Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor

10. NAFTA

200 TEN NAFTA i 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, n a f t a 201 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 202 n a f t a 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...