Home › Features › Essays › Mexico's Coming Backlash

Mexico's Coming Backlash

M. Delal Baer
July/August 1999
Summary -- 

Americans like to take the stability of their southern NAFTA partner for granted. But while things are going well in Mexico, a backlash is brewing. The end of one-party rule has brought chaos to Mexico as three political parties jockey for power in an atmosphere rife with recriminations and dirty tricks. If a minority government emerges from the 2000 elections, it could lose control of the country. Political violence remains a threat, and drug lords and rebel groups undermine the government. It all makes authoritarian solutions ever more attractive. Mexico must wake up before its many nightmares become reality.

M. Delal Baer is Director and Senior Fellow of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and editor of The NAFTA Debate.

Login or Register to leave a comment.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG

Americans tend not to think much about Mexico, home to their 100 million neighbors. When they do, most U.S. policymakers take the stability of their NAFTA partner for granted. Worst-case scenarios are rarely entertained; the danger signs are minimized or ignored.

There are many reasons to be optimistic as Mexico steps into the 21st century. The country has put the worst days of election fraud behind it and opposition parties have made steady inroads against the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Fiscal responsibility has become the norm, large chunks of the economy have been privatized, the central bank operates with great transparency, and NAFTA annually generates $174 billion in two-way trade. These transformations are all signs that a democratic free-market revolution is in process. So why worry?

The answer is that backlash too often follows revolution. It is no easy task liberalizing the oldest single-party regime in the world. The year 2000 will bring Mexico a presidential election that, amid rising civic sophistication and popular discontent, could oust the PRI for the first time in 70 years. This bespeaks progress in Mexico's ongoing democratization, but it will strain the country's fragile new institutions. Nor is it easy for the country that launched the first social revolution of the twentieth century to completely jettison statist ideology. Economic reforms have been only partially consolidated and so remain susceptible to swings in the political pendulum. Meanwhile, drug lords increase their power while revolutionaries, nostalgic for a Marxist past, struggle to establish their own. And the ghost of Luis Donaldo Colosio, a PRI presidential candidate assassinated in 1994, still haunts the landscape with the specter of political violence.

Mexico totters, pulled in one direction by the inertia of its authoritarian past and in another by the wobbly momentum of a democratic future that that is barely 11 years in the making. The sobering worst-case scenarios that follow are by no means inevitable. They are Mexico's nightmares: possible futures that could become real should the country fail to act or do so in the wrong way. But they must be taken very seriously. Together they show just how perilous are Mexico's opening, its transition to a free market, and its ongoing democratic revolution.

A CULTURE OF INTOLERANCE

This is a premium article

You must be a Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you are already a print subscriber, click here to activate your online access.

Buy PDF

Buy a premium PDF reprint of this article.

Related

Essay, Jan/Feb 2006
Furthering Democracy in Mexico
Enrique Krauze

As it approaches its first presidential election in the post-PRI era, Mexico is at a crossroads: it could either consolidate democracy and proceed with needed reforms or fall back into a familiar state of crisis. Which way it goes will depend above all on the candidates of the three major political parties, who must rise above their short-term interests to further the nation's progress toward democratic stability.

Read
Comment, Nov/Dec 1993
The Uncomfortable Truth about NAFTA: It's Foreign Policy, Stupid
Paul Krugman

To the United States, the labor and environmental costs of NAFTA would be minimal and the economic benefits real, but small. The trade agreement is really about helping a friendly and important neighbor in its yet uncompleted economic and political reform.

Read
Essay, Winter 1988
Latin America: The President's Agenda
Sol M. Linowitz

Recent and forthcoming elections in key Latin American countries come at a time when US relations with many states in the region are particularly uncertain. Discusses six areas which should be addressed by policy-makers (1) the debt crisis (2) the need for co-operation between the USA, Europe, Canada and Latin American countries in ending Central America's wars (3) support of democratic institutions (4) the drug problem (5) the need to rebuild inter-American institutions (6) relations with Mexico and Panama. Concludes that too much attention has been devoted to Nicaragua at the expense of greater concerns, although straightforward solutions are unlikely. Former US ambassador to the Organization of American States, and co-negotiator of the Panama Canal treaties. A substantial criticism of Reagan's policy in Central and South America, and interesting for its view of both regions as one.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
In the Quicksands of Somalia
Bronwyn Bruton

Washington's repeated attempts to bring peace to Somalia with state-building initiatives have failed, even backfired. It should renounce political intervention and encourage local development without trying to improve governance.
Read