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Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, because they march in step with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. But only soldiers and guns can keep others alive.1 Neoliberalism, replete with market idolatry and technocratic and technological determinism, had thirty years, but now, judging by its current rejection in South America, it agonizes on its deathbed.
Neoliberalism is dying everywhere, that is, but in Mexico, where the ruling oligarchy, those with commercial and financial ties to the United States especially, has for decades clutched the reins of power. Like the gnomish Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, they hoard their gold, blind to what their southern cousins are doing, and dance blithely to the Western tune of neoliberal dogmas and with bulldog tenacity tightly clutch globalization, the new euphemism for Western imperialism. One truth is self-evident: long ago these Mexicans and their kin buried the aspirations of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the summit of the national social conscience, transforming it from barefoot radical aspirations into a sleazy, hypocritical comic opera.2 The last act of the upheaval of 1910, the glory of the historical chronicle, has turned into a travesty. Judged by its current blueprints, Mexico’s oligarchy, those who dictate policy, are out of step with the needs of the country’s majority. As Octavio Paz mused some years ago, one Mexico, the more developed, “imposes its model on the other, without noticing that the model fails to correspond to our historical, psychic and cultural reality, and is instead a . . . a degraded copy . . . of the North American archetype.”3 These revivalist architects forget that in poor countries it is ultimately the state that protects national resources from looters, provides a semblance of security for the poor, funds schools, and provides health care.4
Perhaps nothing better illustrates this neglect of the underdogs than the politics of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, Panista (member of Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN) presidents who, along with Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Cedillo of the PRI, left their stamp on politics in the days of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Despite vociferous claims by both Salinas and Fox that Mexico boasted the eleventh-largest economy in the world, it had the peculiar and dubious honor, according to a United Nation report, of not standing alongside the fifty nations given credit for human development.5 The prosperity of the elite and the welfare of the people were not one and the same.
By the same token, nothing reveals the nature of a society more than whom it entrusts with political power. Given the weak social conscience of these Mexican rulers, that does not speak well for society. Opinion polls bear this out. According to one, when Mexicans were asked if they had, either alone or with others, taken it upon themselves to resolve a community’s dilemma, four out of five answered no. An overwhelming number replied that Mexicans preoccupied themselves only with their own selfish needs. The editors of Proceso asserted that we live in a society where a collective sense of responsibility is skimpy at best and politics are seen as a “contemptible activity.”
This verdict has the ring of truth. Still, opinion polls tell us that four out of five Mexicans hunger for change. That said, the change they got from the PAN victory in 2000, which ended seventy years of virtual dictatorial rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), falls short of their expectations. Vicente Fox, the victor, and his PAN allies left things more or less as they found them. The change they wrought conjures up what Mexicans call gatopardismo: things appear to change only to remain the same. That election, hailed as earthshaking because it led to the downfall of the despised PRI, made one lesson clear: increased political participation does not lead to a more equitable society. Between the PAN and the PRI, there was not a dime’s worth of difference. Both danced to identical tunes; they were mouthpieces for the traditional lords of Mexico, and both were enamored of NAFTA. To quote Carlos Monsiváis, the perceptive critic, Fox, despite his cowboy boots and country slang, stepped out the mold of Salinas and Cedillo, the last of the Priista presidents, with his worship of neoliberalism, his kowtowing to empresarios, his ceaseless pursuit of foreign investments, and his subordination of the public interest to the private. Citing macroeconomic statistics, Fox hailed the Mexican economy, ignoring that millions of Mexicans live in poverty. As a Brazilian politico once said, no one lives in the macro economy, but apparently Fox did. Like his PRI predecessors, Fox, thinking like the Coca-Cola salesman he had been, put Mexico’s fate in Washington’s hands. Unfortunately for him, American leaders made clear that Mexico would not receive preferential treatment.
To keep politics and, most importantly, the economy safely neoliberal, Fox and his Panistas, in Machiavellian style, did what they could to rig the election of 2006. For this endeavor they had the enthusiastic backing of empresarios, Televisa, and burgueses from Tijuana to Tapachula in southern Chiapas. First, to disqualify Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the popular mayor of Mexico City and member of the left-of-center Partido de la Revolución Democrática, from seeking the presidency, Fox and his allies had a subservient Congress convict López Obrador of disobeying a court order, thus earning him a desafuero (removal of his immunity from prosecution and his right to run for office). Why this animosity? López Obrador, to boisterous public acclaim, had threatened to discard the neoliberal formula and wage a relentless battle against poverty and for social justice and jobs. To help small farmers he vowed to amend NAFTA. A huge public rally in Mexico City on his behalf put a halt to the diabolical desafuero. Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, the Panista candidate, no less Catholic and no less neoliberal than Fox, hailed NAFTA, promised to enhance public security, and at the last minute even talked of lifting the burden of poverty from the backs of the poor. After a nasty campaign, during which the burguesía, with empresarios in the lead, spent millions of pesos on dirty tricks to vilify López Obrador, the Panista won. In the opinion of many it was a fraudulent, hair-breadth victory. Public demands for a vote recount went unheeded. Things would stay the same. In office, Calderón put his antipoverty pledge on the back burner, dispatched the army to fight drug lords, and began speaking fondly of opening Pemex and the Comisión de Electricidad, a government monopoly, to private investment. With good reason, his critics suspected privatization. For their part, PRI politicians, their candidate defeated at the poles, clasped hands with victorious Panistas to hail neoliberal policies, as they had in the days of Salinas and Cedillo.
Why this blindness to public needs? The answer, or answers, are complex but not necessarily unknown. One Mexican psychiatrist draws a picture of an unruly land, a “dysfunctional” society, which operates badly and is impaired or abnormal.6 To understand what this means, one must contrast it with the functions of a normal, healthy family, a unit with multiple roles, starting with the father, who rules, provides, begets, molds, and protects. The mother bears and cares, cherishes and succors; the offspring obeys and prepares to mate and to become a father or mother. At the top of the family pyramid stand the parents, watching out for the welfare of their offspring. That is exactly how it should be, but this is the opposite of how Mexican society operates. For the poor, survival is a rat race; the parents in this world of poverty may shelter and protect their offspring, but those above are indifferent to their welfare.
Most neglected is the Indian community, ancestral home of Mexico, ostracized and relegated to nonexistence in the minds of most Mexicans. Yet, because of a high birth rate and declining infant mortality, Mexico has more Indians now than it did when it gained independence. There are nearly 13 million Indians who belong to 62 ethnic groups and live in 871 municipalities, largely in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Veracruz, and Hidalgo. More than twenty-three hundred rural villages are primarily Indian. In Chiapas alone, nearly one out of four cannot read or write, while half never completed primary school. In Mexico City dwell half a million men and women who speak an Indian language, more than in any other locality in the Western hemisphere. To cite the anthropologist Eric Wolf, none of these Indian communities ever existed on a desert island but was always “part and parcel of the larger society.”7
Why this hoary, unjust pyramid? Well, to start with, for centuries, class, race, and the color of one’s skin determined where one stood in society. The exploitation of the poor is centuries old, but money, the essence of class in most societies, is only one factor. Money cements class status but only partly whitens the skin, and Indian “blood” rarely gains prestige. The scars on society date from the colonial years and are deepened by centuries of proximity to a powerful and rich neighbor always boastful of its European heritage.8 Few wealthy Mexicans call attention to their Indian heritage, but they do take enormous pride in their Spanish ancestry. This gulf that separates certain Mexicans, criollo types, from others, mestizos or Indian by blood and physical features, has for centuries retarded the formation of a national culture and a united people.
