A New Time for Mexico by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8 : HAPPY NEW YEAR

A Lament for 1995

Left with Ourselves

When I was honored with the Cervantes Award for Literature in 1988, Alfredo Baranda, Mexico’s ambassador to Spain, invited me to a dinner. Baranda was well connected in Madrid; guests at the dinner included Felipe González, president of the government, and his minister of the economy, Carlos Solchaga. Solchaga had just returned from Mexico and had been impressed with the discipline and farsightedness of the Mexican administration. President Miguel de la Madrid had devalued the peso so as to spare his successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, from having to make such a difficult decision. Echeverría had done the same for López Portillo, and López Portillo for de la Madrid.

Now, in 1995, this golden rule of Mexican politics—whereby the predecessor makes unpopular decisions and smooths the way for his successor—has been broken, with fatal results. But even if the rule had been maintained—that is, if Carlos Salinas had devalued the currency in November, as Ernesto Zedillo proposed—two of our most obvious problems would still be pending.

The first is the narrowness of the governing group, ever smaller and self-involved. Many of its members are graduates of Ivy League and eastern universities (Harvard, Yale, MIT). For them, the economy unfolds on a blackboard, never in real life; it is something that happens to statistics, not to flesh-and-blood men and women. This group is increasingly distanced from public opinion and the raw material of the nation. It holds out the promise of Adam Smith’s optimistic eighteenth-century definition of economics—the science of human happiness—and ends up confirming Thomas Carlyle’s pessimistic definition in the nineteenth: the dismal science.

The second problem is the unlimited power of the Mexican executive. Two ideas that are standard in Anglo-Saxon public law—accountability and checks and balances—are difficult to translate and virtually unknown among us. We must go back to the vocabulary of colonial law to find something like the concept of impeachment in the juicio de residencia, by which the Spanish Crown judged and held in check its royal officials in the Indies.

Everybody knows the magnitude of the Mexican economic crisis that ended our year of living dangerously. Policies to liberalize trade, reducing duties and tariffs, led to a wave of often frivolous imports far higher than our export capacity. Many small and medium-size industries went broke: the Mexican public prefers tennis shoes imported from the United States (albeit made in Hong Kong) to domestic shoes of higher quality. This is a triumph of status, of images of prestige, over economic reality. It is the result of incessant propaganda about the virtues of the First World, a universe inhabited by Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, in whom the India Bonita and the Indio Magdaleno, yearning and resentful alike, aspire to see themselves. It is a universal phenomenon. When the Albanian boat people reached the coast of Italy in 1992, their first question was “How do we get to Dallas?” Immigration authorities in Europe and the United States have no right to complain:

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