Last night Chris Sabatini from the Council of the Americas and I joined Martin Savidge on WorldFocus to discuss the Obama administration’s policy toward Latin America. The conversation focused on natural resources, relations with Cuba, Venezuela and the war on drugs.
Despite the calm, Chile’s presidential election Sunday was one of the transformative political moments in Latin America in recent years. This transformation did not entail street demonstrations, a new constitution or the introduction of 21st-century socialism–yet it was no less radical. Chile has transitioned toward a more pluralistic democracy and away from two decades of electoral dominance by the Concertación–a coalition of mostly Socialists, Radicals and Christian Democrats forged in opposition to the Pinochet military government (1973-1989).
Right-leaning Alianza candidate Sebastián Piñera won the first-round December vote, outpacing Concertación candidate Eduardo Frei by nearly 15 percentage points. Sunday, by a closer margin, Piñera pulled another victory, making him the first elected conservative Chilean leader in several decades.
This was not an election driven by issues or ideology: Both candidates promised to continue Chile’s market-friendly macroeconomic policies and its popular social welfare programs. Instead it was driven by personal stories. Piñera presented himself as an entrepreneur who would foster greater innovation and competitiveness; Frei as a wise, experienced former president (he led the country from 1994 to 2000).
Piñera’s victory suggests a new era for Chile’s politics. It signifies that the right has finally emerged from the shadow of Pinochet’s military dictatorship to become a viable electoral alternative once more, able to lead an open and dynamic country without a fear of backsliding into the past. It is the end of the pro/anti Pinochet political divide–the guiding cleavage of Chile’s politics since the 1970s.
The Concertación’s loss is also in some ways the result of its successes. While many talk of the economic growth and stability brought by Pinochet’s reforms, it is the policies and actions of the governing Concertación coalition that have truly transformed Chile into a modern state. These successive governments–through sound macroeconomic management combined with the creation of a broad social safety net–succeeded in reducing Chile’s poverty rate from nearly 40% in 1990 to just under 14% today (nearly equivalent to U.S. rates). Chile’s now much larger middle class is more politically independent, and Piñera openly wooed this cohort–ultimately successfully.
While highlighting the diminishing role of Chile’s old political fracture, this election also highlighted a new divide–that between the old and the young. While Frei and Piñera came firmly from the old guard, the spectacular rise of Marco Enriquez-Ominami, a 36-year-old filmmaker and former congressman with the Socialist party, upended politics as usual. He became the most successful independent candidate in Chilean history, winning 20% of the first round votes. His strength lay in an emerging middle class focused on the future and open to political change. Whether we see an Enriquez-Ominami candidacy again in four years, this will surely be the last election where the leading candidates’ formative years occurred under the Pinochet regime.
But Chile’s future political challenge will be how to engage its younger generations. Unlike their parents, seared by the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s, Chile’s youth is politically apathetic. Less than 10% of 18- to 29-year-olds are even registered to vote. Many older citizens are also disillusioned. Polls show that 60% of the population believes that none of the candidates–or their parties–represent their ideas well. As the leftist Concertación tries to recreate a winning strategy and the right Alianza looks to deepen its victory, opening up the political system is vital. Chileans are demanding new approaches and more diversity. This election shows us that after decades of dominance by first the right and then the left, Chile’s politics are now up for grabs.
This op-ed first appeared on Forbes.com
Philip Caputo paints a grim picture of Mexico’s current war on drugs in which appears in the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic. His pessimism reflects more than just skyrocketing murders in places such as Ciudad Juarez, or the seeming inability of the local police forces and courts to get to the bottom of these crimes. His chief concern revolves around Mexico’s military.
Caputo suggests that the military is in cahoots with the drug cartels today, much as they were in the past. Laying out what he can piece together from the few wary interviewees willing to speak to him, he depicts an independent military dismissive of human rights in the best case, and a military turned cartel in the worst. With both the Calderon and the U.S. government pinning their hopes in the war on drugs on this military, either scenario is bad news.
However corrupt the military is today, there is a fundamental difference from the earlier parallels he poses, and these differences matter for Mexico’s future. In the 1980s the secretary of defense was found to be working with no less than three drug cartels, and in the 1990s Mexico’s “drug czar” was discovered to be on the payroll of the Juarez cartel. But these incidences were part of a larger systematic relationship between drug traffickers and the long-standing ruling political party, the PRI. The military’s past drug ties can’t be seen in isolation from an organized system of control and enrichment constructed by the PRI that also encompassed the police, courts, and politicians.
