So, what can we conclude? Why is Mexico underdeveloped? Surely, the question is thorny and labyrinthine: there is no simple answer. But no matter how we frame the inquiry, time is all-important: the historical background looms elephantine. As Marx, in one of his most eloquent moments, wrote, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The ills of underdevelopment took centuries to arise; they did not appear overnight. The gargantuan cracks in the social and economic edifice are old and deep. True, many are manmade, one being the decades-long absence of law and order in the new Republic. Anthropologists and sociologists point an accusatory finger at hurdles to social mobility, a tyrannical nuclear family, religious dogmas, and so on, but upon closer examination, these turn out to be consequences of a peculiar historical legacy. The secrets of yesterday are rarely singular but are complex phenomena concealed from view by evanescent centuries. Nor can all faults be laid at Mexico’s door. Despite the Cornucopia fable, Mexico has neither a plentiful supply of water nor abundant fertile soil for farming. The terrain, mountainous and cavernous, made national unity nearly impossible. Not until the coming of the iron horse, nearly four centuries after the Conquest, did Mexico set out on the road to territorial unification. Exploitation by foreign powers, first Great Britain and then the United States, has played a pivotal role.
Whatever may be said, the colonial centuries weigh heavily on today’s Mexico. One must turn back the clock to begin to understand what went wrong. We must examine the causes, not just the effects, of the malady. The question, if results are the culprits, is how did they come about? We must acknowledge that the cultural mix of Spaniard and pre-Columbians was an uneasy one; for the natives it was a psychological trauma. Not long ago, the denial of a “Black Legend” of an evil Spanish conquest was virtually automatic. But the Spaniards were not just bad apples individually: injustices were not just the work of a small band of heartless Europeans but rather of the social system implanted in the New World. Had the conqueror attempted a conciliatory approach, perhaps a matter of wishful thinking, the results might not have been irreconcilable. Even then it would have taken years, perhaps a century or two, before a blend of the two cultures might have formed a perfect union, one synchronizing values and practices. What occurred instead, was the unraveling of the indigenous universe, including, surely, the chronic stress that arose out from a deep sense of helplessness and an inability to take charge of one’s life. Poverty, it is said, traps its victims in a kind of eternal adolescence, where psychologically it becomes comfortable to stay put rather than risk new adventures. Belief in mobility can require a terrifying act of faith. For this tragic drama, the entire cast of Spaniards, except for a few missionaries and priests, shares responsibility for what befell the Indians. The arrogant and often undisciplined Spaniard simply rode roughshod over them, a largely passive people; whether willing or not, they were driven to accept the Spaniards’ dictates, which left behind a dysfunctional society.
After three centuries of colonial rule, two societies emerged: that of the Spaniard and his progeny, the criollo and light-skinned mestizos, the better-off, and, at the bottom of the social scale, Indians and dark-skinned mestizos, the majority of the Mexican people. Spaniards and criollos could dream of a better world for themselves and their families; Indians and most mestizos learned early to accept their status as God-given. After all, as the church lectured them, the almighty had a special place in heaven for the poor and downtrodden.
Sadly for the future of Mexico, the Spaniard, from the start, was hardly a man of rectitude. Corruption and incompetence had a special place in colonial government, whether at the viceroy’s table or that of his underlings. No wonder, therefore, that official corruption and ineptitude fostered a public attitude of distrust and contempt toward state and public bureaucracy. For Spaniards and criollos, and later their progeny in the new Republic, state and bureaucracy became avenues for upward mobility, the door to personal enrichment. The idea that the state might serve a social function, that it might speak for the common man, took centuries to gain ground; it did not do so until years after independence was achieved. Even now, most Mexicans rarely look upon the state and its bureaucracy as allies in the daily struggle for survival.
But above all, the nature of the economy blocked progress. The Spanish lust for gold and silver gave form and shape to Mexico’s dependent society. For three hundred long years, New Spain’s economy rested on the export of silver bullion to European buyers. Whether they paid well or not, their market set the tone for New Spain’s economy. Nearly everything rested on the sale of silver and, to a far lesser extent, on exports of cochineal and diverse agricultural products. Over the centuries, New Spain put together an export economy of primary goods, using profits to buy what goods the well-off in society purchased. Local industry consisted mostly of primitive obrajes that turned out cheap cotton cloth for the poor. The “curse,” as some refer to it, and what splendidly epitomizes what befell New Spain, sets forth how exports of natural resources of pecuniary value turn into the major source of revenue and block domestic economic growth. It is a paradox of plenty that encourages the conspicuous consumption of imported goods, a system that magnifies inequality. Worse still, the rise in exchange rates, the result of an accumulation during boom eras, spurs “de-industrialization” as the factory and farming sectors become less competitive on the global and domestic markets.
