RAMIN MAZAHERI—The story of “Mexico” – which is to say, of the entire nation – is one of a political unity and optimism which is statistically and culturally rather incredible in 2024. The OECD noted this prior to the vote: Mexicans have more economic optimism about the future than any other major economy in the world (they are tied with Costa Rica and bested only by Denmark). And then you have the results of the elections… what a story.
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FRED REED—He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed with garden trowels couldn’t possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious: Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk. You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk. Let’s think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face. To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly across it. You can’t police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force. A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn’t.
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FRED REED—Things are different, at first physically and then, as you begin to understand the place, profoundly. In any town you find a plaza, unlike any other plaza in any other town, and a church, unlike any other church. Both will be old. The local hotel will be locally owned, alive with color, idiosyncratic. Mexico was not designed at corporate. Nor was it designed by people whose interests were only money, efficiency, and the economy born of uniformity.
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TAMARA PEARSON—Biden called on the Cuban government to “refrain from violence” – a hypocritical stance given the police murders and repression in his own country. “We are assessing how we can be helpful to the people of Cuba,” said White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, using the savior discourse, but not considering repealing the sanctions.
Legendary billboard with Fidel’s encoraging words: “Onward. We’re doing fine!”
Meanwhile, US vice-president Kamala Harris has been making a show of helping Central America and Mexico by ostensibly addressing corruption and the “root causes” of migration in the region. Seven months into the year and no actual help has arrived, but she did tell migrants fleeing for their lives not to come to the US, and the US has kept its border closed – in stark violation of human rights and its own asylum seeker laws.
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JOAQUIN FLORES—Fundamentally, at the level of social ideology AMLO’s policies explode the myth that mass migration outside of natural disasters and calamities, is an inherent and positive feature of the human experience. It exposes the great lie that left to their own devices, people will inherently desire to uproot themselves and become a deracinated collection of individuals deprived of peoplehood and left only as atoms subject to consumerism. In reality, these are all negative aspects of globalization itself.
