La Opinion, Sunday, June 12, 2005
George A. Lopez

With his untimely death last week, our hemisphere lost Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, one of its sharpest minds and boldest spirits. Zinser’s unique combination of scholarly prowess and smart policy sense mixed with his personal integrity, keen wit and courageous assertiveness. Over nearly twenty years, Adolfo’s and my paths crossed for several periods of intense, shared work.

Our association began with Zinser’s service on a prestigious review panel which I chaired for a MacArthur Foundation competition for research grants in international peace and security. Zinser had earned his place via an impressive set of presentations that caught the eye of Program Director Ruth Adams. Ruth’s comments to me on his appointment proved prophetic: if democratic change were to come to Mexico, it would emerge from the ‘new thinking’ about politics and society that typified Adolfo’s writings and activism.

In addition to intellectual toughness, Zinser brought to our committee a clear and vibrant definition of peace and security in the emerging post-Cold War. Adolfo rightly assessed a future in which the role of non-governmental and civil society actors would increase, and where the new security concerns of nations would involve environmental, migration and trade issues. He was especially concerned with whether the US would play out its role as the single super-power as a cooperative partner in global peace-building, or would slip instead into imperial temptations. Yet again prophetic.

Our paths merged once more in early 2002 when Zinser came to the UN as the new ambassador from Mexico. I had written a great deal in the 1990s on UN economic sanctions, especially on Iraq. Adolfo and I met soon after he was appointed chair of the Sierra Leone sanctions committee. He had already thoroughly absorbed our articles and books on sanctions. He zeroed in on our finding that UN sanctions were more likely to succeed if there was an aggressive sanctions committee chairman who would visit the sanctioned region and target, and who would use local investigative expertise to assess sanctions’ impact. His visits to West Africa, working with the dean of Security Council diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock of the United Kingdom, increased the effectiveness of ‘blood diamond’ sanctions and established important conditions for their lifting once peace came to the region.

As the Bush administration stoked the flames of war in the halls of the UN, Zinser shared with me the irony of Mexico’s position. Mexico’s service on the Security Council in the early 1950s came during the historic authorization of the use of force in Korea. This created a kind of identity – if not constitutional - crisis in Mexico regarding war-making powers. Some in Mexico had concerns about again serving on the Security Council. And now here he was, posted as Mexican ambassador, being asked to vote for war!

Although much was made of Mexico’s opposition to the US desire for a Security Council resolution authorizing force against Iraq, I found in Zinser the continued search for what was the right thing to do. Regarding our own research work which claimed that few prohibited Iraqi weapons systems were likely to exist, he asked, “Are you sure?” with an emphasis in voice inflection that cannot be conveyed in writing. In the end, he voted both his conscience and his country’s position. He offered a convincing and courageous ‘no’ to war that history will record as one of Mexico’s finest diplomatic hours.

Zinser’s writing, his activism and his ambassadorship leave many hearing him as an opponent of the US foreign policy establishment. For those who worked with him and read his writings, this is a rather simplistic assessment. Zinser held the US to its own high expectations and he recognized – more than many US analysts – how costly it would become for the US, and to the very principles we espoused, when our actions and policies fell short of those core principles. Can we listen now? Please?

George A. Lopez is Senior Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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