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Death of the Superpeso
While higher interest rates in Mexico had propped up the peso for most of the year, the financial crisis in the U.S. has turned the greenback into a “safe haven” for investors, pumping up its value. And in this shaky economic climate, risk adverse investors have been leery of the peso.
So Mexico has decided to flood its banking system with dollars, auctioning off $2.5 billion to Mexican banks at lower exchange rates. The gambit appeared to work yesterday, bringing the dollar down to just over 12 pesos. The government plans to continue its daily dollar auctions as long as the peso continues falling.
Mexican officials remained upbeat Wednesday, insisting that a crisis is not on the horizon. Finance minister Agustin Carstens told reporters: “Our currency is for now, I would say, one of the best options to invest in.”
Mexicans should hope so - a strong peso means cheaper imports and lower prices for consumer goods. The opposite means more strain for this now-struggling economy.
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Mexico: paying the price of American excess?
In Mexico, the thought seems to be that the entire world is now paying the price of excess in the United States. On the front page of the El Universal daily, columnist Macario Schettino writes that “What we are living now is a speculative bubble that is bursting. During this decade, the Americans thought they were richer than they were and they spent above their capacity to pay.”
Like the rest of the world, the financial crisis is pummeling Mexico. We’ve already written about projections of massive job losses south of the border. Now we find a decimated peso and Mexican companies gasping for breath. Since June 30, Mexican companies have watched their value evaporate: the beer giant Grupo Modelo has lost a quarter of its value on the Mexican stock market. Cemex, the highly successful concrete company, has lost nearly half its value.
Meanwhile, the peso on Monday had its worst fall since 1995, sparking scary memories of the disastrous peso devaluation that stunted the country’s growth for a decade. The dollar is now at about 12 to 1 compared to the peso. A few weeks ago, it was trading at 9 to 1.
And compounding problems for Mexico is the fall in the price of oil, which accounts for about 40 percent of the nation’s budget. Mexico did not take advantage of oil when it was trading at record highs earlier in the year, but you can bet it will feel the pain of lower prices.
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Documentaries rule Morelia Film Fest
I feel a little like a vampire having spent the last two days almost entirely inside darkened movie theaters at the Morelia Film Fest. For two days we lived off of popcorn, movie hot dogs and bags of smuggled candy, as we watched about a dozen movies, highlighted by a string of brilliant Mexican documentaries. There were some big budget premieres thrown in - Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” biopic and the Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” stood out - but the real gems had very small budgets.
The best of the lot was “Los Ultimos Heroes de la Peninsula (The Last Heroes of the Peninsula),” a movie about five boxing champions who rose to prominence in the 1970’s and 80’s in the same sun-blasted Yucatecan city of Merida. The movie, by filmmaker Jose Manuel Cravioto, chronicles the fighters’ rise from poverty to international stardom and back to grinding reality in Merida. All of the fighters have seen their fortunes disappear - through booze, women and unscrupulous promoters. We meet characters like Juan Herrera, who once fought an 11-round championship fight with a dislocated shoulder (truly painful viewing) and who now drives a taxi. The movie is carried by the fighters and their humor, pride and honesty. In one heartbreaking scene, a former champion gets lost showing the film crew around a few blocks from his house. But despite the boxers’ all-too-human shortcomings, we learn what their brief rise to glory meant to their city and its people.
“Intimidades de Victor Hugo y Shakespeare” (thanks to a reader for suggesting this one) is another excellent, and truly bizarre, documentary. It’s about the filmmaker’s grandmother who ran a Mexico City guest house in the 1990’s and her strange relationship with one of her guests. A closeted homosexual, the guest may or may not have been a serial killer who terrorized the city’s women. The owner of the guest house, it seems, will forever be tormented by doubt.
Finally, there was “Nino Fidencio From Rome to Espinazo,” a fascinating look at a new, quasi-Catholic religion emerging in northern Mexico. Based on the child-like healer known as Nino Fidencio who lived in Nuevo Leon, the religion now has a legion of followers among the region’s poor, who find it more immediate than the Catholic Church.
