Remora

LI recommends our long suffering readers turn to Carlos Fuentes piece in the LA Times today. It is as clear as baby's breath: Mexico has always followed the policy of opposing unilateral, unprovoked intervention by the U.S. in Latin America, and it should continue to follow that policy in the Middle East. In other words, gently but firmly dissent from the Bush juggernaut.



"Mexico actively opposed U.S. aggression and intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s; and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Granada in the 1980s. During the Central American wars, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda Sr. built, with French minister Claude Cheysson, the Franco-Mexican accord that gave political status to the Salvadoran guerrillas over the objections of the United States. Then-Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda was the engine behind the Contadora Group -- Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela -- that sought solutions for peace. In these last two cases, Mexico's opposition to the U.S. was riskier than a U.N. vote on Saddam Hussein.

In the face of open aggression and intervention by the Reagan administration against Central America, Mexico worked for a peaceful solution that took the initiative away from Washington and placed it in the hands of the Central Americans. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias' Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 is a testament to that. In all those instances when Mexico has shown its independence, Washington signaled its anger but did nothing against Mexico. It didn't do anything because it couldn't. In the name of what?"

Of course, the below the surface story here is probably intriguing. Fuentes was as shaped and honed by the old PRI system as the widespread graft and one party elections of yore. He was the son of an ambassador, and went to school in D.C. His politics, fashionably soixante-huitarde at one time, have gravitated well to the right. On wonders how much of what Fuentes is writing is a signal sent, discretely, across the border by Bush's friends below it. Even Fuentes, however, sees what the current dust-up is all about:

"Mexico's political independence in the case of Iraq will contribute forcefully to what the world most needs: a counterpoint to U.S. power. The real danger in our time is not the miserable Hussein. It is a unipolar world dominated by Washington. Creating that counterbalance is a political necessity. Future governments, but especially the democratic government of the United States, will end up thanking France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Russia and China for their efforts to create a counterpoint to the United States."

The counterpoint to the U.S., in truth, will come not in the shape of a diplomatic hybrid of varied nations -- it will come in the form of the natural, internal brake exerted by 400 billion dollar deficits, plus 800 billion dollar giveaways. The structure will buckle under that much weight. As usual, it will be the population that doesn't make as much in a year as Dick Cheney will get back in tax refunds that will bear the insupportable costs of foreign policy adventurism. And so disaster shadows us, the flood tide just beyond the horizon.