In years past, American scholars were fond of writing about “many Mexicos,” referring to racial, linguistic, and geographical divisions. That was surely exaggerated, but the idea had a grain of truth. One Mexico, if it has come to be, took a long time in coming. That, however, cannot paper over the gulf that separates the rich and well-off from the poor, a barrier as big as the ubiquitous mountain ranges. A testimony to this disparity are the popular telenovelas (soap operas), in which the virtuous and rich are light-skinned, the women are Western types, and the “bad” and wayward generally sport swarthy complexions and Indian profiles. Like most of the rich everywhere, the Mexican variety exhibit a weak social conscience and are indifferent to the fate of the downtrodden, while their representatives, as they fill workers’ hearts with dreams, pick their pockets. So long as Dame Fortune smiles on them, they care not a whit what befalls the poor.
The cruelty and arrogance that have been inflicted on the poor since colonial days yield a bitter harvest of servility, but also one of anger and mistrust. Lambiscones, or sycophants, are found up and down the social ladder, especially among politicos, says Octavio Paz, but they can also be found in business, partly as a result of the cult of personalities rather than because of principles.9 Mexicans, whatever their social and economic standing, but especially the downtrodden, are a cynical lot. They don’t believe what is told them by those at the top, yet for centuries they passively accepted their condition, at times turning to the church for consolation. No wonder that, until recently, elections seldom drew much interest among the most exploited: in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, some of the poorest states in the Republic, 70 or 80 percent of eligible voters would stay home on election day.10
The nature and interests of the Mexican upper class date from centuries ago, to the final years of the colonial era. With independence, a criollo oligarchy of hacendados, mining moguls, and powerful merchants, all more or less dependent on exports, took over the reins of power. Names have changed, of course, but political and economic power rests with the old interests. Today’s upper class, or classes, are generally an amalgam of the traditional ruling groups in land, commerce, banking, and industry. No evidence indicates that new groups have emerged that are ready to call into question the power of the traditional oligarchy. Industrialization, either during the Porfiriato or, more recently, in the years of “import substitution,” left much of the old fabric untouched. Instead, argues Amiya Kumar Bagchi, the traditional ruling classes, “to the extent that this could be done,” undertook new economic activities but held on tightly to their monopoly of land and government and added the few industrialists to their ranks. A notable characteristic, Bagchi continues, “is that from the last half of the nineteenth century economic life has been guided largely by the enterprise and requirements of the dominant capitalist country of the day, Britain up to 1914, and the United States since then.”11
Proximity to the wealthy and powerful neighbor next door has left a legacy of servility, an exaggerated sense of dependency, a tourist industry, for instance, that caters to Americans but only marginally to Mexicans, or reliance on foreign investment as a cure-all for what ails Mexico. NAFTA is a prime example of this psychology of dependency, emerging from the cockeyed belief that when all tariff barriers fall and foreigners rush to buy and sell, the Mexican economy will roar. Yet for the poor of Mexico, NAFTA has failed to deliver more jobs; half of the workforce is unemployed, underemployed, or in the informal sector, and to exacerbate matters, no country in the world has exported more manpower than Mexico. An average of 450,000 people a year are thought to have crossed into the United States during the early years of the twenty-first century. Some 2.5 million workers had left their families for jobs in the United States, more than sixteen times the rate for the 1960s, when only thirty thousand Mexicans per year had fled northward. Clearly, social programs have not been working.
The Mexican empresario emerged in an era when outsiders controlled nearly all profitable opportunities. It is small wonder, consequently, that there was born a subordination of the native elite before metropolitan capitalists. That is the story of the Mexican oligarchy, always ready to bend a knee before their foreign masters. So, after a brief whiff of economic independence, the oligarchy quickly renewed its ties with American capital, a logical step, since the new burguesía arose from the ranks of the old hacendado and merchant families, who had wielded their power in association with American capitalists as well. The “revolutionaries” described by Carlos Fuentes in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, rushed to join the “new boys on the lot.” Much of the middle class fell in step, overwhelmed by a barrage of Hollywood films with happy endings, Movietone newsreels heralded American accomplishments, beauty contests featured tall blondes, and sales pitches from American radio and television hawked the shiny autos that were rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines. Before long, the well-off, to cite José López Portillo, were imitating American ways of doing things, wearing clothes made in the “USA,” glibly paying homage to globalization, shopping at malls, dancing to rock ‘n’ roll, and identifying their self-interest with that of the foreigners.12 Carlos Monsiváis, the literary sage, referred sarcastically to them as the “first generations of North Americans born in Mexico.”
One fact stares one in the face. The well-off hate paying taxes, and Mexico has one of the lowest tax rates in the world. Less than half of 1 percent of Mexico’s local budgets are collected from property taxes, and much the same can be said of empresarios, who, relying on an old fairy tale, claim that taxing them discourages investment in productive enterprises. When oil revenues are set aside, Mexican rulers raise the equivalent of just 9 percent of the gross national product (GNP) from taxes, roughly equivalent to the rate of taxation in Haiti, the poorest country in Latin America. To make up for this disparity, Pemex, the Mexican petroleum monopoly, turns over 40 percent of its profits to the federal government. Lacking funds for reinvestment, Pemex is seldom at the cutting edge of modern operations.13 Revenues also come from taxes paid by middle-class consumers and from duties on foreign commerce. When Luis Echeverría, then president of Mexico, attempted to reform the tax base in the 1970s, he ran into a stone wall of opposition from empresarios and their allies. “I couldn’t do it,” he told me. Mexico, let it be said, has earned a reputation in financial circles for being one huge “tax-free enterprise zone for the rich.” To quote one Mexican empresario, “We have a saying here: ‘If you pay taxes in Mexico, then you don’t have a good accountant.’ ”14 Some might argue that the future lies with the middle class. But to visualize the middle class as the harbinger of some kind of economic independence overlooks that it was sired by the old, dependent burguesía. In 1940, the middle class constituted only 4.5 percent of the national population, and 75 percent were urban; by 1980 the middle class included 33 percent of Mexicans, but just 19.5 percent of households.15 It is an intermediate class, standing between the poor, the huge majority, and the rich: in the 1980s three out of four middle-class Mexicans dwelt in cities of over a hundred thousand inhabitants. Some two-thirds of the heads of middle-class households were salaried employees; the rest were small business owners, all susceptible to the ups and downs of the economy. The crisis of 1994, which brought a sharp decline in middle-class income, decimated it, leaving just one-fifth of the population in its ranks. Through good times and poor ones, most members of the middle class struggle to imitate the lifestyles of the rich, parroting their views and voting for the PAN. Many heed the preaching of the conservative Catholic hierarchy, which has been more politically outspoken since Carlos Salinas, who possessed a Promethean view of his talents, renewed Mexico’s ties with the Vatican. From the ranks of this class come lifelong practicing Catholics, who uphold the right to life, vehemently oppose all abortions, and decry the use of contraceptives, including condoms. None of the church’s 132 bishops is an Indian. No wonder, therefore, that the PAN administration of Vicente Fox, which was heavily supported by the middle class, left untouched the hallowed principles of the past, seeking above all else to improve Mexico’s image abroad so as to encourage foreign investment.
