When Ross Perot addressed an NAACP audience as "you people" last year, the nation's newsrooms echoed with charges of racism. But now, when he exploits "dirty Mexican" caricatures to garner opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Fourth Estate is silent.

The picture Perot paints of Mexico ignores that nation's growing trend toward democratization and modernization. To rally opposition to NAFTA, Perot often relies on a portrait of Mexico as dirty, corrupt and backward. He uses border pollution as a code to conjure up stereotypical images of filthy Mexicans. (Though few would have guessed he is a closet tree-hugger, Perot is not above dressing in green when it suits his needs.)

Implying that Mexicans can't be trusted, Perot refuses to believe that Mexico will comply with environmental regulations Clinton attached to NAFTA--despite the enforcement mechanisms, including trade sanctions, that the agreement contains.

Perot's distrust of Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's promise to increase wages in Mexico also betrays his belief in Mexican corruption. He regularly points out that Mexican workers earn one-seventh what U.S. laborers make. But he dismisses President Salinas' commitment to raise the minimum wage as Mexican productivity increases, suggesting that Salinas is corrupt and untrustworthy.

Finally, Perot presents an outdated portrayal of Mexico as backward, in order to counter arguments that NAFTA would create an open Mexican market for U.S. products. Challenged on his claim that NAFTA won't increase U.S. exports to Mexico, Perot casually claims that Mexicans are too poor to buy anything. "Let's do business with a country whose people can buy things," he said in last night's debate with Vice President Al Gore '69.

This generalization is not only irresponsible but also inaccurate: The U.S. Small Business Administration estimates that Mexicans already spend more per capita on U.S.-made products than do consumers in Japan or Europe.

None of these arguments are explicitly racist (though some come close). All of them contain an element of legitimate concern, though the concerns are generally answerable. But a subtle disdain for Mexicans seems to underlie Perot's objections.

If the U.S. had negotiated the treaty with a small, emerging democracy in Europe instead of brown-skinned Mexico, would Perot be so vehemently opposed? It's doubtful.

Perot has not made his opposition to NAFTA a simple issue of U.S. best interest. Instead, he has propelled his campaign with attacks targeted directly and specifically at Mexico.

Some of Perot's arguments against NAFTA appeal blatantly to U.S. xenophobia, with more subtle tugs at racist strings. For example, he warns that Asian and European nations are eager to take advantage of NAFTA by investing in Mexico and sneaking their products across the tariff-free U.S.-Mexico border into the United States--a foreign invasion scenario with ominous undertones of a commercial Pearl Harbor.

This image was presented most starkly by an American who called Larry King from Mexico City last night to address Perot and Gore. "There are thousands of Japanese here," she said. "They are waiting, they are lurking."

NAFTA may indeed present trade opportunities to other countries. But that doesn't mean it necessarily threatens the U.S.

Perot devotes much of his anti-NAFTA polemic (a book jingoistically entitled Save Your Job, Save Your Country) to listing the ways in which NAFTA will benefit Mexico, Asia and Europe. The incorrect implication is that anything good for the rest of the world must be bad for the United States.

Last weekend, Perot got another opportunity to exploit cultural caricatures. The FBI received a warning that Mexican gangsters had hired six Cubans to assassinate Perot. Prominent public figures receive such bizarre threats regularly, and investigators have been unable to confirm the existence of a real assassination plot.

But Perot is famous for his paranoia and conspiracy theories. Additionally, the threat allowed Perot to wield some particularly useful stereotypes in his battle against NAFTA: Oliver Stone-style Cuban mercenaries and Mexican mafioso drug dealers.

It is disturbing that this evidence of racism in the anti-NAFTA rhetoric has received scant attention. But it is not all that surprising. The silence may simply reflect the ironic fact that NAFTA supporters are almost as guilty as Perot of fanning xenophobic flames to make their case. This apparent compromise recognizes that the current political climate rewards xenophobic rhetoric--and grants bonus points for bashing Mexico or Japan. Events like the World Trade Center bombing, Chinese immigrant-smuggling and reports Mexican immigrant soaking up tax-funded service in California have turned public mood against one of America's most cherished traditions: its open borders. The lingering effects of the recession and resentment at Japan's economic "miracle," fuel protectionist desires to think locally, not globally.

Fully recognizing the political benefits of protectionism and xenophobia, the Clinton administration has chosen an unlikely--and unconvincing--strategy to sell NAFTA. President Clinton tries to paint NAFTA as bad for Japan and Europe (using the converse of the Perot axiom: Anything bad for them is good for us). He recruits Lee Iaccoca to boast that other nations fear NAFTA because the treaty would create the world's largest unified trading bloc. And he asserts that if Congress rejects NAFTA when it votes on it November 17, by the next day the Japanese finance minister will be in Mexico saying (in Clinton's words), "We've got more money than they do anyway; make the deal with us."

This manipulation of xenophobia by NAFTA supporters is especially troubling since the ultimate goal of NAFTA is to create an open global trade community--a task that is impossible if nations cultivate distrust in one another. Put aside Clinton's exaggerated promises of job creation and Perot's hysterical warnings of job loss. (Perot's most recent figure is 85 million--a full third of the entire U.S. population.)

Most economists who aren't on the Clinton or Perot payrolls agree that the economic effects of NAFTA on the U.S would be minimal. Rejection of NAFTA, though, would symbolize a trend toward U.S. protectionism that would encourage similar trends worldwide and jeopardize global free trade negotiations.

But the image that NAFTA supporters have generated so far has been one of Japan and Europe as trade predators against whom the U.S. must guard its markets--this at a time when Clinton is vigorously trying to pry open the Japanese markets to U.S. goods.

There is something uncomfortably contradictory about using protectionist rhetoric to sell free trade. And there is something self defeating and hypocritical about exploiting xenophobia to produce global openness.

Politicians are expert emotional-button pushers, and Ross Perot is the unquestioned champion of them all. But as Gore said last night while he was wining the CNN studio floor with Perot's bruised ego, "The politics of negativism and fear only go so far."

Those are wise words, and both Perot and his White House foes should heed them. NAFTA supporters do Americans no favor when they decry Perot's demagoguery and then employ demagogic and divisive tactics for their own purposes.