[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 17 (Friday, January 27, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1697-S1699]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FREE TRADE WITH AN UNFREE SOCIETY
Mexico as a Leninist State
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, of the many novel ideas which we
associate with the advent to office of Representative Newt Gingrich as
Speaker of the House, none is more singular than his suggestion that we
would all do well to read, or perhaps reread, ``The Federalist.'' As a
New Yorker, I much applaud the proposal, and would presume on the
Senate's time to invoke that venerable tradition in the context of the
current debate over the proposed United States guarantee of Mexican
debt.
The most striking, at least to my mind, of those 85 essays by James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay is the assertion that the
proposed new Constitution was based on a ``new science of politics.''
If I may cite a commentary of my own, written some years ago, the
establishment of the American Government in the latter part of the 18th
century took its foremost distinction from the belief of those involved
that they were acting upon scientific principles. Hamilton noted, in
the ninth ``Federalist,'' that previous republics had had such stormy
histories that republicanism had admittedly fallen somewhat into
disrepute. This tendency could be overcome thanks to progress in
political science:
The science of politics * * * like most other sciences, has
received great improvement. The efficacy of various
principles is now well understood, which were either not
known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancient.
He went on to cite, as examples of new discoveries, the various
constitutional provisions with which we are now familiar, separation of
powers, the system of checks and balances, popular representation in
the legislature, the independent judiciary, and so on.
How exactly had the ``efficacy of various principles'' come to be so
``well understood''? By scientific method, of course. Which is to say,
the deductive analysis of available data. Which, in turn, is to say the
study of different systems of government which had prevailed at
different times and places in the past.
No. 18:
Among the confederacies of antiquity, the most considerable
was that of the Grecian Republics associated under the
Amphyctionic Council.
No. 17 (by Hamilton, naturally):
When the sovereign happened to be a man of vigorous and
warlike temper and of superior abilities, he would acquire a
personal weight and influence. * * * Among other
illustrations of [this] * * * truth which might be cited
Scotland will furnish a cogent example. The spirit of
clanship which was at an early day introduced into that
kingdom, uniting the nobles and their dependents by ties
equivalent to those of kindred, rendered the aristocracy a
constant overmatch for the power of the monarch; till the
incorporation with England subdued its fierce and
ungovernable spirit, and reduced it within those rules of
subordination, which a more rational and a more energetic
system of civil polity had previously established in the
latter kingdom.
No. 19:
The examples of ancient confederacies * * * have not
exhausted the source of experimental instruction on this
subject. There are existing institutions, founded on a
similar principle, which merit particular consideration. The
first which presents itself is the Germanic Body.
This is but a sampler. ``The Federalist'' abounds in analysis of the
principles on which different states are founded, and the successes or
failures, the strengths and weaknesses associated with each.
It is an unequaled analytic tradition. The more troublesome, then, is
its disappearance in our time. Notably in the matter of our relations
with the State of Mexico.
From the time it was first proposed that we enter a free-trade
agreement with Mexico, I have objected for a single reason.
Mexico is a Leninist State.
The Leninist State is the most noteworthy, if calamitous, political
invention of the 20th century. Having just come through a 70-year
struggle with the original such State, formed as the Union of Soviet
Socialist
Republics, you would suppose we would be able to recognize one on our
southern border. But then you might suppose many things about the
analytic reach of the Department of State and of Treasury, only to be
disappointed. Note that the American Labor movement had no such
difficulty.
Let me hasten to state that Leninist principles were never fully
deployed in Mexico. There was no Great Terror. Even so, ``Americas
Watch'' records in a 1992 assessment that ``torture is endemic'' in
Mexico. Which is to say, State torture. Political opponents are
murdered. Elections are propaganda exercises, and so forth.
The central principle of the Leninist State is that a single
political party holds sway over the whole of society, and in
particular, governs the government. We know from the Soviet experience,
and for that matter from the Mexican experience, that this is never
wholly successful. Yet it is the principle. Hence, the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional. Literally translated, the Party of the
Institutional Revolution.