Today, it isn’t that corruption has ended. But it is no longer as centralized and coordinated as in the past. Democratization opened up not just the political system to different political parties, but also the illicit economy – effectively ending the unwritten contracts that existed for years between the PRI and particular drug traffickers.
What this means is that corruption in the military today is more autonomous than in the past – not linked to a larger system, not controlled or checked by any political party, and perhaps not coming from the top of the chain of command. For some, this may be even worse news – well armed forces with no master. But, this shift may also mean that it is now much more possible to attack corruption – whether in the military or other parts of the government. With each pocket today no longer part of the larger functioning of an authoritarian system, a focused combination of vetting, training, prosecution, and long-term institution building could yield results. Mexico’s corruption remains a very difficult, but no longer insurmountable problem. And the current democratic political dynamic – forcing politicians to appeal to voters – may increase the chances that the Mexican government goes down a different road.
This better outcome is by no means guaranteed. It will take an incredible amount of work and resources over a long period of time. But the underlying dynamics today are quite different, and they provide Mexico – and the United States –an opportunity so that in ten years another journalist will not be writing a similar “Fall of Mexico” story.
Along with my own views on U.S.-Latin America relations, you can find writings from Peter Hakim, President of the Inter-American Dialogue, and Amb. Paul D. Taylor, Senior Strategic Researcher at the Naval War College. Assuming Arturo Valenzuela will in fact be confirmed now that Congress is back in session, he will be soon facing the many issues we discussed – public security, sustainable energy, economic advancement, and hemispheric migration among others.
Mexico City’s Zocalo, its main square, is the center of its history, its commerce, and its politics. Encompassing one side is Mexico’s largest Catholic cathedral, built on the ruins of an Aztec temple. On another stands its National Palace, once home to Spanish viceroys, to French-designated Emporer Maximilian I, and to dozens of Mexican presidents. This majestic building boasts the famous 1930s Diego Rivera mural “Epic of the Mexican People – Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” which depicts the sweep of Mexican history from the Aztecs through the Spanish conquest, from independence to the Mexican Revolution, and Rivera’s future aspirations for a workers’ utopia. Decades later, across the courtyard, lies Mexico’s Finance Ministry, modern Mexico’s hallmark of orthodox market economics.
Across from the National Palace sits one of the colonial seats of commerce, today filled with jewelry shops and two prominent hotels. Until very recently the streets and sidewalks of the Zocalo teamed with street vendors and day laborers, offering up their wares and skills – making symbolic Mexico’s center a center for its vast informal labor market.
Mexico City’s Zocalo is also the center of Mexico’s politics. Each year the President comes out on the central balcony to give the grito – celebrating Mexico’s indepdendence day. It is also the epicenter of conflict. It is here in 1938 that President Lázaro Cárdenas announced the nationalization of Mexico’s oil to an overwhelming crowd. In 1988, during the first truly contested Presidential elections of the century, thousands of Cuahtemoc Cardenas’ followers convened to protest election fraud. In 2001, followers of the Zapatistas used this same space to demand greater political autonomy. During the tense weeks after the 2006 Presidential election, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s swore himself in as President in front of thousands of his supporters. Just last year, the Zócalo was filled to capacity during a country-wide protest against crime.
Two recent events point to the vast transformations occurring in Mexico today. The first occurred in May 2007 when New York photographer Spencer Tunick convened a gathering of nearly 20,000 Mexicans on a cool Sunday morning to pose for photographs – naked. Turnout far surpassed similar events held in presumably more liberal cities of Amsterdam, New York, Montreal, and Barcelona. The enthusiastic shedding of inhibitions by the thousands not only created a series of beautiful photographs, but also hint at the seismic cultural, political, and economic shifts occurring in Mexico today.
This last weekend the Zocalo was scheduled to act as a backdrop for a culturally interesting event (though in the end the event was held just up the road in front of the Monument of the Revolution). Thirteen thousand dancers,most in costume, convened to break the Guinness book of world records for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” reenactment.
