Ajcommittee Outraged over Mexican Lawmaker’s Anti-semitic Remarks

The American Jewish Committee cabled the Mexican government a statement of its “outrage and concern” over “slanderous and defamatory statements against the Mexican Jewish community recently made before the Mexican House of Representatives by Deputy Miguel Angel Olea Enriquez,” a representative of the official government party, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). On January 19, a delegation of AJCommittee leaders will visit Mexico to meet with government officials and the Mexican Jewish community leadership.

During a December I discussion of reforms of the organic law of the Bank of Mexico, Enriquez, in calling for more severe sanctions against those who violate the exchange control, charged that “Mexican Jews are experts in these matters. Therefore, they can avoid all payments of taxes; they inflate their assets; they get financial credit even after blowing up their assets and they speculate with their money.”

In a telegram sent to the Mexican Ambassador to the United States, Jorge Espinosa de los Reyes, Gordon Zacks, chairman of the AJC International Relations Commission, and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of he AJC International Relations Department, declared that Enriquez’s “baseless charges are nothing less than a scurrilous and libelous attack on the moral integrity and loyalty of Mexican Jewry and constitute a manifestation of group libel.”

MEXICAN OFFICIALS REJECT RACIST STATEMENTS

At the same time, Zacks and Tanenbaum acknowledged in their telegram that “we are gratified that Minister of Interior Manuel Bartlett and Representative Enrique Soto Izquierdo, Secretary of the Great Commission of the House of Representatives, in the name of the Mexican government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, have categorically rejected these racist statements rightly characterized by them as ‘characteristic of totalitarian and reactionary regimes’ and violative of the principles of the Mexican constitution.”

These rejections of Enriquez’s personal views were issued on December 7 and 8 following a series of meetings between Mexican government officials, House of Representatives spokesmen headed by Humberto Lugo Gil, President of the Great Commission of the House of Representatives and President of the PRS and some representatives of the Comite Central Israelita de Mexico (the Mexican Jewish Central Committee). Sergio Nudelstejer, director of the Mexico and Central American office of the AJCommittee, was one of the four official Jewish spokesmen.

In behalf of the AJC, Zacks and Tanenbaum in their telegram to the Mexican Ambassador requested that “you communicate our message of outrage and concern to President Miguel de la Madrid.” They also requested an appointment shortly with the Mexican Ambassador “in order to discuss what steps might be taken to counter the negative effects of this episode and to assure that it will not happen again.”

Last week, officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center at Yeshiva University in Los Angeles met with Ambassador de los Reyes and urged that de la Madrid repudiate Enriquez’s statement. They were told that the Mexican President would soon meet with representatives of Mexico’s Jewish community.