"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!" -- Porfirio Díaz.
Unlike the colonial era when Mexico's relationship with the
world was primarily oriented to and controlled from Europe, since
achieving its independence the country has been involved most
actively with the adjacent areas of the Americas. First and foremost
among these has been the United States, to which she lost more than
half of its national territory in the middle of the 19th-century and
from which it has been subject to on-going economic, political, and
cultural pressures ever since. Indeed, a cornerstone of Mexico's
foreign policy has been to resist such pressures, not only at home,
but also throughout Latin America, and most particularly in those
parts of the hemisphere in closest geographic proximity to itself,
i.e., in Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean basin.
Understandably, Mexico's love-hate relationship with the
United States traces its beginnings to its defeats in Texas and the
Mexican War, but has been kept alive by repeated military
interventions or threats thereof in the years that have followed. In
times of peace, the U.S. penetration of Mexico's economic life has
contributed further to distrust and animosity between the two
neighbors. The fact that nearly one-quarter of the productive
capacity of Mexico was in American hands on the eve of the Revolution
must be appreciated as one of the leading causes for the popular
dissatisfaction that resulted in the overthrow of the Díaz
regime. Subsequent cautious moves toward the nationalization of the
country's railway system
and its
mineral wealth reflect continuing attempts to shake
off "Yankee
imperialism". Shortages of agricultural labor in the United States
during the 1960's prompted the inauguration of the bracero program, allowing Mexican migrant field hands to work in
the U.S. for a specified time before returning home to Mexico. This
program also worked to Mexico's advantage, because it provided a
safety valve, albeit a small and inadequate one, for the growing
unemployment that resulted from that country's rapid population
growth. Indeed, once the bracero program ended, the
migration of unemployed Mexicans northward across the border only
swelled further -- in some years totaling between 300,000 and 500,000
persons, though now it was no longer legally sanctioned. By the end
of the 1980's, nearly one-tenth of the population of Mexico was
illegally resident in the United States, and by the 1990's certain of
the border states (notably California) were finding themselves
financially burdened by the provision of educational, health, and
welfare services to the burgeoning numbers of
aliens.
More ominously, as drug use increased in the United States
from the 1950's onward, Mexico not only became a growing supplier of
cannabis (marijuana) in its own right but also was used as a
strategic "bridge-head" or "way-station" to the American market for
the cocaine-producing cartels of South America. The Mexican armed
forces and police, in concert with the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, have expanded their efforts to curtail the
cultivation of illicit drugs in remote areas of the country and to
interdict shipments of such substances into their airports and
seaports from abroad.
However, the United States has frequently challenged such
efforts to curb the supply of narcotics as being "half-hearted" and ineffectual due
to corruption, whereas the Mexicans in turn have argued that the
problem would largely be brought under control only if the American
demand for drugs
were reduced
Nowhere else on earth does a "first-world" nation like the
United States share a common border with a "third-world" country such
as Mexico. With income levels on the north ranging from eight to ten
times what they are on the south, the "pressure gradient" between the
two areas serves to propel a constant stream of disadvantaged people
northward across the frontier. (Following U.S. involvement in the
conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, refugees from
these countries as well as from Honduras have joined the exodus to
El
Norte, crossing first into
Mexico and then picking their way through the length of that country
up to the United States.) Mexican-American
interdependence after World War II has grown rapidly as U.S. economic
and cultural penetration of its southern neighbor has once more
accelerated. Not only is the United States Mexico's largest trading
partner -- both for imports and for exports -- but it is also the
largest source of revenue for Mexican tourism. The geographic proximity of a
growing pool of cheap labor on the southern margin of the largest
consumer market on the planet was the primary motivation for the
maquiladora program and likewise provided the impetus for the creation
of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) in 1994. By the
end of the 1990's, commercial interests both inside Mexico and
without were lobbying for the repeal of many "constitutional
provisions" aimed at foreign business enterprises that trace their
origins back to the Revolution. Thus, as the "globalization" of the
world economy continues apace, Mexico contemplates a future that
increasingly will subordinate what its sees as its "national
self-interest" to that of "international
capitalism".
As part of its "anti-American" posture in the realm of
international relations, Mexico refused to break off diplomatic
relations with Castro's Cuba in the 1960's when Washington began
exerting pressure on its hemispheric allies to isolate his
government. Indeed,
Mexico vociferously denounced all foreign intervention in Cuban
affairs -- especially the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion -- as well as
the U.S. campaign to remove Cuba from all international
organizations. Instead, Mexico has continued an active program of
cooperation with Cuba in economic, educational, and cultural affairs,
and ever since 1975 the sitting Mexican president has paid a formal
"courtesy call" on Cuba during his final year in office. It should be
noted that Mexico's relationship vis-a-vis Cuba is paralleled not
only by Canada but by the European Union as well, so it is not alone
in its reaction to the American policy on this
matter.
