Continuing with the excellent article from SWJ "The Seven Deadly Questions: How To Think About Mexico and Beyond" by Roger Pardo-Maurer, today I want to quote at length from the article:
The spectacle of the cartels and their grisly internecine violence should not distract us from broader structural challenges to state and society in Mexico - especially since virtually all these challenges conceal tremendous opportunities, attainable through enhanced cooperation between our countries. The cartels are more a symptom than a cause; they are strong, in no small measure because the state is weak or ineffective, and Mexico’s fractured civil society is unable to compensate for that weakness. We must look beyond the short-term crises, including the current economic crisis, to deep-rooted trends working against the integrity and cohesiveness of the Mexican state. In light of some of these trends, it is appropriate to ask whether Mexico in the next generation could become a dysfunctional state even if there were no drug problem at all.
The big issues on which Mexico needs to make big progress are roughly captured by the questions below. Some of these questions beg for the transformative application of new technologies and the entrepreneurial spirit, while others, such as the dramatically shifting demographic patterns, call for an urgent reassessment of U.S. immigration requirements and policy. Not all these issues will have an impact on the entire nation at any given time, but collectively and cumulatively they will have decisive impact on the future of Mexico as a nation: on whether it can assure a decent and rising standard of living to its people, maintain a coherent political system, preserve the integrity of the state, and assert effective sovereignty throughout its entire national territory.
1. Water: What will Mexico do when it runs out of water? North and central Mexico are already hard-pressed by the demands of fast-growing urban megalopolises and of industry. Furthermore, global climate change is expected to make this region considerably more arid than it is today. Water shortages already cause for squabbling with the United States (over treaty rights to the intensively-used Colorado River, for example). Over time, they may become a source of tension within Mexico itself as the water-rich and hydropower-producing states of the south become more assertive with their resources.
2. Oil: What will Mexico do when it runs out of oil? Despite two decades of wrenching structural change by Mexico’s government, oil revenues still account for 40% of the federal budget. Quite apart from the political system’s inability to crack open the Pemex monopoly to foreign investment. Mexico’s proven oil fields (including the Cantarell field, until recently the second most productive in the world) are in “terminal decline,” with yields dropping by up to 14% annually. Mexico currently exports about 50% of its oil, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects it will become a net oil importer as early as 2017, an extraordinary reversal for the second largest supplier of oil to the United States.
3. Competitiveness: Does Mexico have a viable strategy to remain competitive in global markets, particularly vis-à-vis China, India, Brazil, and other large emerging markets? There is no clear answer to what such a strategy would entail, especially as U.S. sectors that were the basis of Mexico’s NAFTA boom, such as apparel and the automotive industry, shift elsewhere or fade.
4. Regionalism: How will Mexico manage the widening gap between its impoverished, youthful, and heavily-indigenous southern states and the rest of the country? This a perennial theme in Mexican history, the stuff of revolutions, driven by demographics and the country’s shattered geography. The population dynamics of Mexico’s center and north are quite different from those of southern states such as Oaxaca and Chiapas. These areas, and the neighboring republics of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are the demographic “hot spots” of the American continent, with large cohorts (sometimes exceeding 50% of the population) under the age of 15. The demographic patterns of this vast sub-region, which has been nicknamed “Mayastán”, is typically associated with conflict and instability, and similar to what one finds in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia.
5. Indigenous issues: Has Mexico really found the formula to satisfy the dignity and aspirations of its indigenous peoples? Mexicans can be legitimately proud of their progress in this area. Yet, despite conspicuous advances in the national standard of living, the poverty rates and marginalization of indigenous communities remain at unacceptable levels, and provide fertile ground for populist-revanchist indigenous leaders in the style of Evo Morales of Bolivia.
6. Old people: How will Mexico support its rapidly aging population? Mexico’s dramatic declines in fertility are among the steepest in the world, and the steepest among the major Latin nations. Inconceivable as it may seem today, the work force is projected to start shrinking after 2030. There will be enormous social and fiscal ramifications as each Mexican worker has to support an increasing number of dependents, and as Mexico’s traditional extended family structure becomes leaner. The Worker/Dependent ratio will continue to rise until around 2025 (more Workers for each Dependent) but after that the aging population will cause this to shift rapidly into reverse (more Dependents for each Worker). Mexico has only about 10 years to come up with a viable strategy for how to pay for its senior citizens---a blink of an eye as we know from our own debates on Social Security reform.
7. Young people: If “exporting” Mexico’s unemployed and underemployed young people to the United States is no longer an option, where will they go and what will they do? Not in contradiction with what was set forth in the previous point, for the next 10 to 15 years Mexico will still have a bulging young population. The traditional method of dealing with them, which led to an extraordinary 15% of Mexico’s population to reach the United States, is increasingly unviable; but the social and political impact, within Mexico, of more effective enforcement of U.S. immigration law is unpredictable and may boomerang in the form of social and political instability.
These questions will define Mexico’s agenda in the 21st century. Like it or not, ready or not, that agenda will in no small measure also be ours. The connection between Mexico and the changing face of America is inescapable. The United States is now the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico (and just ahead of Colombia), and a Spanish-language cultural powerhouse in its own right. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Hispanics accounted for half the births of U.S. citizens between 2001-2007, with a majority of those being of Mexican origin or ancestry. The list goes on and on. History will look on Barack Obama not just as our first Black president, but as our first Brown president---the first to bridge the divide from the Black/White racial politics of our past to the post-racial, multi-ethnic politics of a true nation of immigrants in which 1 out of 5 has a foreign-born parent. The irony of this transcendent moment for African-Americans is that Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to power coincided precisely with the moment when Hispanics overtook them as the nation’s largest minority. Hispanics are projected to make up to 20% of the U.S. electorate by 2020.
By comparison with places like Europe, Russia, China, and India, we should count ourselves lucky to have as simpatico a neighbor as Mexico. But that luck may not last for ever, and should never be taken for granted. The challenge for U.S. policy-makers is to seize the opportunities lurking amid the challenges, to look beyond the short-term linear fact of the border and to think in depth of the vast region encompassing Mexico, Central America, and Colombia as a single strategic system of 200,000,000 people, linked to us by history, geography, trade, cultural and religious roots, and, increasingly, blood kinship. At this moment in time, in part due to the accidents of history but also due to epic tenacity and sacrifice in recent generations, the people of this area have a greater sympathy with the United States than at any moment in their history. This is not a moment to be squandered.
