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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent. Give Us More., December 6, 2000
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.
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by Julia Preston
by Alan Riding
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