"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States."
-- Porfirio Diaz
Last weekend orojas@data.net.mx (Octavio Rojas Diaz) made some comments about
the relationship of Mexico and the US. I have spent quite a bit of time
working and playing in Mexico and I really love it, but I also despair at the
terrible inertia of the past there, and the bad social pathologies that are
developing in its pattern of "modernization" in relation to the US. (In this
regard, I highly commend Carlos Fuentes' book "Buried Mirror".) The two most
negative phenomena I see in Mexico's trajectory of modernization are the
propagation of traditional governmental corruption through drug smuggling and
the development of "crony capitalism" in the business classes of the big
cities. Both are examples of a severely truncated functioning of civil
society, in which traditional personalistic patron-client relationships
predominate over the rule of law. In my opinion the two most important
things that real reformers in Mexico should concentrate on are the
encouragement of social transparency and the development of vigorous values
of an independent judiciary that embraces the notion of individual liberty.
The problem, of course, is that gringos doing business in Mexico tend to take
a short view of their immediate interests and take advantage of the existing
local personalistic patron-client relationships, "going along to get along".
This has the very bed effect of simply amplifying the worst aspects of
Mexican society, reinforcing the power of entrenched elites and doing nothing
to open the country up to real progress. Even among Mexico's intellectuals,
this problem takes on a kind of perverse reverse effect: Transparency and the
rule of law seem to be unconsciously identified as "Anglo" values and people
who embrace them come to be identified as somehow disloyal. Breaking this
vicious cycle of American exploitation of the worst characteristics of
Mexican society needs to be the numero uno priority for relations across the
Rio Grande.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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