I'm not holding my breath

(Via BrothersJudd) Georgie Anne Geyer at the San Diego Tribune astounds with Is the tide finally turning in Mexico?

In short, Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures.

When I was in Mexico last fall, after dozens of visits over the years, people on every political and social level confirmed these accusations, complaining to me of Fox's failures. Forty families still own 60 percent of Mexico. There are no voluntary organizations, no civic involvement, no family foundations – and thus, no accountability, allowing corruption to flourish. Mexico gains $28 billion from oil revenue and $20 billion from immigrant remittances. There is virtually no industrialization, no small business, no real chance at individual entrepreneurship. Under Fox, it has created only one-tenth of the 1 million jobs needed.

Ah, but there are new voices of change, of reason, of self-awareness in Mexico, in place of the hoary anti-gringo rants: the beginnings of a transformation of the debate.
The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined “Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity.” It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: “For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure.”

Other prominent Mexicans were quoted as saying, for instance, the formerly unthinkable: that a wall would be the “best thing that could happen for Mexico”; the “porous border” allowed “elected officials to avoid creating jobs.”
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This is European social democracy, this is American New Deal, this is real development talk, in place of the tiresome historical Mexican attitude that everything is the gringos' fault and they should pay for it.
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The fact that the free enterprise candidate for July's presidential election, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), is suddenly and unexpectedly surging ahead on his slogan of “My job will be to make sure you have a job” may show that the Mexican people are fed up. In addition, the fact that only 50,000 of the 400,000 Mexicans in the United States who were available to vote in the July Mexican elections have bothered to register can only indicate a generalized disgust with Mexican corruption and hopelessness, and perhaps even a turn toward American ways.

I'm not a big fan of European social democracy or New Deal development, but even that would be a miracle. The only problem is that if it happened, we would have to find some new hobby for our bleeding hearts. Maybe we could import Haiti?