Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

 After a long period of the neoliberal restructuring, Latin American turned left in the early 20th century:  not radically left, but moderately so, hence the appellation of “the pink tide” to refer to the governments across most of the region that ideologically rejected neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus while presiding over the expansion of their primary goods sectors. Their distinctive policy innovation was to tax their extractive sectors more heavily (and, in some cases, to expand state participation within them) and redistribute these tax revenues to their citizens in the form of higher social spending, infrastructure investment and development projects. Pink tide governments achieved significant progress in poverty reduction as long as global commodity prices were high, but once these sank, then so did the pink tide.   Progressive governments across the region lost elections or were driven from power.   One is left to wonder if the pink tide was made p...

Back the 1990s, a post-development literature emerged from a variety of different sources  Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Karl Polanyi, and others - as a critique of both development practice and Western modernity - on the view that both development and Western modernity are failed projects.  The future requires something else and maybe that something else can be found around the edges of the development project.  State making in Latin America, though, went in a very different direction:  toward embracing extractivism as a mode of development through which progressive states could capture some of the economic surpluses of primary goods production and redistribute them to the poor.  The resulted, quipped one observer, would be a hydrocarbon charged social democracy.  What I would like to review here today are several of the Latin American critiques of this model of development.  This is a renewal of post-development thought, now tied to the critique of progressiv...

The political right in Mexico is engaged in lawfare - an attempt to use its power within Mexico’s legal and electoral institutions - in order to boost the electoral prospects of the opposition parties in Mexico’s midterm elections.  Writing in The Jacobin, Kurt Hackbarth discusses the way in which federal courts have been willing to handout amparos - blocking key government policies, particularly AMLOS energy policies which have been focused on AMLO’s Energy Reform Act.  Hackbrath has a previous article on the Energy Reform Act , which is focused on reversing the privatization of Mexico’s energy infrastructure, which, under PRIAN rule (the term refers to the neoliberal consensus that emerged between the PAN and the PRI in Mexico since the 1980s), had been overrun by foreign corporations irrationally supplying Mexico with what it already had plenty of:  energy.  It is interesting to note, in this regard, that the February freeze that gripped Texas also affected No...