On January 24, I submitted an article entitled “Reforms in Mexico” and writer Margaret Randall filed a very articulate response, finding my ideas “extremely troubling.” She raised three issues to which I would like to respond.
1. My characterization of two-time presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as “loony” when, in fact, she believes that he is a “genuine revolutionary reformer” and “widely believed to have won the election in his first bid for the presidency.” I agree with part of her criticism. Using the word “loony” was wrong because he’s a very intelligent individual. The word “hypocritical” would have been more accurate. The way he shut down some 7 miles of the Paseo de La Reforma and put up a tent city in the Zócalo after the 2006 election was a betrayal of the very people he claimed to be representing – all those street vendors, cab drivers, and employees of small stores whose income was cut off for weeks by his protest. I was there for the elections and again in mid-August 2006 and the suffering inflicted by López Obrador was obvious.
2. As for the passage of constitutional amendments that will open up Pemex, the national oil company, to foreign investment Ms. Randall says that “Pemex has had its troubles, but it represents Mexico, under President Lazaro Cardenas, wresting the country’s oil production from foreign monopolies. That act of nationalization was important. The industry’s more recent problems can be traced to a variety of causes that would be better explained in an article about Mexico’s oil industry that dispensed with a single misleading sentence.”
I agree that “wresting the country’s oil production from foreign monopolies” was an important step those many years ago but the real issue is the “industry’s more recent problems.” Mexico’s oil production has declined from about 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004 to approximately 2.6 million barrels in 2012. (At the same time, oil production in Texas just across the border has skyrocketed.) In 2003, 16% of the oil we import in total came from Mexico. According to SENER, Mexico’s oil ministry, that number had declined to 11% by 2012.
During this time period, the price of oil has risen from $20 per barrel to about $100 so this decline in production has resulted in an enormous loss of revenue. Since about a third of the Mexican national budget comes from Pemex, this has a tremendous impact on everything that the Mexican government should be doing for its citizens - decent social programs, for example, for the people I mentioned in my article.
Recently Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, The Prize, interviewed Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya about these Pemex problems and Lozoya said, “We have the reserves but we don’t have the cash or the technology to develop them.” He estimates that he will need $60 billion a year to make up this lost ground but Pemex can only come up with about $25 billion. So foreign investment is the only answer, not only in terms of capital but also technology and expertise.
Yes, issues like foreign investment and joint ventures are complicated but if it can work so well in the private sector areas like automobile mnufacturing, why not with Pemex?
I recognize that this is an issue of national sovereignty for many Mexicans and a topic that Mexican political leaders have been afraid to touch for years. That makes the willingness of two of the three major political parties to take it on even more impressive.
3. As for education, Ms. Randall says that, “Mexico’s teachers union stands for real reform in Mexican education. If you ask most knowledgeable Mexicans about the education reform bill, they will laugh – bitterly.”
The teachers union has controlled education in Mexico for decades and here are two of their “reforms.” A teacher can give or sell his or her teaching certificate to a family member even though that family member may have absolutely no teacher training or experience. And a citizen can buy a teaching certificate from the union, again without having any teacher training or experience. These certificates are valuable because a teacher’s salary is much higher than the average salary in Mexico. But what does this mean for the student who gets a teacher who either doesn’t show up for classes or is untrained and can’t be fired?
What results has this union domination produced? The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has ranked education in the 34 OECD countries in three categories – Reading-Overall, Mathematics and Science. In their most recent study, 2009, Mexico ranked last in every category. (The US rankings weren’t very impressive – Reading – 14th, Mathematics – 26th and Science – 18th.)
As for how Mexicans feel about their educational systems, here are two anecdotes from families in the Palomas area.
Manuel Hinojos is the police Comandante for that region and lives in El Entronque, about thirty miles south of the border with his wife, Concepción, and her granddaughter, Karima. Karima has US citizenship so they find a way to transport her to the border every day so that she can go to a US school rather than a Mexican one.
The owners of The Pink Store in Palomas have four children. When those children reached school age, the family moved to El Paso. It was so important that their children go to better schools that the parents were willing to commute 150 miles a day from El Paso to their business in Palomas and back.
I support these reforms because I believe that they are essential for Mexico and I respect President Enrique Peña Nieto because he has shed the image of a “dandy from a discredited party” and gained broad bi-partisan support for his ideas. His next steps won’t be easy and there are other very tough issues to deal with like corruption and crime but his accomplishments are already way ahead of our fractured political system.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Margaret Randall for her comments. Although we may disagree on the issues, she was right in saying that they needed more discussion.
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