Central America's big brother.

THE UNITED STATES and Mexico seem to have similar hopes for Central America. Both nations want economic growth and political stability for the region. Those conditions would make for friendly neighbors, provide good trade opportunities for both of the larger nations, and contribute to the Western Hemisphere's security against non-democratic political pressures. The differences are over how to realize these hopes. Mexico's President miguel de la Madrid and Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda claim that Central America's instability stems from lack of economic opportunity for the working class and lack of social justice, their term for welfare programs. But if those were the only causes, Mexico itself, confronted by high unemployment, inflation, and the discontent evidenced by the migration of millions of Mexicans to the United States, would be rent by guerrilla warfare.

Both Mexican leaders deny that the on-going hostilities in Central America spring from the conflict between the Soviet Union's expansionist foreign policy and the United States' concern over hemispheric security. Both the Mexican media and the Mexican government seem aware of a U.S. presence in Central America but unaware of a Nicaraguan presence in Salvadoran guerrilla camps, of Cubans in the Nicaraguan armed forces, or of Soviets in both the military and civilian sectors of Cuba's government. The failure of Mexican officialdom to acknowledge the easily discernible role of Moscow and Havana inside Central America makes it impossible for Mexico City and the United States to formulate a bi-national approach to Central America's problems.

Central America, approximately the size of California in both area and population, unfortunately does not have California's gross domestic product. It is economically stagnant, which has led some of its people to listen to the siren call of the Marxists, though not nearly as many as some of our media --and some of the Mexican media--indicate.

Before the onslaught of the Communist guerrillas in 1980, tiny El Salvador was nurturing a light-industrial sector. Even today, after guerillas have destroyed 40 per cent of the country's electric power, Salvadorans continue to operate tractor, bicycle, petrochemical, and computer-assembly plants. The Communist guerrillas, under the label Revolutionary Democratic Front, refused to take part in the internationally monitored elections for a constituent assembly in 1982, for the presidency in 1984, or for the local governments and the General Assembly on March 17 of this year. Since they cannot win at the ballot box, they instead threaten death to those who do vote, a threat that so far has failed to keep Salvadoran voters from the polls.

Do Mexican newspapers report the Salvadoran voters' courage? Only a few of them, such as El Sol de Mexico in Mexico City, El norte in Monterrey, and Vanguardia in Saltillo. The major papers, including the very professional and well-written leading daily, Excelsior, ignore it or play it down. But they wrote about the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua as if the Sandinistas had a mandate. Missing from Mexican media coverage of the Nicaraguan election were these facts: The campaign leading up to the November 1984 balloting was bogus. The non-Marxist minor parties got no space in the Sandinista newspapers, Barricada and Nuevo Diario. And the Nicaraguan radio stations are controlled by the government.

The Nicaraguan supreme electoral tribunal reported on November 30, 1984, that the National Liberation Sandinista Front got 735,000 of the 1.1 million votes cast. That gave the Sandinistas 67 per cent of the presidential vote and 61 of the 96 seats in the powerless Congress. If we ignore the fraudulent campaign, in which all anti-Marxist parties save one were decertified, we might agree with the leftist claim that the vote was legitimate. Even so, that means one-third of the Nicaraguan voters had the courage to vote against the Marxist government. The Mexican media never mentioned that.

Un-News

BUT THEN, the Mexican media are generally selective about the news they choose to cover in Nicaragua. Mexican television gave great play to Daniel Ortega and Miguel d'Escoto last November when they denied that Soviet tanks were arriving in Nicaragua, until a French TV crew filmed the unloading of those tanks. Then the story suddenly became un-newsworthy.

That Nicaragua has built a military force of 88,000 regular soldiers plus 100,000 reservists in a nation of only 2.6 million gets little or no play. Nor does the fact that Nicaragua's neighbors include defenseless Costa Rica to the south, a free nation without any armed forces, and to the north El Salvador, a tiny country torn by guerrillas who get their amrs from the Sandinistas. Also to the north is Honduras, whose elected civilian chief executive, Roberto Suazo, has been careful not to provoke heavily armed Nicaragua. Only when U.S. troops went on maneuvers in Honduras did the country seem less vulnerable vis-a-vis its heavily armed neighbor.

The Coco River forms part of the boundary between Nicaragua and Honduras. Just south of that river are the ancestral homelands of the Miskito-Zumo Indians, who have lived there since before the coming of the Spanish explorers. I visited the Waspan Zumo headquarters some years ago and found the people to be gentle and peace-loving. These Indians, the Sandinistas have killed, dispersed, jailed, and sent into exile in order to establish a cordon sanitaire. But I looked in vain for any word of criticism from the Mexican government.

