MEXICO’S DOUBLE STANDARD

Mexico City. Almost the first thing I saw, arriving in Mexico City’s airport late in April, was a cartoon in Novedades, the nation’s second largest newspaper, commenting on Watergate. A creature with Nixonian features and a devil’s pointed tail passing between his legs and under the door was peering through the keyhole from which the point of his own tail emerged. “It Has a Tail!” said the caption. My first reaction was: How apt! But then, realizing that I wasn’t looking at an American paper and that the creature was dressed as Uncle Sam, I had a second reaction: How ungenerous and cruel! Because far from sympathizing with this predicament of its neighbor, far from expressing alarm that a democracy could be afflicted with such a cancerous growth, far from applauding the zeal with which both American parties were joining hands to expose every ramification of the corruption, Mexico appeared to be crowing with delight. “Typical!” the cartoon seemed to be saying, “Just what we’ve always said about the United States, and now the whole world knows.”

Would our own press be expressing glee, I thought to myself, if it were discovered that the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) had bugged the opposition party’s headquarters? Perhaps; I hope not. . . . But what a preposterous idea. In the first place Mexico’s opposition offers no threat at all to the party that has been running Mexico ever since the revolution of 1910-1920. And in the second place, if any such scandal within the PRT existed, and it was so much as hinted at in Novedades, either the edition would be confiscated by the police and the editors seized within minutes, or the paper supply would be cut off so that no second edition could ever appear. I asked several Mexican friends later what would happen in the event of such an exposure, and they said just that, without my suggesting it.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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Mexico City. Almost the first thing I saw, arriving in Mexico City’s airport late in April, was a cartoon in Novedades, the nation’s second largest newspaper, commenting on Watergate. A creature with Nixonian features and a devil’s pointed tail passing between his legs and under the door was peering through the keyhole from which the point of his own tail emerged. “It Has a Tail!” said the caption. My first reaction was: How apt! But then, realizing that I wasn’t looking at an American paper and that the creature was dressed as Uncle Sam, I had a second reaction: How ungenerous and cruel! Because far from sympathizing with this predicament of its neighbor, far from expressing alarm that a democracy could be afflicted with such a cancerous growth, far from applauding the zeal with which both American parties were joining hands to expose every ramification of the corruption, Mexico appeared to be crowing with delight. “Typical!” the cartoon seemed to be saying, “Just what we’ve always said about the United States, and now the whole world knows.”

Would our own press be expressing glee, I thought to myself, if it were discovered that the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) had bugged the opposition party’s headquarters? Perhaps; I hope not. . . . But what a preposterous idea. In the first place Mexico’s opposition offers no threat at all to the party that has been running Mexico ever since the revolution of 1910-1920. And in the second place, if any such scandal within the PRT existed, and it was so much as hinted at in Novedades, either the edition would be confiscated by the police and the editors seized within minutes, or the paper supply would be cut off so that no second edition could ever appear. I asked several Mexican friends later what would happen in the event of such an exposure, and they said just that, without my suggesting it.