Castaneda, Once a Friend of Castro, Now Helps Shape Mexico's Reforms
By PETER FRITSCH and JOSE DE CORDOBA Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MEXICO CITY -- Why are some of America's most rock-ribbed conservative lawmakers suddenly talking to Mexican officials about ways to let more Mexican workers into the U.S.?
Much of the credit goes to a former Communist militant and friend of Fidel Castro. Today, after an unusual journey across the spectrum of Latin American politics, Jorge Castaneda is Mexico's foreign minister and one of the most important players in the new Mexican government's reform movement.
The brilliant son of a Mexican diplomat, the young Mr. Castaneda rebelled against the establishment and became a prominent leftist. But by the early 1990s, he abandoned the left and moved toward the political middle. There, he met a charismatic, self-made businessman named Vicente Fox.
Mr. Fox is now president, and Mr. Castaneda, 47 years old, has returned to the political establishment, enjoying the influence that eluded him as an often-shrill outsider. That clout will go on display later this month when Sen. Jesse Helms puts away past animosity toward Mr. Castaneda to visit Mexico with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In what is probably the first such foreign trip by an entire congressional committee, the former foes will discuss Mr. Castaneda's approach to immigration, which is gaining a surprising amount of traction in Washington. Among other things, the proposals would allow far more Mexicans to enter the U.S. legally, regularize the status of many of those already working in the U.S. illegally and restore a revised version of a guest-worker program that dates from World War II.
An Unlikely Collaboration
Given Mr. Castaneda's background, few could have predicted such a fast start with the American Republican establishment. A polyglot political scientist educated at the University of Paris and Princeton, Mr. Castaneda once sympathized with the armed struggle of Central American revolutionaries, to the great distress of U.S. policy makers, and added his voice to those of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in decrying the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Equally unlikely is his collaboration with Mr. Fox. The president, who is 58, joined Coca-Cola Co.'s Mexican unit in 1964 as a route salesman and worked his way up to run the unit. His conservative National Action Party has espoused everything from a strict antiabortion agenda to longer hemlines. An academic underachiever, Mr. Fox was an ambitious state governor in 1996 when he began absorbing Mr. Castaneda's ideas on pushing market forces in Mexico, taking the initiative on trade issues and ending the nation's ostrich-like foreign policy.
"Fox was a tabula rasa and Jorge opened him to a world of ideas," says Manuel Camacho Solis, a former presidential hopeful from whom Mr. Castaneda withdrew his support when it became clear that Mr. Fox had the best chance of toppling the ruling party. "Many on the left see Jorge as a traitor," Mr. Solis says. "But there is no denying his influence in this government."
Mr. Castaneda plays down his role as Mr. Fox's intellectual mentor. "Vicente Fox is not a guy you brainwash," he says.
From Marxist to Pragmatist
Yet many of the aggressive policy initiatives Mr. Fox launched since taking office on Dec. 1 reflect Mr. Castaneda's evolution from hard-line Marxist to pragmatic power broker. Ideas such as taxing sales of food and medicine -- hardly classic leftist nostrums -- appear to come straight out of a 1998 alternative policy paper drawn up by Mr. Castaneda and Roberto Mangabeira, a Brazilian-born Harvard Law professor and advocate of leftist alliances with the center.
Mr. Mangabeira wrote much of Mr. Fox's January address to world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, in which the Mexican president criticized "market-friendly policy making" for its failure to bridge the income gap afflicting Latin America.
With Mr. Castaneda as the driving force, Mexico has made immigration a defining issue in relations with the U.S. In February, when President George W. Bush visited Mr. Fox's ranch, Mexico won U.S. agreement to high-level negotiations aimed at establishing the orderly movement of migrants across the border. Last week, Mr. Castaneda met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft to discuss immigration.
Among the possible components of a new immigration framework is the revival of a "guest worker" program which gave temporary U.S. work visas to thousands of Mexican workers during World War II, when labor was scarce. The U.S. government terminated the arrangement in 1964. In exchange for an increased number of visas, Mexico will probably cooperate with U.S. authorities in controlling immigration flows by trying to break up smuggling rings and going after migrant traffickers.
Mr. Castaneda's proposals could meet resistance if the U.S. slowdown makes immigration a more controversial subject. But heavyweights are listening. Lawmakers such as Texas Sen. Phil Gramm are getting behind guest-worker legislation. Many states are feeling the squeeze of a labor shortage in the service sector, and many politicians recognize that an increasing part of their voting constituency is Mexican. There is also support for Mexico's desire to end the annual ritual whereby the U.S. certifies countries as cooperating with the war on drugs; offenders can lose aid. "When Sen. Helms met recently with Mr. Castaneda," says Roger Noriega, a top Helms aide, "the message was: We want to do everything to help you succeed."
How Mr. Castaneda came to collaborate with people from the conservative end of the political spectrum is a tale of shifting allegiances and personal ambition. "I obviously haven't been hanging out with conservatives over the past 20 years," he says.
An Insider's Insider
Though an irritant to the past two administrations of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Mr. Castaneda grew up in privileged circumstances as an insider's insider, the only son of a diplomat. Graduating from high school in 1970, he attended Princeton University, finishing in three years with a bachelor's degree in economics and history.
