Respect Tops Zedillo’s Agenda for Clinton Visit

MEXICO CITY — They both have injured knees. They both went to Yale, honeymooned in Acapulco--with their in-laws--and share a love for jazz.

And when Presidents Bill Clinton and Ernesto Zedillo meet here next week, Zedillo said Friday, their most important goal will be to project a “mutual respect” between their governments and their neighboring nations.

In a wide-ranging interview in English on the eve of Clinton’s first state visit here, the Mexican president acknowledged that he expects few breakthroughs on the key issues of illegal immigration, drug trafficking and trade disputes in a relationship that is as delicate as it is intertwined.

“A complex and important relationship such as the one that exists between Mexico and the United States should not be constructed in one day or one state visit,” Zedillo said. “In fact, our work with the Clinton administration has been a permanent one.”

But among the revelations in his 70-minute interview with U.S. correspondents here Friday, Zedillo said he has ruled out a request by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that its agents be allowed to carry arms in Mexico, a request that Clinton this week said he hoped Mexico would grant.

“Whatever we can do to cooperate more [in the drug war], let’s do it,” Zedillo said. “But again, there is a line that has been drawn very strongly, and that is sovereignty. So when I am told some people in the U.S. government would like to see their agents armed in Mexico, I say, ‘No. The answer is no. No further discussion.’ ”

The Mexican president also said he believes that a new counter-narcotics agency created here this week to fight corruption among federal agents will succeed where previous attempts this decade have failed.

Yet Zedillo conceded that the Feb. 18 arrest of his handpicked anti-drug czar on charges of collaborating with Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel was not only a shock but “the most difficult, sad and bitter moment of my administration”--even worse, Zedillo said, than the economic crisis that impoverished most of his nation soon after he took office in 1994.

“I was fully deceived,” Zedillo said of the arrest of counter-narcotics chief Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo.

Throughout the interview, though, he stressed the positive side to U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the war on the multibillion-dollar cross-border narcotics trade and the contentious immigration front.

Both issues have sparked bitter and acrimonious public debate here and in the United States in recent months: U.S. lawmakers cited Gutierrez’s arrest in a failed effort to decertify Mexico as an ally in the drug war, and Mexican lawmakers sharply condemned a tough, new U.S. immigration law that makes it easier to deport illegal migrants.

“In all of these issues, there is frequently a lot of noise,” Zedillo said, adding that among his and Clinton’s goals are “to take out all the noise that has emerged.”

“We believe in cooperation,” Zedillo said. “We don’t believe in confrontation.”

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Among the most likely achievements of Clinton’s May 5-7 visit here, he added, are a series of documents that will detail shared U.S.-Mexican assessments of the facts and threats concerning drug trafficking and illegal immigration.

“One thing that might arise from this visit is to put in black and white, on a sheet of paper, the framework with which we are dealing in such important bilateral issues as drug trafficking and migration,” Zedillo said.

On Mexican immigration to the U.S., which brings more than $4 billion back into the Mexican economy each year, Zedillo said the two governments have commissioned a study to determine the extent of a phenomenon that is argued more often through emotion than facts.

“There are many issues that have to be clarified, not only for governments but perhaps, more importantly, for people at large,” he said.

What is clear, he said, is that the solution to illegal immigration ultimately lies with Mexico’s economic progress.

“We believe that only by fostering Mexico’s economic development will the pressures of migration subdue,” he said.

“Our only concern has to do with the basic human, labor rights of migrants,” Zedillo said.

But as they sort through the complex issues that affect their nations, it was clear Friday that Clinton and Zedillo will have a wealth of common ground they can use from their own personal lives.

Clinton spoke about the coincidence of the two presidents’ Acapulco honeymoons during a state dinner in 1995.

Clinton noted that their mothers were nurses who did their postgraduate studies in Britain and that both men went to Yale.

But it was only after the interview Friday that Zedillo disclosed his own knee injury--the result of a tennis game last December--and the lesson he learned from Clinton’s crippling fall in March: “I became more careful with my own therapy after President Clinton’s injury.”