Mexico On a Tightrope

...Two Spanish Muslims, Aurelio Perez Yruela and Esteban Lopez Moreno, were instrumental in the process...

...Leaving aside such unresolved thorny issues as the undocumented Mexicans in the United States, September 11 has created new strains in the relationship of the two countries...

...ACTUALLY,0'Farrillisfar less critical of the United States than he is of Mexico's Foreign Relations Secretary Jorge Castaneda, whom he deems excessively subservient to Washington...

...In a standard litany, he declared that "informed intelligence" is preferable to "intelligent missiles," and that it would behoove the U.S...

...Perhaps the most interesting development in Chiapas is the growth of Islam among a segment of the indigenous population...

...Defense Department official of Hispanic background, Ana Maria Salazar, during an address to a business conference in Puerto Vallarla...

...Armando Lagos Barba, the director of a computer school affiliated with the University of Guadalajara, has noted that the EZLN web site is conspicuously dated and contains no mention of the September 11 events...

...On October 8 the "International Opinion" section of Mural, widely considered the most thoughtful of Mexico's newer dailies, carried an essay titled "An Intelligence Deficit" by the Reverend Jesse Jackson...

...The U.S...

...was featured in La Jornada, ajournai that still expresses all the orthodoxies of Cold War antianti-Communism...

...Sinai...

...Now the "wounded beast, invoking God and the forces of good," seeks to profit from the situation by "globalizing the 'antiterrorist' struggle...

...San Cristobal's Roman Catholic Bishop Felipe Arizmendi has urged his parishioners to respect their rights...

...If the American-led coalition is successful, the price of oil and gold will soar and the main beneficiaries will be the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, Russia, "the oil companies, and the financial elites [who promote] globalization...

...Reactions to the War - 3 Mexico On a Tightrope By Addison De Witt Guadalajara It has become fashionable to speak of Mexico as "lukewarm" toward its northern neighbor's September 11 disaster and subsequent war against terrorism...

...This is almost entirely limited to members of the Tzotzil tribe, many of whom were expelled from the town of San Juan Chamula by Catholic Indians in 1991 because they had embraced evangelical Protestantism...

...Against whom did you declare it...

...As for President Vicente Fox, on October 10, he gave the war in Afghanistan his enthusiastic seal of approval...

...Where Fox supports Castaneda, Creel's backing derives from a powerful hard-line nationalist element in Fox' own National Action Party (PAN) that considers him too liberal and too globally focused...

...An interview with him in La Jornada began by denouncing Castaneda as "Arabophobic and Islamophobic," and suggesting that he volunteer to fight in Afghanistan if he is so enamored of Bush's views...

...Would Robin Hood have gone after the Sheriff of Nottingham's children...

...And Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN...

...Creel has pointedly warned that Mexico "should not subordinate itself to the United States...

...The Foreign Affairs Secretary, like Fox, has stated in the media that the attack on the United States was an attack on Mexico...

...is now in a recession, he observed, and historically war has been the cure: The Spanish-American War ended the agricultural recession of 1898, and Pearl Harbor ended the Great Depression...

...Writing in its English-language daily, the Mexico City News, he completely refrains from La Jornada's shrill invective...

...How oil-poor Israel would benefit from skyrocketing petroleum prices is not explained...

...The sharpest criticism of the U. S. from an economic perspective, though, has come from Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, a specialist in geopolitics and economics who is a member of the Accounting and Administration Faculty at UNAM...

...In a similar vein, an unsigned article headlined "Is the United States Headed Toward a Police Regime...

...In Meyer's view, the first hypothesis is more tenable...

...Castaneda's tormentors included a heavy sprinkling of perredistas (members of the Left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution) and the Greens...

...A more sober voice among the naysayers is that of political columnist José Antonio O'Farrill Avila, a member of one of Mexico's most influential publishing families...

...Though Jackson's prestige has slipped back home, among Mexico's anti-American intelligentsia his words continue to be treated like directives from Mt...

...Their conversion to Islam began in 1994, shortly after the Zapatista uprising...

...Turning finally to economics, JalifeRahme maintained that the war is really about oil...

...Denunciations of U.S...

...Article 4 of the Penal Code states that "crimes committed abroad against a Mexican national will be punished in the republic," and Article 20 would seem to mandate that "families of victims of the attacks have the right to receive judicial assistance and to compensation when the case merits it...