Independence in 1821 did not put an end to this deadly dance with outsiders. Until the 1880s, the main export was still silver, and after that industrial metals, particularly copper. Then, with the discovery of petroleum deposits in the subsoil, exports of the black gold kept the wheels of the economy turning. Only briefly, first under the Cardenista regime of the 1930s and then during the years of import substitution, did Mexico attempt to break the old dependency. The Cardenista expropriation of Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell earmarked natural resources for national development instead of foreign exchange, an article of belief in industrialization by way of import substitution. By the late 1970s, however, it was back to the old ways of dependency on the exports of petroleum. Mexicans, once again, had mortgaged their future to foreign capitalists.
The reliance on exports of primary goods has blocked any possibility of fundamental economic and social change. Exports of petroleum finance nearly half of the government’s operating costs. The international trading system largely determines Mexico’s “backwardness,” the result of a belief in free trade doctrines as old as the fairy tales concocted by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Trade, after all, is not always beneficial; it can be, as it has been for much of Mexico’s history, a vehicle for exploitation. The “equal terms of trade” ideal is more myth than truth. Exporters of primary goods, whether of the agricultural variety, metals, or petroleum, seldom sit in the driver’s seat, a place reserved for the buyers, the powerful industrialized nations of the West, and now Japan.
The consequences of this unequal relationship are enormous. Not only is the export sector of the economy dependent on outsiders, but so is the nation. Decisions in government rest largely on what occurs in the dependent economy. Foreigners control the good and bad times and, by implication, the ups and downs of the everyday lives of millions of Mexicans. Whether you can purchase daily essentials depends largely on whether outsiders are buying what your country exports; today that is petroleum, a commodity with a short life expectancy. Some thirty or forty years from now, Mexico will run out of its deposits of the black gold. Then what? In this scenario, national industry takes a backseat. Empresarios, the local lords of what passes for a national industry, seldom command much respect, because the public looks upon them as imitators, not, as in the industrial West, as innovators. They copy what outsiders do much better at cheaper prices. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Mexican middle class hungers for American-made goods.
Mexicans have created for themselves a semicolonial economy. Like a beggar asking for alms, they rely on foreign investment and exports to generate growth. Exports alone account for almost a third of the country’s gross domestic product; 90 percent of them are exported to markets on the other side of the border. NAFTA perpetuates this asymmetrical relationship. When American consumers stop buying, the market for assembled television sets, auto parts, and winter fruits and vegetables vanishes. A pall then descends on Mexico.
If the pitfalls of this lamentable dependency needed further proof, it came in the wake of the Great Recession of 2009, one of the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, which set Mexico adrift on a sea of troubles. Coming out of Wall Street, the financial citadel of the United States, the recession was the result of a banking debacle, a stock market slump, and a housing bust, exacerbated by greedy speculators and chicanery of all sorts. The shock in Mexico was felt at once. The peso’s value dropped, spurring capital flight, inflation, and speculation, as well as a sharp rise in the price of imports, dealing hammer blows to Mexican consumers as well as businesses that relied on foreign goods. Exports fell, dropping precipitously for auto assembly and auto parts, with plants in over half of the Republic’s states. Even Volkswagen, the German giant, laid off workers, while industrial production and retail sales plummeted. Maquiladoras shut down or cut workers in Baja California Norte, Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila, once the most prosperous region of the Republic. For some economists, to quote a disgruntled Jesuit priest, a spokesman for the Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral, a labor body, what was obvious was “the bankruptcy of a model that merely exports, that relies on foreign capital and worships it.” Even orthodox economists, once bell ringers for Mexican neoliberal policies, an austerity formula that reduced the national debt and tamed inflation, had second thoughts: their sage advice had not saved the country from the pain of the global recession, especially when investors pulled dollars from Mexico’s “emerging market.” Out the window went a cockeyed claim, that when the U.S. economy catches a cold, Mexico’s gets pneumonia. Now the new assumption was that it was the other way around.