Historical evidence tells us that the Western nations did not always embrace the economic practices they now seek to foist upon peripheral countries. At one time they all fought tooth and nail to protect their infant industries, erecting tariff walls and using subsidies or discriminatory shipping rules. Most certainly those were the practices of the United States and Great Britain, which now hypocritically call for a ban on all barriers to capital. Laissez-faire, a dogma only partly embraced by the West, may have once yielded results, but today the state must play an active role if resources are to be used to produce items that will meet basic needs, rather than to manufacture commodities for export under unequal exchange terms. A proper balance is needed between state regulation and the rule of the market; a centralized authority must raise capital and draw up an economic blueprint, given the nature and magnitude of the development challenge, made all the more difficult by an international economic system that has historically relegated peripheral countries to the role of suppliers of raw materials.16
The economist Albert Fishlow points out that state supervision of the Mexican economy led to sustained growth; the failure of this approach should not be an argument for a return to laissez-faire but rather for a correction of errors.17 Whatever its drawbacks, the state during the days of the corrupt Miguel Alemán regime paved the way for industrialization, and under Lázaro Cárdenas Mexico witnessed agrarian reform and took steps to lessen the terrible inequities in the distribution of income and wealth. State intervention had been a fact of life since the days of Porfirio Díaz, when the state, albeit belatedly, started to play a central role. In a society as diverse, skewed, and complex as Mexico’s, the state is the one unifying force. The challenge was not whether to weaken it, but how to make it more democratic. It should not be shrunk into oblivion. To do so cripples the economy and places the majority of Mexicans at the mercy of a rapacious burguesía that has yet to demonstrate that its leadership will benefit everyone.
Reliance on exports, the perennial economic sin, is a two-edged sword. As the political economist Joan Robinson understood, a government resolved to eliminate mass poverty and unemployment may garner much help from export earnings, which can be used to improve the productivity of agriculture and increase the capacity to produce vital consumer goods. But, she continued, an increase in profits from foreign trade in itself cannot be relied upon to bring about a better life for the majority of the population. Profits may simply exacerbate economic disparities and heighten social tensions.18 There was a time when Western economies hungered for raw materials, but not today. The global economy relies more and more on high-tech manufactures and, above all, sophisticated services. The old strengths of the peripheral world, abundant raw materials and cheap labor, are every day less important. According to the World Bank, raw material prices, already below those of the Great Depression, will decline further.19 Campesinos in Chiapas, for example, recently left their coffee crops unpicked because the price of coffee on the international market was too low. Recent studies show that even the prices of textiles, clothing, wood products, and chemicals produced by Latin American, Asian, and African countries of the periphery have fallen since 1970. Mexican goods sold abroad are still largely primary products or manufactures of minimal technological content, both unable to compete with exports from China, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taiwan.20 The income derived from such exports will not create jobs or satisfy the needs of the burgeoning population. Due to international competition, export-led growth keeps wages low. Low wages, in turn, weaken domestic consumption, stunt the development of an internal market, and generate destructive regional competition. Additionally, Mexico has a new problem: China has become the chief exporter, in dollar terms, to the United States, Mexico’s principal export market.21 Worse still, in the not too distant future Mexico could well become a net importer of oil, which for over sixty years has supplied a goodly share of government expenses. The last two decades have witnessed a decline in oil production, while proven oil resources have declined.
Mexico is a capitalist country, but its capitalism is one of underdevelopment, making it excessively vulnerable to the ups and downs of financial markets. Old traditions and the framework of an advanced economy exist side by side; ancient forms of economic and social organization share the national stage with globalization. It is a dependent capitalism; Mexican welfare rests essentially on the United States. In Mexico, recovery cycles, on the heels of recessions, do not restore jobs to the same degree they do in industrialized nations. Poverty, unemployment, and small farmers in distress characterize Mexican capitalism. In urban areas, settlements consisting of flimsy hand-built shacks without running water, toilets, or even windows, once thought temporary, have become a permanent fixture. Poverty, formerly identified with campesinos, is becoming increasingly urban; millions of the poor dwell in close proximity to wealth and opulence.
Other ills confront Mexico. We must not forget that over half of Mexico’s land surface is either arid or semiarid; it is a parched, empty landscape with obstacles as huge as the surrounding mountains. Regular rainfall covers just over 7 percent of the land. Water scarcity is a growing national problem. Mexico has less drinking water per capita than it did half a century ago, and much of it is contaminated, presenting a danger to public health. Over 100 million Mexicans share this water, if not always equally; by 2050, some 130 million will be dependent on it. Even now, over 12 million Mexicans do not have running water in their homes.22 The poor and the wealthy alike share contaminated cities crowded with too many people and too many autos. Mexico City, home to over 20 million Mexicans, has some of the most polluted air in the world; taxi drivers, street vendors, and residents complain of hacking coughs, watery eyes, and headaches. Yet not until 1995 did Mexican authorities declare its air unhealthy.
The Panista leadership shows little inclination to make the internal market the national engine. Mexico is one of the fifteen leading export-oriented countries in the world, with nearly all of its sales ending up in the United States. In one month alone, what Mexico sells on that market equals its yearly commerce with all the nations of the European Union. Nothing has been done to rescue small and medium-sized industries, which have been left to fend for themselves. These enterprises, the hardest hit by NAFTA, employ 80 percent of the labor force, turning out huaraches, western saddles, belts, candies, cheese, and so forth. Unemployment soars to heights not seen for decades. No week goes by without news of small businesses closing and jobs being lost. More than 4.5 million Mexicans, one-tenth of the workforce, are unemployed. Wages, furthermore, stagnate; for an economy relying on the open market, wage control is a powerful tool for achieving the much-heralded ideal of “competitiveness.”
Over the last decades, economic growth has stalled at about 2.3 percent.23 But according to INEGI, the government’s office of statistics (often accused of sugarcoating bad news), by 2008, the year of the Great Recession in the United States, that figure stood at 1.6 percent, the lowest growth rate since 2004. Even worse, the Banco de México predicted that the economy would grow at a measly 0.5 percent during 2009.24 The underground economy, estimated at about 25.5 million people, fuels the country’s primary job engine.25 Wages, calculated in real terms, had fallen to 25 percent of their equivalent in 1976. Mexican capitalism, it must be told, bestows benefits on the top 15 to 20 percent of population but fails to meet the basic physical and emotional needs of the great majority. That is Mexico, where the country’s architects wave the anti-inflation flag and demand “competitiveness” of one and all, thus creating a dog-eat-dog world in the face of surging poverty and unemployment.