The simple fact is that the Russian Revolution made a great
impression in Mexico--as it did in the United States and most countries
in the world. But unlike most, Mexico set out to reproduce the Soviet
model. So much that when Trotsky fled the Soviet Union, now controlled
by Stalin, he did not settle in Paris, as failed revolutionaries were
expected to do; he went instead to Mexico City. Upon his arrival in
1937, Trotsky saw that Mexico was a
[[Page S1698]] place where he could continue his work. Here was an
important battleground in the struggle to win international support for
Marxism. He wrote:
Of all the Spanish-speaking countries, Mexico is virtually
the only one where the necessary freedom exists for the
dissemination of the Marxist word. This international
situation assigns a leading role to Mexican Marxists not just
with respect to Latin America, but with respect to Spain
itself, as well the growing Spanish emigration to all
countries of the Old and New World. * * * History has
assigned serious responsibilities to Mexican Marxists.
Stalin, of course, pursued him. But Trotsky's myth persists in
Mexico. This from the August 27, 1990, issue of Newsweek:
Leon Trotsky? The man who applauded the arrest of dissident
factions of the dawn of the Russian Revolution? The military
commissar who argued for the coercion of workers into
industry and preached that the Soviet Union should be a
springboard for world revolution? This week, on the 50th
anniversary of his assassination at the order of Joseph
Stalin, Leon Trotsky is being hailed in Mexico as a prophet
of perestroika, an avatar of socialism with a human face. The
Mexico City government has spent more than $100,000 to
restore the house where Trotsky died; the elaborate ceremony
to make its reopening this week was to be presided over by
the mayor. ``This anniversary * * * is our chance to show
that socialism still has validity,'' Aguilar insists, ``that
it can still be identified with human rights.'' Exclaims
political scientist Paulina Fernandez: ``Trotsky represents a
badge of honor for communism today.''
This may seem sentimental and harmless; and to a degree it was. But
in foreign affairs, for example, the Government of Mexico made itself a
firm ally of Marxist causes throughout the cold war. At the United
Nations it would occasionally vote with the United States, mostly by
accident. But in General Assembly votes 1975-90, it voted with the
Warsaw Pact 90.3 percent of the time. I was present as U.S.
Representative in 1975 when Mexico joined the Soviet Union and 70 of
the most obnoxious dictatorships in the world in the infamous
Resolution 3370, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. Mexico had
no part in the quarrels of the Middle East, but that was the party line
and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional toed it.
Mind, by 1990 the Leninist regime in Mexico was coming apart, much as
it was in Russia. The regime had long since become corrupt; rather, the
corruption had long since become evident. A kind of division of the
spoils took place. Intellectuals were given foreign policy. Viva Fidel
and all that. Entrepreneurs were given industry--such that in 1993,
President Salinas could hold a fundraising dinner at $25 million a
plate. Party bosses were given various fiefdoms--to use a feudal term--
probably including portions of the drug traffic. And so it went.
Workers got little; peasants got nothing.
Then reform appeared.
The central organizing principle of the P.R.I., one which had indeed
brought stability to the Mexican State after decades of bloody chaos,
was the single term, 6-year Presidency. In 1988, the P.R.I. chose
Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had earned a Ph.D. in government at
Harvard. Others like him appeared in Mexican Government circles. It is
not clear to me how much they rejected the Leninist model of the
Mexican State. Surely they accommodated it; almost certainly, however,
they recognized that it didn't work well. In the Leninist tradition, if
you will, this brought about vicious intraparty conflict. To succeed
Salinas, the P.R.I. chose Luis Donaldo Colosio, who attended the
University of Pennsylvania, to be the next President of Mexico--this
choice was probably dictated by Salinas, one of the inducements to
giving up office in the Mexican manner is the power to choose one's
successor--Colosio was assassinated in Tijuana in March, 1994. Among
those subsequently arrested were local P.R.I. opponents of Colosio.
Probably in the same pattern, in September, 1994, Jose Francisco Ruiz
Massieu, the reform minded Secretary-General of the P.R.I., was
assassinated in Mexico City. The main suspect has evidently implicated
other P.R.I. officials in the killing. In the meantime, in Chiapas,
followers, or descendants, or what you will, of Emiliano Zapata brought
about an internal rebellion. Zapata, who had written in 1918:
Much would we gain, much would human justice gain, if all
the people of our America and all the nations of old Europe
should understand that the cause of revolutionary Mexico and
the cause of Russia, the unredeemed, are and represent the
cause of humanity, the supreme interest of all oppressed
people. * * * It is not strange, for this reason that the
proletariat of the world applauds and admires the Russian
Revolution in the same manner as it will lend its complete
adhesion, sympathy and support to the Mexican Revolution once
it fully comprehends its objectives.
