Título: DISTANT NEIGHBORS. A PORTRAIT OF THE MEXICANS
Autor: RIDING, ALAN
Año: 1985
Género: ENSAYO
Formato: EPUB
A study of Mexico –political, social, cultural, economic– by a journalist who was for 6 years (1978-1984) The New York Times bureau chief in Mexico City. With portraits of Mexico's top leaders, about a nation whose stability is vital to our national well-being.
Mexico is coming apart at the seams. This is the clear message of this important, insightful, and uneven book by a former New York Times correspondent in Mexico.
After forty years of steady but poorly distributed economic growth, the Mexican economy has come unstuck. Local industry is highly protected, grossly inefficient, and incapable of generating new jobs. Much of the rural population is trapped in rain-fed subsistence agriculture on poor soil in a land-tenure system that provides neither viable plots nor living farm wages. A massive external debt absorbs much of the oil revenue left over from the predations of a corrupt state monopoly and equally predatory oil workers union.
Economic decline and stagnation are calling into question a hierarchical, centralized political system of powerful special interests and their brokers. The restive urban middle classes, shocked by inflation and successive devaluations, are withdrawing their loyalty from the political system and increasingly, in northern Mexico, voting for candidates of the conservative opposition PAN party. Politicians are torn between opening up the system to allow for more democracy and relying on increased coercion to ensure control.
Adding fuel to the economic and political tensions is a persistent social crisis that denies minimally adequate housing, nutrition, education, and other social services to a majority of the population. Government and public sector jobs are used as sinecures at all levels, and social services are often a subsidy of the rich at the expense of the poor. Similarly, while Mexico City suffers from man-made environmental disasters, the wealthy try to buy their way out of the smog, traffic jams, and water shortages.
Riding finds the ruling classes materialistic, ambivalent, and rudderless. But he finds resilience in something called “Mexican soul” –the fatalism, stoicisim, and “spiritual aspirations” of the people. He foresees no massive disorder or violence but a continuing steady erosion of national confidence, governability, and popular support or acceptance.
–Aaron Segal / Worldview, May 1985
Alan Riding started with Reuters in New York City, covering the United Nations. In 1971, he left Reuters and moved to Mexico to work as a freelance reporter, principally for The Financial Times, The Economist, and The New York Times. In 1978, he joined The New York Times as Mexico City bureau chief. Before leaving Mexico for Brazil in 1984, he wrote «Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans», on modern Mexico.
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