Mexican standoff.

The news regarding Mexico over the last few weeks has galled most Americans almost as much as it has people here. First came the arrest of General Jesus Gutierrez, chief of the country's drug-intelligence agency and allegedly in the pay of Juarez Cartel leader Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Not long after that, the New York Times reported allegations that two Mexican governors had taken drug money. Then Humberto Garcia Abrego -- whose brother Juan ran the Matamoros Cartel until his arrest last year -- somehow disappeared while being questioned by police. Those same police seem incapable of catching any other cartel leaders -- Carrillo or the Arellano Felix brothers, who are suspected of murdering Juan Cardinal Posadas in 1993.

Mexicans, meanwhile, are incensed over the certification process. They have a drug problem because America has one. Cartoonists down here have portrayed Uncle Sam as both a cokehead, snorting lines which turn out to be the stripes of the flag, and a junkie, teething a rubber cord to steady his arm as he signs the certification document.

Then Sen. Ernest Hollings further inflamed matters. He suggested to Madeleine Albright that the U.S. needed some new friends in Mexico and probably ought to provoke a political crisis so as to get rid of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). And there's no indication that bi-lateral love will get deeper soon. A trial in Houston of Mario Ruiz Massieu began recently. If prosecutors keep their promises, it will connect the family of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari with the drug cartels.

The past few weeks have been one of those rare moments when Americans' attention is directed toward the country with which we share the 1,952-mile border that divides the First World from the Third. The average American might be pardoned for thinking that Mexican politics is one harrowing cesspool of corruption and dirty money. Hollings, Dianne Feinstein, and Richard Gephardt and Jesse Helms, has felt that way for years. They're right. But Americans ought to pause before giving way to any cozy self-righteousness or heavy-handed political maneuvers.

Mexican corruption has to do with the most remarkable one-party state in the world. The PRI was formed in 1929, in the era of the great one-party states: the Fascists, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks. It has quietly outlasted them all and will be the only one to make it -- albeit limping -- into the twenty-first century.

Political scientists interested in how one-party states maintain and use power wasted their time studying the various Fascist or Communist permutations. The PRI had the answer all along. First, it had no ideology beyond self-preservation -- so anyone could fit in. Second, it discovered this enduring truth: every man has his price. Instead of rustling up some master race or a dictatorship of the proletariat, the PRI bought off all those who could give it trouble -- intellectuals, unionists, lawyers, farmers, teachers, street vendors, garbage pickers, students. The cost of loyalty was: a research grant, a piece of sidewalk on which to sell, land, money, or merely the chance to break the law without being hassled. In downtown Mexico City, an entire 13-story building is jammed with tiny offices housing the shells of what were once fiery social movements, now bought off.

The PRI offered the primary characteristic the U.S. sought in a Cold War Latin American government: stability. The party tolerated no competition. So what developed was a steroid-gorged presidency and party structure sitting atop a weak, dependent everything else. As long as things stayed calm, no one in the U.S. Government seemed to care too much. But the facade has crumbled. In the middle of a terrifying drug war, Mexico finds itself institutionally, not to mention economically, unarmed.

DEA agents have understood this for some time. U.S. politicians are beginning to get the point now, too. According to Raphael Ruiz Harrell, a Mexico City law professor and criminologist, "Mexican society has been broken by the government. It couldn't organize itself. There was no civil society capable of speaking for itself."

At no time is the effect clearer than when drug trafficking is the focus. Mexico's military -- its "clean institution" -- can't match the narcos' reach. Its police forces are involved up to their mirrored shades in drug smuggling; the congress, judiciary, and press are spineless toadies. Local governments -- which might have provided an economic, political, and moral bulwark -- can barely keep roads paved. Even the Catholic Church and business leaders are just now learning their social role.

Take a trip through northwest Mexico -- Sonora, Durango, Chihuahua, and especially Sinaloa, where drug smuggling began --and you will see a true and vital "narcoculture" developing in the institutional vacuum. Traffickers are revered as heroes. They are manly free-traders who satisfy the gringos' aching demand for dope. The "narcocorrido," an entire genre of music recounting the exploits of drug smugglers, has emerged as the dominant form of popular music. Narcos are even known to commission songs about themselves the way princes paid painters in Renaissance Europe.

"The government" -- by which people mean the police or army --has long been discredited as corrupt, incompetent, unfair. In many areas, narcos are the major employers. And sometimes they do what government can't. Rafael Caro Quintero, the now-imprisoned narco who killed DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, is still admired for having put the first paved roads in his native region, central Sinaloa.

What Senators Hollings and Feinstein feel so powerless to affect is really just the natural extension of a 68-year system based on purchased loyalty and the prostitution of law. The difference is that the traffickers, not the party, now have the money to call the shots.

Meanwhile, the PRI is falling apart. What happened in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s -- the crumbling of a desiccated one-party state -- is now happening in Mexico. Mexicans, meanwhile, are exercising long-atrophied civic muscles. There's a public effervescence that is exciting to watch -- politics, sex, and economics are discussed frankly.

No one's sure what will emerge from this historic moment. Spain needed only two years after Franco died to come to an agreement on new basic political rules. Chile and Argentina required short periods as well. Untangling the web of deals that kept Mexico together has taken eight years -- so far.

But if nothing else, the hullaballoo of the last several weeks ought to convince Americans that we can no longer afford to look south only during Certification February each year.