That was then. It is now 1994. Mexico has entered into a free-trade
agreement with the United States and Canada. There will be a
Presidential election in August. The regime is in peril. A fixed
exchange rate is maintained to ensure a large inflow of U.S. consumer
goods to produce a sufficiently satisfied electorate. A huge foreign
debt ensues. Followed in turn by devaluation and the present crisis of
1995.
Surely, this could have been anticipated as a possible if not
probable sequence. It was not. Two successive administrations went
forward with NAFTA with the same confidence that had attended our
earlier free-trade agreement with Canada.
I have no explanation for this. None has been proffered--note that
A.M. Rosenthal argues in this morning's Times that there is a need for
testimony under oath. A plausible explanation would be that our policy
makers looked upon Mexico as a typical Third World economy which had
adopted a policy of import substitution as a means towards industrial
development. This was common enough economic strategy in the
postcolonial period. Charles P. Kindleberger notes that it was indeed
the much respected prescription of eminent economists such as Raul
Prebisch of Argentina and Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden. India would be a
good example of a democratic developing nation that opted for this
strategy. By the beginning of the 1990's, however, the Indian
Government was changing its view--even as at the beginning of the
1980's it had faced a foreign exchange crisis.
Surely, Mexican Government officials, under the influence in part at
least of American economists, had also begun to change. The collapse of
the Soviet Union hastened this appreciation in the value of American
degrees. Just this Monday a poor fellow was ousted from President
Zedillo's cabinet for having falsely claimed to have a doctorate from
Harvard. But old habits die hard in a still theoretically one-party
State. A free-trade agreement necessitates a flexible exchange rate to
correct imbalances in the flow of imports and exports. Even so, the
Salinas government maintained a fixed exchange rate until after the
election. Then came the crash.
At this point I would like to make a seemingly contradictory
argument. I opposed NAFTA. First, I voted against President Bush's
request for ``fast track'' authority. Then, in 1993, I voted against
the resulting agreement. I was then chairman of the Finance Committee.
I did nothing whatever to hold up the agreement, and I might have done.
To the contrary, I saw to it that it was reported out of the committee
promptly. When it came to the floor, I asked my colleague Max Baucus,
then chairman of the Subcommittee on International Trade, to manage
time in support of the bill. Which thereupon passed.
My objections, which I believe I stated clearly enough, were
political more than economic. I did not believe that the United States
appreciated the troubles that would almost surely come of entering into
so close a relationship with a polity so very different from our own;
different in ways that could bring about a crisis such as that of the
present.
Nonetheless, I fully support Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan,
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Secretary of the Treasury
Robert Rubin in their advocacy of a $40 billion loan guarantee fund for
Mexico. My reasons are twofold. First, I have the uttermost respect for
Dr. Greenspan and his associates in this matter. He asserts that he
came to his present position ``with great reluctance.'' This week he
told the Finance Committee that he all but detested the ``too big to
fail'' argument, be it applied to banks or nations. And, yet, there was
something to it. Just yesterday, he told the Foreign Relations
Committee, ``If this were strictly confined to Mexico, there would be
no purpose whatsoever in a
[[Page S1699]] government loan guarantee.'' But the issue is not
confined to Mexico. It is Dr. Greenspan's judgment that the economies
of the whole of the developing world are potentially at risk. The
Senator from New York is not about to hear such testimony from Alan
Greenspan and pay no heed.
Similarly, I was struck by the comment yesterday by my distinguished
colleague, Paul Coverdell, not just incidentally former head of the
Peace Corps, warning against demands for strict conditions on the loan
guarantee which may ``inflame'' relations with Mexico. May, indeed.
They most assuredly will. Then we shall have chaos on our hands; or
rather, on our border.
In my view, it comes to this. We probably ought never to have entered
a free-trade agreement with a polity so very different from our own.
But we did. And we now face the consequences. They are nothing we
cannot manage. As the headline from an editorial in the Buffalo News of
January 26, 1995 explains:
It's risky, but U.S. has to try to rescue Mexico's economy
location and trade links leave us little choice
The true disaster would be to insist on conditions that would arouse
all the hostility and hysteria of a nation of 93 million souls on our
southern border who for almost the whole of the 20th century have
defined themselves by what they loathed in us. Cuidado, amigos.
Thank you, Mr. President, for your patience. I yield the floor.
Mr. BYRD addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cochran). The Senator from West Virginia.
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