Globalization is a blueprint for economic growth that integrates peripheral countries into the Western economy. The subservient classes of the peripheral countries embrace globalization, which resurrects the old reliance on exports. But this integration benefits mostly the well-off, perhaps one-fifth of the population. The idea of “one world” is a myth, propagated by those who want you to believe in a “one-world economy,” which in reality is neocolonialism.26 Globalization, the current Western drive to tear down international barriers to capital, represents nothing more than the search for profitable investment opportunities abroad, its architects multinational corporations and the powerful states that speak for them. What NAFTA peddles is little more than the right of these corporations to exploit the resources and markets of Mexico. But, then, this is how it has always been. To quote Thucydides, the venerated historian, “The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must.” This drive endangers what is left of national industry and the jobs of those not members of the global elite. Globalization purports to reduce differences between core and peripheral countries, but the world evolves in the opposite direction, accentuating them.
Meanwhile, corruption, that old nemesis, haunts Mexico. The poor economy leaves an opening for it. According to one estimate, nearly one-tenth of the GNP is lost to it. Corruption finds fertile soil among all classes, the rich and the poor, whether politicos, empresarios, merchants, or guardians of the public order. Mexico, if truth be told, is one of the most corrupt countries in the Western hemisphere, and as the journal Proceso writes, the situation can only go from bad to worse. Proceso estimates that some 60 percent of politicos either accept bribes or have criminal backgrounds. Asked to find a incorruptible politico (honrado), even Diogenes the cynic, with his long beard and lamp, would have thrown up his hands in despair. Corruption eats at the heart of Mexico, rendering moot the trust between people and their leaders. It springs forth from the unholy marriage of political and economic power; money buys influence, and power attracts money. All the same, millions of Mexicans, particularly the less well-off, are as honest as the day is long.
Corruption, in Mexico apparently a kind of aphrodisiac, makes a mockery of politics. Until the election of 2000, the PRI machine, in an alliance with empresarios, television moguls, and the wealthy, relied on the purchase of votes, threats, and the military to rid itself of rivals. To quote Carlos Hank González, a Priista oligarch, “a politico without money is an incompetent politico.” The courts, and justice itself, look the other way. Unhappy politicos and businessmen might speak ill of the president behind his back, but in public, like good lambiscones, they heed his beck and call. Fear of angering el Presidente leaves no one willing to speak up. The political apparatus has been so well oiled that during the presidential elections of 1988, when early returns favored the opposition candidate, PRI politicos in Mexico City shut down the computers and the next morning proclaimed their candidate the victor. To quote a Mexican saying: “Our elections are burdened with the dubious prestige of a whorehouse: they work but are they virtuous?
The drug traffic exacerbates corruption. When huge sums of dollars are at stake, police, soldiers, public officials, and even empresarios dig their fingers into the drug pie. Proceso estimates that half of the agents of the Procuraduría General de la República, the Justice Department, receive money from drug lords. Poverty, too, plays a role, for one must eat, and, if one has a wife and children, take care of them, and the drug trade pays well. According to one estimate, nearly half a million Mexicans have links to drug trafficking. In the early years of the nefarious trade, it was thought that the drug gangs were merely ferrying cocaine, heroin, and marijuana through Mexico to markets across the border. That myth has gone up in smoke. In 1993 only 8 percent of Mexicans had used drugs; by the turn of the century nearly one out of five Mexicans were either users or had tried drugs. Cocaine, not marijuana, became the drug of choice. The largest number of drug users lived in the northern states, the most prosperous. One reason for the growth in drug use is that peddlers, unable to transport drugs across the border, sell them on the local market. That, plus deteriorating social conditions, rampant inequality, the lack of jobs, and recurrent economic crises help explain ballooning drug use.
Rival drug cartels in cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, havens of the unruly, have turned their cities into shooting galleries where police and drug mafiosos kill each other. The corruption of soldiers asked to clean up the drug mess goes on unabated. During 2002, in Guamúchil, Sinaloa, some six hundred soldiers of the Sixty-fifth Battalion were detained on suspicion of having helped local drug dealers escape detection. That same year, two generals were tried for their ties to the Juárez drug fiefdom. Not long ago, the country’s top drug enforcer, a general, was sent to jail after it was learned that he had ties to one of the drug cartels. Yet no other agency has done more to stem the drug trade than the military. When the government tries to eradicate marijuana and heroin poppies, the campesinos who cultivate them complain. As José López Portillo tells it, when his soldiers uprooted marijuana and heroin poppies in Sinaloa, a hotbed of the nefarious business, campesinos asked, “¿Entonces que vamos a sembrar para comer?” (“What are we going to grow so that we can eat?”)27
A macabre irony of the odious business is that it became a national calamity with the victory of the PAN in the election of 2000, which was hailed as a hallmark of Mexico’s democratic maturity. Until then, the PRI political machine had, in its own tenebrous ways, kept the drug business under wraps; that is, it was merely a problem but not a major national worry. Governors, mayors of towns and cities, and their underlings, some undoubtedly with ties to the drug peddlers, were left to make whatever arrangements suited them with their nefarious neighbors. Though Vicente Fox, whose election toppled the PRI, left this scene more or less undisturbed, Felipe Calderón, his successor in the national palace, made the drug trade his chief concern. Calderón believed that taking on the traffickers was good politics, and he feared that unless the drug business was stopped, it would in time turn Mexico into a facsimile of the Republic of Colombia, a notorious pariah. By openly repudiating the PRI’s policy of accommodation, declaring a “war on drugs,” and calling more and more on soldiers to hunt down the culprits, Calderón unwittingly unleashed a Republic-wide wave of terror. The army, with some help from unreliable police agencies, on occasion caught a major drug mafioso, but in so doing they brought on a bloody aftermath, as the mafioso’s underlings killed each other to determine who would succeed him, while rival gangs then fought over control of territories. As the number of murders, increasingly of local police and innocent bystanders, escalated, the weakness of the federal apparatus to put a stop to the butchery became obvious. The president of Mexico had been defrocked, shorn of the power to dictate events, a power long attributed to him by Mexicans and a legion of pundits and scholars. Before long, inhabitants of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, where violence became endemic, refused to venture out at night, and the tourist trade in much of the Republic, a mainstay of the federal budget, tottered as fewer Americans and Europeans, fearful for their safety, came to visit.
With the signing of NAFTA, by which giant American corporations gobbled up the small, Salinas and his cohorts, and later Fox and Calderón, made clear that more than ever the fate and welfare of Mexico’s economy rested on Uncle Sam’s shoulders. To cite a Mexican critic, one began to discern a certain resemblance between contemporary Mexico and the country of Porfirio Díaz, when foreign investors had the run of the country. Certainly, foreign investment can be helpful, but capitalists, we have to remind ourselves, do not come to Mexico to develop national industries; they come to operate businesses of their own, largely to take advantage of cheap labor costs. The investment of capital takes second place to the extraction of profits, and most of the reinvestment, says Bagchi, goes “to other advanced capitalist countries.”28 Capital flows in the form of investments from core countries to peripheral ones tend to generate debt and currency crisis as a result of excessive borrowing by the client as well as the repatriation of profits.
