Adolfo Aguilar Zinser (shown at a faculty luncheon prior to our event), Mexico's permanent representative to the United Nations, spoke in Moses Hall on November 18. He addressed the evolution of Mexican attitudes toward participation in the UN Security Council and current debates in both the General Assembly and Security Council, as well as the process by which Mexico helped to craft the current resolution on Iraq.

Lydia Chavez, Graduate School of Journalism

The Mexican Ambassador to the United Nations returned briefly to his role as a professor in November as he gave students at UC Berkeley a lesson on Mexico’s charged history with the U.N. Security Council.

Ambassador Adolfo Aquilar Zinser, who taught at Berkeley in the late 1990’s, has long been a participant in the Center for Latin American Studies program on U.S. Mexico relations. His talk at Moses Hall underscored how dramatically the alliance between the two neighbors has changed.

Zinser said that avoiding a seat on the 15-member Security Council had almost become a Mexican tradition. “Why get into trouble in matters and affairs that are not ours, why not just leave the United States alone,” the 53-year-old diplomat said explaining the country’s reasoning for serving only twice in the past.

In those experiences Mexico’s foreign policy often clashed with U.S. interests and acting out their differences in the international forum only exacerbated bilateral relations. Zinser pointed to Mexico’s 1981 Security Council experience as a case in point. While the Central American civil wars raged, Washington was on one side and Mexico the other. Ambassadors Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Jeane Kirkpatrick argued openly and Mexico found the disputes won them few friends in Washington.

The next time the Mexican government was asked to stand for a seat on the Security Council, Zinser said, it politely declined.

In the ensuing years, however, much has changed—at least in Mexico. The country of 94 million signed a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada in 1993 and its ruling party lost the presidency to the opposition in 2000. A year later Mexico decided to confront its age old dilemma: how to disagree with the United States in the U.N. without it leading to a confrontation and how to agree with out losing its national dignity.

In many ways, Zinser, a graduate of the Colegio de México and Harvard, offered the perfect profile for a diplomat seeking new answers to those questions. Once the spokesman and advisor to Mexico’s leftist leader Cuauthémoc Cárdenas, Zinser, like Mexican foreign policy, has moved from the left to the center.

 

The diplomat became the country’s first independent senator in 1997 and recognized early on that Vicente Fox, then Governor of Guanajuato from the National Action Party, had the potential to end the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s grip on the presidency in the 2000 elections. When he did, Mexico was ready to gamble that it could join the Security Council and disagree with the United States without “severely changing the bilateral relationships.”

If Zinser and Mexico had changed, however, the U.S. representative offered a voice from the past. U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte was Ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan Administration where he helped run the contra war against the Sandanistas. Later in 1989, President George Bush appointed the career diplomat to become ambassador to Mexico.

At the time, the Los Angeles Times quoted a column by Zinser in which he wrote, “Independent of what his mission in Mexico might be and how he fulfills it, Negroponte symbolizes all that Mexico has always considered injurious to cooperation and good relations with the United States.”

But in November, Zinser offered high praise for Negroponte. “He understands fully the power of the,” United States “so he does not impose or brag,” said Zinser who added that the United States had often “done both” in the past. “We have had very heated exchanges and I’ve never seen him do anything offensive.”

Zinser said the maturing relationship between the two countries was evident during the recent diplomatic battle to forge consensus on a U.S. resolution on Iraq. In that effort, Mexico held back its support until language emerged to help temper its northern neighbor’s yen for war.
“Thanks to diplomacy, we have a chance today” to avoid war Zinser said. “What the U.N. can do is build a middle ground.” The latter, he said, is all the more necessary in a world in which there is one superpower. “You need checks and balances.”

In response to a question, Zinser added, that it helped to have Secretary of State Colin Powell in the mix. “It is good to know that there is someone who believes there are solutions that can be found diplomatically.”
During his visit to the Bay Area, Zinser also met with Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. There, he praised the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but cautioned that the accord failed to address the disparities between the two countries.

He referred to the European Economic Community and its policy to invest in the infrastructure of the less developed member countries such as Portugal and Spain. The North American agreement, he said, ignores similar needs in Mexico that “are far beyond the capabilities of Mexico.”

 

Ambassador Zinser and Jerry Brown (left), the mayor of Oakland, at a breakfast meeting on Tuesday, November 19.