Follow that peso:

...The abbot's resignation was something of a reprise, on a smaller scale, of course, of the 1990 resignation of the archbishop of Saint John's, Newfoundland, Alphonsus L. Penney...

...Congress on behalf of a $40-billion stabilization scheme...

...Last year, caught in a crossover of interest rates, the wealthy district of Orange County suffered a series of huge losses in its investment portfolio and was forced to declare bankruptcy...

...Next, he looked on as Serra Puche's replacement, Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, sought to propitiate bankers and investors...

...GEORGE W. GRAYSON George W, Grayson, who teaches government at the College of William and Mary, has just written The North American Free Trade Agreement: Regional Community and the New World Order, published by the University Press of America...

...One might argue that the contract's balanced-budget amendment-certainly the most constitutionally dubious Republican proposal-fits Drucker's third step, and that it would force profound structural changes on how the republic does its business...

...Without referring specifically to the "pedophile priest" case, already the subject of searing scrutiny in the media, they acknowledged "past mistakes...

...deep in the Lancand6n jungle...

...The EZLN has a small circle of leaders, and the recent ar REPORT ON MEXICO 4: 10 March 1995 Commonweal rests delivered a thumping body blow to the organization...

...The governing party's Ivy-League-educated brain trust delayed information about Mexico's economic situation until after the August elections, devalued the peso in December...

...In view of the alleged security threat, Zedillo ordered Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia, a member of the opposition National Action Party (PAN), to track down and arrest the top five EZLN operatives...

...As it happens, approximately six years ago, Mexico's thenchief executive Carlos Saunas faced a problem remarkably similar to the one that now confronts recently elected President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon in Chiapas...

...As a Yale-educated economist, he knows how difficult it will be to implement the provisions of the February rescue-package...

...The reason is simple...

...and foreign investors...

...And he disdained primary elections to select PRI candidates in favor of hand-picking nominees in a procedure called the dedazo of which Zedillo is a beneficiary...

...He also removed from office the governors of half the country's thirtyone states, often because they had embarrassed his administration...

...But the petting by 500 PRI landowners of the cathedral of San Cristdbal de las Casas as the police stood by for two hours made Zedillo appear insincere...

...Federal Reserve, severely limits presidential control over monetary policy...

...The continuing crisis in Chiapas has come to symbolize Mexico's larger economic and political problems...

...But the 'Indies' remember 11 Coinnionweal 10 March 1995...

...Salinas's bold response to the conniving petroleros-he dispatched troops to arrest the wrongdoers just two months after taking office-endowed the president with an hombre fuerte or strong-man image...

...Putting him away quickly could burnish Zedillo's badly tarnished image, which suffered another setback in midFebruary when the right-wing PAN candidate trounced his ruling party opponent for the governorship of Jalisco state...

...Nor are Mexicans happy with the implications of the $50billion bailout, including the increase in interest rates...

...These entreaties were rewarded, Zedillo said, by the rebels' stocking clandestine safe-houses in Mexico City and Veracruz state with weapons...

...Finally, some 80 percent of Mexican firms-representing 40 percent of production-have failed to adapt to NAFTA-inspired competition and may close down...

...When that happens, Washington will have no more white rabbits to pull out of the hat...

...There can be little doubt that such an amendment would have a revolutionary effect, but not even the contract's most ardent proponents have been willing to spell out the details...

...In a February address to the nation, the president reviewed his repeated efforts to settle the fourteen-month-long Chiapas dispute through negotiation and dialogue, including an early February appeal for the EZLN "to openly, explicitly, and decidedly raise their demands through political channels...

...After only two days in his new post, however, Whelehan himself resigned...

...Mexico must now put up as yearly collateral $6-billion worth of its nationalized oil, some of it from Chiapas, for U.S...

...At Maynooth, where the Irish bishops had gathered for their fall meeting, they offered an "unreserved" apology to the victims of clergy abuse, and to their families...

...For example, he steamrolled legislation and consti tutional amendments through a pliant Congress dominated by his ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRJ...

...and then blamed the Chiapas uprising for the peso's fall...

...were temporarily relieved when he called for a cease tire...

...REPORT ON IRELAND FALLOUT FROM PEDOPHILIA THE DOMINOES KEEP TUMBLING list a few miles up the pot-holed road from Mount Nugent, a quiet village near Ireland's lovely Lough Sheelin, is Holy Trinity Abbey, home of the Nor bertine religious community, in Kilnacrott, County Cavan...

...We always hoped that a combination of treatment, Father Smyth's intelligence, and the grace of God would enable Father Smyth to overcome the compulsive nature of his disorder...

...His standing in public-opinion surveys improved dramatically and paved the way for implementing one dramatic reform after another...

