Saturday, August 22, 2009

Fukuyama in Poder

What conclusion can one draw from the recent cover of Poder, other than that the editor's goal was to make Francis Fukuyama look like some sort of species of ninja academic?

The cover story is built around an interview with Fukuyama, as well as a translation of this column from March. The interview doesn't propose anything ground-breaking, but it covers some interesting terrain on the Washington Consensus (he thinks it was a double-edged sword), the use of the army in Mexico (he's in favor of it), and the Mérida Initiative (he thinks it should be expanded to more countries with more cash to support it). Fukuyama also had perhaps the pithiest possible retort to people who call Mexico a failed state:
Many people in Mexico believe in the hypothesis that the country is a failed state.
That's because they've never lived in a failed state, like Somalia, Afghanistan, or Haiti, to name a few. 

No comments: