Entrenched interests enslave Mexicans in cycle of hopelessness

At a modern factory set amid cactus fields in this central Mexican city, workers wielding pneumatic tools carefully attach rudders, elevators and horizontal stabilizers to the aft fuselages of state-of-the-art jets.

The plant, owned by Canada’s Bombardier Aerospace, the world’s third-largest civil aircraft manufacturer, embodies Mexico’s growing industrial prowess and a vision of its future ”“ prosperous and modern, where workers and their families enjoy a standard of living befitting one of the world’s most populous countries, sitting next door to the world’s largest economic power.

But the image is far from the Mexico of today, and many here now wonder if it will ever be the Mexico of tomorrow.

Twelve years ago, Mexicans thought their country had been given a fresh start when, for the first time in seven decades, the political party that had been identified with a do-nothing bureaucracy, crony capitalism and a corrupt government lost its hold on the presidency. The defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known here as the PRI, opened the door, many hoped, to better government, fairer distribution of the country’s wealth, and a real start toward remaking Mexico into a booming nation of middle-class consumers, instead of its long-standing role as a source of cheap and often illegal migrant labor.

When Mexican voters go to the polls July 1, however, the PRI’s candidate is all but certain to win, exiling from power the business-friendly National Action Party, the PAN, whose two terms in the presidency ushered in scant beneficial change. Instead, the optimism that pervaded Mexico when Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox took power in 2000 has turned into a persistent malaise, where a drug war filled with public executions and horrific beheadings is the overriding image.

New York Times Magazine, By Patrick Radden Keefe, June 15

One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for ”œFather” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s ”œinsatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. ”œPoor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. ”œSo far from God and so close to the United States.”

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 ”” more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

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