And Mexico, we must not forget, has accumulated debts. In 1964, it owed just 2.3 billion dollars to private and government lenders; by 1972, that sum had jumped to 7 billion dollars, and in 1982 it was 87 billion dollars, with the government in hock for 70 percent of it and the private sector for the rest. By 2003, the debt had reached the astronomical figure of 97 billion dollars, a sum equivalent to 43.7 percent of the GNP. The debt included the 1980s bailouts of Mexico and that of 1994–95. Some 70 percent of the federal budget in 2003 was earmarked for payment on the national debt and FOBAPROA, the bank bailout. A debt of $1,317 dollars hangs over every Mexican.29 Only Brazil had a bigger debt among the impecunious countries. The International Monetary Fund, moreover, wanted borrowers to pay promptly.30
NAFTA, besides, has reinforced social inequality. This is what Andrés Manuel López Obrador had to say after a tour of every municipality in the country: “We must not forget that the current economic model has created tiny islands of progress in a sea of poverty.”31 Or to cite the newspaper La Jornada: “In our country there coexists a way of life at levels of those of Italy, side by side with regions of poverty comparable to those of the poorest of the African nations.32 No one who knows Mexico can dispute that. Mexico is a land of extremes, where the rich wallow in the lap of luxury next door to the miserably poor. Distribution of income is so uneven that the poorest fifth of the population has an income comparable to that of the poorest fifth of Sri Lanka. The polarization is worse where industry has a toehold. In the Colonia Álvaro Obregón of Mexico City, a manufacturing hub, families live in caves. According to the March 2007 issue of Forbes magazine, ten of the world’s billionaires were from Mexico, among them the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, mentioned earlier. Their total value added up to 6 percent of the GNP. None, significantly, was an industrialist, unless one includes the making of cement, but Lorenzo Zambrano, head of Cemex, owns only a quarter of its stock, the rest of which rests largely in the hands of Americans. To cite Carlos Monsiváis, when these pampered families are worth billions of dollars, the news transcends the ordinary and becomes a moral scandal. In a country where some 20 million people live in extreme poverty and another 35 million are considered poor, the wealth of these individuals equals Mexico’s budgets. Social inequality is as Mexican as the tortilla; it has been a hallmark of the country since the arrival of the Spaniards, but not as it is today, to cite a common opinion among many Mexicans.
That assessment rings true. For example, in March 2007, Proceso published a story about the inhabitants of El Nayar, a municipality in Nayarit with thirty thousand inhabitants, most of them Cora or Huichol Indians. In Los Encinos, one of the villages in the municipality, a doctor comes only once or twice a month. The sick have to walk miles to the nearest clinic; some die on the way. One child, one of many, survived just fifteen months, dying from malnutrition, a daily affliction of El Nayar. So poorly fed was the child that he could not sit up; he breathed with difficulty and sobbed day and night. One day, his paternal grandfather, worried that the child was dying, walked for an hour to find a curandero (healer) in a nearby village, only to learn that the healer could not come until later that day. When the curandero arrived, the child was dead. Taking the child to the nearest hospital would have cost six hundred pesos, a sum beyond the grandfather’s ability to pay. When a scorpion bit two-year-old Martha Griselda, Martha’s mother took her to a nearby clinic but found it closed. When the attendant arrived some two hours later, he gave Martha an injection, but it was too late. The child died, as had her two older brothers, one five and the other one, also from scorpion bites. The father, a campesino, lacked the money required to take them to a clinic.
Los Encinos, whose inhabitants are corn farmers, have no electricity, sewers, or running water. Their sole modern convenience is a school with sixty-seven students; their teacher tells a reporter from Proceso that some of his students have only a tortilla to eat at lunchtime. “That tells me,” says the teacher, “that they eat sparsely at home and are hungry all of the time,” so “when we can we give them crackers to eat.” Hungry children, he adds, are notoriously poor students: “They seldom pay attention, reveal scant interest in learning, and spend their time dwelling on food.”33 El Nayar is part of the Mexico where Slim and his companions enjoy their billions.
The origins of today’s scandalous inequality go back to the ballyhooed miracle years of Miguel Alemán, who, along with his gang of rapacious empresarios, politicos, and landlords, enriched himself as few Mexicans had done before. As Carlos Fuentes wrote eloquently in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, the revolutionary elite married into the old Porfirista families and laid the basis for a new oligarchy of wealth. For these empresarios, landlords, bankers, and politicos, modernity, which they claimed to have brought to Mexico, meant an opulent home in Mexico City or Cuernavaca, wealthy friends, nightclubs in Acapulco, with mistresses, fiestas, and being part of the international jet set. Their only worry was that one of their grandchildren might marry a swarthy Mexican. Modernity meant costly autos, fancy coming-out parties for their daughters, sumptuous weddings, women in high heels, a cigarette in their mouth, and dining on prime rib at the San Angel Inn.
What passed for moral outrage was tempered by an urban society that enjoyed the fashionable notion of getting rich quickly and mysteriously. This was the world of the super rich, replete with the racist and classist attitudes toward the poor. Unholy alliances with the kingpins of politics and monopoly magnates were common among them. Carlos Slim, for example, purchased the nation’s telephone network from Carlos Salinas at a bargain price; his monopoly nonetheless, according to Guillermo Prieto, head of the Mexico’s Central Bank, charges some of the world’s highest phone rates. Emilio Azcárraga, the major stockholder of Televisa, the country’s television channel, banked millions from his alliance with PRI politicos. These wealthy men shared close ties to presidents, were party to juicy federal contracts, were privy to insider knowledge of the stock market, enjoyed scandalously low prices for paraestatales, failed to pay taxes, and maintained incestuous ties with foreign capital.
As they always do, some pundits will tell you that inequities are inevitable, that eventually the gap between the rich and the poor will disappear or at least diminish considerably. That is humbug. As the political theorist Immanuel M. Wallerstein argues, the gap, which day by day grows bigger, is “not an anomaly but a continuing basic mechanism of the operation of the world economy.”34 In previous eras, core and periphery were such that the development of laggard countries appeared possible, but not today. So the discourse of development has gone by the wayside, replaced by talk of “adjustment.” Macroeconomic growth helps, but as in the case of Mexico, it does not provide solutions. The course pursued by Mexico amply illustrates this truth: macroeconomic growth rates come at the cost of social neglect and economic inequality. According to the World Bank, in 2002 Mexico had the ninth-largest economy in the world but ranked sixty-ninth in per capita income, and it had one of the least equitable income distributions in Latin America. The top 10 percent of Mexicans had 42 percent of the national income, but the bottom 10 percent had a mere 1 percent.35 The gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened since 1982. Mexico is the eleventh most populated country in the world, and the poor are far more numerous than before. Nor is poverty simply a rural problem; city folk are poor too, often plagued by malnutrition, alcoholism, and prostitution. Poverty and misery dictate life spans: seventy-five years on average for the better-off; just forty for the rural poor. About 15 million people purchase much of what they want; the others simply try to provide food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their families and pray that illness or some unforeseen catastrophe does not befall them.
