THE NEO-CAPITALIST ASSAULT IN MEXICO

DEMOCRACY VIS-À-VIS THE LOGIC OF THE MARKET

Álvaro de Regil

The author, Director of The Jus Semper Global Alliance, offers his vision on the long crises of Mexico and its project as a nation. The author tells us that for almost twenty-five years Mexico has walked a path of permanent decline in its human and economic development. The gap between rich and poor has exacerbated to unimaginable levels that take the country back to the early XIX century. In the economic stage, instead of reaching full-blown development, Mexico has been incapable of laying out its own destiny and it is more dependent than ever on the first world and especially on the United States. Instead of developing its own technology, of developing its domestic market and of strategically opening only those sectors where top competitiveness has been reached, its governments have gone down the easy path of speculation, of technology dependency and, especially, of the pseudo-attraction of foreign direct investment by surrendering its labour force for a miserable price. The author asserts that this has been possible because Mexico continues to be a profoundly oligarchic country.


The author ponders that, albeit Mexico has finally lived a duly democratic electoral process, it has only vindicated the ruling class so that it can keep subjecting the country to its usufruct and still keep Mexico quite far from real democracy. In this way, this essay reflects on the manner in which the oligarchy operates, and it disserts about its connivance with the first world to impose neoliberalism in Mexico, within a global context, and on how it pretends to consolidate it.


Lastly, the author poses the urgent need to organise a civil society, strong and supportive of the socially disadvantaged, which incorporates all ranks of society, gets fully and permanently involved in the public matter and commits itself to the common good in order to build a real democracy and a new country. Otherwise, he tells us, Mexico would be left to deal with an increasingly brutal ethos -always in a global context- reminiscent of times that were assumed to have been long ago transcended.

Essay prepared on February 2004. For a full review of this essay, click here or on the picture to download the pdf file.

(This essay updates and abridges the three original essays on Mexico of the series The Neo-Capitalist Assault