Recently I had an opportunity to interview Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, 2000- 2006 (Mexican presidents can serve only one six-year term). Fox was a member of the PAN party, and bested his rivals from the PRI party, which had controlled the Mexican Presidency for more than 71 years. Fox had been a very high-profile President, standing 6’5”, looking very presidential, telegenic (which never hurts), articulate and usually wearing black cowboy boots, which was sort of his trademark. His bona fides include a degree from Harvard and a business background, specifically a career with Coca Cola as president of the Mexican operation and later all of Latin America. He left the presidency of Mexico with a 70% approval rating.
In preparation for the meeting I did some background reading on Mexico and discovered that many of the impressions I had of our southern neighbor, which I suspect are shared with many of my countrymen, are really very stereotypical and flatly wrong. The perception is of a third world country, sleepy, easygoing, kind of rural, not too industrialized, deep into drugs and drug wars, impoverished in many areas and sending many of their population as illegals to slip into the United States for minimum-pay jobs. It has just enough truth to sound reasonable, but in fact is about 50 years behind the times. It’s not just our general population who hold this perception, but also many Congress members who see their function as protecting us from this perceived Hispanic onslaught.
So here are a few simple facts. (I know some of you hate numbers but it’s a reality check.)
-Mexico has a population of about 117 million, roughly one-third of the population of the United States.
-Mexico has a gross domestic product (GDP as it is known, which is a measure of the size of a country’s economy) of $1.17 trillion (the U.S. has about $15+ trillion), according to the World Bank.
-Mexico’s economy is the 14th largest in the world, just behind Spain and just ahead of South Korea.
-Canada, our neighbor to the north, has a GDP of about $1.81 trillion.
-Canada’s economy is the world’s 11th largest, according to the World Bank.
-The U.S., Canada and Mexico have a combined GDP of about $19-20 trillion, which is bigger than the EU (which has 28 countries), and in fact is larger than any other grouping in the world and makes North America the economic powerhouse of the world.
-Population growth is a bit different. Of the three countries, the USA is growing at 2.2% per year, Canada at 1.8% per year and Mexico the fastest, formerly at about 5.1% per year, although slowing a bit lately.
-Pricewaterhouse Coopers has estimated that by 2030 Mexico will be the world’s 10th largest economy, and by 2050 the world’s 7th largest, bigger than either Germany, France or the UK.
There is between the American perception and Mexican reality a gigantic disconnect, which is one of the things Fox talked about in the interview. There is a large American perception about violence in Mexico, which is in the main overstated, but what there is directly relates to the drug wars.
Fox has a different take on the drug wars. He sees Mexico as stuck between the producers— Columbia, Venezuela, and some of the Central American countries—and the drug market, which is the United States where all the consumers reside. To a certain extent he feels we have asked Mexico to solve an American problem, the rampant use of drugs. In other interviews Fox has been quite outspoken that the American war on drugs is a total failure and that we should be considering decriminalizing drug usage and legalizing marijuana. Other countries like Portugal are experimenting with decriminalizing drug use and appear to be successful.
Fox also has formed a privately funded presidential library, the Vicente Fox Center of Studies, Library and Museum, a first for Mexico, located in the his home state of Guanajuato where he formerly was governor and where his family ranch is located. The purposes are for academic research, a think tank, and principally and most importantly, to expose young people to government as well as to “raise their levels of aspiration” so they can see the value of education and the possibility that they can change and influence their own lives.
Fox visits the United States often and anticipates being back in California and Malibu in the near future, and I’ll be writing about him in more detail.