An untimely cold finally gave me a chance to watch The Godfather (I and II)—30 years late, but just in time for fitting juxtapositions. I spent my down time sleeping, reading news about Mexico’s ongoing narco-cartel bloodbath, and reviewing former U.S. Amb. Jeffrey Davidow’s book, The Bear and the Porcupine. Most poignant were the similarities...
To paraphrase one observer of Albanians, “Mexico is not a society with corruption; Mexico is a corrupt society.” Mexico has been undergoing a social crisis since the end of the Partido Revolutionario Institucional’s 71-year monopoly on political power. Gone is the state’s patronage of competing interests, populism that succeeded by co-opting all opponents. The coffers...
SLOW TRAFFIC RIGHT LANE. It is a simple concept if you are literate and socially conscious. Consideration for others, however—the idea that you are not alone in the world and that it does not belong exclusively to you—is not an inborn value, but one taught by family and society. The realization that, while we may...
Behind the recent headlines here in Mexico of massive peasant protests, blocked highways and international crossings, and demands for NAFTA treaty renegotiation lay a few facts about incompetence, corruption, and inefficiency. The rural sector has brought its disputes to the Big Tamale—as if Mexico City’s 21 million inhabitants did not have enough headaches and two-hour-long...
After decades of outward socio-cultural differences and political animosity, North America’s two United States—north and south of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo—are becoming more socially homogenous than some would care to admit. Mexico’s economic disparity has been the most extreme in all of Latin America, a social stratification described by George Baker as “equivalent to the...