Book review: 'A Mexican Utopia', by Luis Rubio

Luis Rubio is one of Mexico's most experienced and wisest commentators. As a group they are prone to periodic laments as to why their country, so rich in so many ways, remains so poor. Is it the DNA? Or the geography and history? Or is it because of a clash between the new and the old, the democratic and the authoritarian?

In his latest book, A Mexican Utopia, Mr Rubio takes a different approach. It is less about how to make Mexico rich than how to make it kinder and better. His utopian vision is slightly tongue in cheek; Mr Rubio admits readers may wonder what he "has been smoking". Yet its thesis is serious and timely.

"Mexico's problem is not criminality or violence," he writes, "but the absence of government, the absence of competent institutions capable of maintaining order, imposing rules, and earning the respect of the citizenry."

In short, Mexico's central problems are gross legal impunity and the absence of the rule of law. Remarkably, the book was finished before last year's disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero state, and before the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto was shaken by conflict-of-interest scandals. It is testament to Mr Rubio's prescience that his book reads like a commentary on both of those events.

Mr Rubio argues that Mexico is stuck, although not in a conventional sense. The economy is on a sound footing and has many centres of modernity and genuine excellence, especially among exporting and manufacturing industries. And in the first two years of his presidency, Mr Pena Nieto passed a number of radical economic reforms - including opening up the energy sector to private investment - that could expand these areas.

Yet it is not the economy that ails Mexico.

The lack of the rule of law is common to many emerging economies, but in Mexico it has particular characteristics.

For most of the 20th century, Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) under a "one- party democracy". It was a stable system, based on a pyramid structure with a president-cum-emperor at the top, political and corporate chieftains jostling below him, and the rest underneath.

Although a corrupt system, based on patronage and discretionary power, it provided 71 years of stability. Then the PRI lost the 2000 presidential election and the pyramid was dismantled. Institutionally, there was little to take its place.

The exception was the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Nafta instituted a degree of modernity: it reassured investors by putting in place a framework of rules that limited the discretion of elites. Their trade-off was less power in return for more economic dynamism. Yet the remainder of Mexico's democratic apparatus - the structures that buttress citizenship and the accountability of power - remained half-formed.

Mr Rubio wants the equivalent of a Nafta for the rest of Mexico - an institutional framework that supports the rule of law and replaces patronage and corruption.

The need for change is largely moral. But it is also utilitarian. Mexico's place in the global economy means that the current "prehistoric" system no longer works. Indeed, the lack of rule of law could even threaten the fruits of Mr Pena Nieto's reforms.

How to achieve this utopian state? Mr Rubio cites the example of Spain's transition to democracy. There, he writes, the main concern of the first post-Franco government was to focus less on the "what" of had to be done than on the "how", ie Spain's institutional arrangements.

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In Mexico, that would mean ripping up the system of privileges and submitting all society fully to the law. Such a change would require the savviest of political operators.

So who could lead it? Mr Rubio floats a paradox: Mr Pena Nieto himself, because, as his radical reform package has shown, "Pena Nieto's greatest asset is his capacity for political operation".

That may be a pipe dream, but it is one of the more fertile possibilities raised in this rewarding book. At only 145 pages, it enjoys the further merit of brevity - and is available as a free download from the Wilson Center think-tank in Washington DC.

A Mexican Utopia: The Rule of Law is Possible, by Luis Rubio, Wilson Center, January 2015

Free to download: www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mexican-utopia-the-rule-law-possible

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