While my interest in Mexico began decades ago, my deeper fascination with the country burgeoned much more recently. Basic, often bold changes, have been instituted. Some came from the top, such as the shift from looking inward for economic development to putting an emphasis on growing exports. This change came gradually at first after the debt crisis of 1982, only to accelerate as the 1980s proceeded, culminating in NAFTA. Entering into NAFTA, in turn, forced a shift in relations with the United States from uneasy coexistence to a search for more active cooperation. Relations between Mexico and the United States could never again be the same once NAFTA went into effect.

Some changes welled up from below. The political opening of the country was much slower in coming than its economic counterpart, but my conviction was that as the Mexican economic model changed, the old patterns of governance and control had to give wa y to something new – something better, I hoped. The role of the central government as the rector of the economy had to be different as hundreds of state-owned enterprises were privatized (or "disincorporated" as the Mexican authorities w ere prone to put it) and micro decisions were shifted to private actors. This did not mean that the government’s role in directing the economy was eliminated, but rather that it was shifted to macro matters and not the details of how businesses were run. For me, this was healthy. I have greater democratic trust in decentralized decisions by thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of independent actors, than by half a dozen political figures whose mandates were questionable. The market does not resolve all pr oblems, but it allows the government to work on the important ones. It remains to be seen how effective government will be in this new role, as policy rector and not as day-to-day operational rector.

I was convinced that once the shift to market decisions, to dispersed rather than centralized power, took place, pressure for political democracy would grow. It did, as was manifested in the frequent, almost yearly, measures to open the political syst em, each limited, but each taking the process further than before. The crash of 1994 and the consequent economic hardships of 1995 intensified the process of democratic opening. The best and the brightest of Mexico led the country into disaster. They did so largely in secrecy and with an air of arrogant intellectual superiority that doomed the old political model. Economic liberalization gave the impetus to political opening and economic collapse spurred the process even further.

Mexico is by no means a democracy to the degree that exists in the industrial countries of the west. The legislature and the executive have not yet worked out the rules of their respective responsibilities. The judiciary is weak. The media have far les s ability to uncover wrongdoing than exists in more mature democracies. Investigative reporters are still intimidated and even killed for going too far. Many of the most widely read news outlets have a line they pursue not only in their opinion pieces, b ut in their ostensible news coverage. Corruption, abetted by vast sums of drug money, remains pervasive.

To use Enrique Krauze’s phrase, Mexico is still not a democracy without adjectives, but it has come a long way from its authoritarian, near-dictatorial, past. My current fascination is to speculate about the path that will be taken to eliminate the ke y impediments that remain so that Mexico truly will be able to take its place among the world’s democracies.

Successes and Failures

I take as given that a country going through transformations as basic as those Mexico is experiencing will, at best, move one step backward for every one and one-half steps forward. I have tried to capture this in my writing. The old import-substit ution model was kind to the business class, to those whose income came from profit, and much less gracious to those whose incomes came from wages and salaries. Mexico turned the distribution of national income familiar in the United States on its head; in stead of 65 to 70 percent of national income going to wages and salaries, proportions close to these went instead to profits. The result was obscene income inequality and an outrageous level of persons living below the poverty line. Educational opportunit ies and access to health care were similarly distorted against low-income and rural Mexicans. These inequalities, these failures to provide individual opportunities across-the-board, are part of the explanation for the large-scale emigration to the United States.

My initial hope was that the new market-driven economy would gradually correct these distortions. They have not, certainly not so far; they have, in fact, worsened. Real wages in Mexico have not increased from where they were before the 1982 crisis. M exico has not been able to sustain steady growth under the current economic model, but instead has experienced economic change in fits and starts -- down after 1982, up after 1987, albeit modestly, down drastically in 1995, and now moving up again.

Income distribution has worsened because, as one would expect, persons better placed economically are better able to cope with hard times than those barely able to cope even in good times. Inequalities – in incomes, education, and opportunities – mus t be addressed. Correcting them is hard. Part of the fascination with Mexico is how this will be approached now that the market is dominant in economic decision-making while at the same time democracy signifies that government neglect in addressing such b asic issues can be punished at the ballot box.

What Follows

The articles that follow, all relatively brief, were written during the past few years. They deal with a variety of issues, all stimulated by the changes taking place in Mexico. I view the transformation going there as a success story thus far, not because all is going well, but because constructive change is going on at all, and without widespread bloodshed. One should never use the word "revolution" lightly when referring to Mexico, but when a number of basic changes are taking place si multaneously, some strong word is appropriate. Economic policy has changed drastically; the PRI no longer controls the lower house of the legislature; the PAN controls six states and many more municipalities; elections are relatively clean, certainly as c ompared with what once was the case – and consciousness of the country’s social problems now penetrates much more deeply into government and the society as a whole than before. These are momentous changes and they merit close observation.