Además Michael Reid, el editor y autor del informe puede ser escuchado en una entrevista de poco más de cinco minutos.
Time to wake up
Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, must resume reforms and set the economy free—or risk backsliding, says Michael Reid
“WAKE up, wake up, my dear, the dawn has broken, the birds are singing and the moon has set.” Thus go the lyrics of Las Mañanitas, the Mexican equivalent of Happy Birthday, belted out every day in restaurants and homes across the country, often by troupes of mariachi musicians in full regalia. The verse seemed particularly appropriate as Mexico celebrated its 196th birthday on September 15th—the anniversary of the day when Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest, called for independence from Spanish colonial rule. Mexico gives every impression of sleeping while the world changes around it. Having seemed to embrace globalisation—favoured by its geography, on the doorstep of the world's largest consumer market—the country risks slipping back into internecine conflict and introversion.
Six years ago the election as president of Vicente Fox (pictured left) completed a long transition to democracy, ending 72 years of authoritarian rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It also seemed to set the seal on the economic modernisation of the world's largest Spanish-speaking country, with a population of 106m. After Mexico went bankrupt in the debt crisis of 1982, the last three PRI presidents cast aside protectionism and state capitalism, most notably Carlos Salinas (in office 1988-94), who led his country into the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. Mr Fox, a former head of Coca-Cola's Mexican operations, pledged further economic liberalisation and reform.
Mr Fox's government can look back on a number of achievements for which his many domestic critics give him insufficient credit. In recent years the country has enjoyed greater political freedom than perhaps at any other time in its history. The government has maintained economic and financial stability, with inflation for this year estimated at 3.7%. Easier bank credit, together with a vast housebuilding programme promoted by the government, is slowly bringing tangible benefits to an expanding middle class. Social policies have helped to cut poverty.
Even so, many of the hopes raised by Mr Fox were dashed. He lacked a majority in Congress and proved unable to win approval for any big reforms. Instead of the annual growth of 7% he had promised, the economy has limped along at an average of just 2.5% since 2000. The government's finances look better than they are, helped by extra oil revenues equal to 2% of GDP. “Fox has fallen asleep in a hammock of oil money,” says Liébano Sáenz, who was chief of staff to Ernesto Zedillo, the last of the PRI presidents (1994-2000).
Labour productivity is low and growing only slowly. Oil apart, Mexico's exports to the United States are losing market share to China's. Some of the social policies have reduced the incentive for millions of small businesses to put themselves on a proper legal footing. That is only one symptom of a wider absence of the rule of law. Another is mounting violence from drug gangs.
On top of all this, Mexico's politics have suddenly become much more complicated and confrontational. The campaign ahead of the presidential election on July 2nd was dominated by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As mayor of Mexico City, he had made himself popular by providing pensions for the elderly and public works. Standing for a centre-left coalition, he took his fiery oratory to the public plaza in a country where politics has long been dominated by backroom deals. But he was pipped at the post by Felipe Calderón, the candidate of Mr Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN). Mr Calderón won 35.9% of the vote against Mr López Obrador's 35.3%, a margin of just 233,831 votes out of almost 42m. The PRI's Roberto Madrazo polled a meagre 22.2%.
To many Mexicans, the election appeared to highlight their country's divisions and to call its growing globalisation into question. Mr López Obrador spent his formative years in the PRI. He left it in the late 1980s when the economic nationalists in the party lost out to the free-market technocrats. Though many of his economic policies were mild enough, he inveighed strongly against poverty and privilege. To his detractors, he seemed to stand for a return to the authoritarian populism practised by the PRI in the 1970s. Nothing in his life suggested any interest in or knowledge of the world beyond Mexico.
Apart from one brief wobble, in the run-up to the election Mr López Obrador was always ahead in the opinion polls. But he made mistakes, insulting Mr Fox and staying away from the first of two campaign debates. Some of the economic policies he proclaimed stirred fears of a return to financial instability. He was also the target of a smear campaign. Mr Calderón dubbed him “a danger to Mexico”, comparing him to Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez. Mr Fox, along with Mexico's richest businessmen, weighed in on Mr Calderón's behalf.