The best of the film festival is coming to Mexico City later this month and hopefully will make it eventually to Austin. Catch it if you can.
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Dispatches from Morelia
The more time you spend in this city, the more you realize what a crime the Independence Day grenade attack was. This is truly an amazing, overlooked city: block after block of finely preserved colonial buildings made of stately cantera stone, intricate carvings and dramatic arches. It’s a vibrant place as well: centuries-old mansions and government buildings that are now boutique hotels, hip restaurants and atmospheric bars. It’s a city of mystery and grace and it deserves far better than to be linked forever with what some are calling Mexico’s version of 9/11.
We are here for the Morelia Film Festival, Mexico’s most important film festival, and people like Steven Soderbergh and Maya Zapata and Ximena Sarinana are wandering around the cobblestone streets. Juan Carlos Rulfo, Mexico’s pre-eminent documentary filmmaker, is giving interviews in leafy corners of out-of-the-way plazas. Film buffs from all over the continent are poring over programs at outdoor cafes. The downtown is bustling with people, and for the first time since the attacks two weeks ago, Morelia may be getting back to normal. Squint, and it’s like it never happened.
Morelia depends on tourism for a good deal of its income, and taxi drivers and hotel workers say the last few weeks have been wretched, marked by mass cancelations of nervous tourists. Many are hoping the film festival will spark a resurgence. A city press release insists that much more to the city than the theme of security. So far, the city feels as safe as any in Mexico, and probably safer, given the reinforcements that have been sent here by President Felipe Calderon. My advice: if you have a trip planned to Morelia, you should come.
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Heading to Morelia
In addition to reporting back on the movies at the festival (they include Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” epic and a slew of fascinating-looking documentaries) we’ll be gauging the city’s atmosphere and seeing if folks are still on edge. Morelia is one of Mexico’s most beautiful colonial capitals and the grenade attacks threaten to damage the city’s tourist trade. Hopefully things are heading towards normalcy.
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The world according to Slim
Periodically, smartly attired women would pass silently among the reporters, passing out various charts showing that Slim did not in fact run a monopoly. That’s news to many Mexicans who view Slim’s telecommunications empire as just that. In fact Slim’s Telmex controls more than 90 percent of the country’s land phone lines and Telcel has more about 70 percent of the nation’s cell phone service. According to several international organizations, Mexicans pay some of the world’s highest phone and Internet rates.
The talk, which perhaps naturally focused on the financial crisis gripping the U.S., was mostly pleasant, although Slim did get testy when pressed about his personal wealth and monopolistic practices. Here are some highlights:
—Slim urged more flexibility and creativity in dealing with homeowners facing foreclosure, suggesting temporary, interest-only loans as an alternative to seizing a home. “There need to be solutions…that aren’t total punishment,” he said.
—There was much curiosity about Slim’s recent purchase of 6.4 percent of the New York Times’ stock. Many of the ink-stained wretches wondered what Slim saw in newspapers at a time when the industry is suffering through its own crisis. Slim, much to our relief, argued that there will always be a need for quality content regardless of the packaging. “It’s an evolution,” he said of the newspaper business. “The ones that don’t evolve will disappear.”
—Slim took umbrage to any suggestion that his companies were bad for Mexico, lashing out at one reporter: “To think that in poor countries there shouldn’t be strong companies is perverse,” he said. “Why should foreign companies (be the only ones that prosper)…The ideal would be that there were more companies like this.”
—He also turned the tables when asked about monopolistic practices, complaining that Mexican regulators won’t let him run video over phone lines as part of a so-called Triple Play of cable, telephone and Internet service. On the other hand, cable and other phone companies have accused Telmex of charging outrageously high connection costs to hook up to its monolithic network, forcing many would-be fixed line providers out of the market.
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First class subways cars in Mexico City?
One of the greatest challenges facing Mexico City is figuring out how to squeeze 6 million cars and trucks through a decidedly 20th street grid. For example, the city’s loop, instead of being a freeway, has about a half dozen traffic lights, which contributes to the city’s horrific traffic jams (one study found that the average daytime speed on some roads is 12 mph). The city is struggling and straining to manage an overwhelming traffic situation that will likely only get worse as more residents buy cars.
