MEXICO An Exchange

...The United States-at least its most educated, wealthy, and influential citizens, readers of The Times-can no longer afford the ignorance and misconceptions of the past...

...Implicit in this reading of history and current events is a sense of Mexican politics quite different from that conveyed by Mr...

...But if foreign readers need these opinions, they also need more-some effort by the reporter to tell what is really going on, not just impressions and opinions, but real and important movements of power...

...But they did not choose a radical option...

...the rise of the Left is not really a rise, but a resurgence...

...Then this opposition became a formidable contender for power...

...Womack: I do not intend to respond to your personal insults, but amidst all the spleen you vented are some serious issues that do merit an answer...

...Your editorialists and reporters have conveyed the impression that something very serious is going on in Mexican politics, but given no clear account of what it is-much less an explanation...

...Salinas may in fact finish up doing many of the things that the "Left" is calling for, but would that make him a leftist...

...Larry Rohter Mexico City Dear Jack: For a historian, I understand that journalism is a frustration...

...If I object that the party organized in 1929 was not the PRI but the PNR (Partido Nacional Revolucionario), that this PNR fell to pieces in 1935-36, that some of the pieces went into lengthy exile, that other pieces were subsumed with much more powerful elements of different origins into a new party-the PRM (Partido de la Revoluci6n Mexicana) in 1938-and that this PRM was itself reformed into the PRI in 1946, then I may well seem to you to be merely picking nits...

...But I would dispute your interpretation of the Cirdenas phenomenon as "the rise of the Left...

...Insiders in politics never tell the whole truth, often they tell pure lies, but it is the duty of a good journalist to get the truth out of them anyway...

...I do not underestimate him...

...Rather, voters were moved by nostalgia, nationalism, a unique form of Mexican fundamentalism, accumulated distaste for the PRI and intense anger over the collapse of economic hopes...

...Not intended for publication, the letters were circulated among editors and passed on to the correspondents themselves...

...Your own relationship with Salinas is well known here...

...The PRM was really as close as Mexico came to a popular front, and its reform in 1946 was not merely acronymic but deeply symptomatic and significant: The purge of the Left from all positions of national leadership, the isolation or destruction of Leftist elements that continued to struggle for popular front causes, and the indefinite subordination of the Left that remained in the new party...

...What kind of picture would you have of either the Democrats or the Republicans if you thought that what you had in 1929 was basically what you have now, just bigger and older...

...For example, on July 13, 1987, discussing the presidential selection process, I quoted Manuel Moreno Sinchez as saying the successor to de la Madrid would be "he who best disguises himself' and "hides his true intentions...

...It is of much more than antiquarian or nitpicking interest to get major questions of modern Mexican history right, or at least out in the open for discussion...

...6 (M ) 05 a N Uw .r...

...You argue that the PRI of today is not the same as the party that was founded in 1929, a statement that seems to me to be almost a tautology...

...Like any professor, I could go on, but you have better things to do than suffer more of my lecturing...

...That said, we agree that Mexico is entering a period of great uncertainty and, more than ever, it is essential that the politically literate north of the border understand what is going on-if only to resist the temptation of meddling...

...There were, as you know, serious succession crises in 1970, 1976 and 1982, but the 1988 crisis is clearly different...

...Therefore, I also agree that, while Salinas might have been picked by de la Madrid with the idea of perpetuating the same economic policies, Salinas will do his own thing...

...I think the picture is a lot more Scomplicated, as do most Mexicans...

...Both Rohter and Riding have resorted again and again to the poor man or woman in the street for their impressions of what is underway...

...To use a phrase I once heard from one of the men in the street you do not like to see quoted in The New York Times: a chameleon may change colors, but it remains a chameleon...

...I happen to have known both men for many years and know Salinas to be more intelligent (perhaps astute is a better word) and politically imaginative than de la Madrid...

...I have yet to meet a Mexican who does not have a point of view regarding the crisis the country is experiencing...

...Following Womack's letter to Times executive editor Max Frankel are Rohter's and Riding's replies...

...You say that I naively assume that Salinas' performance over the last six years is a guide to what he might do as president...

...Dear Mr...

...It also appears to me that you have seriously underestimated the intelligence of readers of The New York Times...

...ous if misunderstood...

...Mexicans voted against the PRI and not for the Left...

...Frankel: For at least a year The Times on Mexico has been no more than a tourist guide to the important political developments underway there...

...I don't for a second think that anyone who reads my stories on Mexico assumes that the PRI has remained free of internal conflict for 60 years...

...And do you really believe that the PRI of the last 40 years can be characterized simply as a capitalist party...

...I agree that the policies adopted by Mexican presidents are shaped by their personalities and by circumstances and not by loyalty to their predecessors...

...Despite some drastic shifts of position over the years, the PRI is still the party of the Mexican Revolution, whatever that means in 1988...

...REPORT ON THE AMERICASvirtually all elections until this last round...

...To argue that the Left has been out in the political wilderness since the days of Alemin [president 1946-52] is an attractive proposition...

...If anything like this is the case, then the makings of the PRI's present crisis date from 1946-48...

...As a matter of fact, I talk regularly with the people who are directly involved in the political process...

...To assume that what Salinas did as President de la Madrid's interestedly loyal minister for the last six years is any guide to what he will do in the next six is another example of incompetence or laziness...

...Rohter...

...Then suddenly they were informed that the main opposition was actually a new left-wing coalition, but with folkloric tendencies...