By the same token, Mexico has been very critical of the U.S.
involvement in the internal affairs of the Central American and
Caribbean republics. The C.I.A. subversion of the first
democratically-elected President of Guatemala in 1954 was merely the
beginning of a host of interventions which included the 1965 invasion
of the Dominican Republic, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1990
invasion of Panama, and the 1994 invasion of Haiti, and which
escalated into supporting the so-called Contras in their effort to
overthrow the government of Nicaragua and the
rightist 'death-squads"
of El Salvador, all in the name of
"anti-Communism." Mexico
was one of the founding members of the so-called "Contadora group",
established in 1983 in an effort to end the conflicts in Central
America and to remove the influence of both the United States and the
Soviet Union from that arena.
The following year Mexico helped establish the "Cartagena
group" whose aim was to help provide foreign debt relief to the
poorer countries of Latin America and later became a signatory to the
"San José accords", along with Venezuela, by which it agreed
to supply oil on concessionary terms to the economically-weak states
of the Caribbean basin.
Of more immediate concern to Mexico were events on its own
southern frontier, occasioned by the military campaign launched by
the army of Guatemala against suspected "Communists" among the Maya
Indians in the Petén
region. As government
soldiers attempted to herd the isolated inhabitants of the area into
centers where they could be more easily monitored by the military, as
many as 40,000 of the Indians sought refuge across the border in the
Mexican Yucatán. Unable to cope with this
unwelcome influx of migrants into its territory, Mexico at first
attempted to keep them out, but ultimately had to establish
internment camps and, insofar as possible, to provide employment for
these homeless people, all the while trying to stem the "invasion"
through negotiations with the Guatemalan authorities. Only after the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the "diminished threat" that it posed did the
military-dominated government of Guatemala move toward relaxing its
persecution of the Indians.
Finally, following the signing of an accord in 1992, the slow
return of the displaced refugees also
began. However, the
so-called Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994 and growing drug
scandals involving the Governor of the state of Quintana Roo have
resulted in a much-increased presence of the Mexican military in
these areas in the last few years. "Sympathetic"
paramilitary up-risings have also shown themselves in other areas of
the country, including Guerrero and Oaxaca.
The Elections of
2000
On Sunday, July 2, 2000, Mexico held what has subsequently
been hailed as the most democratic presidential election in the
country's history. Over 37 million Mexicans --
approximately 64% of the eligible electorate -- cast ballots for
candidates of no fewer than eleven political parties, of which only
the three largest had any possibility of achieving a sizable
plurality, much less a majority. Indeed, no candidate won a
majority in the country as a whole, though Vicente Fox, the Governor
of the State of Guanajuato and the candidate of the Alliance for
Change (AC) -- of which the largest constituent party was the Party
of National Action (PAN) -- received the highest number of total
votes, or 42.5% of the total. His chief opponent, Francisco
Labastida Ochoa, the candidate of the incumbent PRI
party (the Institutional Party of the Revolution),
received just over 36% of the total votes, and Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas, the son of former president Lázaro
Cárdenas and the candidate of the Alliance for Mexico (AM) --
of which the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD) formed the
principal element -- came in a poor third with about 16.6% of the
votes.
Fox obtained a majority of votes in seven of Mexico's 32
states, racking up his highest total in his home state of Guanajuato
(61%) and achieving his next-best results in the adjacent states of
Aguascalientes (54%), Jalisco (53%), and Querétaro
(52%). In Sonora he
received 51% of the vote and in both Baja California Norte and in
Nuevo León he just topped the 50%
mark. On the other hand,
Labastida obtained a decisive majority only in the state of Sinaloa
(64%), whereas Cárdenas could not muster more than 37% of the
vote even in his own home state of Michoacán.
In the Mexican Congress, where 300 seats are divided first
according to majority vote and thereafter according to proportional
representation, Fox's Alliance for Change obtained 141 seats, the PRI
ended up with 131, and Cárdenas' Alliance for Mexico secured
28 seats. In the Senate, the Alliance for Change won
effective control over 13 states and the Federal District, the PRI
retained control over 16, and the Alliance for Mexico won majorities
in 2. The House of Deputies ended up being divided in
the same manner, although a majority of Senate seats in Chihuahua was
exchanged for a majority of House seats in Quintana Roo
instead. As a result of the various races for state
governorships in 2000, the Alliance for Change succeeded in electing
8 -- one of them being in the state of Chiapas and the Alliance for
Mexico took 5 -- including the Federal District, but the PRI hung on
to fully 19. In any event, after 71 years of single-party
government, the electoral changes that were effected in Mexico in
2000 were heralded as long-awaited harbingers of hope by most of the
country's people. For the first time in a
couple of decades, a presidential transition has not been marked by a
plummeting devaluation of the peso; investors are not panicking; and
the prices of tortillas and television sets are not escalating out of
sight. Change is definitely the watchword of the
day!