On the political front, a Quisling class, the handmaiden of the rich and powerful, was as always ready to join hands with the traditional exporters. Once hacendados and foreign mining moguls, and now empresarios and big farmers, their fortunes, especially with NAFTA, were tied to foreign corporations. This Quisling class ostensibly sets policy. The political reforms of recent years, giving huge amounts of money to political parties supposedly to make them independent, have merely made politicos more interested in remaining in office rather than in seeking ways to curb economic and political ills. One party, the PAN, apparently cares not a whit about the awful predicament of the poor, while the PNR splits between a faction that does and others who want simply to feed at the public trough. The PRI, a cynical lot, always scheming to return to power, shifts gears with the prevailing political winds. At another level, what you have on the part of sundry bureaucrats is a callous indifference (desprecio) toward the plight of the poor, as the following story, told to me by a friend from Tijuana, illustrates. My friend, accompanied by the state secretary of education, drove to the outskirts of the border city, where the shacks were made of tarpaper and discarded plywood. Upon seeing that the local school was in no better condition than the hovels around it, my friend asked why was this so. Should not the school have been a worthy model for local residents? The responsibility lay with the teacher, replied the bureaucrat, not his office. He was not at all troubled that the teacher, probably young and poorly paid, was woefully unprepared to get local parents, most likely penniless, to build a better school. Corruption in politics goes on as before, to the scorn of a cynical public. At this juncture, the PRI no longer wields dictatorial power, but this democratic change, oddly enough, makes the appearance of a reformer such as the Lázaro Cárdenas of the 1930s virtually impossible. With the political reforms, it behooves politicians, whatever their so-called ideological leanings, to keep the public trough full. Why alter the system when you have money in the bank?
The effects of this historical drama on Mexican society are devastating, as Rudo y Cursi, a film by Carlos Cuarón, tells us. That Mexicans are daily victims of corruption is now accepted as commonplace, inevitable. Things are as they are because that is the way they are in Mexico. For one to climb the stairs of society requires either big or small acts of corruption. The exception would be if things were not that way. No one is shocked anymore by the breakup of the Mexican family, nor by the rise of drug addiction. Single women with families abound, and no one takes notice. In Rudo y Cursi, one female head of a household is a single mother of eight, each by a different man. In this society where machismo dictates, the woman, more vulnerable now, simply goes from one man to another. When one leaves, she finds someone else. Yet the Mexican man, asserts Cuarón, never stops dreaming; even when trampled underfoot, he dreams of when he will be well enough so that he can get drunk.
Many Mexicans ask, where does the responsibility for our atraso (backwardness) lie? Is it in ourselves or in the outside world that exploits us? A good question. The answer is that both share blame. The United States, the colossus next door, has not always been a friend, taking half of Mexico’s territory by force in 1847, and twice more invading its neighbor in the next century. Today, some 90 percent of Mexican exports travel north to American markets, while Mexicans buy from their neighbors an equivalent amount. The maquila industry of the northern border, from Tijuana on the Pacific Ocean to Matamoros on the Gulf, is simply an adjunct of American industry. Were a miracle to occur and Mexicans attempt basic structural reforms that endangered American interests, they would surely face a hostile colossus. And yet, what would Mexico be without access to the giant market and capital next door? As things stand, that marriage, for better worse, is a fact of life.
The Mexican dependency on and admiration for the colossus next door hardly help turn things around. Self-denigration, say some, is one result. Mexicans are only too ready to condemn themselves, to admire Western Europe and the United States. Too often, like their empresarios, they become imitators and not innovators. Copycats they are, particularly the well-off with economic ties to American capital. That NAFTA virtually wiped out small and medium-sized local industry matters little to them. So long as Americans buy avocados and vegetables from giant farms, import copper and other industrial metals, establish assembly plants for autos in Mexico, and come as tourists, Mexicans are a contented lot. Even Mexican artists, writers, and filmmakers, once on the hunt for the authentic, imitate their colleagues across the border and in Western Europe. The upshot of this economic, political, and social morass, say observers, is a culture of dependency. All of the above helps to explain why Mexico is underdeveloped.