The solution, posed most recently by recently by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is to encourage more use of transportation: get people out of their cars and onto the subway and bus system. Unlike some cities, Mexico City has an efficient and helpful mass transit system. You can get pretty much anywhere in the city on bus or subway.
The problem is, there is a huge percentage of residents that simply refuse to take the train or bus. Many upper class residents find the Metro too dangerous, too dirty and too chaotic to even think about entering. And it’s not uncommon to find even middle class residents who haven’t taken the subway in decades and would rather be caught dead than get on a pesero, as Mexico City’s wild and wooly little green buses are called.
Last year I interviewed Humberto Bravo, an expert on airborne pollution at Mexico’s Autonomous University, who identified just this reluctance to use mass transit as one of the city’s greatest challenges. He argued it’s time to think outside the box to get the city’s more privileged classes on the train.
He proposed having some subway cars set aside as first class cars - they would cost more to board, but would be clean, comfortable and safe. Such a plan would play into the city’s well-established class system (even the city’s movie theater’s have VIP rooms). Bravo speculated that such a plan would never work - protesters would immediately send up cries of classism on Mexico’s egalitarian mass transit system.
So what do you think? Is Bravo’s plan simple realism or classism run amok?
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Looming economic disaster in Mexico?
Analysts in Mexico are predicting some serious doom and gloom in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis in the U.S., which sunk the Mexican stock market 6.4 percent on Monday.
Rogelio Ramirez de la O, a well-respected Mexico City economist (and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s economic advisor during the 2006 campaign) predicts a disaster for job creation. He believes Mexico will lose 1 million jobs this year and another 1.5 million jobs next year. To put those numbers in context, consider that Mexico needs to generate about 1.3 million new jobs per year just to keep up with young people entering the workforce.
It gets worse: Ramirez predicts that money sent home from Mexican migrants in the U.S. will fall 20 percent, taking $5 billion out of the Mexican economy. Meanwhile economists are predicting economic growth to slow to 1.5 percent next year, about half of government projections.
If there is any silver lining south of the border it’s that most agree that Mexico’s financial system should be insulated from the crisis hitting the U.S., in part because it mortgages are rare and hard to come by in Mexico. Added Finance Minister Agustin Carstens yesterday, “The Mexican banking system is healthy and doesn’t depend on foreign credit.”
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Ban? What ban? Madrazo running again in Berlin
In fact, organizers sought to ban him from this year’s race, but Madrazo was able to evade them by registering online. “He cheated in 2007 and he shouldn’t have been registered,” race director Mark Milde told the Reforma newspaper. “We were surprised to see him on the list of participants.”
Milde said the online registration system is not well controlled.
Madrazo, interviewed after the race, seemed surprised by his ban. “I think that’s a mistake,” he told Reforma. “And here you have me, running this marathon.”
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Mexican pundits: McCain looking ‘desperate’
For Carmen Aristegui, who hosts a nightly news show on CNN en Espanol, McCain has not looked good: “What McCain has tried to do over the last few hours has projected the living image of desperation,” she wrote in this morning’s Reforma newspaper. “The failed maneuver has left him in bad standing - not just with voters in his country, but with the rest of the world.”
Leo Zuckerman, a columnist with the Excelsior daily, writes today that the momentum now favors Barack Obama. “McCain hasn’t known how to respond to the economic crisis his country is living,” he wrote. “It’s evident it doesn’t suit him to debate at this moment. He has little to gain and much to lose.”
There were a few dissenting voices in the Latin American web: The Colombian newspaper El Tiempo wrote in an editorial that McCain “adopted a position of a statesman and a leader.” But the newspaper warned that the uncertainty over tonight’s debate as well as the implosion in negotiations over the bailout could have “disastrous effects” for McCain’s poll numbers.