One of President-elect Fox's first initiatives was to call for
a more open border with the United
States. Ironically, the
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has just the opposite
vision of the future: 1300 miles of roads paralleling the frontier,
thousands of stadium-style floodlights dispelling the darkness along
the Rio Grande, spy cameras monitoring strategic crossing points, and
unarmed military units beefing up the surveillance conducted by the
currently understaffed Border Patrol.
For many Mexicans, one of the most attractive alternatives to
continuing a life of poverty is to attempt an illegal entry into the
United States. However, as the U.S.-Mexican
border becomes ever more heavily "militarized", such a move has
become increasingly perilous.
Indeed, well over 425 persons lost their lives in the year
2000 alone attempting to enter the United States in remote desert
areas. Nevertheless, the desperation that motivates these
unfortunates is such that, even with the increased risks involved,
they are willing to undertake the
gamble. Needless to say,
those who are apprehended by the Border Patrol find such detention
merely a temporary inconvenience, for within a matter of a few days
or nights they simply resume their attempt somewhere else. For those who finally manage
to evade the Border Patrol, the hope is to quickly lose themselves in
the multitude of their countrymen and women already resident in the
United States and to find some sort of employment that will permit
them to eke out an existence.
Poverty and unemployment are among the strongest "push"
factors directing the wave of emigration northward, not alone from
Mexico but from the countries of Central America as
well. In the one-month
of October 2000, Mexican authorities detained more than 170,000
Central Americans who were seeking to transit the country on their
way to the United States.
Low as the standard of living in Mexico is, it still is about
3-4 times higher than that of most Central American countries; the
result is that about five per cent of such illegal immigrants are
content to be absorbed into the Mexican economy. But native- born Mexicans,
who are confronted with an average minimum wage of just over $4 a day
-- that is, if they can find a job in the first place --hear reports
from their friends or relatives who have already escaped to "El
Norte" that they can confidently expect to find a job which will pay
at least that same amount, or more, every
hour. As a Mexican carpenter
returning to visit his family at Christmas once told me, in Houston
he was able to earn in one hour what he would have earned in one
month back on the farm. Moreover, the fact that he
was also able to carry with him armfuls of Christmas presents would
have been unthinkable had he not made the move to flee from his
native village.
When the geographic origins of Mexican migrants to the United
States are examined, it quickly becomes apparent that proximity to
the border is one of the critical factors in the equation. The state
of Zacatecas leads in the number of migrants, followed by Guanajuato,
Durango, the Federal District, Michoacán, and San Luis
Potosí. It should be noted that all of them lie on the
meseta, and all of them are predominantly mestizo in terms of their
ethnic composition. It
should be noted that Mexico's most impoverished citizens, its
Indians, are not the ones seeking a better life in the United States,
most of whose own Indians are either wards of the government or
support themselves running tribally-owned gambling casinos!
The remittances that the successful migrants send back each
year to their families in Mexico are not
inconsequential. Indeed,
in the six years following the adoption of the NAFTA agreement, i.e.
from 1994-2000, such remittances have amounted to 83 per cent of all
the U.S. investment in Mexico over the same time period -- some $28.2
billion compared to about $33.7
billion. (At the present
time, it is estimated that the annual remittances of Mexican migrants
total between $6 billion and $10 billion, making them virtually
equivalent to the Mexico's entire income from tourism.) The lion's share of these
remittances -- more than 97% -- have gone to pay for the basic
necessities of life back in Mexico, food and
housing. It is estimated
that such remittances constitute the primary source of income for no
fewer than 220 municipalities of the country, and make up from 50-60%
of the incomes for more than 1.1 million families in
all.
To be sure, the "outflow" of these vast amounts of money from the United States to Mexico has also produced handsome profits for those firms involved in such transfers, nearly 60% of which are effected by two American companies, Western Union and Money Gram. By exchanging pesos for dollars at a rate about 1 peso lower than the official rate, i.e., 9 instead of 10, they have ensured themselves a commission which averages about 10-12% on every transaction, amounting to a grand total of about $3 billion in the first half-dozen years of NAFTA's existence. (Some estimates put the commission rate charged migrants for sending remittances back to Mexico as high as 30%.)
(The day to day
events in Mexico continue shaping the country's destiny, so this
chapter is as yet incomplete. The fact that Vicente Fox broke the
hold that the PRI had on the presidency did not alter the fact that
it retained control over both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies,
and in effect "checkmated" any substantial reforms or changes that he
might have wished to make. As one of my Mexican informants commented,
"You really cannot expect one man to do very much in six years", and
even now as his term nears its final phase, Fox's wife is positioning
herself to make a run for the presidency on her own. Despite some
progress in fighting graft and corruption, the battle against
poverty, the efforts at job creation, the struggle to protect the
environment, and the campaign to improve the lot of the Indian South
still have a long way to go.)