Obama and Mexican Leaders: The Latter Look Worse by Comparison

Julio Madrazo puts into print to what a lot of Mexicans have been saying about Obama over the last few months:

Having heard [Obama's victory speech], one would like to know that some Mexico politician was capable of offering a speech like that, and more important still, putting the words into practice. Let's take a look at just some of his sentences.

"We may not get there in one term." When has a Mexican politician dared to accept that the problems of the country are so deep, so severe, that the solution will take a long time? Here we believe that if we don't sell immediate achievements and results we aren't doing our job well. We're not capable of accepting that our country requires us to set the rout, define the path, and work in the same direction for decades. Eradicating poverty will take decades, a quality educational system years, better health services, building the infrastructure that is needed; the transformation of Mexico will take many years. But, aside from that, to get there we must have a clear strategy. [Emphasis mine.]

"I will listen to you, above all when we disagree." In Mexico we disagree more than we listen to each other. When we listen to each other, as was the case with the reform of Pemex, we move forward. Listening to others requires respect, a constructive attitude, and a real will to understand others.

"Change can't happen if we go back to how it was before. I couldn't happen without you, without your new spirit of sacrifice." Who in Mexico has adopted a position like this? Who in Mexico has made a call for a new spirit of sacrifice, a new patriotic spirit? No, on the contrary, here we want things to change doing the same as always, acting as we did before.

What sacrifice are the union leaders who hang on to a labor law that doesn't allow Mexico to be competitive prepared to make? Or those of the SNTE [the teacher's union] so that there is a real change in the quality of education? What sacrifice are businessmen that hide in tax loopholes prepared to make? Who in Mexico has told us that we need to change is to help ourselves and work harder? What changes are the public and private monopolies that strangle the economic growth of the country prepared to make?

"Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship, pettiness, and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." How would this phrase be applied to [our] political leaders? Let's hope that they'd take it as a call to attention. Mexico isn't advancing very quickly in its transformation, we're not advancing in our democratization, en our modernization that is urgent, because our leaders are poisoned with partisanship, pettiness, immaturity. But what leader has dared to say this with clarity?

In Mexico, to talk like this, with the truth, is counterproductive. The aforementioned get angry, take offense, and cooperate less. It's an attitude of payback, because they don't accept the criticisms, adopt the wrong attitude, one of blocking, not of changing. "If I changed," they think, "it would benefit my opponent. Never."

The piece's thrust seems basically true, although after several months in office and a few missteps and a couple of moves that look worse in Mexico, I'm sure Obama will seem less that the transcendent politician that every country needs. However, the part in italics gets at an enduring flaw in Mexico's security policy, most evident in the arbitrariness of Excelsior's (and other media's) 100-day countdown for the implementation of Mexico's security pact: a dose of steadfastness and patience is sorely needed. It's easy for me to say, since I haven't been living here for decades as crime has worsened, but the nation's security problems are so entrenched that all you can do in the short term is hammer out a long-term strategy acceptable to all, establish some baseline tactics to help you get there, and then wait. One hundred days is way too short a time-span to evaluate a public policy.