MEXICO: Whose Crisis, Whose Future?
Brooks, David
DEMOCRATIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT are firmly on Mexico's agenda, due to the profound economic and social crisis facing the nation. But questions of democracy are always conditioned by the U.S....
...It impels the dynamic of society today, even though anything might happen tomorrow...
...The debt crisis, the Central America crisis, the crisis of the Left: there are too many of them, and they go on too long...
...Brooks, born and raised in Mexico, spent two months there this year interviewing politicians, writers, labor organizers, popular leaders and embattled citizens...
...De la Madrid's minister of budget and planning for five years, he devised the country's foreign debt payment strategy and implemented the IMF austerity measures...
...We think of a crisis as something that cannot be resolved, that is at a perpetual impasse...
...their opinions, analyses and generous sharing of their hopes and visions for the country's future made this issue possible...
...What takes energy is getting on with something else...
...The new president is expected to carry forward a new revolution in Mexico, a technocratic one...
...Their voices appear only briefly in quotes in the following pages...
...North Americans thus have an unusual responsibility to understand this crisis-what it is, how it came about and the forces struggling to determine its outcome...
...Claimed by virtually all classes and programs, the already ambiguous concept may be completely turned on its head in 1988, when the country's new president takes office...
...In Mexico, la crisis is the focus of energy...
...Salinas, a 39-year-old Harvard-educated economist, is the technocrats' technocrat...
...But while la crisis daily grows more real, la revoluci6n may be losing its meaning entirely...
...Salinas, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the politics of rural land ownership, may thus be called upon to destroy the ejido (communal landowning) sector-the cornerstone of the Mexican Revolution of 1910...
...If he succeeds, however, it will be at the expense of the country's "social pact''--the four-way alliance (state/ labor/peasants/business) which has sustained the ruling party in power for over 50 years...
...The party approved him on the spot, waving flags and banners prepared in advance for each possible candidate...
...In a tradition that has endured for more than half a century, President de la Madrid "unveiled" his chosen successor at a rally of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...The ties which we maintain with Mexico are perhaps the most diverse and numerous that we have with any nation," a recent State Department briefing began...
...Thus Mexico is at a turning point: its context is the economic and political crisis...
...As a result the United States exercises enormous influence in Mexico, which will prove critical in the current crisis...
...This issue, written by NACLA researcher David Brooks, looks at this crisis and at the ideas and struggles of those who would resolve it...
...the PRI, the party of the revolution, has not lost an election in 57 years...
...its significance fuels the debate over which course to take to the future...
...For many North Americans, "crisis" is a word that is losing its validity-no matter how real to those on the receiving end...
...Indeed, big business has already made known its demands, including the elimination of all wage and price controls and increased government support for agribusiness exports...
...Somehow, there will be a way out of the crisis, and the battle to determine that way out involves every sector of society...
...presence-possibly the most undemocratic aspect of Mexican society...
...The choice will be duly ratified in next summer's elections...
...IN MANY WAYS, THE PARTY'S CHOICE WAS not surprising...
...He has been hailed by business leaders-Mexican as well as foreign-who look to him to continue wooing business interests and complete the privatization of the economy begun under his successor...
...Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexico's next president, was named this past October, though he will not be elected until July 1988...
Vol. 21 • September 1987 • No. 5
