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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 7, 1982
PAGE 8
With all their arrogance and xenophobia, the Argentines have
avoided confronting the people most responsrETe for their prob
lems--thernselves•...These national attributes have led some
Argentines to despair of their country
t
s future. "I don't think
we are worthy of democracy," laments the poet Jorge Luis Borges.
Dangerous Precedent for the United States
It takes no stretch of the imagination to realize that "Hispanismo,"
coupled with the principle of redressing old territorial disputes, repre
sents a serious threat to the very territorial integrity of the United
States. The TIMES of London editorialized in its April 20 edition:
•••the arguments which Argentina maintains to uphold its claim to
the Falklands might entitle Mexico � time in the future to
advance the � kind of theories for reclaiming much of the
Pacific Southwest from the United States.
Mr. Haig--or more
particularly Mrs. Kirkpatrick--might brood seriously on that
implication.
In a similar vein, a commentary piece in the May 5, 1982 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MONITOR called for a "statute of limitation" on territorial disputes. The
author, Pat M. Holt, wrote:
•••there
are
many•.•situations in which the statute of limita
tions would be a useful principle. The U.S., for example, has
not occupied Texas and California for as long !-2 Britain has had
the Falklands.
The thought of Mexico now asserting a claim
appears ludicrous, but logically it is no more ludicrous than the
Argentine invasion of the Falklands.
(It might be argued, not
entirely in jest, that through uncontrolled and largely illegal
migration Mexico is in the process of reoccupying Texas and
California anyway.) •••
Carlos Rangel, the noted Venezuelan writer, editor and television
commentator summed up the all-pervasive Mexican attitude toward the United
States in his article "Mexico and Other Dominoes" in the June, 1981 issue of
COMMENTARY.
All Mexicans, without distinctions of class or ideology, see the
United States as the other, the antagonist, radically and
essentially the foreigner. The United States is the image of
everything Mexico is not.
It is strangeness itself.
Yet
Mexicans are condemned to live with that strangeness•.••
In 1845-46 the U.S. not only took Texas (which had seceded from
Mexico on its own in 1836} but also made that the occasion for
invading Mexico, occupying its capital city, and tearing off its
body the territory of the present states of California, Arizona,
Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
Understandably there is enormous bitterness in Mexico about the
loss of the 1846 war and of what appears today � the �
desirable half of the country's territory. There is no way out
for Mexican pride as those lands blossom and become even richer
and more desirable than the North American Northeast: either they
would have developed in roughly the same direction if they had