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Circus elephant dashes onto highway, killed by bus
This has got to win as strangest news item of the week down here in Mexico: on Monday night a four-ton circus elephant, spooked by a black cat running between its massive legs, escaped from his pen, wandered through the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec, and ended up on a busy highway where it was hit and killed by a bus. The bus driver was also killed in the collision, which left the bus crumpled like an accordion.
The elephant, named Hildra, even passed through a toll booth during its wild escape. “It crossed through the toll booth in lane 3 before the amazement of employees and drivers, who couldn’t believe their eyes,” is how the El Universal newspaper described it.
Hildra had to be removed with a tow truck and will likely be buried. The Union Circus will no doubt face some legal action and employees are pointing the fingers at each other. Hildra’s handler said he was never trained to take care of elephants and did all he could to run down the elephant after it crashed through what’s being described as a flimsy metal gate. “I wanted to follow her, but she was very fast,” Marcelino Flores told El Universal between sobs. “Why didn’t I quit this morning? I knew I couldn’t take care of animals, I know how they are.”
Luis Arrellano, the owner of the circus, promptly denied any responsibility, telling police when he arrived on the scene (according to El Universal): “It was (Flores’) fault, you should arrest him, not me.”
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Mexico pledges to halt sale of teaching positions
We’ve written about the cronyism inside Mexico’s educational system before - the last time about a new national teacher test that about 70 percent of teachers and teaching school students failed.
The importance of the state test is potentially large. Mexican officials hope to use it as the determining factor in placing teachers in schools. Up until now, teachers often got their positions by buying them, inheriting them or, as a teachers union boss famously put it, giving “sexual favors.”
The hope is that ability will replace well-connectedness, improving the level of education in Mexico. Teachers throughout the country though are resisting the change and striking to get the teachers’ test thrown out. In Morelos, just south of Mexico City, teachers have been on strike since the beginning of the year (38 days), meaning 400,000 kids have yet to go to school this year. The teachers, who argue that the test is the first step in privatizing education in Mexico, brought their protest to Mexico City last week, infuriating local residents when they closed several busy thoroughfares with their protests.
The federal government, which shares some of the responsibility for the current state of affairs by cultivating and tolerating the old system for decades, has now decided to fight the teachers to the end over the teaching test. “It’s the demand of millions of parents that merit and effort be present in the classroom,” said Education Secretary Josefina Mota. “That’s why we will do everything possible to eradicate the practice of selling teaching positions…(we) are determined to bring the battle to its ultimate consequences.”
But apparently inheriting teaching positions is another story, as education authorities in Puebla and Quintana Roo reached an agreement this week to allow teachers near retirement age to will their positions to their children.
Opponents of the teacher testing argue that the test will lead to greater inequality between schools in wealthy areas and those in poor, rural areas. Teachers also complain that the government is seeking to bring an “entreprenurial logic” to teaching. But the protests are also a sharp rebuke to controversial teachers union president Elba Ester Gordillo, who many teachers feel sold out the union by agreeing to the test.
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Mexico to inspect cars coming from U.S.
In an attempt to clamp down on rampant arms smuggling into Mexico, Attorney General Eduardo Medina announced this week that Mexican customs officials will soon be inspecting 10 percent of vehicles crossing the southwest border into Mexico.
Currently, just a tiny percentage of vehicles are checked when they cross into Mexico, where entry procedures are far more lax than on the U.S. side of the border. Vehicles are randomly selected for inspection based on a traffic-light type device that flashes green (you’re free to go) or red (pull over). In some border crossings the red or green light appears to be triggered by the weight of a vehicle as it passes over a scale.
Up to 95 percent of the guns and heavy weaponry used in the ongoing drug wars come from the United States, especially from gun shops and gun shows along the border. That violence has already killed more than 3,000 people this year, including scores of police and officials.
