Saturday, February 13, 2010

Castañeda on the Impact of Castañeda

Via Malcolm Beith, Jorge Castañeda reviews his own book in a recent Newsweek column:
Through public debates with declared presidential candidates, meetings with students, and discussions with businessmen and political activists in many corners of Mexico, Aguilar Camín and I have begun to move the country away from the body- and head-count of the country's bloody drug war, and its understandable obsession with violence and organized crime.
A pretty high opinion of his influence, don't you think? Also, as a matter of fact, he just wrote a long article slamming Calderón's "war" for a major American magazine in which the body count appeared in the third sentence. Incidentally, Beith thinks he's running for president in 2012.

2 comments:

Richard said...

Casteñada would LIKE to run for Prez, but last time out, one snotty Mexican observer (not me!) said his base was limited to the dozen or so Mexicans who get their Mexican political opinions from the New York Times. Maybe you run in different circles than I do, but I can't think of anyone who takes him seriously.

pc said...

Yeah there's no way he's going anywhere. I dont know too many NYT-reading Mexicans, and maybe they do indeed love him, but that's not much of a constituency. With the Newsweek column and his teaching at NYU, is profile is almost bigger in the US than in Mexico at this point.