...But for some time he has been walking a tightrope, his balance threatened by the possibility that his instinctive pro-Americanism and excellent personal relations with Bush will give political enemies the opportunity to portray him as insensitive to Mexican nationalism...

...The Villista statement, headed "Imperialist War Against the Poor," is a tad softer than the EPR screed, with its one grudging concession that America's behavior toward the Third World "explains but does not justify" the deadly suicide missions...

...The last is singularly ironic, for during the Cold War the word was applied favorably to citizens of Iron Curtain countries who were outwardly pro-Communist but secretly pro-Western...

...citizens can be held incommunicado up to 72 hours, the article went on, simply because the police can't tell a Hindu from a MexicanAmerican whose ancestors came from Oaxaca...

...Addison De Witt is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist who lives in Mexico...

...Who is responsible for September 11...

...He deplores the fact that "the [Mexican] Constitution was overlooked by all, or nearly all, of those considered law experts...

...Also slipped in was the gratuitous information that Castaneda's brother, Andres, has the surname Rosenthal...

...In a deeply heartfelt statement, he said: "We need somebody to tell our president, 'This is your chance to do some good for your country...

...relations, but one thing is certain: To maintain his present standing with the people of Mexico, Vicente Fox will need all his skill as well as his famous luck...

...Getting in his own thrust, O'Farrill wrote that "Castaneda was a strident opponent of NAFTA, critical of the United States and the neol iberal policies of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] which he now defends so furiously...

...It can be safely assumed that Marcos, who is adept at public relations, would say nothing that could be construed as gloating over the horrific U.S...

...Why the United States, of course...

...No one, for example, could be more hawkish than 78year-old Reynaldo Perez Gallardo, excommander of Escuadrón 201, the Mexican squadron formed in 1944 to aid General Douglas MacArthur's forces in the Philippine campaign...

...Instead, President George W Bush is opposing fundamentalism with fundamentalism and "burying democratic liberties in the United States...

...Anybody nostalgic for the radical jargon heard in New York's Union Square in the 1930s and '40s would have a fascinating trip down memory lane reading the harangues the EPR and EVRP have issued...

...In a particularly wounding stab, one deputy told the Secretary that "the foreign policy of the nation must reflect the interests of Mexico, and not [be an attempt to] erase from your curriculum your historic rejection of NAFTA and the United States...

...He implores citizens not to forget "our Constitution, our history and, above all, our condition of Mexican sovereignty...

...policy...

...They went to San Cristobal, where they settled in the impoverished Nueva Esperanza barrio and established a mosque and religious school...

...The attacks, they claim, were protests against the "hegemony of North American imperialism," which has a "totalitarian and unipolar vision" of a struggle of Good (global capitalism and the "democracy" of neoliberal economics) vs...

...Mexico's leading Leftist intellectuals have never been as concerned as they are today about the erosion of civil liberties in the United States...

...Fox has long enjoyed the reputation of a man to whom luck has always been a lady...

...His objections to unlimited support for the Bush antiterrorist initiative is based, rather, on constitutional grounds...

...In the catechistic style of history's most famous ex-seminarian, Joseph V Stalin, the EPR manifesto bristles with rhetorical questions, trite metaphors, elephantine sarcasm, and inverted commas used for histrionic effect...

...Just look at its lengthy record of offenses against peoples of all nations...

...Resident aliens can be detained, kidnapped or deported merely because they signed a 1980s petition urging the release of South Africa's jailedNelson Mandela...

...But for Castaneda to be "white on the inside, red on the outside" was seen as a repudiation of his Leftist past...

...THE PEREZ GALLARDO, EPR and EVRP statements, of course, representthe extremists' views...

...A favored tactic has been to liberally air and endorse the opinions of Americans critical of the hard-line stance against Islamic fundamentalism...

...After all, the 15 Mexicans missing and presumed dead were a tiny minority among the other foreigners and the many Americans killed...

...With the indignation they usually reserve for the plight of Mexicans on death row in Texas, they have suddenly become fervent champions of gringo dissenters...

...But if the country's feeling about 9/11 is lukewarm, that is true only in the literal sense of combining icy cold and boiling hot water...

...response to this challenge entails "a risk of global [naturally] McCarthyism...

...In between, reactions to America's tragedy boil down to pro forma sympathy mixed with criticism of past U.S...

...Security-oriented legislation will mainly target "national minorities, particularly if they are people of color, not Presbyterian [sic], or if they have rejected neoliberalism...

