@ — Sunday, Nov. 22, 1992 - North Shore News
Mi ico’

Bob
Hunter

THE FIRST beer a Canuck
journaliste has in Mexico
City is a religious experience
of sorts.

Hell, you're paying 20,000
pesos for a beer!

There’s no way around it. Pay-
ing 20,000 anything gives you
pause.

You sip.

You do not gargle it down
Australian style.

Rationally, you know this
works out to roughly what you’d
be paying for a brew back in
Canada, but that doesn’t help.

It takes a few trips to the bar
before a tight-fisted Canuck can
relax and enjoy a drink, as he
would at home.

Ah yes, home.

Home, where the government of
Brian Mulroney has agreed to an
economic menage a trois ar-
rangement between Mexico, the
United States and Canada, mak-
ing us the Three Trade Amigos.

The question is, who'll end up
on top?

The Mexicans, ! swear, are
grinning for some good reasons.

l can’t prove this, you under-
stand. We're talking gut feelings.
Nothing scientific. Just an old grin-
go reporter’s sense of the way
the wind is blowing.

But yep. Grinning. That’s what
they’re doing. Sometimes it seem-
ed they almost had to put their
hats over their mouths to hide the
grin.

But it was nothing overt.

{t might even just have been
that they like us a whale fot more
now than they used to, what with
them apparently not being as
upset as they used to be about the
loss of California and Texas and
all that.

Most Mexicans that | met, in
fact, still weren't all that sure
what the distinction between an
Americano and a Canadiano was,
and it was a tough thing to ex-
plain in nearly non-existent
Spanish.

Why try? Does it matter? When
you're visiting a country, it comes
down to simple things, doesn’t it?
Smiles, or no smiles.

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We were getting plenty of
smiles. That’s what mattered.
Even a sprinkling of respect. I
swear,

Now [I’m the first to admit this
might have had something to do
with the fact that Big Al Mac-
Cormack, ray travelling compa-
nion, is six-foot-five.

His shoulders are slightly pulled
in from a lifetime of having to
duck to avoid hitting things with
his head in a world built for tittle
people.

Alis one of the most gentle
souls afive, but an extremely short
person could be forgiven, not
knowing him, for worrying about
what could happen if a guy this
big should ever turn psycho and
(like Lenny in John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men) inadvertently
snap somcbody’s neck.

Al’s size. The North American
Free Trade Agreement. Just being
Canadian. Although maybe it had
nothing to do with any of this.

Maybe it was just that we had
plastic.

Plastic is still a celatively care
item in Mexico, at least outside of
the upper classes, su far as I could
tell.

in Mexico today, as in Canada
or the States, possession of a
credit card is probably a better
defence than even a good metal
shicld was 500 years ago in
Europe.

all smiles

And certainly it helped that we
had visas issued by the Mexican
government, plus a letter of in-
troduction from the Mexican
Consulate in Toronto.

Still. Super-friendliness every-
where.

We felt safe. Pretty much on
top of things. Almost at home. In
fact, quite a bit at home, con-
sidering. You want a
McDonald’s? A Burger King? A
subway? A bank?

It is the same system.

Aha. Yes. We are already lock-
ed together in some sort of super-
system embrace. Intcrest rates.
Currency fluctuations. Stock
markets. Car parts. Software pro-
grams.

I pondered this deeply, of
course.

Without trying to be too cute
about it, | compare the change in
Mexico between now and the last
time I was there, in the 1960s, to
the change in France after that
country pulled out of NATO and
established itself as an indepen-
dent military power.

The old hostilities could be
shrugged off. A kind of pragmatic
equality could take hold. They
were standing on their own two
feet and didn't feel inferior or
dominated any longer.

They might still be standing in
Uncle Sam's shadow, but he
couldn’t bully them around any
longer.

In any event, sweeping gencral-
izations aside, Big Al MacCor-
mack and I were in Mexico City
on serious business. We had a
five-part television series to shoot.
We were staying at a four-star
hotel. We had expense account
hard foreign currency to throw
around,

Hey, who would mess with us?
We had planned to rent a car,
but got talked out of it, thankful-

ly. The best hope is to hire a
driver with a car ata fixed rate
and keep him the whole time
you're there.

Thus we headed off into El
Traffico — and a kind of
ground-level ozone form of
enlightenment! Honestly. Remain
tuned.

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