Miskitos V. Hopis

IF WE Amercians uprooted the Navajos and the Hopis from their sacred ancestral lands in Arizona, the UN would certainly hold a special session to condemn the action, and probably rightly so. Certainly the Mexican media would be burning with anger. But the Sandinistas' treatment of the Miskitos did not provoke official or journalistic anger in Mexico, a nation that prides itself on its Indian origins and on the Indian base of its composite Spanish-Indian or mestizo culture.

Why do Mexico's government officials support the Salvadoran Communist guerrillas and the Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua? To be sure, Mexico has dealt kindly with President Jose Duarte of El Salvador, especially since he began to negotiate with the guerrilla front. President Duarte, an intelligent and capable leader, understands the dynamics of U.S. politics, and realizes that such negotiation--if he does not give power to those who would destroy him--helps guarantee that liberals in the U.S. House of Representatives will not oppose aid to his government.

When President Duarte communicates with Mexico, he uses the vocabulary of revolution itself. He knows that Mexico's leaders want to reaffirm their allegiance to the Mexican Revolution, always writen with a patriotic big "R" to distinguish the current program of on-going reforms from the petty military struggles that took place before 1910.

The Mexican Revolution inside the Mexican political system means an institutionalized series of social reforms and welfare programs, and a mixed public/private economy with the government a partner in some major industries and the owner of others (including petroleum, electric power, railroads, airlines, and motion pictures). Mexico's leaders get into office by praising the concept of revolution. Social revolution is the political vocabulary of all its political parties, including the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN). The phrase "Mexican Revolution" has become an article of faith in public life.

Fortunately, Mexico started its own revolution seven years before the Bolsheviks took power in Moscow. By the time the Soviet Communists had stabilized their power at home and begun encouraging a collectivized world, the Mexican Revolution was a nationalistic success.

In the Twenties, Mexico's leaders squelched Communist attempts to gain power within the Mexican Revolution or even to encroach upon its home-grown slogans and formulas for public policy.

In 1921, when Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto of the state of Yucatan, head of the Mexican Socialist Party, tried to convert the revolutionary leaders in his state to the new Communist Party, President Alvaro Obregon sent an army to overturn his government and chase his followers out of the state. The Marxists were decimated. That pattern was repeated whenever the revolutionary coalition was challenged by pro-Moscow forces.

The Mexican revolutionary coalition now includes the Institutional Revolutionary Part (PRI), the top levels of federal and state government administrators, officials of the Mexican Federation of Labor (CTM), and leaders of the Federation of Industrial Chambers and of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce, the last two entities representing organized management.

No politician has been able to gain any significant office in Mexico without publicly pledging allegiance to the Revolution. The mystique of the Revolution has even affected Mexico's foreign-policy posture: Organized forces anywhere in Latin American who claim to be fighting for a social revolution have a claim on Mexico's sympathy. School textbooks, radio soap operas, and TV talk shows all reiterate that view.

Sheiks of Mexico

PUBLIC, Mexican leaders assert that any social revolution would better the lives of workers elsewhere in Latin America. Privately some of these leaders concede that if Marxists should consolidate power in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the new regimes would find Mexico's olifields a tempting target. Mexico admits to 72 billion barrels of petroleum reserves and may have 100 billion--Latin America's Saudi Arabia. These reserves are located in Mexico's southernmost states, separated from El Salvador only by Guatemala, which itself has seven or eight billion barrels of petroleum reserves, making it a second target.

Many Mexican leaders also privately concede that despite future risk, Mexico's immediate need is to co-opt its own alienated Left, including those living at the marginal level. Fortunately for the Revolution, the U.S., with its unguarded border, provides a safety valve against violent explosion inside Mexico by draining off millions of Mexicans who find temporary jobs here and send their earnings back home to their families. So Mexican politicians can continue to placate their own Left. But in the process they engage in news management, which does harm in the long run to themselves and to others.

Mexican media and government officials invariably describe the Marxist Sandinistas as "progressive" or "liberal" and the Communist guerrillas of El Salvador as "democratic" or "leftist." If these Mexican politicians and journalists had been alive in 1912 when the Titanic struck an iceberg, they would have asserted that a luxury liner had stopped to take on ice.

Perhaps the language of diplomacy must always be polite. But euphemisms that are self-deceiving serve no one but the enemies of freedom.