That this would occur in Mexico highlights the power of globalization. And, perhaps less dramatically, it points to the many moments of intense fun living within one of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities.
What are the 6 books you find most useful in thinking about Mexican politics? Foreign Affairs asked me for my list. I’d be interested in yours…
Mexico’s rise on the American foreign policy agenda should not come as a surprise. Over the last generation, deepening business, personal, cultural, and community relations have drawn the two countries closer together. Trade between them has tripled, with Mexico becoming the United States’ third-largest commercial partner. Flows of people, always part of the bilateral relationship, skyrocketed: over four million Mexican citizens have headed north in the last decade, while over a million U.S. citizens have migrated south, forming the largest nonmilitary community of American expatriates in the world. At the start of the twenty-first century, Mexico is still forging its political, economic, and social identity. It has undergone a true democratic transformation, and its three political parties now compete in clean and transparent elections. But it remains unclear whether Mexico will follow a path of growth, stability, and market-based democracy or one of instability, corruption, and crime. What is certain is that understanding Mexico — where it came from, how it got there, and where it might be headed — is vital to U.S. interests.
Politics in Mexico: The Democratic Consolidation. By Roderic Ai Camp. Oxford University Press, 2006.
In this book, now in its fifth edition, Roderic Ai Camp, one of the preeminent scholars of Mexican politics, deftly guides readers through more than 200 years of political evolution in Mexico, analyzing the events and concerns that created the Mexican state one sees today and exploring both the continuities and changes in that state’s relationship with societal organizations and interests. Camp focuses on Mexico’s extended transition to democracy, including reforms to the electoral process, the expansion of political participation, and the subsequent shifts in power among the various branches of government. Those interested in delving deeper can consult Camp’s specialized works on many of the themes presented, such as the recruitment of political leadership and popular political attitudes. But Politics in Mexico, drawing on decades of experience and innovative research, provides a comprehensive overview of the main issues and forces affecting the country today.
Mexico: Biography of Power. By Enrique Krauze. HarperCollins, 1997.
This exhaustive history, written by one of Mexico’s best-known intellectuals, chronicles nearly two centuries of Mexican politics, from independence to the early 1990s. After identifying major themes underlying the country’s political and social identity — its colonial legacy, its mestizo population, and the early power of the church — Enrique Krauze turns to a leader-driven historical narrative, examining the lives of Mexico’s various strongmen and presidents, who, from the battlefield to the executive office, shaped Mexico’s political development. This personalized dynamic has faded with democratization, but the memory and vestiges of it remain relevant in Mexican politics today.
Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy. By Julia Preston and Sam Dillon. Macmillan, 2005.
Written by Julia Preston and Sam Dillon, the New York Times correspondents covering Mexico in the late 1990s, this readable narrative provides a thoughtful analysis of the country’s democratic opening. Spanning the period from the devastating 1985 earthquake in Mexico City to the 2000 presidential elections, the authors investigate the economic changes, security threats, and political intrigue crucial to understanding the shifts that occurred in Mexican politics. The book explores the many pressures on the old one-party PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) system, the individuals and organizations that pushed for change, and the events leading up to democracy’s final breakthrough: the election of the opposition PAN (National Action Party) presidential candidate Vicente Fox.
First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the Twenty-First Century. By David Lida. Riverhead, 2008.
Spanning 570 square miles and home to more than 20 million people, Mexico City is the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere. Even as federalism has decentralized power to Mexico’s states, the capital remains the political, cultural, and economic center of the nation. In this journalistic account, David Lida offers many telling vignettes that capture politics, culture, and life in el D.F., the federal district. He lays out the intricacies of Mexico’s economic inequalities, its sex and age discrimination, its traffic jams, and its deep-seated corruption. But he also illuminates the thriving high- and low-brow art scenes, from well-respected galleries and theaters to lucha libre (Mexico’s version of professional wrestling). Lida explores the country’s cabarets, cantinas, and street food, as well as the coexistence of traditional markets and Wal-Marts that make the city — and Mexico — what it is now.
The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict. By Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro. Routledge, 2001.
At the turn of the twentieth century, strongman Porfirio Díaz lamented, “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States.” Some still share that view, but whatever the tone of bilateral relations, all would agree that Mexican politics cannot be understood in isolation from the United States. Expertly dissecting the complicated relationship of these two neighbors, Jorge Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro analyze the impact of the end of the Cold War, internal changes within Mexico and the United States, and the creation and strengthening of bilateral and multilateral institutions over the last two decades. The authors show how these multiple factors led to closer ties in areas as diverse as security, the economy, and the border.
