Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep
Sanders, Sol
W hen the Viet Cong were the world's favorite heroes, and the United States was Amerika-with-a-bigK, it was awfully modish to speak and write about the arrogance of power. A parallel phenomenon was...
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...The process has not been melodramatic but gradual, fueled by many Yanqui good intentions and righteously approved by our media...
...Growing urbanization, it seems, has not done so either, as the quote above implies...
...Sanders uses the word "chaos" vaguely, apparently in order to create a mood of impending doom...
...The author says that the purpose of this book is "to present a panorama of Mexico's problems as they relate to the U.S...
...In short, the danger where Mexico is concerned may well be more intense in the United States than in Mexico itself...
...T Ike the expression about "greater la problems," Mr...
...Given that Mexican (not to say human) history makes this radical and collective change of spirit very, very unlikely, one is driven to the conclusion that this book is actually predicting a collapse, and urging Americans andtheir government to get ready for it, or else...
...Collapse and exodus would allow the USSR and Cuba to create "greater problems" for the United States...
...These include close family relationships that provide economic and social security in a society that has few government welfare services, and a feudal hierarchy in the villages and city barrios that keeps order and provides an indigenous social organization, however archaic and undemocratic to the modern eye...
...The majority of Western media reporting on Latin America is rotten with the arrogance of weakness, while public attitudes in Latin America—where they concern the United States—are riddled with the corruption described by Hoffer...
...For gringos the south-of-the border archetype remains Villa-cum-Zapata or Speedy Gonzales, and matiana in a land of lazy brown anarchic peons who, whatever happens down there, cannot do us much damage...
...In this book Sol Sanders attempts to correct, the one and explain the other in the case of Mexico...
...But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness too corrupts...
...in the early 1970s Edward Banfield used our pages to call for welfare reform...
...which runs a sclerotic and corrupt system of government that may well break down...
...Another factor not mentioned by Mr...
...Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many...
...Not even the Cuban Missile Crisis could wipe out this prejudice, which informs the obsequious and watery "co-opting" activity of American liberals...
...It is made up of all the factions who want "progress...
...Money-back guarantee...
...Much of its discussion is spoiled by obstinate superficiality, apparent haste, and much lapsing into tabloid-speak, beginning with the title: Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep...
...In 1986 we featured Rael Jean Isaac on the Legal Services Corporation (a bureaucratic hotbed of empire-building and abuse), Bill flicker on The Farm Crisis (agricultural subsidies suck non-farmers into agriculture—get rid of them), Fred Barnes on Democratic Presidential Candidates Conservatives Could Live With (Bradlee, Robb and . . . ?), and in 1987 Dixy Lee Ray on Acid Rain (saying it really wasn't important), and That Guy on AIDS (calling for quarantine...
...Sanders, this is no more likely to alter than the cultural attitudes of the Mexicans themselves...
...In a little book called The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer wrote: "It has been often said that power corrupts...
...The Marxists work very hard, with plenty of "co-opting" help from Americans (academics and others), until—the rest is familiar, right down to European and U.N...
...Sanders strongly implies that Mexico is going to fall apart, unless the Mexicans simply abandon cultural and political attitudes which they have inherited from centuries of Spanish rule, and which are the tissue of their politics today...
...The phenomenon I mean is the arrogance of weakness...
...The tradition of aguantar—to bear suffering and affliction—which is so much a part of the Indian heritage of the poor in Mexico, also permits the society to ride out bad economic and political periods that might destroy a more rigid and sophisticated culture...
...Among the factors tending to this is an economy ruined by socialist dogma, largely inherited from fatuous American academics...
...it is still prominent in the sort of compassionate reportage which makes Daniel Ortega into a neo-George Washington, the victim of American oppression...
...It is not only feasible, but in certain circumstances rather likely...
...We are a forum like no other...
...Sanders...
...It goes like this: Americans elect an administrationfull of good liberal instincts, urgently favoring human rights, hating corruption, and determined to do the right thing for the Third World, including Mexico...
...Sanders will have much luck in exciting Americans with his dire prophecy of collapse, Russian and Cuban "problems," and so on...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...
...Quite frankly, we're not a magazine for everyone...
...Certain American academics, with "contacts" in Marxist circles in Mexico, urge the government to condemn the messy, decaying situation in Mexico, and help open the country to change—for the better, naturally...
...Mexico offers help to those who wish to subvert the United States...
...Box 10448, Arlington, Virginia 22210...
...Sanders mentions these "problems" several times, but is never specific about them...
...In these (as in many other) cases . . . you read it here first...
...He provides some information that will interest the general reader, but the book has to be handled with care...
...in early 1983 Gregory Fossedal and Karl O'Lessker expounded the doctrines of SDI...
...Writing like this makes The American Spectator one of the most intriguing magazines in America...
