Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

Mr. Oppenheimer has talked to those outside and inside the government of Mexico to describe in careful detail the myopia and success of the PRI which has kept Mexico "stable" for seventy years but has looted the country in a form of political machismo that now affects the middle class which no longer applauds such audacious machismo. The Zapatista movement is particularly well detailed in both its true meaning and its sad hijacking by idealistic middle-class Marxists who have no more concern for the Mayas than does the PRI for the majority of the Mexicans. If one is to begin to understand Mexico one should begin with this book.

This is a great read for anyone wanting to know about Mexico during the 1990s. It's very indepth, at times it feels like maybe Oppenheimer doesn't have all the information to tell the story, but he sure tells a lot of it. It's also not overly biased, like many books about recent Mexican history. Oppenheimer does a great job of setting the scene, explaining who is who, and helping the reader get their arms around all the different factions that make for a volatile social environment in Mexico. I also read "Castro's Final Hour" which was informative, but not as good (especially since the "final hour" was somewhere in the early nineties, and now it's 2001). I'd love to read more of Oppenheimer.

I read this book as a person who has visited Mexico on a number of occasions for both business and pleasure. I found it to be highly informative and also entertaining. Having experienced firsthand the struggle of Mexicans to catch up with their wealthy neighbors across the border, while simultaneously putting up roadblocks in their own way, I had no trouble believing some of the outrageous political wheeling and dealing Mr. Oppenheimer described. A great book if you want to get insight into the modern Mexican political and economic climate.

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.

I would like to recomend this book because it really captures the moment and when you have a doubt of the information provided you can look at the extensive resources section.

A must read...

The only way to learn about what really happens inside the corruption ravaged Mexican Political landscape is to read this book. Learn the truth from a man, who KNOWS LATIN AMERICA AND THE POLITICS OF MEXICO.

i love this book for the following reasons;
1. the book has a lot of insightful analysis but presented in story telling prose. it captures your attention and interest level as it is easy to read and read like a story.
2. the journalist has long years living and working in Mexico. he comes from a strength of in depth knowledge at ground level as opposed to most american journalists writing about Mexico which is liberal "gringo" writing about mexico but living across the border in U.S.
3. the writer provided historical, cultural and financial evidence to show how "corruption is in the gene of mexico/mexican". lots of enlightening information provided.

one of the best books i read on/about mexico and her people.

Mexico is one of America's three largest trading partners. It's also a big source of drugs and illegal immigrations to the U.S. You could say Mexico and the U.S. are pretty intimate. That opinion would be reinforced by the ease with which NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) passed in the early months of the Clinton administration. Yet something has always been fishy, and Andres Oppenheimer attempts to put his finger on it in this new book. He's well-suited to the task, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his work reporting the Iran-Contra scandal for the Miami Herald. He also wrote the book Castro's Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba. His story begins with the Mayan-supported uprising in the southern state of Chiapas beginning in 1994, the biggest Indian uprising in the last eighty years. As Oppenheimer recounts, Chiapas became "the epitome of everything that was wrong with Mexico. It was the most corrupt, authoritarian, backward area of a country that was being hailed abroad for its dramatic steps toward modernization." While President Salinas' modernization program was designed to push Mexico into the big leagues of international trade, Subcommander Marcos-- a leftist intellectual from Mexico City who became the rebel leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army,-- saw that either way, with or without economic modernization, the poorest of Mexico's poor would stay that way. The author has dug deep to fashion a compelling story from many sources both credible and otherwise. He concludes that Mexico has a culture of deceit, as described by writer Octavio Paz in his 1950 classic, The Labyrinth of Solitude. He believes that meaningful political reforms are still far off. He reinforces the point by ending his book with irony: "As this book was being completed, it was Morgan Stanley & Company that was taking the lead on Wall Street, putting the gloomy post-devaluation predictions aside and upping its Mexican position from a market-neutral 24 percent to a `slight overweighing' 26 percent of its Latin American portfolio.... The atmosphere on Wall Street was jubilant-- just as it had been on that long-forgotten Tuesday morning, four days before Christmas, 1994." The book is not all negative about Mexico, but America's tendency is to forgive, forget.... and throw money at the problem. Bordering On Chaos is a rough-and-ready, streetwise chronicle of our neighbor who would like to keep up with the Jones' to the north but can't do it on their own.