Pubdate: Sun, 2 May 2010
Page: WK10
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Mexico

NARCOS, NO'S AND NAFTA

This is a strange time for U.S.-Mexico relations. The Mexican 
government just issued a travel advisory warning Mexicans about going 
to Arizona -- where they could get arrested by the police for no 
reason -- and the U.S. government just issued a travel advisory 
warning Americans about going to northern Mexico -- where they could 
get shot by drug dealers for no reason. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart de Mexico 
is expected to open 300 new stores in Mexico this year, thanks to 
growing Mexican demand for consumer goods. And Mexico's drug cartels 
will probably open just as many new smuggling routes into America 
thanks to our growing demand for marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth.

We take the Mexican-American relationship for granted. But with the 
drug wars in Mexico turning into Wild West shootouts on city streets 
and with our own immigration politics turning more heated, what's 
happening in Mexico has become much more critical to American foreign 
policy and merits more of our attention. Mexico is not Afghanistan, 
but it also has not become all that it hoped to be by now. Something 
feels stalled here.

Three groups are now wrestling to shape Mexico's future. I'd call 
them "the Narcos," "the No's" and "the Naftas." Root for the Naftas.

The Narcos are the drug cartels who are now brazenly attacking each 
other in turf wars and challenging the state for control of towns. 
The success of U.S. and Colombian efforts to interdict drug 
trafficking through the Caribbean and north from Colombia have pushed 
the cartels to relocate their main smuggling up through the spine of 
Mexico. President Felipe Calderon is bravely trying to take them on, 
but the Narcos have bigger guns than the Mexican Army -- most 
smuggled in from U.S. gun stores.

The Mexican daily Reforma reported last week that "the recent wave of 
insecurity in Mexico has made businesses related to public security, 
automobile armoring, insurance, satellite positioning systems and 
bulletproof vests grow at an unprecedented level." Companies in 
Mexico, it added, now invest between 1 percent and 3 percent of their 
sales in security. In 2006, it was just 0.5 percent.

While the Narcos are the rising bad-news story here, the rising 
good-news story is Mexico's burgeoning middle class -- sort of. 
Mexico has two middle classes. One lives off the oil pumped and 
exported by the state oil company Pemex, which funds 40 percent of 
the government's budget. That budget sustains a web of salaries and 
subsidies to teachers' unions, national electricity company workers, 
farmers unions, state employees and Pemex workers.

I call this group the No's because they are the primary force 
opposing any reform that would involve privatizing state-owned 
companies, like Pemex, opening the oil or electricity sectors to 
foreign investors or domestic competition, or bringing best-practices 
and accountability to Mexican schools, where union control has kept 
Mexico's public education among the worst in the world.

Fortunately, though, there is another rising middle class here, which 
the Mexican economist Luis de la Calle describes as the "meritocratic 
middle class." It's people who came from the countryside to work in 
new industries spawned by Nafta. This rising middle class has a 
powerful aspiration to dig out of poverty. Mexico has standardized 
school achievement tests, so you can see how well schools in one 
neighborhood stack up against another. Some of the best results, said 
de la Calle, can now be found in small private schools in poor Mexico 
City neighborhoods where the Naftas reside.

What is also striking, he added, are the names of the private schools 
in some of these poor Mexico City districts -- like Iztapalapa: "They 
are called John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, Winston 
Churchill, Carlos Marx, Van Gogh and Instituto Wisdom." Why such 
names? They are appealing to the aspirations of Mexicans, about 40 
percent of whom live below the poverty line but 75 percent of whom 
identify themselves as "middle class" in polls.

De la Calle also studied the top 50 Mexican baby names in 2008. The 
most popular for girls, he said, included "Elizabeth, Evelyn, 
Abigail, Karen, Marilyn and Jaqueline, and for boys Alexander, 
Jonathan, Kevin, Christian and Bryan." Not only Juans. "We have two 
middle classes," he said. "One comes from teachers' unions and Pemex 
and power companies, who milk the Mexican government. These are the 
middle-class conservatives, and they want to preserve the status quo. 
But there is a rising and far larger Mexican middle class coming up 
from the bottom who send their kids to the Instituto Wisdom and who 
have a meritocratic view of the world."

So here's my prediction: When Mexico's steadily falling oil 
production meets its rising meritocratic middle class, you will see 
real political/economic reform here. That is when the No's will no 
longer have the resources to maintain the status quo, and that is 
when the Naftas from the Instituto Wisdom will demand the reforms 
that will enable them to realize their full potential. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake