Booker T. Washington High School

Model United Nations Club

Country Briefing: Mexico

With a population of 100 million, Mexico is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the hemisphere.  It is a large, diverse, rapidly-growing country notable for its long border and complex relationship with the United States.  With a per capita GNP of $5,530, it is a country of medium wealth, but deep pockets of poverty and income inequality weaken the social fabric.

History: Indians first settled here 20,000 years before Columbus, building the hemisphere’s most impressive array of early civilizations.  These included the original Olmec peoples, the Mayan centers of Chichen Itza and Palenque, Teotihuacan, and Aztec Tenochtitlan.  Spanish settlers arrived in the form of Cortes’ invading army in 1519, and soon founded a new Catholic civilization on the ruins of the earlier ones.  Government was based on the narrow rule of peninsulares – people from the Iberian peninsula, supported by the Church and a mestizo class, over large populations of Indians and African slaves.  As Spanish power declined, the colonists grew more restive, finally achieving their independence in 1810.  A succession of military and landowner-led governments followed, during a period of frequent conflict (wars of rebellion were fought as well as struggles with the US in 1848 and French imperialists in the 1860s).  Despite the loss of much of its territory to the United States, Mexico endured.  The major social tensions in this period concerned the privileged position of the Church and the all-important question of land reform.  This ultimately led to a chaotic revolution in 1910, one of the first great modern revolutions.  Various dictators ruled until the formation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known in Spanish as the PRI) in 1929.  Thereafter one-party rule dominated Mexican politics, steering the country into the industrial age.  Oil wealth helped fuel economic growth, and the PRI effectively managed many social transformations.  However, while the PRI helped to modernize Mexico, it failed to bring democracy to the people.  Civil unrest returned in 1966, and led to the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1968.  The oil boom of the 1970s fueled a new wave of growth, but the oil glut of the 1980s proved definitively that economic management by a single party was infeasible.  Shifting course, the PRI began new reforms in the 1990s, opening its economy to international trade and negotiating the historic North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States in 1994.  This greatly increased economic growth, even if much of it is in the form of maquilladoras – sweatshops – along the border with the US.  These reforms were accompanied by growing democratization, as political opposition groups were allowed to compete politically.  In recent years, change has brought both growth and instability, including the Zapatista uprising of southern peasants fearing the effects of globalization, the prosecution of one leading PRI politician and the assassination of another.  In 2000, Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party defeated the PRI to win the presidency, the first win by a non-PRI candidate in 71 years.  Fox now faces the challenges of continuing reforms while managing the social strains that accompany them.

Diplomatic Agenda: Mexico’s first and foremost international concern is economic.  While the economy has grown over the last 15 years, more needs to be done.  It needs reliable sources of foreign capital, money that is best secured by low-interest loans offered by the International Monetary Fund (the IMF).  It could also use money from the private sector, such as foreign businesses wishing to open up plants in Mexico.  To do this, though, it must guarantee political stability.  Continuing democratic reforms will help, but there are dangers.  In the southern Chiapas region, many Zapatistas continue to operate against the government.  The government needs to secure this situation, ensuring that such local rebels do not build links with foreign terrorist organizations or with international drug traffickers.  Immigration is an important humanitarian issue, for two reasons.  Mexico would like the United States to declare an amnesty for Mexican illegals in the US, to legitimize their legal status.  An amnesty would improve the position of Mexican-Americans, and incidentally improve their ability to send money back to families in Mexico. Mexico would also like to reduce the number of Central Americans moving through Mexico on the way to the United States.  One idea under discussion is called Puebla Panama, a Mexican initiative to develop trade and businesses along the entire Central American isthmus.  This would slow down migration, it is believed, by giving Central Americans a reason to stay home.  Much depends on the ability of Mexico to resolve issues like the illegal flow of immigrants and drugs across the border into the US.  But conflicts like the recent vote on Iraq (Mexico opposed the US-led effort) may make cooperation difficult.  Finally, environmentalism is an important concern, but it has taken a back seat to economic development, with the result that Mexico faces environmental catastrophes in the big cities, along the coastlines and along the border with the US.