Mexican cartels routinely use poor border residents to buy their guns in exchange for a fee. Texas, with its relatively lax gun laws, is considered a prime source of smuggled guns. Earlier this year, American officials announced Project Gunrunner, which will bring the eTrace gun tracking system to consulates within Mexico. According to the ATF:
Firearm tracing intelligence is critical because it allows ATF and its partners to identify trafficking corridors, patterns and schemes as well as traffickers and their accomplices. Firearms tracing helps identify firearms straw purchasers, the traffickers, trafficking networks and patterns, thus allowing law enforcement to target and dismantle the infrastructure supplying firearms to the DTOs in Mexico.
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Get ready for Mexico’s Next Top Model
The ‘Top Model’ phenomenon isn’t the first to cross the border. Big Brother became a nationwide phenomenon in Mexico a few years ago, and Sony is in its third season of Latin American Idol. That has been a mega-hit in places like Venezuela and Guatemala, but less so in Mexico, where it faces competition from home-grown talent shows like La Academia.
Producers think the Mexican version of ‘Top Model’ will begin production sometime next year.
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Narcos: we didn’t blow up celebration
In the hours after the frightening Independence Day grenade attack in Morelia, suspicion fell, perhaps naturally, on a fledgling drug cartel called La Familia. After all, La Familia is headquartered in Michoacan, the central Mexican state where the attacks occurred. And La Familia has been engaged in a brutal war on two fronts - with its traditional rivals in the Sinaloa Cartel and former-allies-turned-bitter-enemies the Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel.
On Friday morning, La Familia went on a PR offensive, draping at least five banners around Morelia, declaring their innocence and blaming the Zetas. La Familia has used such publicity throughout its history - they’ve taken out ads in local newspapers and even had a spokesman who would meet with intrepid reporters. The group presented itself as the savior and protector of Michoacan, defending it from traffickers from other states and pledging to rid the state of Ice methamphetamine (Of course the group was also linked to mass beheadings, kidnappings and extorsions.)
We still don’t know who committed the attacks. Two suspects arrested in Zacatecas on Thursday were cleared of involvement after what one can only surmise was a thorough interrogation. Most agree that drug cartels are the likely culprit, although some have speculated it was the result of rancorous political fights within Michoacan. But authorship of such an attack would be political suicide, even for the most radical group.
It would also seem counter-intuitive for La Familia to attack their own state’s celebration. As much as they link themselves to Michoacan pride and seem to cultivate popular sentiment, it would also be a public relations suicide for them.
Regardless of who did it, the impact on Morelia has been huge. Here’s how Jennifer Rose, an ex-pat living in Morelia, described the scene this morning on her blog Staring at Strangers:
“Life is the same in Morelia - and it isn’t. And never will be. Like anyplace else, lives go on, people go to work and shop at Walmart (where there was a false alarm this week about a bomb), and on the surface, it looks the same. There is a palpable tension in the air, a quiet nervousness that just wasn’t there on Monday afternoon, and many people are on a heightened sense of alert. People will avoid public events for a while. We’ll put on a brave face, but the reality is that many are filled with fear.”
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Independence Day ‘terrorist’ attack rocks Mexico
The Grito de Independencia is an almost sacred act in Mexico. The annual celebration of independence brings millions into the streets for late-night, ritualistic cries of Viva Mexico!
Last night the revelry was shattered when who authorities believe were drug traffickers lobbed three grenades into the celebration in Morelia, the picture-perfect colonial capital of Michoacan state. At least eight people were killed and more than 100 wounded.
Even in a country long used to horrific acts of drug violence and kidnappings, the grito attack represents a new level of terror. The Austin-based Stratfor private intelligence agency warned that warring Mexican cartels may be ratcheting up the violence: “The Sept. 15 bombing…is a significant departure from previous cartel operations because of its indiscriminate nature,” the agency wrote in a report today.”… (S)uch an attack on a public gathering celebrating a national holiday is unprecedented. Even though the attackers may have been going after a specific target (who may or may not have been killed) - and even though death tolls from recent public displays of violence have been higher - the collateral damage, both physical and psychological, is quite extensive.” Mexican officials are labeling the attack an act of terrorism. Leonel Godoy, the governor of Michoacan, said that authorities had received threats of an Independence Day attack and laid the blame on organized crime. The president of Mexico’s human rights commission called the attack the worst that Mexico has suffered in recent memory. “When there is an attack on the populace, we’re talking about terrorism,” Jose Luis Soberanes told reporters. “I’m very worried because we don’t know where this is going to end.”
