Is the tide finally turning in Mexico?
May 30, 2006
Funny thing about Mexican President Vicente Fox's visit to the American West last week: It didn't turn out as one would have expected.
The tall, lanky, laconic "presidente," who seemed to offer such hope to Mexico when he was elected five years ago, started out in Salt Lake City with the usual emotional cries for "fairness" and "decent treatment of our people." But before his visits to Washington and California were over, it was clear that the background music to the old show had changed dramatically.
Fox was greeted by some of the best in the American intellectual community with an honesty about his abundant failures that has not been seen before. A brilliant paper by professor George W. Grayson of the College of William & Mary, widely circulated before the visit, laid out Mexico's shame:
President Fox makes $236,693 a year, more than the leaders of France, the United Kingdom and Canada; Mexican congressional deputies, who serve only a few months a year, take home at least $148,000 a year, plus a $28,000 "leaving-office bonus" at the end of the term. Meanwhile, Mexico collects taxes equivalent to 9.7 percent of GDP, a figure on a par with Haiti; there is painfully little to spend on education and health care, which means there is no social mobility and little job opportunity.
Professor Grayson ends his paper with: "U.S. leaders and the American public have every right to insist that Mexican officials act responsibly, rather than expecting that their neighbor to the north will shoulder burdens that they themselves should assume."
In short, Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures.
When I was in Mexico last fall, after dozens of visits over the years, people on every political and social level confirmed these accusations, complaining to me of Fox's failures. Forty families still own 60 percent of Mexico. There are no voluntary organizations, no civic involvement, no family foundations - and thus, no accountability, allowing corruption to flourish. Mexico gains $28 billion from oil revenue and $20 billion from immigrant remittances. There is virtually no industrialization, no small business, no real chance at individual entrepreneurship. Under Fox, it has created only one-tenth of the 1 million jobs needed.
Ah, but there are new voices of change, of reason, of self-awareness in Mexico, in place of the hoary anti-gringo rants: the beginnings of a transformation of the debate.
The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined "Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity." It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: "For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure."
Other prominent Mexicans were quoted as saying, for instance, the formerly unthinkable: that a wall would be the "best thing that could happen for Mexico"; the "porous border" allowed "elected officials to avoid creating jobs." And former Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castañeda, who always took a tough line toward the United States, writes in the Mexican newspaper Reforma that Mexico needed "a series of incentives" to keep Mexicans from migrating, including welfare benefits to mothers whose husbands remained in Mexico, scholarships, and the loss of land rights for people who were absent too long from their property.
This is European social democracy, this is American New Deal, this is real development talk, in place of the tiresome historical Mexican attitude that everything is the gringos' fault and they should pay for it. This is a real revolution of the mind! It also may indicate that, while President Fox failed in carrying through such basic modern reforms, he did lay the basis for them.
Two important points here. The fact that the free enterprise candidate for July's presidential election, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), is suddenly and unexpectedly surging ahead on his slogan of "My job will be to make sure you have a job" may show that the Mexican people are fed up. In addition, the fact that only 50,000 of the 400,000 Mexicans in the United States who were available to vote in the July Mexican elections have bothered to register can only indicate a generalized disgust with Mexican corruption and hopelessness, and perhaps even a turn toward American ways.
If this is true - and it certainly seems so - then there may be hopeful currents running below the deceptively static surfaces of Mexico today.
Surely the fact that America has awakened to the insult of its "neighbor" cynically exporting its problems, while doing nada at home, can only help Mexico and jar it to some modern sense. Ironically, the debate and the anger in the U.S. about this mammoth illegal immigration has already helped Mexico to begin to shed its dependency on America - and to turn its energies toward its own real predators, all home-grown.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060530/news_mz1e30geyer.html
