Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

This topic addresses the geopolitics of Mexico.  One thinks that Mexico is part of the U.S. backyard.  The backyard may be outside the exceptional space of American identity, but one might say the same for the "inner city" in the United States.  Besides, no matter how foreign it might be, it is still our backyard. This is even more the case since the implantation of a neoliberal order in Mexico, beginning with the debt crisis of the early 1980s, extending through NAFTA in the mid 1990s and Pena Nieto's Pacto por Mexico in 2013.  In the discourse of U.S. policy makers, the neoliberal order is nothing less than "our globalization", which we should be willing to defend.  Or, in the words of Thomas Shannon (formerly of the U.S. State Department), the United States has achieved economic integration with Mexico and now it must defend that achievement; it must, in effect, "armor NAFTA."  But from whom? The answer back in 1994 when NAFTA went to effect...

Here is an interesting article on Mexico and Brazil's energy sectors ( https://nacla.org/news/2018/04/20/fueling-elections-mexico-and-brazil ) from the invaluable Report on the Americas. Both Mexico and Brazil have large energy sectors that have been dominated, until recently, by state owned firms (PEMEX in Mexico and Petrobras in Brazil). Both countries have elections this year and, in both, there is the possibility of a left wing victory. In Mexico, Pena Nieto, the current PRI president, has been privatizing some of PEMEX's reserves, auctioning them off to multinational energy corporations. Pena Nieto also abruptly cut off domestic subsidies for gasoline (leaving consumers with higher prices), which hardened already widespread public opposition to energy privatization. National ownership of oil has long been a symbol of Mexican national sovereignty. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has a commanding lead in Mexico's presidential elections. AMLO's energy policy...

Just reading John Ackerman essay in Proceso this morning on how the Mexican Federal Election Commission has certified that two minor candidates - Jaime Rodriquez Calderon or "El Bronco", the governor of Nuevo Leon, and Margarita Zavala, the wife of former president Calderon - were added to the presidential ballot in spite of their failure to gather enough signatures and the irregularities associated with the signatures they collected. Ackerman draws two conclusions from these decisions. First, these minor candidates will take votes away from Andres Manual Lopez Portillo (or AMLO), the current front runner in Mexico's presidential elections, and second, there is a block of four judges in the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion (TEPJF), who may be prepared to overturn the results of the 2018 elections in order to keep AMLO from coming to power. Here is a link to the essay: https://www.proceso.com.mx/530781/estalinismo-electoral . Just a bit of backg...

Hello to everyone and most particularly the students in my Politics of Mexico course this summer, both virtual and real time.  The real time students are part of a study abroad experience.  We will be in Mexico this summer from July 6 to July 21, studying the outcomes of the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico and producing a documentary on Mexican perspectives on politics, which we are calling "Mexico the Other Side of the Wall." I am hopeful that his blog will serve to connect the virtual and real time classes and give people access to commentary on political developments in Mexico.    I think about this project in relationship to the concept of the subaltern from post-colonial studies.  The subaltern are subjugated groups, the victims of class domination, (neo)colonial domination, or both.  Who cares about the subaltern? The subaltern exists in order to be acted upon, not to act in its own right. This is one way of making sense of the absence of Me...