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The Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in the Yucatecan jungle near Cancun has been burning for five days and it’s not clear when authorities will be able to put out the fire. The fire, which was fueled by winds associated with Hurricane Ike, has ravaged nearly 10,000 acres of the World Heritage Site, which hosts about 500 bird and mammal species and is a nesting site for endangered sea turtles. Reserve director Francisco Guerrero told the Efe wire service that fire crews may need to cut roads into the reserve to bring in heavy machinery, which would cause “extensive environmental damage.” Sian Ka’an, which means “Where the sky is born” in Mayan, contains 23 archeological sites, some of which are more than 2,000 years old. It sounds like an amazing place. According to the bioreserve’s website, “the northernmost section of Sian Ka’an contains what is thought to be an ancient trade route through lagoons and mangrove channels between the cities of Tulum and Muyil.”
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Spectacular Sian Ka’an bioreserve continues to burn
Horror stories from the Mexican burueacracy
When it comes to opening a new business, Mexico also misses the mark. The country is ranked 115th in that category. No wonder experts often complain that outdated bureaucracy is strangling small businesses and exacerbating Mexico’s chronic job shortages.
President Felipe Calderon on Tuesday announced he is taking aim at Mexico’s bureaucracy (as many have before him), pledging to reduce the number of administrative procedures and applications (needed for everything from renewing a passport to obtaining a marriage license to getting an environmental impact report on a new development) from 4,200 to less than 3,000.
To kick off the fun, Calderon launched a contest for citizens to nominate the country’s worst bureaucratic hurdle.
Have any of you been ensnared in the scary world of Mexican bureaucracy? We’d love to hear your horror stories.
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Mexico captivated, worried by Palin pick
Most Mexican commentators believe Palin’s pick has rejuvenated McCain’s campaign and was designed to woo white women voters. “Palin…has transformed the campaign and taken out the boring and tedious parts,” writes Concepcion Badillo in the Mexico City daily La Cronica. But Badillo also points to perhaps Palin’s most troubling aspect south of the border: the fact that she only got a passport last year and has little foreign policy experience.
In a column entitled, “Keep a careful eye on Palin,” Milenio columnist Fernanda Gonzalez wonders, “This is the woman who would be in charge of American foreign policy?…Wouldn’t a better option be Joe Biden, who presides over the Foreign Relations Committee in the American Senate?”
Palin is also taking flak for her frequent references to religion, which pundits say recalls George W. Bush, whose reputation is thoroughly in tatters in Mexico. Jose Francisco Gomez Hinojosa, writing for the Noreste newspaper, mocks Palin, saying “She also sees a divine mandate in the construction of a controversial pipeline in the south of Alaska that’s been severely criticized by all the environmental organizations in the U.S. For Palin then, God is on her side, meaning (she believes) the American position that considers the U.S. to be the policeman of the world, the one who decides what happens in every latitude, is sent from God.”
Palin’s personal life has also fascinated the Mexican chattering class: The Seminario newspaper says her family drama is “worthy of a Televisa telenovela.” In Reforma, Jorge Alcocer says “The American electoral show is entering its final season and it will be better than any movie or TV series.”
Mexico remains firmly in the Obama camp, with recent polls showing him with a 54 to 16 advantage over McCain.
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Accused Marti kidnappers were police
In the end, the kidnappers behind the Fernando Marti killing, which has galvanized Mexico, sparking protest marches and calls for overhauling the nation’s justice system, turned out to have strong connections to the federal police.
Authorities this week arrested several people they say masterminded the kidnapping of 14-year-old Marti, including a 35-year-old woman who worked for the Federal Police at the time of the kidnapping. Officials say Lorena Gonzalez Hernandez set up the fake checkpoint that ensnared Marti, his bodyguard and driver as they drove to Marti’s high school. The three were taken out of their armored car after stopping at what they believed to be a federal checkpoint in southern Mexico City. Marti was later killed after his family paid a reported $5 million ransom. The reported mastermind of the operation, Sergio Humberto Ortiz, is a also a former cop.
