Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

“Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America, which is formally part of it in fact, but leaves within short order. And so, it's only this question of what Aldo Henrique calls the miracle that Mexico exists. And to explain it is a paradox. To make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands off government. It's imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains. It's very difficult to rule from a central any central pole. And so savvy governments or governments with no choice, which are quite often same thing, are very hands off. Federalism is built into Mexico's soul.”

“Yucatan economy centers on tourism, the Riviera Maya, Cozumel, etcetera. There's an awful lot in these key populated coastal strips of foreigners. Killing them is bad business. Stability is better for business anywhere. In Yucatan, there's more of an imperative for that. So that's one. And the other is that it has ceased being what it used to be which is a major transit and transhipment route. And so, when I proposed to my wife on a beach in Quintana Roo, we could go out at 8AM next to Tulum, when Tulum was a small dusty town. We could go out and twice a day we would see small planes coming up from Central America. And we knew perfectly well as they headed north up through Quintana Roo that this was a drugs run.”

“Oaxacanos are good at politics, and they are very politically engaged. If you want to make huge leaps, you say, well, that goes back to this the conquest, the sixteenth century, where Spanish rule sort of flows around them. Why? Because people who live in mountains, tend to be quite good at war, and quite prickly, and the Oaxacanos epitomize this. And so outside the main valley, Oaxaca stays largely independent and very decentralized. And every time Oaxaca gets a chance, it sees it to really push for autonomy and political power. Every village in Oaxaca says, we are now a county. It's almost like Swiss Cantons. It's this extraordinary democratic urge. And that trains people to be good at politics.”

“The best meal I had in Yucatan by country mile was about half an hour outside Merida. And it was the same thing, ask a local taxi driver, come on, if you want a really good meal, where would you go? And you said, ah, it's a bit of a drive. And you say, okay, I can see, perverse incentive knowing my question. But when you end up in a sort of small warehouse, really in the middle of nowhere, stuffed full of Mexican people with the most incredible deer, you think, okay. You know, I actually think this was this was a fair a fair reflection. I envy that meal.”

“Mexico has a revolution, first of all, one of the great revolutions, which lays down radical prescriptions for equality, which are then traduced by one of the most unequal economies in The Americas? So you've got talking revolution. You've got massive enduring inequality. And yet you have this, as you point out, abnormal peace going back to 1929 with regular elections like clockwork, every six years. Every six years, there's a peaceful transfer of power. There is never any even imagination of a January 6 moment there. This is a one party state and the elections are rigged. No question. All the way until the last decade, really, the national elections are rigged, but the local ones are not.”

“In more straightforward terms, this is one of the reason that Mexico's healthcare system at a really nuts and bolts level works, is because every communal farm, ajido they're called, has a medical office. And so even though in the sort of apparent terms of giving Mexico's rural population a new level of wealth, autonomy, it doesn't work particularly well. It brings a certain pride. It brings a certain independence. It brings good health care. There are all these less tangible benefits. There's nothing like it in The Americas.”

“How could it do this compared to the rest of Latin America? Two things. First of all, by keeping Catholicism out of political life more than almost anywhere else. And so whereas you have priests inveighing against the evils of contraception, again, across most other Latin American societies, the revolution and the nineteenth century before it meant that Mexico has a unique degree of separation of church and state, as the church just doesn't say anything as the government goes about aggressively pushing the pill, condoms, etcetera. Women who are educated have far more autonomy to say yes to contraception. And you see this really clearly in rates of uptake of the pill, which in the sixties goes through the roof as soon as it's available.”

“Guerrero is a place which is very dear to me. The story in that state is a long tradition of the drive for political independence, exacerbated in its intensity by a large Afro Mexican population on the coast who distinctly conscious that they have been discriminated against, who are good at violence. I think it's because Guerrero is next door or it's relatively close to Mexico City, And so it's threatening to Mexico City in the way, say, Sonora or Yucatan isn't so much. And so when some fairly oppressive conditions, you can imagine them, land monopolization, political thuggery, etcetera, combine in a state with people who really are very keen on independence and are relatively close to city, the answer is this sort of reinforcing cycle of repression, opposition, repression.”

“The story in that state is a combination of, production and transshipment. For transshipment, you've got the ports of Lazaro Carnas, which is a huge port that is a total white elephant. So it's a very good place to begin precursors and fentanyl more recently, precursors for meth. You've got the avocado industry, huge prize for extortion, which is increasingly many drug trading organizations, principal or major part of their portfolio, and avocado farmers and lime farmers are great to extort. And then finally, we come back to my favorite themes, mountains. It is quite easy to hide things like meth labs, and it's quite easy to kill soldiers who come looking for you. Michoacan is sort of made for guerilla warfare.”

“The idea of electing judges is a really poor idea, I think, in Mexico because of the interest of local drug trading organizations in having sympathetic judges. And it's a lot lower cost to get them elected than to threaten them. Judges are people who it's generally a bad idea to kill. State doesn't like it. Happens really regularly, but still quite a high risk strategy as opposed to just having them in your pocket. And while electoral turnout across Mexico is admirably high and remarkable, judicial elections have just been the glaring exception to that. I think turnout was 13%, and I think that in itself is a condemnation of the whole project.”

“I'm writing a book which is a prehistory of money laundering, And it's based on a document I found in the British Foreign Office, which is a query from a director of the great bullion dealers, Johnson Matthey. And it says, I've just been in touch with a person on a steamship lying off in the Channel Islands who has £5,000,000 worth of illicit government, Mexican government silver on board. I'd like to buy it pennies on the pound. What would your advice be? And the first bit of advice is check that the silver actually exists and don't tell the Mexican government. I would like to know what happened next at that end because I think I know at the Mexican end where it came from and how it got onto the ship in New York Harbor.”