal had been mistaken for the leader of a local drug ring, despite the fact that he was wearing his clerical garb.

Revelations such as these are familiar. Power in Mexico has resided within the PRI, the line between the party and the state has been blurred, and on occasion arguments within the party are settled by murder. These features of Leninist totalitarianism appeared early in the Soviet state. In Political Succession in the USSR (1965), Myron Rush explains:

[W]hile Lenin still ruled, he exercised his

power through both the Party and the

government. In the Party, formally, he had no special

position but was simply a member of the

Politburo along with six others, he headed the

government, however, as Chairman of the

Council of People's Commissars. He governed

through the state appararas directly, through

the Party apparatus indirectly...The Party, as

the embodiment of the Revolutionary will,

decided overall policy.

Mexico continues to maintain the Leninist model of having the president fulfill the official role of head of state, while controlling the party without formal title, though the paw and the government appear to be moving apart somewhat. Much of what has happened of late in Mexico echoes an earlier time of change and violence. But there is much that promises a new era altogether.

On May 23, 1991, as the U.S. Senate debated granting fast track authority to enable the administration to negotiate NAFTA, I went to the floor to explain my opposition: Mexico lacked an independent judiciary. This was, and I fear still is, a matter of seeming small interest to our Department of State. But observe: it has become a matter of considerable interest to the rulers of Mexico. On May 12, 1994, the first ever presidential election debate took place between Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, the PRI candidate who succeeded the assassinated Colosio, and his opponents from the National Action Party (PAN) and the Party of Democratic Revolution (PDR). During the debate, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos of the National Action Party charged that Zedillo does not "get a passing grade in democracy." If elected, Mr. Fernandez de Cevallos promised to form a plural government. In turn, Zedillo used the debate to announce his intentions to establish a truly independent judiciary. The CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service records him as saying, "I am proposing the total reformation of our judicial system. This must be deep-rooted reform, starting virtually from ground zero, because we need a justice system that will function for the Mexican people."

Once elected, President Zedillo in one stroke cleared the bench of an twenty-one sitting Supreme Court justices. These judges had been appointed for life. While the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, like most things in Mexico, reality is something quite different. Appointments to the court are made by the president and approved by the Senate (in which 95 of the 128 senators belong to the PRI). Again, Freedom House is instructive.

The judiciary is subordinate to the president,

underscoring the lack of a rule of law. Supreme

Court judges are appointed by the executive and

rubber-stamped by the Senate. The court is

prohibited from enforcing political and labor rights,

and from reviewing die constitutionality of laws.

Overall, the judiciary system is weak, politicized

and riddled with corruption.

Very possibly President Zedillo means to change this and much else. The North American Free Trade Agreement surely indicated a desire by Mexican elites to begin to put the institutions of the Leninist state behind diem. Pfaff writes:

The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, a

product of the PRI system, is attempting to reform the

party and the way it has perpetuated itself in

power. For the first time crimes committed

within the party leadership are being exposed to

public view, investigated and given the promise of

prosecution.

Free elections have appeared. In May an opposition (PAN) candidate won "a landslide" victory for governor of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Again, Golden of the New York Times (which has been covering Mexico brilliantly) observed, "It was only the fourth official victory for the opposition in a gubernatorial vote in sixty-six years...." But a beginning? More than just possibly.

It may be the United States can help. More to the point, we have no choice but to try to help. We have made a huge commitment to this relationship. There is no point in arguing now whether we should have done so. We did, and we are obliged to live with the consequences.

As I write, the U.S. president has just returned from Moscow, where the great transition from totalitarianism is underway, to what purpose and what end we do not know. But surely, we know that it matters to us. The Department of State has focused attention on the matter, has proposed policies, responses. The same intelligent, patient, persistent attention now needs to be paid to the incipient transition in Mexico. There is, perhaps, not long history of aggression against Mexico, and the consequent suspicion of our motives. But we can at least let it be known that we have some inkling of what they are going through. There are small "d" democrats in Mexico who need to know this. If there is anything we have learned from this hideous century it is that it makes al the difference when those who resist totalitarian regimes know that there are those abroad who know of their resistance.

COPYRIGHT 1995 The National Interest, Inc.
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