...It is expressed among us by the knee-jerk assumption that because a country or some ethnic group is, in the cant expression, "underdeveloped" or "oppressed," it is therefore instilled with a chemically pure brand of virtue...
...These people still toady to xenophobic Mexican Marxists, a breed that infects Mexico's intellectual elite like mold rotting damp bread...
...Even the influence of neoPelagian acolytes of "Liberation Theology" have not much altered the basic passive conservatism of the Mexican poor...
...If we should happen to trade the one for the other, this might well give us the "cogent policy" which Mr...
...A little warmed-over McLuhan—TV, the global village, and all that—is ofMEXICO: CHAOS ON OUR DOORSTEP Sol Sanders/Madison Books/$18.95 Herb Greer THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 49 fered up to counter this and suggest that everything is different now...
...For now I doubt that Mr...
...Covert help is given to undermine the PRI and reform the structure of the army with new "liberal" officers...
...Sanders would like to see...
...We encourage our writers (and readers) to sort the sheep from the goats, to follow the implications of ideas down the road as far as they can see—not just for a year but for ten...
...Other possibilities are offered in rather a token manner, but Mr...
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...a few token arrests have done nothing to change this...
...Our liberals like to contrast this invidiously with the strength, the prosperity, and the confidence of America, which they hold up as the felo de se of Western democracy...
...If we have fallen foul of that world in recent years, it may be because we have taken the coopters as our guides rather than Machiavelli...
...If the Mexican system should collapse, this loathing would not prevent a flood of refugees, millions of them, from crossing into the United States...
...In particular it harbors the largest contingent of KGB personnel this side of the Iron Curtain, and furnishes a conduit for the infiltration of Soviet agents into America, North and South...
...of course Marxists are included, because this is a real democratic arrangement...
...In these (as in many other cases) . . . you could read it nowhere else...
...It may be that Americans will come to notice that their southern border marks off a Hobbesian world, whose politics are more than a little like those of the Italian Renaissance...
...All in all these facets of Mexico, plus considerable North American involvement in the country, throw doubt on the massive spontaneous collapse predicted by Mr...
...But it is not very convincing...
...A parallel phenomenon was common at the time...
...There are electoral and other atrocity stories...
...Like Batista, like Somoza, the PRI oligarchy is a scandal, it is ruining Mexico, it is corrupt, undemocratic, and dictatorial...
...Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the fruits of weakness...
...B ut there is one more scenario the author appears to have missed...
...The continuing drug traffic is used to stimulate public insistence that something be done...
...His text records a number of alarming observations: Mexico is not a real democracy but a fief of the PRI (Party of Institutionalized Revolution), Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in England...
...For example: Mexican society, for all its weaknesses and failures, has proved through the centuries to have great inner resources, great flexibility, and built-in attributes that keep it operating against enormous odds...
...It is the typical Red Revolutionary or quasi-Jacobin scenario, with internal troubles weakening the system and eventually causing a general effondrement, followed by the rule of hard men and horrors that will send millions of suffering wretches into the sanctuary of our (formerly Mexican) Southwest...
...This Vance Packard approach to international politics is undermined by several passages in the book itself...
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...The Mexican population is growing like a runaway tumor and cannot feed itself, much less attain some version of the Good Life...
...Nothing to lose but your preconceptions...
...For historical reasons sketched by Mr...
...Sanders is horrified that American public opinion, even among "Hispanics," seems indifferent to these facts and contingencies, and that our government has no cogent policy to cope with "the chaos that is descending on the Latin States...
...American policy worldwide would be "skewed," demanding "an immediate reordering of military priorities of a magnitude not seen since Pearl Harbor...
...demands that we leave "poor little Mexico" alone to educate the peasants and improve their health care...
...For example, back in 1978 Jude Wanniski and Paul Craig Roberts introduced our readers to supply-side economics...
...Our readers come from the top—not just in politics, but in business, arts, the law...
...Sanders also points out that the Mexican army, based on a traditional scattering of local warlords, is not the sort of organization conducive to a military takeover as seen elsewhere in Latin America...
...And the principal feeling of Mexicans toward their gringo neighbors is a venomous envy and loathing, sometimes mitigated by grudging admiration...
...The curious quality of his melodrama, coming as it does from an obvious conservative, is that the framework is so very Marxist...
...Naturally Mexico's government supports the Marxist-Leninist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua...
...Whether you are a conservative or a liberal, you share a lively curiosity and our enthusiasm for looking at issues from several points of view...
...The precedents of Cuba and Nicaragua are not labored, but they are a grim double presence in the wings...
...Sanders is that the Mexican people have had several generations' experience of revolutionary rhetoric and its failed promises—however much their small and pimpant intellectual elite likes to take it seriously...
...Underground activity is encouraged, spreads, helped by army deserters, and—after a bit of bloodshed here and there—a new coalition is installed in Mexico City...
...It also abets a venal police force, helping in the traffic of drugs across Mexico's northern border...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
