Bordering on Chaos: Mexico's Roller-Coaster Journey Toward Prosperity (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is an attempt to understand Mexico's steep descent into turmoil, which happened rapidly after the uprising in Chiapas on New Year's Day 1994. Following the assassinations of a presidential candidate and then the congressional leader, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had barely left office when the peso collapsed. Pursued by allegations of corruption, Salinas then fled the country. Oppenheimer, a reporter for The Miami Herald, argues that the crisis is the result of nothing grander than a turf war within a decrepit ruling party and that the Chiapas uprising is not something new, just another eruption of the Marxist intellectualism that has long flourished in Latin America. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Miami Herald Latin American correspondent Oppenheimer traveled all over Mexico between 1992 and 1995, and this crisply written, eye-opening report depicts a country in the throes of political turmoil, corruption, peasant rebellions and massive layoffs. The authors, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 as part of a team that uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal, scaled guerrilla-held mountains to interview self-styled Subcommander Marcos, the white, middle-class Marxist revolutionary who in 1994 led a Maya armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas. Oppenheimer views this revolt as symptomatic of a country marked by vastly unequal distribution of wealth and wasteful public works projects that fail to address the real needs of the people. He offers disturbing, fresh slants on the ruling party's control of TV news, the booming cocaine trade of Mexico's drug mafias, the rise of government-backed monopolies in key industries and the recent political assassinations that have weakened the ruling elite's credibility. Despite this bleak picture, Oppenheimer suggests that Mexico is stumbling toward a modern democracy under its new, technocratic administrator president, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (October 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316650250
• ISBN-13: 978-0316650250
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #742,346 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Investigative Reporting Is Just What Mexico Needs, February 21, 2000

By	Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Andres Oppenheimer shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Iran-Contra. Normally, I find investigative reporting in the U.S. dull, since the reporters get wrapped up in the technical details of a subject like Whitewater and tend to miss the big picture. But the Woodward/Bernstein approach is exactly what Mexico needs. Oppenheimer's dug up scandals that are doozies -- a lengthy recounting of the "Billionaire's Banquet" in which 30 Mexican plutocrats pledged an average of $25,000,000 million US dollars each to fund the ruling party's 1994 re-election bid is a classic.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GOOD HISTORY, WELL RESEARCHED, FAST PACED READ, April 12, 2003

By	Denis Benchimol Minev "Amazonia" (Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil) - See all my reviews

In Bordering on Chaos, Oppenheimer does a very good job of depicting the events and digging up the dirty that led to many of the most important events in mid-1990s Mexico, including the murder of the leading presidential candidate, the rise of the Zapatistas and the choice of Zedillo for president.

However, instead of pure history, we are presented with deep character development for the two main actors in this process, Zedillo himself (the president to be) and Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista movement. In this process, we learn of the political ploys adopted by the PRI, the almost monarchic party that led the country for most of the century. These include forays into education, health, and the most important social services. Another important area is the corruption going on at the top levels of the PRI, requiring, for example, that business people contribute a minimum of [several] million to participate in the government, or else be excluded, with all that it entailed. There is less than I would like to know on Carlos Salinas, the now disgraced but formerly darling leader.

Overall, a good history and a well written book. If you have an interest in Mexico, or in the crisis period of the mid-1990s, this may offer some of the pieces that build up a puzzle of it.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. Give Us More., December 6, 2000

By	Timothy Ritter (Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The dearth of good books on Mexico makes this one very welcome. It's architecture rests largely on two character portraits: one of Ernesto Zedillo, and the other of the man who calls himself Subcommander Marcos. There is some sketchy material, too, on Carlos Salinas, but it's the type of data that adds to the enigma of the man rather than to our understanding of him.

With Zedillo, one can see why two huge accomplishments coincided with his term in office, and went largely unlauded: 1) the payback of the bailout money ahead of time, and 2) the holding of real elections.

Oppenheimer shows Zedillo to be honest and smart--unlike many Mexican politicians, his degree from an Ivy League school was not just window dressing; he really is a trained economist. But he was not very popular. As an uncorruptible technocrat, he never would have gotten the nod to be the new president if not for the assassination of Colosio, whose campaign manager he was at the time of the murder. But once he was thrust in by Fate to the number one spot, he proved unusually effective. He was not fashionable or charismatic, and not very well loved by the electorate, which understandably blamed him for the devaluation which occurred at the very beginning of his term. Carlos Salinas was fashionable and charismatic, and there can be little doubt that the conditions necessitating the devaluation accumulated during his term.

Even now, with Zedillo gone, those two accomplishments loom over the future more powerfully than anything else that has happened in Mexico for many years.The payback of the bailout money signals that though there may be stumbles on the way to free trade with the US, a quick recovery is possible instead of a long Japanese-style tailspin. The bailout money could have gone into the pockets of well-placed Mexicans, (where now are the millions that the World Bank poured into Russia?) but it did not. I would guess that a lot of credit for that goes to the unfashionably honest Zedillo.

The conversion to a truly multiparty system where it is possible for anyone to win also bodes well for the future, both economically and culturally. Mexico could have started having real elections a long time ago, elections that were more than just costly and showy formalities, but it did not. They didn't have a real election until it was time to replace Zedillo. The irony is that a corrupt system put into power an honest man, who then reformed it.

The other character that makes this book work is Rafael Guillen, AKA Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista uprising, who turns out to be neither an Indian nor a peasant nor even a native of Chiapas, but simply a garden variety marxist from a middle class family in Tampico. An undereducated and underworked lout, he acquired a degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a dissertation on capitalist oppression (what else?). Employing in this dissertation a style reminiscent of the Unabomber, he revealed the family to be the first "unit of oppression", followed by schools, the second "unit of oppression", and so on. The only thing that can break this ubiquitous oppression, according to the budding Subcommander, is "proletarian politics".

Oppenheimer doesn't go into how this ideological huckster managed to convince the peasants of Chiapas he could help them--that would be an excellent and highly entertaining book in itself--, but he does show clearly what type of person cooked up the rebellion, which did no good for anyone. In short, it was the kind of person without enough sense to use something other than a ski mask (wool?) to disguise himself in the tropics.

By making plain the character of these two men, Oppenheimer adds much to our understanding of what has gone on in Mexico in the last few years. Still, much goes unanswered, such as the actual legality or illegality of the billionaires' banquet, where each of thirty rich men pledged $25 million to the PRI for the election of 1994. Oppenheimer tells of what a scandal there was when the publication El Economista broke the story, but doesn't say whether anyone was prosecuted or even had in fact broken the law. The implication of the secrecy of the banquet and the subsequent scandal, is that there are legal limits on campaign contributions in Mexico, as there are in the US. I'm not sure this is the case.

If in fact there are no legal limits, it becomes a question of whether Mexicans in general disapproved of their richest compatriots throwing their financial weight around. It's to Oppenheimer's credit that he notes the alternative to wealthy men giving dizzying sums to the PRI, which is the Mexican government giving dizzying sums to the PRI, which is the way it had been done since the Revolution.

Frankly, if I were a Mexican taxpayer, I'd rather the PRI got its money from the billionaires.