Even Carlos Slim, the richest of the richest, admits the problem in Mexico is “neoliberalism gone wild.” With that dogma, he goes on to say, Washington denies Mexico any chance for internal growth. His verdict certainly applies to NAFTA. Or, to cite the opinion of Ricardo Pascoe, a diplomatic figure of note, NAFTA traps Mexico into the position of servant to the United States. The elimination of tariffs on American goods and the failure of Mexico to support its own industries weakens the country. The rush to join the global economy opens channels only for groups of select Mexicans and excludes many others, polarizing society because it offers opportunity for just a few. No one pushed Mexico to join NAFTA, declares Victor Flores Olea, a diplomat and intellectual. Mexican leaders did so on their own, “subordinating national interests to those of the United States.” Empresarios and technocrats fell in step with American claims that, by dropping trade barriers and opening Mexico to their investments, Mexico would bloom. Superficial benefits came, but mostly to members of a domestic elite willing to cooperate so long as there was something in it for them. NAFTA conferred on foreign investors a special bonanza; between 1995 and 2001, foreign investments rose dramatically. Most Mexicans’ standard of living, however, declined, and Mexico ranked fifty-fourth in the development chain.
Since the signing of NAFTA, economic growth has been a meager 1 percent. For the majority of Mexicans, the medicine offered is not going to make the patient better. Trade ministers, La Jornada reminds us, do not speak for the majority but for an elite that benefits from joint ventures with transnationals. Some of NAFTA’s advantages to Mexico have fallen by the wayside. Mexico’s proximity to the United States no longer carries the weight it once did, because air and sea transportation are faster and cheaper than ever, while trade barriers have fallen around the world. In the last three years, Mexico lost almost half a million manufacturing jobs to countries as diverse as China and tiny Honduras. Those jobs have been replaced by the informal sector, what economists refer to as off-the-books employment, and poor Mexicans, more sanguine, do “what one does in order to keep body and soul together.” By one estimate, over 62 percent of Mexicans with “jobs” survive in the informal economy.36 Foreign investment, meanwhile, has dropped to its lowest level in a decade. NAFTA, while enhancing Mexico’s ability to supply manufacturing firms from the United States with low-cost parts, declared the New York Times, has not transformed Mexico into an independently productive economy. With NAFTA, to cite La Jornada, “we rely on our exports . . . but our national industry has virtually disappeared.”37 Contraband textiles supplied over half of Mexico’s needs, lamented La Jornada, despite it being an industry that dates from the early years of independence.
What about NAFTA and the Mexican farmer? One of the oddities of the Mexican picture is that, although city dwellers outnumber campesinos, today more Mexicans till the land for a living than at the time of the Revolution of 1910. According to La Jornada, at least three out of four of them live in dire poverty.38 Fox, the PAN president of Mexico, liked to boast that under his leadership rural poverty had declined slightly. If true that was not due to Fox’s policies but to the huge volume of remittances sent home by Mexicans in the United States. In just one year, Mexicans working in the United States send home some $20 billion. However, as stated before, campesinos simply cannot compete with big American commercial farms. One statistic tells volumes about the magnitude of this disparity. On American farms there are 1.6 tractors for each farm laborer; in Mexico, there are just two tractors for every hundred. As Octavio Paz recognized years ago, “Our rural population, poorly clothed, illiterate and underfed, has paid for the development of that other Mexico.”39
NAFTA, which already threatens the welfare of campesinos, is about to jettison all tariff barriers. In 2009 all tariffs fell by the wayside. By the terms of the agreement, Mexico has opened its grain market, as well as dry beans, apples, meat, and dairy products, while Washington has accepted Mexican vegetables, cotton, and sugar. Mexico’s comparative advantages are few: cheap and abundant labor, some land and, here and there, water. The principal beneficiaries have been the vegetable growers, large-scale exporters, of the Yaqui and Mayo river valleys of Sonora and the Fuerte River region of neighboring Sinaloa. Experts predicted that trade asymmetries would likely grow under free trade unless dramatic growth occurred in the Mexican agricultural export sector. Failing that, NAFTA would most likely weaken Mexico’s farm sector.
That is precisely what has occurred. The big farms, feasting on irrigated land, thrived. They exported vegetables and fruits, gaining an advantage over their American rivals because of longer seasons of sunshine and cheaper labor. These farms supplied over 80 percent of the fresh vegetables purchased by the United States, while exports of products made by large Mexican and transnational food-processing corporations jumped upward dramatically. Just the same, in 1996, just months after the signing of NAFTA, Mexican imports of basic staples from American farms, corn, beans, and wheat among them, were three times those of preceding years and represented nearly half of Mexico’s consumption. The worst was yet to come. By 2007, imports of American corn had risen from less than 1 million metric tons in 1993 to nearly ten times that amount, at the expense of millions of campesinos, whose corn and beans made up the diet of the poor. Among the winners, reported the New York Times, were the Grupo Bimbo, Mexico’s largest food company, reaping profits from cheap grain imports; Maseca, the world’s biggest producer of cornmeal and tortillas; and Sigma, the importer of cheap pork and poultry.40 Other beneficiaries included the upper class and elements of the middle class, which purchased most processed foods. By 2002, Mexicans imported half of the food they ate; cheap cornmeal from the United States went into the making of one out every three tortillas. Yet, as Joan Robinson wrote, raising your own food is an effective form of import-saving investment. Consequently, when a country borrows money to buy its food, it is “borrowing in order to eat.”41
NAFTA along with the dismantling of the ejido system, which includes some 70 percent of Mexico’s farmers, will drive an estimated 15 million campesinos off their lands in the next twenty years. When asked how he felt about their plight, Fox, the former Coca-Cola salesman and ardent free trader, replied callously that “a farmer who cannot survive in the 21st century is simply going to have to find another job.” Unbelievably, in the inner circles of government suggestions surface from time to time for special programs to teach campesinos and workers fleeing Mexico the rudiments of gardening and of home care for the elderly, skills supposedly required for jobs in the United States. Fox was so much of a free trader that when his Congress passed a 20 percent tax on soft drink bottlers who used high fructose corn sweeteners from the United States, he vetoed it, but the Mexican Supreme Court overruled him. The tax shielded Mexico’s sugar industry from low-cost American imports. However, Fox won, because the World Trade Organization sided with the United States and ruled the tax a restraint of trade.
Is there a lesson for us in the plight of Mexican small farmers? Trade deals such as NAFTA offer no solutions. Governments of the peripheral countries cannot simply stand by but must take an active role in the transformation of their farm sector, not just to ensure sound environmental techniques, but more to the point, to allow large numbers of campesinos to remain on the land. Until industry can muster up the requisite number of jobs in the cities, agriculture must support the campesinos. Keeping them on their lands and subsidizing the production of the basic food staples is a prerequisite for alleviating poverty and hunger. Yet, in the face of cheap corn imports from the United States, Calderón, like Fox before him, turns a deaf ear to small farmers pleading that Mexico renegotiate NAFTA.
What about industry in the days of NAFTA? One term, coined by La Jornada, comes to mind: desindustrialización. The number of large industries declines, but since their focus is the export market, their importance rises, as smaller establishments fall by the wayside, left to find customers on the internal market, weakened by low urban wages and, in the countryside, by the inability of campesinos to compete with cheap imports of corns and beans from American farmers. Ironically, as exports grow, so do imports, more so than sales abroad, and the result is a deficit in balance of payments.42 More and more industry is the story of maquiladoras, assembly plants of foreign corporations.43 NAFTA, boasts the Los Angeles Times, turned Mexico into “an exporting power house,” but it is the saga of the maquiladoras. By 2001, the maquiladora sector of the economy accounted for half of all trade between Mexico and the United States. It was estimated that 40 percent of American exports to Mexico returned in the guise of finished goods. This, said some observers, was not trade but the rental by American corporations of cheap Mexican labor; as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla lamented, “we sell our labor so that others can profit from it.”
