Thread: The Shadow of El Norte

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13249624/site/newsweek/

The Shadow of El Norte
The country is now so inextricably intertwined with the United States that whoever wins the tight election will find his actions constrained.

By Joseph Contreras
Newsweek International
June 19, 2006 issue - This year's presidential race in Mexico is starting to look a lot like the star-crossed U.S. election of 2000. Former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, once so sure of his eventual victory that he skipped the first of two televised debates, has seen his lead in the polls vanish. Rival Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) has clawed back into the race with a series of negative TV ads bashing López Obrador as a populist and a lackey of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's. At the end of an inconclusive second debate last week, López Obrador struck back by accusing Calderón of having steered contracts to his brother-in-law while serving as Energy minister from September 2003 to May 2004. Calderón has hotly denied the charges; polls show the two candidates in a statistical dead heat as the campaign enters the homestretch. The July 2 vote could well produce the same sort of photo finish that ushered in weeks of legal wrangling north of the border before George W. Bush was proclaimed president—and like Bush, the Mexican winner will likely inherit a deeply polarized Congress and citizenry.

And that is only one of the ways in which Mexico resembles its neighbor to the north, for good or ill. The next president will inherit a nation so inextricably tied to the United States as to be a de facto economic colony. Mexican exports to El Norte account for more than 90 percent of its overall international trade, and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 unleashed a flood of American capital into Mexico. Annual direct U.S. investment swelled from nearly $5 billion in 1994 to more than $21 billion by 2001. The dominance of American companies is epitomized by Citigroup, which owns what was once Mexico's largest bank, and Wal-Mart, which ranks as the country's largest private-sector employer, with upwards of 140,000 Mexicans on its payroll.

Against that backdrop the successes or failures of any future Mexican president hinge in good measure on the economic well-being of the United States and the policies of the administration in Washington. Calde-rón, 43, a Harvard-educated champion of the free-trade policies that successive Mexican governments have embraced since the dawn of the NAFTA era, has tried to spin that fact to his advantage, implying that he would have the best chance of smoothing relations with the Great Colossus to Mexico's advantage. But even López Obrador, 52, will be constrained from baiting his counterpart in the White House in the chest-thumping manner of Chávez. The fact is that Mexico may not be the 51st state—but its fate is now linked to America's like no other nation in the world.

From top to bottom, the country is becoming ever more Americanized in its society, media, lifestyle and even appearance. The principal engine driving that process has been the influx of U.S. investment, which has introduced dozens of retail chains and thousands of new products in recent years. Mexico's consumers now regularly shop at Home Depot and Costco, many of its top-drawer corporate executives boast M.B.A.s from elite U.S. graduate business schools, and its Yuppies pepper their conversations with words like "bye" and "wanna-bes," and increasingly settle for a Big Mac or a Subway Veggie Delite instead of the traditional three-hour Mexican lunch. "I enjoy American sitcoms more than Mexican ones," admits Mary Carmen Méndez, a 24-year-old university student from the city of Puebla. "Nearly all the movies we see are from over there, there's a tendency to work ever-longer hours and I feel slightly invaded. Yet it seems there's no way of stopping it."

Some of the social ills typically associated with the United States have also infected modern Mexico. Its citizens have the world's second highest rate of obesity, and more and more of its teenagers get wasted on crack, ecstasy, crystal methamphetamine and other hard drugs. The AIDS epidemic that has killed more than 40,000 Mexicans was literally imported in 1983 by a 32-year-old flight attendant who worked on the Mexico City-New York route and picked up the disease from one of his many American lovers. Some Mexican social commentators argue that neither narcotics nor expanding waistlines are exclusive to the United States. But in the context of the North American continent, noted the late Mexican Finance minister Jesús Silva Herzog, "the globalization of Mexico signifies Americanization."


That is a bitter pill for a nation that has suffered so much at the hands of the United States. From the time they enter elementary school, Mexicans are taught that the gringos stole more than half the national territory at the conclusion of the Mexican War of 1846-47. The wounds inflicted by that conflict on national pride were reopened during World War I when U.S. Marines occupied the port of Veracruz at the height of the Mexican Revolution. The harsh lessons of history have nurtured a toxic stew of envy and resentment toward the United States that is best captured in a quotation engraved in the collective memory of Mexicans from every walk of life. "Poor Mexico," the saying goes. "So far from God, so close to the United States."

Those 12 words are widely attributed to Porfirio Díaz, the mustached dictator who ruled Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution toppled him in 1911. Like the Ivy League-educated Mexican apostles of free trade who negotiated and then implemented NAFTA, Don Porfirio presided over an unprecedented infusion of capital from abroad that modernized the economy. It also won him the derisive moniker "mother of foreigners, stepmother of the Mexicans," although Díaz, to his credit, actively courted European investors as vital counterweights to an overbearing U.S. corporate presence. No such pretense of diversifying foreign capital guides economic policymaking in Mexico these days. American companies accounted for two thirds of all foreign investment in Mexico last year.

The economic umbilical cord does not end there. Two of Mexico's three biggest sources of foreign exchange come directly from the United States. One is the nearly $11 billion that foreign tourists spend in Mexico each year, 90 percent of whom are American citizens. The other is the estimated $20 billion in remittances that Mexican immigrants working up north sent back home in 2005. The ongoing debate in the United States over those 10 million countrymen has dominated the Mexican press in recent weeks. But immigration has yet to emerge as a divisive issue in the campaign, in large part because both Calderón and López Obrador have limited themselves to broad platitudes about the need to ensure respect for the human rights of their fellow Mexicans up north.

That's largely because both camps recognize that on this as on so many other critical issues, the dominant voice remains Washington's—and the political gridlock during a U.S. election year is likely to forestall any dramatic moves on immigration. Whether Mexico, where much-needed reforms of the country's tax code, labor laws and the energy sector have been paralyzed by friction between current President Vicente Fox and a fractious legislature, can handle a similar stalemate is debatable. "Though the institutions in the U.S. were not prepared for [the 2000 election aftermath], there was an ultimate trust that a decision would be reached and a consensus would be created around the victorious political actor," notes Ana María Salazar, a columnist and news anchor of dual nationality who had held senior posts in the State Department and the Pentagon under the Clinton administration. "In Mexico we don't necessarily have the political actors or the institutions that can ensure there won't be a major constitutional crisis or economic instability." A made-in-the-U.S.A. outcome on July 2 could put Mexico's young democracy to its toughest test yet.

This story is adapted from the book "Tan Lejos de Dios: El México Moderno a la Sombra de Estados Unidos" ("So Far From God: Modern Mexico in the Shadow of the United States"), published last month in Spanish by Grijalbo.

The next president will inherit a nation so inextricably tied to the United States as to be a de facto economic colony.

Mexico a de-facto colony of the U.S.? Heck, where I live it is the other way atround, WE are like a colony of Mexico.