Millennium Development Goals
Most assessments suggest that
extreme poverty in Mexico is falling although the World Bank reports that the figure remains as high as 18% in 2005. The latest progress report for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) dated April 2005 expresses confidence that the Goals will be achieved, with doubts conceded only in relation to some individual targets for health. There has been high investment in education over the last 10 years, with spending now reaching over 6% of GDP, and the number of children out of school
has been halved since 2000.
However, such analyses fail to convey a true picture of poverty in Mexico where pressures of a population in excess of 100 million combine with the
faultlines of a largely deregulated open market economy to create extremes of inequality. Bottlenecks of poverty are particularly found amongst rural indigenous groups and in the overcrowded shanty towns of the country’s vast cities. In 2005 45% of the population had difficulty in providing for basic needs and there is increasing consensus that the National Development Plan (2007-2012) currently under consideration must include
more pro-poor policies to counter the shortcomings of the economic model.
Economy
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US-Mexico border
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As the unstable informal economies and inhuman living conditions prevailing in the peri-urban slums increasingly fail to deliver expectations to their estimated 20 million inhabitants, so the lure of a life in the United States takes hold. Every day around 1,000 Mexicans are believed to cross the US border and 1.2 million illegal immigrants were arrested in 2005. Border issues dominate the relationship with the US, especially
since the 9/11 tragedy. There is strong opposition within Mexico’s poor communities, and indeed from President Calderón, to the latest initiative of President Bush to
construct a massive 700 mile fence and engage 6,000 additional security guards.
Many observers feel that this extreme example of migration is the direct result of two decades of structural adjustment policies and free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by US, Canada and Mexico in 1994. This perspective considers that NAFTA has created unemployment and poverty, undermining firstly the agriculture sector in Mexico (to the benefit of US agribusiness) and secondly an emergent industrial sector (to the benefit of manufacturers in low cost countries).
Although there is no serious move to reverse the open market model in Mexico, non-governmental interests are now
more inclined to challenge the wisdom of signing up to US–sponsored agreements, as has been the case with the controversial
Plan Puebla Panama, a massive government development plan supported by the IMF and World Bank which aims to assist the poor Puebla region with top-down infrastructure investment rather than concern for the needs of the population.
There is of course no escaping the close economic ties with the US; the two largest earners of foreign currency for Mexico are oil exports and remittances from almost 10 million Mexicans working in the US. Aid from the US for development of military capacity in Mexico at $60 million is almost double the level of its aid for social development.
Health
Wide sectors of the population in Mexico lack access to adequate health facilities. This is partly due to restrictions on overall government expenditure and partly due to the fiscal relationship between Federal and State governments which leaves some regions struggling to obtain an appropriate share of resources. A government initiative known as “Popular Health Insurance” aims to provide access to all those not covered by health insurance by 2010 but there are doubts that sufficient funding will be available.
Poorer regions are therefore at risk of failing to achieve targets for health indicators, especially for
maternal and infant mortality. Women’s health is often further undermined by a
culture of domestic violence which is proving difficult to expose and control.
Mexico has the third-largest number of people living with AIDS in the Western hemisphere, after the United States and Brazil. Despite the fact that 94 per cent of Mexicans are Catholics,
attitudes towards the use of condoms for protection against the virus are positive.
Politics
Mexico is governed by an elected president and ministers; the legislative body (Union Congress) is made up of two elected houses; the House of Representatives (with 500 deputies) and the House of Senators (with 128 senators). Judicial power is exercised by 11 ministers of a Supreme Court.
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Vicente Fox
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For more than 70 years the country was governed by the same political party, the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Principles of democracy and human rights established in the constitution were consistently undermined in this period and it was not until parliamentary elections in 1997 that an alternative political party,
Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), gained power. The trend was confirmed in the presidential election of December 2000 when the PAN candidate Vicente Fox emerged as the country’s new leader. But although the people wanted a change, the “new” party found it very difficult to root out corruption and reduce inequality, the two main promises made by the President. Drug-related and violent crime also proved intractable.
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Felipe Calderón
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The emergence of a further party, the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), created a
clear-cut choice for the electorate in presidential and parliamentary elections held in July 2006. Its candidate, the former Mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, stood on a slogan of “first the poor, for the good of all” with promises to relieve poor farmers by renegotiating the NAFTA treaty. By contrast the more conservative PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, is closely aligned to business interests and neo-liberal economics. Calderón emerged the winner but only by the narrowest of margins and only after the Federal Electoral Tribunal rejected Obrador’s claims of fraud. Although the European Union team of observers pronounced the election to be fair, other groups uncovered evidence of
widespread malpractice. Calderón’s room for manoevre in the presidency may be limited by parliament where PAN lacks an absolute majority.
