Guest Column
What Price Reconciliation
- By Fred Rosen
- The Herald Mexico/El Universal
September 11, 2006
In his first speech after being ratified as Mexico's president-elect, Felipe Calderón, called for "a common agenda and project" and a political reconciliation. "Mexico," he said, " does not deserve to be divided by causes that can be overcome by means of reason, of understanding, of institutions, of the law and of democracy."
This past Wednesday, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda weighed in on what it would take to put that reconciliation in motion. His suggestions are reasonable, and should be taken seriously by the incoming government, but real, long-term reconciliation will require a good deal more than Castañeda proposes.
"The main questions facing Mexico now," he writes, "are how Felipe Calderón will govern with a mandate of barely 36 percent, and how, indeed whether, he will acknowledge the pent-up social demands of the millions of Mexicans who voted for Mr. López Obrador."
So far, so good.
He begins by proposing that Calderón embrace the kinds of electoral reforms proposed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that "Mr. López Obrador's aides…be given, as any party with a third of the vote deserves, a major, even decisive, role in overhauling an electoral system that has outlived its usefulness."
He suggests that Calderón "propose allowing for the re-election of members of Congress, mayors and the president himself…. Reforming this system to allow for two four-year presidential terms and re-election of other officials would be intrinsically meritorious, but it would also provide Mr. López Obrador's followers with an incentive to play by the rules: their hero could have another shot in just four years' time, and if he wins and governs successfully, he could remain a full eight years in office."
Worth a try, but electoral reform is on the margins of the deep discontent mobilized by López Obrador.
Castañeda ends his op-ed with a more substantive proposal: "Mr. Calderón could follow Bill Clinton and Tony Blair's model, but reverse it. Instead of triangulating from right to left, Mexico's new president should take some of the left-ish planks from his rival's platform, refashion them in a way that makes them acceptable to his own followers, and turn them into policy. The most obvious example would be the creation of a well-financed, means-tested and efficiently administered program to provide universal health care and pensions to the elderly who lack entitlements. Several other proposals lend themselves to this type of triangulation in areas like education and poverty eradication."
Better, but still short of the mark. Reconciliation will require a great deal more than some new social welfare programs for targeted populations - worthy as such programs may be. Real reconciliation will require a redirection of the past quarter century of Latin American policy initiatives - a redirection currently embodied (albeit imperfectly) by the cooperative social initiatives of the countries of the South American Common Market (Mercosur).
This would require a more difficult "triangulated" position on Calderón's part. Such a position is well expressed in an essay on the decline of the appeal of Marxism by centrist political philosopher Tony Judt in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. "If Marxism fell from favor in the last third of the twentieth century," writes the anti-Marxist Judt, "it was in large measure because the worst shortcomings of capitalism appeared at last to have been overcome. The liberal tradition-thanks to its unexpected success in adapting to the challenge of depression and war and bestowing upon Western democracies the stabilizing institutions of the New Deal and the welfare state-had palpably triumphed over its antidemocratic critics of left and right alike. A political doctrine [i.e. Marxism] that had been perfectly positioned to explain and exploit the crises and injustices of another age now appeared beside the point."
But now, writes Judt, the "Social Question" has returned "with a vengeance" in the form of the market fundamentalism embraced by, among a great many other political actors, Felipe Calderón. "What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital..."
"In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation..."
- If Judt is right, until a Mexican government can begin to challenge the market fundamentalism that has been producing wealth and poverty in equal measure, we may see periods of relative peace, but not much reconciliation.
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- The Herald Mexico edition/El Universal article at: http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=34521&tabla=articulos
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