...At the same time, GOP presidential candidates will bash Mexico across the head and shoulders as they seek to discredit the economic policies of both Clinton and Zedillo...

...A similar experiment in reforming government through the back door was undertaken by frustrated California voters in 1978 with Proposition 13...

...First, opposition-party control of at least one-quarter of the expanded, 128-seat Senate provides an important tribune for critics of presidential initiatives...

...Zedillo must also decide about the call of the former gov error of Chiapas, Eduardo Robledo Rinc0n, for the resignation of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia of San Crist6bal de las Casa.s...

...FOLLOW THAT PESO ZEDILLO & CHIAPAS s the world knows, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (F71,N) has laid claim to a slice of Mexico's impoverished Chiapas state...

...idet about Pic.ident i:nrcsto Ledil lr}', mi I it.rr y actions in Chiapas...

...However, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos--the ski-masked, bandolier-wearing rebel chieftain, whom magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair have depicted as a Spanish-speaking Scarlet Pimpernel-remains at large...

...But "revolutionary glee" and budgetary knife-wielding are no substitute for real progress...

...For now...

...A few months later, in October, after details of the "pedophile priest" became known in the media, Father Kevin Smith, the abbot since 1969, resigned, admitting "many errors" in having transferred Smyth from parish to parish, from country to country-a trail that included assignments in Scotland and Wales, North Dakota and Rhode Island in the United States, and Northern Ireland and the Republicin an attempt to stop his sexual abuse of children...

...We fully accept our obligations in regard to the civil law and the need to cooperate with the civil authorities which 6: 10 March 1995 Commonweal...

...Since Mexico's oil was nationalized in 1938, it has been jealously protected as a national treasure...

...This abuse apparently was not unkown to his superiors...

...the Zapatista mediator and 7aricFather-to the Maya, has refused to resign, and has Five years before mandatory retirement...

...Furthermore, Reynolds had lost support when, in the absence of half his Cabinet and the Labor party membership, he nominated Whelehan to presidency of the High Court...

...5 with which to grease the PRI's sixty-six-year-old patronage network...

...Heavily armed government troops swept into Chiapas, reportedly seizing the guerrillas' Lacandon forest headquarters without firing a shot...

...Mexicans expect their leaders to act decisively...

...Mexico's new president, reeling from a recent 40-percent devaluation of the peso, has borrowed a page from Salinas's book...

...Smashing the Zapatistas could lift the hugely unpopular Zedillo's standing at home...

...is an associate professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the Universirv of San Francisco...

...Many PRI leaders, especially old-guard "dinosaurs," deplore the effort by Zedillo, a convinced democrat, to distance the presidency from his own party...

...A successful anti-insurgent campaign would also win praise on Wall Street where twenty-something money-managers-distraught by the peso debacle-have made the Chiapas situation a crucial litmus text of Mexican stability...

...Still, Marcos/Guilldn, or whatever his name, is the Zapatistas' big enchilada...

...His resignation was precipitated by the Labor party's withdrawal of support of the coalition government, already beginning to disintegrate as the result of two previous political scandals, this time on the charge that Reynolds's former attorney general, Harry Whelehan, had outrageously neglected to act upon nine Northern Ireland warrants for the extradition of Father Smyth...

...ALBERTO HIIERTA Alberta Huerta, S.J...

...Some Mexicans are angered and most are skeptical...

...The behavior of Father Smyth, a member of the Norbertine community since 1945 and a Norbertine priest since 1951, "perplexed and troubled our community over many years," according to a statement to the media by the former abbot...

...Asone Zapatista said: "Don't forget April 10, 1919...

...Our anger, our pain, our anguish, our shame, are clear to the whole world...

...Fourth, the creation of an independent central bank, though not as autonomous as the U.S...

...But Zedillo must not let the antiguerrilla effort distract him from putting Mexico's economic house in order...

...Robert L. Livingston (R-La...

...Those close to Ruiz said Robledo's action was an orchestrated strategy by Zedillo to remove "the meddlesome and maverick bish op...

...In Ireland, not only did the abbot resign but, the following month, Prime Minister Albert Reynolds as well, himself a victim of the awesome ramifications of this child molestation case...

...Going up the hill to the abbey is like ascending the mythical mountain...

...The commission that he had appointed to investigate charges of clerical abuse, in its final report, faulted him for failing to act...

...Meanwhile, he advanced evidence that EZLN leaders were "neither popular, nor indigenous, nor from Chiapas," but the offshoot of the Forces of National Liberation, a violent movement that dates to the late 1960s...

...But many Mexicans, including the Maya in Chiapas, see this as a flashback to the days of Porfirio Dfaz (1830-1915), the dictator who practically gave the country's natural resources to foreign interests and was a cause of the 1910 revolution and Zapata's insurgency...

