Negative stats show Mexico is ripe for revolution
The Albuquerque Tribune
Kent Paterson
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Katherine Augustine: High school students profit from man devotion to
human rights
Amid protests, Felipe Calderon took office Dec. 1 as Mexico's new
president. Calderon inherits a country where class polarization,
political conflict and escalating criminal violence define the
landscape.
Six years after former Mexican President Vicente Fox pledged an
immigration accord with the United States, millions of new jobs and a
promised educational revolution, Mexico's social and political
indicators are in the negatives.
Both the United Nations Development Program and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development chide Mexico for continued high
poverty rates. Some reports compare sections of the Mexican countryside
to Mali or the Sudan. Public high schools and universities are unable
to serve all aspirants, who are frequently funneled into private
schools of dubious quality and purpose.
With the minimum wage of less than $5 per day buying less than it did
30 years ago, it's no mystery why as many as 4 million Mexicans crossed
into the United States during the Fox presidency.
As a parting gift from the Fox administration, Mexicans began paying
more for gasoline, milk, tortillas and other goods beginning Dec. 1.
According to Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, Geography and
Informatics, many rural towns became ghost towns during the Fox years.
Millions of Mexicans only get by because of remittances sent by
relatives in the United States - a money flow which the Bank of Mexico
estimates will reach a record $20 billion to $25 billion in 2006.
A different story prevails at the top. During the Fox years, modest
billionaires such as Carlos Slim became super-tycoons, which, in Slim's
case, meant achieving the status of the world's third-richest man, with
a fortune of $30 billion, according to Forbes magazine. A handful of
companies control the transportation, entertainment, media, beverage,
food and communications sectors. Close to 90 percent of bank stock is
controlled by foreign companies and investors.
To be fair, Fox might be credited with fulfilling one of his campaign
goals of 2000: creating economic development. In the last six years,
the illegal narcotics economy has boomed - transformed from a mainly
export trade oriented to the United States to an industry with an
important domestic market as well.
The drug cartels are in an all-out war for the spoils, tossing grenades
and firing off bazookas in their battles, while leaving decapitated
bodies on the streets as gruesome warnings to rivals. Executions and
grenade attacks take place within the eyesight and earshot of tourists
in resorts such as Acapulco and Zihuatanejo.
By the end of 2006, somewhere around 2,000 people - most of them young
- will have been killed in this year's bout of narco-violence. Few
suspects are detained for such crimes, and honest government officials
admit they are overwhelmed by the power of organized crime.
As the Nov. 25 narco-tainted slaying of Mexican pop star Valentin
Elizalde in Reynosa highlighted, Mexico now has on its hands a "lost
generation" of youths who are sucked into a cycle of easy money,
addiction and violence.
Driving this social disaster is the implosion of the free-market
economic model formalized in the North American Free Trade Agreement, a
pact Washington refuses to renegotiate despite the growing clamor in
Mexico to revisit the deal.
Scratch the surface of street protests - whether over the presidential
election or misrule by the governor of Oaxaca - and economic and
justice grievances stemming from a teetering political economy rise to
the fore.
How will Calderon address Mexico's crisis? So far, all the evidence
suggests that he will stay the course. Calderon's new Cabinet, whose
members range from recycled Fox administration officials to U.S.- and
British-educated technocrats, portends more of the same.
More than a few Mexican analysts see historical parallels between the
current setup and the 30-year Porfiriato of the late 1800s and early
1900s, the era when dictator Porfirio Diaz kept wages low and the
population in line for foreign corporations.
Some observers note the tendency for Mexico to explode in revolution
every century. The 100th anniversary of the last upheaval, 1910, is
just around the corner.
.
|