Gonzalez’s family says she is merely a scapegoat and told the El Universal newspaper she was in Cancun when Marti was kidnapped. Indeed, Mexican authorities have been under intense pressure to find the kidnappers, with Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard agreeing to step down if justice wasn’t served.
Investigators seem to have gotten some of their best tips from merchants in Mexico City’s notorious Tepito neighborhood, a sprawling informal market and center of drug, weapons and contraband commerce.
Gonzalez has reportedly been a tough nut to crack in custody. El Universal writes that during her interrogation she mocked investigators, even after they reportedly beat her in the head. “You guys are idiots,” the paper quoted her as saying. “To get something out of someone you need to put a bag on their head and pull a rope around their neck. But you know what guys? Even if you do that I’m not saying anything.”
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Kidnappings’ shatter the psyche, and the economy
Mexico is living through an epoch of fear and terror, much as it did in the mid-1990’s, when the peso devaluation sparked a crime wave that made the country unlivable for many. Now Mexico is feeling the double whammy of raging drug wars - which tend not to involve innocent bystanders, but make for grisly headlines - and the more immediate threat of kidnappings, which have spread to the previously unaffected middle classes.
So bad is the violence that the Mexican government expects it will shave a full point - about $10 billion - from Mexico’s economic growth this year as investors and companies pull out of Mexico or look for safer climates. Investors, it seems, just aren’t willing to slap down millions in a country that can’t keep its people safe.
On a more personal level, the insecurity has invaded the minds of many Mexico City residents, creating a sense of mass terror as residents see danger lurking around every corner. Our neighborhood of Coyoacan, a pretty place with colonial buildings and tourist trolleys, has seen kidnappings, body dumpings and armed robberies, that at least anecdotally have risen sharply over the last year. Neighbors are scared.
There have been marches, protests and full-throated demands that politicians do something to stop the violence. But I get the sense that many people still feel isolated, unprotected, and on their own when it comes to assuring their safety. Some search for ever more extreme solutions. Dozens of Mexicans have implanted themselves with tracking microchips, that may or may not work in case of kidnapping.
Agustin Barrios Gomez, who runs an online information service for ex-pats, recently wrote in a column that the rash of violence had convinced him that Mexico must relax its gun control laws to allow citizens to arm themselves.
“As much as it pains this author to say it, the Mexican government can no longer legitimately restrict the right of its citizens to protect themselves with firearms,” he wrote in the The News. “In the face of its astonishing failure to protect its citizens, it must now get out of the way. As a global solution (arming citizens) is complete and inadequate. But as an individualistic stopgap measure, primal and unfortunate, it has now become necessary.”
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I’m an American living in Victoria de Durango. While the present administration here has made tremendous strides in prepping certain areas of this city, especially El Centro, for an influx of foreign tourist other areas of the city are still faced with
... read the full comment by Daniel | Comment on Looming economic disaster in Mexico? Read Looming economic disaster in Mexico?
The poor suffer the post form crisis. Crisis happens from debt, overextension of credit (like subprime), inflexibility, and loss of investor confidence replaced with fear.
Although mexico right now has less over-extension of credit, no sub-prime
... read the full comment by eljefejesus | Comment on Looming economic disaster in Mexico? Read Looming economic disaster in Mexico?
Just like China keeps its currently low on purpose, the peso is at a good level now, one that keep mexican goods affordable and workers in mexico employed. A strong peso makes mexican-manufactured goods less competitive.
in the last several years
... read the full comment by eljefejesus | Comment on Death of the Superpeso Read Death of the Superpeso
Re: “So much potential in Mexico…wonderful people, poor government”
How about this: “Poor Mexico: so far from God and so close to the United States!”
This nails it: Mexico is the victim at once of a deeply
... read the full comment by Sam | Comment on Looming economic disaster in Mexico? Read Looming economic disaster in Mexico?
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