Current life on the Mexican side of the borderlands rarely conjures up that of the 1920s. For those of us who knew the latter, the dissimilarity is striking. The arrival of maquiladoras has dramatically altered the contours of the region. Old tourist spots recede into memory as urbanization takes hold, transforming hamlets into big cities; Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, plant kingpins, shelter hordes of inhabitants, teeming with the social ills that are typical of chaotic, unplanned growth. Migrants from every corner of the Republic flock north, lured by the dreams of jobs in industry. Yet globalization, what maquiladoras exemplify, merely shuffles the outlines of the asymmetrical relationship. Mindful of their consequences, critics in Ciudad Juárez have dubbed the society of maquiladoras “Maquilamex,” a term that grudgingly acknowledges the weighty role that assembly plants play from Tijuana to Matamoros and captures the ambivalence of a people troubled by what they witness.
Workers in maquiladoras assemble articles of sundry nature from components of foreign manufacture, parts that stay in Mexico just long enough to emerge as computers, television sets, auto parts, and textiles. One apt description is that the plants, on orders from outsiders, perform production tasks for others. These articles are sold abroad, mainly in the United States, where most of the components originate. Their sales abroad represent a hefty slice of Mexico’s industrial exports.44 Mexicans contribute their labor, as well as the water and the land on which the maquilas stand. These plants are offshoots of a global economy that has reshaped the role of the peripheral world, changing it from simply a supplier of raw materials to a purveyor of cheap labor. That change relegates certain kinds of jobs to a rubbish heap in countries such as the United States and transfers them to places where women and children labor for a pittance. As Pat Buchanan put it, capitalists “anxious to offload their American workers on the junk heap of the global economy” make the peripheral world a mecca for transnationals.
The Mexican border once housed over two thousand maquiladoras. Until their recent decline, their numbers multiplied almost daily, transforming dusty tourist towns, once havens for whorehouses and saloons catering to American tourists, into cities that were home to Fortune 500 companies but also to shantytowns bereft of running water, sewers, paved streets, and schools. Workers in the maquilas dwell in hovels in the slums of Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros. Ciudad Juárez, baptized the “queen of the maquilas,” has over 1 million inhabitants; less than half of its roads are paved, while discarded cardboard makes up the walls of some its homes. The New York Times reports that in Ciudad Acuña, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas, maquila workers earn “miserable wages and American companies pay . . . minimal taxes”; its “schools are a shambles, its hospital crumbling, its trash collection slapdash,” and “half of its 150,000 thousand residents” used backyard latrines.45 What was said of Ciudad Juárez and Ciudad Acuña applies more or less to the other cities along the border.
Yet maquilas drive the local economy and are the Republic’s chief source of industrial jobs.46 They employ more than a million Mexicans. At first they hired predominantly young single women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, and they account for over one-third of the Republic’s labor force. Today the ratio of men to women is about even, though men have the better jobs. Maquila jobs entail hardship. Wages are kept low, kept there by plant decision, Mexican government policy, and unforeseen events, such as devaluation of the peso; the cheap labor makes for windfall profits for management. Workers theoretically earn the federally mandated minimum wage, but their take-home pay is less than one-fifth the minimum wage of the United States, because they live in a border community where rent and food cost dollars. Job security and health and disability benefits hang by a thread, and hope of advancement is a dream. Work conditions, though better now, are often poor. But for young women from southern Mexico, what the maquila represents is a job, especially for those struggling to survive at the bottom of the economic and social scale. A female officer in the Beta corps, Mexico’s border patrol, tells a young woman looking for a job in the maquila: “They don’t pay all that well, but at least you can live. . . . You’ll have to limit how much meat or chicken you buy. You’ll get to eat it but not every day.” Low wages, like those paid to maquila workers, limit the growth of an internal market.
The coming of NAFTA has also cost jobs. Reforms that required the privatization of paraestatales, railroads, and airlines have led to layoffs. In Mexico, NAFTA is referred to by the initials TLC (Tratado de Libre Comercio), but workers say that TLC really stands for “Todos a la calle,” everyone out on the street. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, during NAFTA’s first eight years Mexico lost 1.3 million jobs and wages fell to one-seventh or one-eighth of those paid in the United States. Even by government statistics, after NAFTA took effect, manufacturing wages dropped, showing a decline in real wages of 21 percent between 1994 and 2000. About 25 percent of Mexico’s workers earned the minimum wage, the equivalent of four dollars a day; half of the workforce made less than eight dollars. These wages have been estimated to have lost half of their purchasing power since the advent of NAFTA; according to Mexican officials, the income of over half of the population failed to cover the cost of food, clothing, health care, public transportation, and schooling. Low wages throttle the purchasing power of millions of Mexico and consequently do little to build up an internal market.
The maquila phenomenon began as a temporary expedient, an attempt to capitalize on U.S. tariffs that allowed offshore subsidiaries of American transnational corporations to assemble products from American components for resale in the United States. Tariff duties were imposed only on the “value added,” that is, the cost of foreign labor. The cheaper the labor, the lower the value added and the bigger the profits. The plan was to entice American corporations to build plants along the border by allowing them duty-free access to imports of necessary machinery, equipment, and raw materials, including components to be assembled. Mexican legislation that set limits on foreign ownership and management did not apply to maquiladoras. When legislation barred the transnationals from owning land along the border, Mexican politicians rewrote it quickly to permit full use for up to thirty years. In 1972, legislation threw open the whole Republic to them, with the exception of Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey, industrial citadels. Now Aguascalientes, Puebla, and Yucatán house many of them.
Foreign investment is the lifeblood of the maquiladoras, an industry beholden to foreign decisions and events. The absence of linkages to Mexican industry ensures the survival of the maquilas as enclave operations, which in turn guarantees continued dependence on the United States. The border is an industrial enclave of maquilas that employ cheap labor and whose corporate offices are usually in the United States. Assembled goods wend their way north, but these exports do not represent trade in the conventional sense. Even so, they muddle the significance of trade statistics for both Mexico and the United States, a point emphasized by the economist Victor Urquidi, who talks of “hyperbolic figures given out by authorities and accepted by not a few of his fellow tradesmen.” Urquidi had the facts on his side. More than four-fifths of these exports represent United States companies trading with themselves.47
That asymmetrical relationship spells disaster. Since the market for the maquilas’ output lies largely north of the border, every crisis there strikes the industry with sledgehammer blows. When American consumers stop buying, maquilas shut down, their workers go jobless, and local merchants find themselves with shelves of unsold goods. Moreover, since the year 2000, for a variety of reasons, lower-paying jobs for one, Mexico’s maquilas have lost ground to those in Central America and China; the American market is no longer sacred territory for them.48 China now controls it. Equally important, if not more so, once the cost of the imported components (insumos) is subtracted from the sale price, profits to Mexico are minimal.49 Maquilas offer no way out of the morass of Mexico’s underdevelopment.