In 1973, Mr. Castaneda moved to Paris, where he befriended Marxist philosophy students studying at the Sorbonne. One friend who would influence the young Mr. Castaneda was French revolutionary theoretician Regis Debray, whose arguments in favor of armed struggle were adopted by Che Guevara. As military strongman Augusto Pinochet ousted Chile's socialist president -- then the most spectacular blow to the Latin American left -- Mr. Castaneda began his doctoral work at the University of Paris on a critique of the theory of Third World economic dependence then in vogue.
Returning to Mexico in 1978, Mr. Castaneda became a militant in the Communist Party. Roger Bartra, an intellectual who has known Mr. Castaneda from their student days in Paris, remembers a cafe extremist who favored publication of a hard-line magazine overseen by the party hierarchy. The youthful Castaneda's radicalism, Mr. Bartra says, was typical of the privileged sons of the PRI elite. "It was their way of rebelling against the political class," he says.
Breaking with the party in 1980 after losing a factional struggle, the 28-year-old Mr. Castaneda began working for his father, who had been named foreign minister the previous year. The son leveraged his contacts with people like Mr. Debray (then advising the socialist Mitterrand government in France), and persuaded his father to move away from Mexico's traditional foreign policy of neutrality. To the irritation of the U.S. -- then supporting President Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador in a civil war against Marxist guerrillas -- Mexico and France joined in a 1981 declaration recognizing the rebels.
During this period of revolutionary ferment in Central America, the younger Mr. Castaneda also helped Sandinista leader Miguel D'Escoto organize Nicaragua's Foreign Ministry. At the time, he says, Mexico hoped to dilute the influence of Mr. Castro's Cuba with the triumphant Sandinistas but to no avail. "That's where we lost the battle to Cuba," Mr. Castaneda says.
Yet he grew close to Mr. Castro and the head of Cuba's intelligence service for Latin America, the late spymaster Manuel Pineiro, while working in the Foreign Ministry. His relationship with Mr. Pineiro led some in the U.S. to speculate that Mr. Castaneda worked as a Cuban agent -- an idea that he calls "absurd and false."
Change From Within
When his father was sent to Paris as ambassador in 1983, Mr. Castaneda needed a job. He began writing political commentary for a variety of publications. He questioned the free-market opening of President Miguel de la Madrid in the mid-1980s, but his earlier success at turning his own views into policy convinced him that he could effect change from within the government.
In fact, Mr. Castaneda worked closely with the PRI campaign of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988, acting as an adviser to Mr. Salinas's future chief of staff, Jose Cordoba. But when PRI officials announced the failure of the government's vote-counting computers, seeming to strip the leftist candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, of the presidency, Mr. Castaneda saw wide-scale fraud and split with the PRI for good, shifting his support to Mr. Cardenas. Salinas insiders say Mr. Castaneda split because he wasn't offered a prominent post in the government; he denies the claim.
In Mr. Salinas's push to conclude a free-trade agreement with the U.S., Mr. Castaneda saw a cynical attempt to use foreign investors to help extend the PRI's autocratic reign, stretching back to 1929. "I got upset that Nafta was coming along to sustain this system and slow down democratic reform," he says.
Mr. Castaneda became a regular fixture on the anti-Nafta circuit. When House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt announced his opposition to Nafta in late 1993, he quoted Mr. Castaneda. His rising profile corresponded with a tempering of his political views that had been under way since the fall of the Berlin Wall. His 1993 history of the Latin left, "Utopia Unarmed," argued against armed revolution in Latin America, instead advocating gradual reform.
Meanwhile, Mr. Castaneda was becoming active in pro-democracy groups. His work as an election observer took him to Guanajuato state in 1991. There, he helped Mr. Fox declare a victory after the election was allegedly stolen from him by the PRI. The two men became friendly and worked closely when Mr. Fox thought of supporting Mr. Cardenas's second run at the presidency in 1994.
Though Nafta was proving to be an economic boon throughout 1994, its first year, Mexico's experiment with globalization blew up in its face when the country was soon forced to devalue its currency. Leftists crowed about their predictions of just such a disaster but seemed powerless to capitalize politically.
To Mr. Castaneda, it became clear that the left needed to make common cause with the center to have any relevance now that free trade and reform were facts of life. That's what brought him together with Messrs. Fox and Mangabeira, along with like-minded individuals from Chile, Brazil and Argentina.
"The existing leftists in Mexico were mummies who didn't want to try anything bold," says Mr. Mangabeira. So Mr. Castaneda abandoned Mr. Cardenas for Mr. Fox in 1997. That year, Mr. Castaneda published a critical biography on Mr. Guevara that many leftists saw as an act of treason.
Mr. Castaneda continues to shake things up. He recently approved the groundbreaking extradition of a former Argentine soldier accused of genocide during Argentina's "dirty war," cutting through the international conventions that hampered Spain's efforts to extradite Gen. Pinochet. And to Washington's delight, he wants to give Mexico a role in peacekeeping efforts in Colombia.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Castaneda addressed French businessmen at the French ambassador's house. A flute of champagne in hand, he delighted the crowd with jocular, flawless French.
"The ancien regime in Mexico has come to an end," he said. "But the new ancien regime is just getting started."