...There has been next to nothing about him lately in any newspaper or magazine, except that the Zapatistas boycotted the recent Chiapas elections...

...He reported almost gloatingly on Castaneda's "rough sailing" in his September 25 appearance before Mexico's Congress...

...The epithet has become so all-embracing here that one wonders how many who evoke the former Wisconsin Senator's disreputable shade know he was far more interested in taunting Secretary of State Dean Acheson at American Legion picnics than in formulating global strategy or underpaying Guatemalan fruit pickers...

...The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon caused a great many deaths," the piece conceded, "but at the same time they appear to have resuscitated the McCarthyism and hysterical xenophobia that committed so many crimes in the past...

...Perez Gallardo advocates recruitment and training of Mexican pilots to participate in antiterrorist operations wherever U.S...

...A historical rundown then contended that artists and intellectuals were forced to make abject confessions and inform on others because they had been "guilty" of sympathizing with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, and that the Rosenbergs "stole no atomic secrets but committed the "crime' of being Communists and Jews...

...The correct way to counter terrorism is to stop spending money on the Pentagon and concentrate on global economic development...

...Salazar also angrily chided Mexico for being one of the few nations not to have "publicly mourned victims of the terrorist attacks...

...The term, implying a posture of tepid indifference, is said to have been used by an outraged U.S...

...Afghanistan, the Arab world, the Islamic world, terrorism as a whole, the terrorists...

...The article concluded with the charge that "the new McCarthys" are sowing mass terror and increasingly isolating Washington from peoples of the world who reject the "dorsal flexibility" of their governments...

...Have we declared war...

...or coalition forces are pursuing the new enemy...

...But, one may ask, if the sweep for terrorists implicated in the attacks turns up living persons, should they be tried in Mexico as well as in the United States...

...Put gold on the name of Mexico.'" At the other end of the spectrum are the declarations issued by two of Mexico's violent clandestine guerrilla groups, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) and the Villista Army of the People's Revolution (EVRP...

...Why did you declare it...

...Professor JohnSaxeFernândez, a geopolitical specialist at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), calls the operations of international capital and the bipartisan plan to combat world terrorism "the new face of modern McCarthyism...

...The second scenario has Castaneda keeping relations smooth with Washington, while Creel acts as a "lightning rod" to ward off attacks by what Meyer calls the "political class"—that is, those now on the outside who are eagerly looking in and their supporters in the media...

...Quoting President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jalife-Rahme further observed that the "geography of Islam" has created an "arc of crisis," and added that the U.S...

...Indeed, some emotions are almost as intense here as in the U.S...

...The ongoing military response to terrorism has woven many imponderables into the fabric of Mexico-US...

...Specifically, he points out that two articles of that "honorable Magna Carta' have been disregarded thanks to "the ignorance shown by public officials...

...All Castaneda and Creel themselves have in common, Meyer concludes, is that they both are fair-skinned and bearded...

...death toll...

...O'Farrill noted that in the course of his inquisition Castaneda was called "vain, inefficient, a violator of the Magna Carta, and even a 'radish...

...actions and present U.S...

...Terrorism doesn't recognize borders and doesn't respect anyone...

...That's why Mexico considers the terrorist attacks of September 11 as attacks against humanity...

...The Mexican government strongly supports these actions," he said in a prime time television address...

...Evil (millions of impoverished people having the temerity to disapprove of transnational corporations...

...This will cause Islamic terrorists "to lose support of the masses...

...asked one legislator...

...With no Leftist past to atone for, he has managed to avoid many of the brickbats that have descended upon the luckless Castaneda...

...Lorenzo Meyer, a professor of international relations at the College of Mexico, calls attention to a strong difference of opinion it has caused as well between two key members of Fox' own Cabinet, Castaneda and Interior Minister Santiago Creel...

...to realize that most of the world is inhabited by people who are poor, nonwhite and nonEnglish-speaking...

...In other words, Mexican officialdom should demonstrate at least as much zeal in serving the interests of Mexican victims of September 11 and their families as it does in supporting the United States...

...Is this rift evidence of a serious weakness in the Fox political apparatus, or is it part of a deliberate division of labor...

...Although these men may have ties to the Basque nationalist group ETA, the Tzotzils themselves are peaceful...

...policy by Latino intellectuals invariably mention McCarthyism...

...Brown-skinned U.S...

...The writer Carlos Fuentes succinctly captured the current mood: "We're partners [with the U.S.], but in no way are we achichincles [stooges...