Civil society and a full range of media are allowed to flourish in Mexico where people are accustomed to sensationalist headlines and stories. Civil society is particularly active in
support of minority and indigenous groups.
Human Rights
As in other Latin American countries, Mexico has a “dirty war” history from the 1970s, a period of unexplained political killings and disappearances. It also has difficulty in shaking off a culture of human rights abuses from that time, in particular the prolonged detention of suspects and the use of torture to extract false confessions from them, and the impunity with which such practice is allowed to take place.
President Fox expressed commitment to addressing these problems and made all the right moves – a new law was proposed which would render evidence obtained under torture as unadmissable, a Special Prosecutor has been appointed to investigate crimes of previous governments or the military, and there is a Policy Commission on Human Rights and much improved access to information.
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No justice in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
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But somehow none of these initiatives is able to gain real momentum or reach the outer layers of State administration. A review of the promises made by Vicente Fox at the time of his election points out that the Special Prosecutor’s office lacks resources and has
failed to secure a single conviction. Recent judgments have indeed concluded that it is “too late” to proceed with prosecutions for events under investigation.
The most notorious example of failure of the criminal justice system is found in the northern city of Juárez, where as many as 400 young women have been murdered over a period of years without a single arrest having been made by indifferent police authorities. Amnesty International has pointed out that there is
no principle of presumption of innocence in Mexico’s constitution and that flaws in the legal system are therefore inevitable.
Conflict
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Zapatistas in Mexico City © Ramon Cavallo/AFP
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The potential for violent political conflict within Mexico centres on the poorest states of Chiapas and Oaxaca where a large proportion of the population is indigenous, suffering particular discrimination in land rights and access to education and health resources. It was from Chiapas that an uprising of Zapatista rebels against the government erupted in 1994, provoking severe counter-measures by the authorities. Led by the charismatic pipe-smoking Subcomandante Marcos, the rebels and their cause for more rights for indigenous people have enjoyed a degree of sympathy within Mexico and beyond. After a long period of little violence, Marcos is
currently engaging in the peaceful political arena on a left-wing agenda.
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Conflict in Oaxaca
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Social tensions also created disruption in Oaxaca during 2006 when a teacher’s strike evolved into a shutdown of public services in protest against the alleged corruption of the State governor, Ulises Ruiz. As the stand-off became more violent, with accusations that Ruiz was engaging armed militia to attack the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO),
Federal forces were called in to restore stability.
Environment
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Mexican flora © Solange Márquez
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There is heated debate in Mexico amongst scientists and the general public as to whether the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops will contaminate local maize varieties. But this has not prevented the government from passing a new law to
permit the planting of GM seeds. Although
Mexico has many achievements on the environmental front, deforestation remains a key issue, with environmentalists warning that
forest cover may not survive beyond the current century unless tougher action is taken.
Mexico City itself is the focus for the country’s most severe environmental problems as its infrastructure and regulations fail to keep pace with rapid population growth.
Air quality is below safety standards for most of the year whilst depletion of the aquifers and lakes for which the City was famous condemns much of the population to
intermittent and inadequate supplies of low quality water.
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Cascada Tarahumara, México
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Over-extraction of water is a problem throughout Mexico, not helped by the freedom granted to the agriculture sector to use water without charge, accounting for 75% of all water use in the country. Although the National Water Programme aims to to create 70% access to clean water in rural areas, it is the poorest people who tend to be cut off from supplies and obliged to pay the highest charges. Government spending on water is declining as a %age of GDP, despite some estimates that the infrastructure requires investment of $1.6 billion per annum.
Solange Márquez is the National Co-coordinator of Rescue Mission: Planet Earth, Mexico (Peace Child International) and a member of the Ad-hoc Working Group on “Youth and Millennium Development Goals: Challenges and Opportunities for Implementation”. She has started the Mexican Youth Alliance for MDGs Implementation. Solange has also been working for three years as a Parliamentary Advisor at the Mexican Senate with the Foreign Affairs and Parliamentarian Practices Commissions and serves as a Latin-American representative of the Youth Network for Peacebuilding, UNESCO.
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