Brand Mexico

I couldn’t have written a more succinct review than Elliot Brockner at Latin American Thought:

Roberto Newell Garcia of the Woodrow Wilson Center has published a great report titled “Restoring Mexico’s [International] Reputation.”

The basic premise of Newell’s argument is that Mexico is facing a number of problems, but that the one that gets far and away the most coverage – organized crime/drug-related violence – is not necessarily the most important. Citing successes across issues as disparate as improved health care/life expectancy and economic conditions that should be the envy of the BRICs, he implies that in many ways, things in Mexico are going well.

I heartily recommend Newell’s not overly long (about 40 pages) study of Mexican coverage by foreign (mostly U.S.) media, and its obsession with the “drug war” to the detriment of genuine Mexican successes.

HOWEVER… and there is always a catch… Restoring Mexico’s International Reputation assumes that various Calderon Administration initiatives should be included as the “good news,” which is not necessarily true.

I would certainly have expected a publication like the Wall Street Journal to have given more coverage to economic changes that benefit foreign investors, which is good news (or certainly, better news than the drumbeat of “drug war porn” suggests) but what Newell faults about business coverage is emphasis on some assumed deficiencies in the Mexican economy:

There are many reasons for this, but among the most pernicious are the unreasonably high cost of non-tradable goods (i.e. energy costs, telecoms), perverse incentive structures that cause the informal economy to grow at the expense of the formal economy where productivity levels are 30-40% higher, unresolved issues related to Mexico’s public finances that rely too heavily on oil revenues and impede the growth of infrastructure and issues related to the competitive structure of key sectors of the economy, including the labor market.

I think the report is excellent, but this assumption that the Calderon Administration proposals that — rather than strengthen the “formal economy” seek to legalize the “informal economy” — might not be considered positive steps (at least not in Mexico, although they might by the WSJ).  The reforms “related to the competitive structure  of… the labor market” coming from the administration seek to make it possible to legally hire workers by the hour (as opposed to today’s system under which those in the “formal economy” at least earn a theoretically living wage for their labor, no matter how many hours of actual work are included in the work day),  open the market to temporary and contract laborers and give management a much stronger hand in labor relations.

Energy costs aren’t particularly onerous, although with “green pricing” wasteful energy practices are costly.  Administration and opposition proposals to seriously consider alternative energy and energy savings policies maybe are more important news than carping about not following neo-liberal prescriptions.

As to oil revenues, it might not be what the north of the border press would like to hear, the news story was not that the changes were needed, but that the “reforms” proposed by the Administration simply were untenable.  One might argue that the dearth of coverage of the oil extraction reforms was made worse by failure to adequately cover alternative proposals and tax reforms that have been made to at least begin to lessen dependence on what so far is not really a declining revenue source, just a declining resource that has been over-exploited since the 1890s, and should be expected to decline.

Which, by no means, lessens the value of  Restoring Mexico’s International Reputation to understand the reason for misperceptions about this country.

I am much less taken with Jorge Castañeda’s sales pitch for his latest book, Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans, in Friday’s Los Angeles Times.  Castañeda, who as foreign secretary in the Fox Administration, pushed for closer diplomatic alignment with the United States and in A Future for Mexico opined that Mexico’s “problem” is its historical memory, is now arguing that Mexico’s problem is that it isn’t — like the United States — a culture that prizes competition above co-operation and compromise, and one that like the ahistorical United States SHOULD simply reinvent itself, and seek to “transform its cultural, psychological and spiritual reality in a generation”.

While perfectly true that those who emigrate to the United States “adapt to a new economic, social, political and legal environment, or their enormous effort and sacrifice go to naught.”  But that is true with any immigrant to any other country.  One adapts to the new culture or one doesn’t.

Castañeda, like Newell, sees the “good news” being overlooked, writing:

Today, Mexico has a middle class encompassing nearly 60% of the population; it has a functioning representative democracy; it enjoys the benefits and vicissitudes of an open economy; and it has become one of the world’s most globalized countries. One out of every nine Mexicans lives abroad (a higher proportion than any other nation except El Salvador and Ecuador), foreign trade represents well over half of its gross domestic product, tourism is its largest employer and more civilian Americans reside in Mexico than any other foreign country.

This is a tremendous success story…

A growing middle class, a functioning (more or less) representative democracy and maybe even an “open economy” and “globalization” may indeed be success markers, but I am sure that the reasons eleven percent of Mexicans live abroad is not.  And, I’m not sure an over-dependence on tourism (as opposed to a healthy internal market) or having a huge number of what are mostly foreign rentiers residing in the country is necessarily a “tremendous success story”.  A different story than that presented by the foreign media with its fixation on narcotics and its related ills, perhaps, but one that needs to be understood.  But, that story can only be understood within the context of that history Castañeda seems to believe we should all forget, and which the foreign media never learned.