...They have pledged to fight for the un derdog Mayan population in its struggle against what they perceive to be a repressive oligarchy in Mexico City, now selling their country to the gringos...

...Such moving from place to place, and covering-up the violations, was the way the problem used to be handled, the former abbot explained...

...In those years," he ruefully confessed, "frequent reassignment was often the way church authorities handled priest pedophiles and other problem priests...

...In addition, he worked ceaselessly to undermine the balkanized, leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party, while boosting the stock of the center-right PAN...

...There he was beyond the power of Parliament (Dail Eireann) to question him...

...It mandated super majorities to approve tax raises...

...It was the day after Reynolds admitted that his former attorney general was to blame for the failure to extradite Smyth...

...But since taking office in December, Zedillo has seemed the ineffective prisoner rather than the articulate master of events...

...In shame, he resigned...

...Then, he stayed largely on the sidelines while Bill Clinton dominated Mexico City headlines-first, for battling the U.S...

...Ironically, Salinas-impelled reforms have made it more difficult for the politically inexperienced Zedillo to emulate his predecessor's decisive actions...

...Failure to slash government spending and exercise rigorous monetary discipline now will mean that in a few months, whatever the outcome of a "let's-track-downSubcomandante Marcos" crusade, international bankers will call Mexico on the carpet for failing to fulfill its promises...

...If Zedillo had hoped to upgrade his image as a tough president by ordering the arrest of the Zapatista leaders, the cease fire put him in a quandary: How likely were the fugitives to negotiate when there were outstanding warrants for their arrest...

...The populist revolutionary hero was shot by government troops during peace negotiations...

...Last June, one of its priests, Father Brendan Smyth, sixty-seven-who had voluntarily surrendered to civil authorities in Northern Ireland on a charge of child molestation-was tried and con victed, and began serving a four-year prison sentence in Magilligan prison in County Derry...

...To date, the 104th Congress has equated constriction with reform...

...Today's Zapatistas will scrutinize whatever offer the government makes...

...Bishop Ruiz...

...Now, after recurring municipal crises in school funding, basic services, and even police protection, Proposition 13 is increasingly seen as a debacle, straitjacketing the state...

...then, in bypassing American lawmakers to craft a $50-billion bailout in concert with the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, and other financial institutions...

...something the army has not done...

...The abbey, though, despite its peace ful and pastoral setting, is not tranquil these days...

...Some local governments, unable to drum up sufficient operating revenue from balking voters, turned to risky investment strategies...

...We are naked...

...While some Orange County conservatives have taken the county's default as a golden opportunity to cut government even more, there is another lesson that can be drawn from this sad chapter: Ill-conceived legislation can lead not only to "smaller government" but to the useless destruction of valuable and necessary public institutions...

...There is something of a precedent, however...

...The Zapatistas...

...lndios have long memories and expressed suspicion and fear of walk ing into a legal and political ambush...

...Contracting rather than expanding employment in a nation whose population yields 1.2 million new job-seekers each year means that a mounting number of Mexicans will seek illegal entry into Texas and California...

...We are a sinful church," the penitent archbishop candidly admitted...

...We now see how inadequate this approach actually was...

...they want the army to leave the jungle as a good faith gesture in the peace process...

...He has been identified as Rafael Sebastian Guilldn Vicente, thirty-seven, a Jesuit-trained, prizewinning sociology student from Tampico, a Gulf Coast port...

...By contrast, Salinas often exercised executive power without respecting the law, the constitution, or other branches of gov ernment...

...chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, did hint recently only that the cuts will be "monumental...

...He remained missing-in-action as Finance Minister Jaime Serra Puche bungled the Christmas-time peso devaluation, emerging only to fire his long-time confidant in late December...

...Second, the economic liberalization highlighted by NAFFA has undercut key interest groups-trade unions, peasant organization, and government workers-that form an integral part of the once-cohesive PRI political machine...

...Third, the sharp reduction in import permits and other regulatory devices in an ever-freer market obviates the need for so many patronage jobs, while reducing a source of boodle c'.ic an...

...and the trap...laid for Emiliano Zapata...

...Purportedly, Zedillo agreed to an amnesty plan that included the Zapatista leaders...

...When Salinas took office, a powerful band of corrupt oil-union thugs had sought to intimidate the reformist Saunas administration...

...Columnists in local newspapers---from the highly respected Reforma to the tendentious Unomdsuno-have literally shouted the question: "Who's running the Mexican government...

...were not taking any chances with Zedillo's flip-flops...

...Painful as it may be in the weeks ahead, he should spearhead a short, sharp shock rather than risk a prolonged recession and protracted inflation...