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Lorenzo
Meyer speaks at the Women's Faculty Club
on the challenges facing the Fox government in
Mexico. Among the challenges he identified in continuing
Mexico's transition away from authoritarian rule
are the growing divide between rich and poor, a
persistent lack of respect for the rule of law,
and the lack of economic growth recently.
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Signs
of Democracy: Mexico’s New Beginning
Daffodil Altan, Graduate School of Journalism
Lorenzo
Meyer, one of Mexico’s most respected academics,
spoke at UC Berkeley on March 5, 2003 on the consolidation
of Mexican democracy. The talk was part of the U.S–Mexico
Futures Forum, a series organized by the Center for Latin
American Studies, which began in the fall of 2002. Meyer
also taught a seminar at CLAS through late March entitled “The
U.S. and Mexico: Conflicting Agendas: A View of the Present
from a Historical Perspective.”
Meyer
has made it his life’s work to bring history directly
to the forefront of every discussion. “In Mexico
everything is charged with history, everything, every discourse,
from the left to the right, everything. It is a great political
weapon because history has been continually redistributed
among Mexicans by the conquerors of the moment.” One
of the problems now, according to Meyer, is that “Fox
is likeable, but he is extremely ignorant about the history
of Mexico and its complexity.”
It
is obvious from the way Meyer leans into his audience that
he loves to tell a story. His English is musical, dissonant
and even high pitched when he hits the irony in his stories.
They are stories that touch, after all, on the marrow of
Mexico’s history: its long and troubled road to democracy.
According
to Meyer, the consolidation of democracy, symbolized by
Vicente Fox’s election in 2000, is not, like in the
United States, the result of an inevitable historical trend,
but rather an attempt to overcome a tradition of authoritarianism
inherited from the Conquest.
Until
2000, “Mexican political life has been the antithesis
of democracy,” Meyer said. Even though democratic
revolutions occurred at key points in Mexican history — the
War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution, for example — they
all ended in long-lasting authoritarian regimes. Today,
however, Meyer believes that Mexican civil society is strong
enough to support democracy, even in the midst of an economic
crisis.
“You
can smell it in Mexico City. There are many, many organizations — not
very efficient ones,” he said tongue in cheek, “but
there they are, it is a civil society. There is a free
press, really, really a free press. The government cannot
control the press. So a civil society that isn’t
alive, say, in the Soviet Union, is very much alive in
Mexico and this is an integral part of a democratic society,” he
said.
Still,
the difficulty in overcoming a tradition of authoritarianism
inherited from the Conquest and the U.S.’s historically
schizophrenic treatment of Mexico threaten to override
the country’s promise for democracy.
“The
year Fox came into power the Mexican economy just stopped
because the U.S. economy started behaving peculiarly,” said
Meyer. “We have not grown. How do we address the
dilemma in Mexico that there is equality in political terms,
but inequality in economic terms?”
Pointing
to the fact that half the population is still considered
poor, Meyer’s voice rises, “What is the good
of a democracy if this is the situation?” The country,
he said, is too caught up in solving its immediate problems
to address larger social challenges. “Mexican democracy
comes at a time when the market is in full force there.
So those who do not have in Mexico cannot participate in
the market. How, how do you go to the Zapatistas in the
countryside and say to a little girl, ‘Here you go,
enterprise.com’?”
Meyer’s
obsession with history pushed him to be one of only two
students out of 13 originally enrolled who completed their
PhD’s in International Relations at the Colegio de
Mexico in the late 1960’s. Meyer then spent three
years earning a doctorate at the University of Chicago
before returning to Mexico to teach.
A
professor since 1970 in the International Studies Department
at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, where he
also directs the U.S.–Mexican Studies Program, Meyer
has written eleven books on subjects ranging from internal
Mexican politics during the 1920’s and 30’s
to books about contemporary Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico
relationship. He writes a weekly column for a national
newspaper, La Reforma, and hosts a weekly show on public
television about history.