...It is true that Cirdenas was nominated by four vaguely Marxist, socialist or populist parties, but three had been PRI satellites and the fourth, the Mexican Socialist Party, did so only after it became apparent that its own candidate, Heberto Castillo, was going to win only three or four percent of the vote...

...I know that interested readers are far more sophisticated than that, though you may not...

...You are yourself hardly an unbiased observer of what is taking place...

...Furthermore, I find your own interpretation of the evolution of the PRI to be simplistic...

...A country is studiously ignored for long periods and then, when it becomes "news," generations of events are telescoped into a few paragraphs with all the risks involved...

...Larry Rohter and on occasion Alan Riding seem to have taken for granted that the PRI began in 1929, under another name but already programmed to grow without essential change...

...Last August and September, historian John Womack of Harvard University wrote a series of letters to the editors of The New York Times, protesting the coverage of Mexico provided by correspondents Larry Rohter and Alan Riding...

...I would add (with a confessed amount of self-interest) that, for those with a continuing interest in Mexico, The Times has provided fuller coverage over many years than any other newspaper...

...Salinas would follow as a resident of Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the White House...

...I also trust that my readers are well aware that no one in the current politically charged atmosphere can be truly neutral or impartial...

...To write as both Rohter and Riding have is to confuse three substantially different parties...

...Were I to disqualify sources simply because they have points of view, it would hardly be worth my while to do any reporting at all...

...I think that the majority of the politically involved Mexicans I talk to are capable of distinguishing between what they would like to see happen and what is really happening...

...What it does mean is that I will take those views into account when I write and that if someone else expresses similar views on the record, I will not hesitate to use that quote instead...

...I have every intention, therefore, of continuing to describe the PRI as I have in the past, since the formulation I use is both a concise and accurate summation of the party's role in modern Mexican history...

...U.S.-Mexican relations are going to be considerably different, much more unpredictable, possibly subject to severe strain...

...Your Manichean, reductionist view of the world and of Mexico is similarly no secret, and it happens to be one that I do not find persuasive...

...And now all your readers get is shallow description of intense conflict in the Mexican Congress over the presidential succession-again without explanation...

...There is also the failure to determine who the insiders are in any of the factions of the PRI, or the PAN, or the Left, much less to get any of the truth into the clear...

...John Womack Cambridge, MA Dear Dr...

...when they do not I am quite capable of discounting any wishful thinking myself...

...Thus Rohter continually identifies the PRI as founded in 1929 and victorious in Cuauhtemoc Cardenas: the rise of the Left...

...In the past, candidates have pledged fealty to the man who selected them, only to head off in entirely different directions once they took office...

...But I resent your efforts to impose them on me and the audience for which I write...

...This is a nice touch, and certainly the opinPresident Carlos Salinas de Gortari I ions of ordinary people are often more wise and to the point than those of professional pundits...

...Report on the Americas is pleased to share with its readers what the Times could not...

...That is not how politics works anywhere, certainly not in Mexico, as Alan Riding learned years ago and Larry Rohter should have learned by now...

...Besides, both Rohter and Riding often fail to explain anything about Mexican intellectuals whom they quote apparently as objective observers but who are actually declared partisans of one or another current in or outside the PRI...

...Warmest wishes...

...A politics where Republicans and Democrats are all in the same party...

...That does not mean, however, that they will agree to be quoted in my articles...

...On the contrary, I have often included in my reporting the warning that Mexican presidents have a habit of breaking with the policies of their predecessors...

...But this is not "ancient history," insignificant and boring...

...with bloody gunfights in the provinces, nothing much under firm control, a chief executive much less in command than any "Western" president or prime minister, and issues that were alive in 1938 or 1946 [that are] still alive...

...Your objection to my quoting "the man in the street" makes no sense at all, especially coming after an election that was a watershed in Mexican history precisely because the average Mexican confounded the expectations of the political establishment...

...I think it is an over-simplification to suggest the huge support for Cdrdenas meant significantly increased support for the Left...

...My experience since 1971 was that, while the PRI was never monolithic, it remained remarkably disciplined until money seriously began to run out in the mid-1980s...

...As for the question of the people whom I do quote, the academics and political analysts to whom you object so much, you've hit on another tautology...

...First, your readers were continually informed that opposition to the government and the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] was mounting in the form of increasing support for the PAN [National Action Party], a relatively old and in Mexican terms quite conservative party...

...A politics of bitter internal conflict, private feuds, public compromises...

...it does not suddenly become an iguana or a skunk...

...Well, you won't understand either the PRI or the emergence of the Left now as an obviously powerful force...

...But your complaint that I don't talk to the "real insiders" about what is going on in Mexico is even more curious...

...So what...

...One problem is your reporters' ignorance of modem Mexican political history (or indifference to it...

...But it inconveniently leaves some major questions unexplained, such as the Echeverria [1970-76] a years in particular and Mexican foreign policy in general...

...I hope nevertheless that you have suffered so far, because what is going on now in Mexico and what will go on between the United States and Mexico are extraordinary questions, possibly dangerVOLUME XXII, NO...

...You are, of course, entitled to your views...

...Then, when Salinas was chosen as the PRI candidate in October 1987, my front page story on the announcement included this paragraph: "Mexican politicians and journalists cautioned today that it was impossible to predict which policies Mr...

...Believe me, it is also frustrating for journalists, but that's the business...