Yet, thanks to the maquila, a growing middle class prospers, and the rich and the well-off are numerous, dwell in comfortable houses, send their children to private schools, and raise prosperous and happy families. Numerous employees of federal, state, and municipal governments are hardly reliant for their livelihood on their Yankee neighbor. Professionals, among them physicians, lawyers, architects, and engineers, sell their services to Mexicans and are seldom indebted to tourists. They make up part of what Mexican scholars refer to as a national burguesía.
But the transformation may be more mirage than reality. Economic growth continues to be an offshoot of American capitalism. Mexicans, even the burguesía nacional, rely for their daily bread on economic ties with Uncle Sam. This relationship, regardless of what is beneficial about it, spells dependency. The northern side of the border, with its far larger capital resources and its gigantic market, controls the dynamics of the southern side. The availability of cheap labor is still the principal reason for border maquilas. At the same time, their reliance on the U.S. market makes them highly vulnerable to the ups and downs of its economy. During the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, as many as thirty-two thousand maquila jobs along the border vanished. Nearly half of the workers in the maquilas of Ciudad Juárez lost their jobs. This unpredictable employment picture is hardly the cement for an internal market, nor does the border represent a dynamic binational economy. There can be no equality between two societies as long as one, the more powerful and rich, gets the better of the other. Unless a miracle occurs, the Mexican side will always be the tail of the dog.
Maquiladoras are merely one aspect of this dependent relationship. Mexico’s export economy relies mainly on American customers. Most Mexican exports end up in the U.S. marketplace. Most of what Mexico buys also comes from north of the border, one more sign of Mexico’s precarious dependency. Mexico’s trade with sister Latin America nations is minuscule. Mexico’s trade with Brazil, the biggest of the South American countries, is less than 1 percent; the entire Mercosur bloc—Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—absorbs just 1 percent of Mexico’s trade.50 As an editorial in La Jornada argued, reliance on traditional exports to spur the economy makes no sense for Mexican industry, nor does it expand the domestic market. Stagnation, or worse, shrinkage, of the U.S. market would bring about a decline in real wages, a spike in unemployment, and more poverty.51
One would think that conservatives who welcome change only if it occurs slowly would support public education, lest the pent-up anger of the dispossessed boil over. But not in Mexico, where until recently just 3 percent of the federal budget went to schools, one of the lowest percentages in Latin America. Today teachers are better paid, but little else has changed. A recent study by the World Economic Forum paints a grim picture: Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe—African countries hardly at the forefront of modernity—rank above Mexico in the quality of their education. To cite a report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, many Mexican students do poorly when it comes to comprehending what they read, and they cannot solve simple mathematical equations. In the classroom, teachers, who too often behave as autocrats, dictate but seldom encourage open discussions: “Obey the teacher and do not question”; that is the rule. As one observer put it, Mexican schools suffer from a pedagogía memorista (a pedagogy of memorization). In 2006, Mexico had 32 million Mexicans older than fifteen who had not completed la educación básica completa, primary school.52
The state of public education in Mexico, most observers agree, is deplorable. To make matters worse, the country lacks a teacher corps sufficiently prepared to undertake the necessary changes. Teachers are poorly trained and are beholden to the corrupt charros (bosses) who run the biggest labor union in Latin America. Those charros have the power to appoint teachers, name school heads, supervisors, and even state educational authorities. Students attend schools with broken windows, leaky roofs, and faulty toilets, when they have them at all, and they are beset by a dearth of schools supplies, including textbooks. Rural schools are the worst off. One out of every five students in the primary schools abandons them before the fifth grade. Called upon to help support their family, students, particularly in the countryside and in urban ghettoes, miss classes; absenteeism is a major problem.53 Almost half of Mexico’s population has not completed grade school. In the Indian communities, just one out of five students finishes grade school. At the secondary level, nearly one out of every two students does not graduate because they must work. Among older Mexicans, between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five, just one out of ten finished high school. Illiteracy, the old nemesis, hangs on and is as high as 70 percent in regions of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Over 6 million Mexicans ages fifteen and older cannot read or write. One reason for this illiteracy is that large numbers of students drop out of school before they have mastered basic reading and writing.54
No better is the state of higher education, though Mexico spends sixteen times as much per university student as it does for those in primary school. Yet Mexico is not competitive in most high-tech industries that require substantial research or advanced skills. Only a tiny percentage of the GNP is devoted to industrial research.55 In most Western nations, the federal government is primarily responsible for the funding of basic research, especially at the university level, but Mexicans depend largely on the scientific and technological advances of other nations. Research scientists, asserted a former rector of the National University, have to make due with migajas (crumbs), since neither federal authorities nor the private sector display any inclination to support them.56 Mexicans become “managers of what others invest, build, and sell to them.”57
But change has come. The dominant culture of the United States recasts the daily lives of Mexicans through television, radio, and film, imperiling the local culture, to quote Carlos Fuentes. Some admire the United States so much that they endeavor to superimpose its way of life on Mexico.58 With that attitude comes a contempt for everything Mexican. As the artist Daniel Manrique says, Mexicans prefer to be the nalgas (ass end) of North America rather than the leaders of Latin America. That, according to a Mexican scholar, stems from the desire of the middle and upper classes to “develop” Mexico, even if it costs “our self identity.” Whatever the validity of these views, the truth is that the presence of American culture is overwhelming. American films, rock ’n’ roll, artists, writers, and even cuisine—the popularity of hamburgers attests to that—are now part of Mexican daily life.
NAFTA spurred that transition, modifying key aspects of Mexican culture. Even the young acknowledge it, as Barbie dolls, toy jeeps, miniature motorcycles, and toy guns made in American factories replace the traditional wooden toys. Especially susceptible to American ways are the middle and upper classes, who, because of travel, Hollywood films, and television, know more about the life and aspirations of Americans than they do of their country’s Indians. It is becoming virtually impossible for Mexican heroes to compete with Superman. Young Mexicans, neither sadder nor wiser, rarely read the giants of Mexican literature, the novels of Juan Rulfo or José Rubén Romero; listen to the music of Juventino Rosas or Blas Galindo; know the heroes of Mexican history, Melchor Ocampo and Lázaro Cárdenas; or prize the monumental art of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. That, to a large extent, may be because heroes of the past have been used to justify all sorts of shenanigans on behalf of a false patriotism that eulogizes dead heroes who can no longer endanger the privileges of the ruling classes.
A few decades ago, Octavio Paz labeled Mexicans malinchistas (Uncle Toms). That holds true even more today. The admiration for Americans and Western Europeans, how they look and dress and think, is more alive than ever. The color of one’s skin frequently, if not always, opens or closes employment doors; the lighter one’s skin, the brighter the future. What you have, as Raúl Béjar and Héctor Rosales say, is a “racismo a la mexicana.”59 The love affair with globalization, say Mexican students of the national psyche, implies a sense of defeat: Mexicans have given up trying to forge their own destiny. Yet, to call up a celebrated dictum, a belief that a just society is just around the corner, if it is to prevail, requires that you believe in it with all your heart. Yet Mexicans cannot hide behind others, nor can they simply imitate what works for others. Mexico is not the United States, and Mexicans are not Americans.