The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11. By Edward Alden. Harper, 2008.
Mexico’s possible futures cannot be fully understood without a thorough comprehension of U.S. concerns over and approaches to border management. Edward Alden skillfully investigates the transformations of U.S. border policy since 9/11 — in particular, the rise of immigration enforcement as the predominant means of protecting the United States against further terrorist attacks. This shift has had strong repercussions for Mexico, because of the 2,000-mile-long border it shares with the United States, its estimated ten million citizens living in El Norte, and the deep economic and social links between many U.S. and Mexican communities. It also has had significant consequences for policymakers trying to develop more effective bilateral relations, as this mindset influences approaches to issues of organized crime, trade and economic development, and the health and safety of populations on both sides of the border.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr user kgardinger.)
For those of you who may prefer to read in Spanish, my Foreign Affairs article on Mexico has been translated and appears in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Latinoamerica, which you can find here.
President Obama has recognized that Mexico should be a high priority for his administration. In the issue of Foreign Affairs that hit the newsstands today I argue that U.S. and Mexican interests will be best met if the United States goes beyond the current focus on border control and support for Mexico’s public safety institutions and pursues a more ambitious goal: supporting Mexico’s democracy. I hope you enjoy reading it and look forward to any comments you may have.
(Photo: Presidents Barack Obama and Felipe Calderon at Los Pinos. Courtesy of El Enigma at Flickr.)
How Venezuela came to claim the region’s highest murder rate.
Mention violence in Latin America today and most people think of Mexico. But if you want to talk about murder, the region’s hot spot is somewhere else entirely: Venezuela. After a decade under President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s homicide rate has increased by about 140 percent, making Venezuela one of the most violent countries in the world. Even in the context of Latin America, where homicide rates hover at three times the global average, Venezuela now holds top rank — by far the highest in South America, with a violent death rate of 48 per 100,000 — more than twice that of Mexico. These murders occur mostly at night and spike every two weeks around payday. Young people are increasingly the victims, three times more likely to be killed today than 10 years ago.
Not surprisingly, Venezuelans see crime and public safety as the No. 1 challenge for their country. According to Latinobarometer, a well-regarded regional polling agency, Venezuela is the only Latin American country where crime is cited as both the most important national and personal issue. The violence was a major issue in last November’s regional elections, with both Chavistas and opposition leaders blaming their opponents for the scourge. Perhaps unsure who was culpable, voters split their allegiance and the vote was a draw.
See the entire article at Foreign Policy Passport here.
I wrote the following for a CFR “expert brief” which originally appeared here.
Brazen assassinations, kidnappings, and political intimidation by drug lords conjure up images of Colombia in the early 1990s. Yet today, it is Mexico that is being engulfed by escalating violence. In 2007, drug related killings topped 2,250; in 2008 they reached nearly 6,000. Drug cartels are adopting guerrilla-style tactics – sending heavily-armed paramilitary battalions to attack police stations, ambush military brigades, and assassinate high-level security officials, political officials, and journalists. They also are adopting innovative public relations strategies to encourage recruits and intimidate their enemies and the population in general: hanging narcomantas–drug banners–in public places, placing videos on YouTube depicting gruesome murders, and more recently staging street protests against the military’s presence in some of Mexico’s largest cities and most violent regions.
Mexico’s drug business has changed significantly since the 1980s. Previously primarily middlemen, Mexican drug cartels now produce, transport, and distribute drugs. Every year over 500 metric tons of cocaine, 15,500 metric tons of marijuana, 18 metric tons of heroin, and a still unknown amount of methamphetamines make their way through Mexico into the United States. These cartels also supply Mexico’s growing domestic market for illegal substances, and their networks have become increasingly sophisticated. U.S. and Mexican interdiction efforts in the last two decades weeded out mom-and-pop operations, leading drug trafficking organizations to professionalize their operations and add former Mexican military officials, some of them U.S.-trained commandos, to their payrolls. They also diversified their business structures, adding new products (such as meth) and moving into U.S.-based distribution and production. [ Read More ]