So when the vote unexpectedly went against him, Mr López Obrador and his backers felt robbed. They cried fraud, though they never produced any convincing evidence, and called for “civil resistance” against the electoral authorities. For seven weeks the beaten candidate's supporters camped out in the centre of Mexico City, occupying the Zócalo, the great square that has been the heart of the city since Aztec times, and blocking Reforma, its grandest avenue. “To hell with your institutions,” declared Mr López Obrador.
Even the independence celebration on September 15th was overshadowed by the post-election conflict. Mr Fox chose to mark the occasion in his (and Hidalgo's) home state, leaving the traditional venue, the Zócalo, to Mr López Obrador's people for the evening. After a final rally of his supporters at which he vowed to proclaim himself the “legitimate president”, Mr López Obrador suspended his protests. But he said he would not recognise Mr Calderón when the new president formally takes over on December 1st.
In “The Labyrinth of Solitude”, his classic study of the Mexican character, Octavio Paz noted that his countrymen habitually mask painful realities, hiding more than they reveal. Mr López Obrador's claim to be leading a mass social movement for democracy against a “usurper”, Mr Calderón, fits in with that tradition. Mr López Obrador recalled a long history of electoral fraud under the PRI. He drew a particular parallel with 1988, when Mr Salinas was declared president after the computers counting the votes had “crashed” while showing an early lead for his leftist challenger, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
The parallel was askew. In 1988 the electoral authority was the Minister of the Interior. But a decade ago, with the agreement of all the parties, Mexico set up independent electoral institutions. According to those independent bodies, two counts of the ballots (and a partial recount of 9% of them) all showed the same narrow lead for Mr Calderón. The election produced the best-ever haul of congressmen for Mr López Obrador's centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The electoral tribunal did find that the interventions of Mr Fox and the business groups were technical violations of the electoral law, but no other democracy would worry about such things.
Most of the people camped on Reforma, far from constituting an independent social movement, were cogs in the political machine built by the former mayor. The protest had the backing of the Mexico City government. “It's not the people v the powers that be. It is the powers that be,” quipped Jorge Castañeda, a political scientist who was the first foreign minister in Mr Fox's government.
The biggest irony of all is that as former members of the PRI, several of Mr López Obrador's closest collaborators were complicit in the fraudulent campaigns of the past. The protests were “the rebellion the PRI didn't do in 2000” when it lost power to Mr Fox, says Héctor Aguilar Camín, a historian. “Alternation in power had happened very cheaply for us. It's the first protest against this young democracy, done by the ex-Priistas of the PRD.”
Mr López Obrador's attempt to emulate Evo Morales, the Bolivian president who toppled two predecessors by organising street demonstrations, seems to have backfired. Polls show that if the election were held today, Mr Calderón would win by a comfortable margin. On October 15th the PRD lost a gubernatorial election in Mr López Obrador's home state of Tabasco even though he went to campaign for his party.
All that said, Mr López Obrador's campaign laid bare many Mexicans' deep sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. And Mr Calderón, having won the narrowest of victories, has had to rearrange his priorities. He now lists these as job creation, the fight against poverty and public security; at the start of the campaign they came in the reverse order. “Pragmatically, I'm interested in winning over a part of the electorate that wasn't with me and whose concerns were much more centred on poverty,” he said in an interview for this survey.
The first question raised by the election and its messy aftermath is whether Mr Calderón can govern Mexico. The second is whether he can restore it to a path of democratic progress and rapid economic growth. This survey will argue that, contrary to appearances, he has an extraordinary opportunity to do both—but only by being far bolder than his predecessor in tackling the many vestiges of the old order that are still holding the country back. Many of these involve monopoly power, public and private, political and economic. They cover a broad range: from the teachers' union to Pemex, the state oil monopoly, and Telmex, a private telecoms near-monopoly. It is these bastions of unaccountable power, rather than Mr López Obrador's antics, that are the real threat to Mr Calderón's government and to Mexico as a whole.
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