Mexico: Slouching Toward Normality

For the foreseeable future, Mexico will perplex the United States, because what is going on there remains as opaque as ever to most Americans. This doesn't have to do with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) alone, even though the complexities underlying that agreement are formidable. Unlike Canada, our other NAFTA partner, the differences go beyond arcane disputes over fishing rights and lumber. Over the next decade Mexico will present U.S. policymakers with a baffling array of rapidly changing political, cultural, economic, and social issues. These changes bear uncertain results for Mexico, which--because of a growing economy; a population of 93 million, plus millions of legal and illegal Mexicans living in the United States; 3,000 miles of common border; and the position as America's third largest trading partner--will have enormous implications, positive and negative, for its northern neighbor.

North of the Rio Grande, Mexico often appears to be America's inescapable poor relative, the unruly bad boy of the neighborhood. In Mexico on the other hand, the United States has historically been seen as the neighborhood bully and imperialist--to be wary of, albeit not feared anymore. Thus, when U.S. ambassador Jeffrey Davidow recently stated the obvious, that Mexico is today the Western Hemisphere's epicenter of drug mafias, the reaction, as filtered through a heated electoral campaign and its associated nationalist rhetoric promoted by the Left, was instant condemnation. The ambassador's statements provoked a self-righteous nationalist outcry from all Mexican political parties. There is nothing new in that, but this time the hullabaloo was far from convincing, and much attenuated from the response such a remark from such a source would have elicited in years past. As if to underscore Davidow's point, within days the Tijuana chief of police was murdered by drug traffickers. What is new and interesting in the past three years or so is that the response of Mexico's powerful cultural, social, and political elites to criticism of their country by outsiders, particularly in the giant El Norte, has become a matter of selective rather than reflexive indignation. This is a dramatic change.

Despite its admission to the elite club of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and membership in NAFTA, Mexico is a country starkly in transition: between quasi-socialist statism and free markets, between a de facto one-party system and a multi-party democracy, between nationalism and globalism (in all its aspects, human rights included), and attempts to press all of the above to the advantage of party, ideological, and particular group interests. In economic and social terms, the transition is toward what is usually described by the catch-all term used and abused in the political discourse of all candidates for presidency and Congress--"neoliberalismo." More than a coherent economic and political philosophy, this describes an attitude of acceptance of free markets and participation in the global economic system.

Just as important, the slow grind of demographics is inexorably obliterating memories of the bitter past. Nearly 50 percent of the population was born after Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. The epic struggles that went into the making of modern Mexico's identity--such as the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938--are little more than ancient history to the Nintendo generation. What makes today's Mexico different from the country Americans pretended to know just a decade ago is the simple, albeit understandable, fact that past gringo confusion over politics and economics south of the Rio Grande is now being shared by many Mexicans as well.

Mexico's Democracy: Progress and Paradox

Nothing encapsulates this new level of confusion more than the present political campaign, which culminates in the July 2, 2000, presidential and congressional elections. Mexico ceased to be a de facto one-party state after the 1988 presidential campaign, in the sense that the long ruling (since 1929) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has actually had to go out and...