Opinion Archive

What to Make of Foolish Forbes

December 17, 2008

In its latest edition, Forbes Magazine published a cover story called "Mexican Meltdown: The Coming Disaster". The front page sports an especially dark and menacing Mexican looking over a Mexican-flag bandanna, guerrilla-style, into the camera. Forbes could have done a review of the problems of this huge, diverse, and vitally important country. The cover could have been "The Mexican Challenge". But Forbes decided to go the simple "everything's going to pot" route. Perhaps they believe this will sell more magazines. But what they did is irresponsible and wrong, as Ambassador Sarukhan himself points out in an interview included within.

The truth is that all the American public gets is bad news about Mexico. Even relatively responsible NBC News only talks about violence... over, and over, again. Its parent company, GE, has been lobbying the Mexican government to allow its Spanish-language Telemundo to operate here. Nevertheless, we never hear about the Mexico that represents an attractive market for GE. We only hear about drugs, violence and poverty, with an occasional shot of a Cancún beach during Spring Break.

This does not serve the interest of the American public, which has a larger stake than it knows in the success or failure of its neighboring North American country. And it certainly makes the job of those of us who are here working in favor of promoting the rule of law, economic growth, etc., more difficult.

The media has pidgeonholed Mexico as 1) a place of violence and poverty, or 2) a place with bucolic, or fun, beach destinations. If your story is in any way nuanced, or truly analytical, it has no place in the mainstream media. The upshot is that we get gems like the Forbes article: "drug-related violence pervades all segments of life in Mexico". No, it doesn't. The 107 million Mexicans and 1+ million Americans who live here are certainly worried about narco-violence. But it certainly does not "pervade" our lives here. To say it does is to misinform the public, at best, and to generate fear and loathing towards Mexico and Mexicans, at worst.

To pretend that Mexico (and perhaps even the 27 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the US), will just bid "adiós" and fall off the edge of the entire American Southwest is ridiculous. Nevertheless, that is the leitmotif behind many of the reactions to what people are seeing in the news. Airing our problems could provide a wakeup call to people in power, but expectations are often so low that dissing Mexico fuels despair, not action.

Explain yourself

In February, this column pleaded: "President Calderón needs to get interested parties with more local legitimacy to argue Mexico’s case". At the time, it asked for a coordinated, multi-disciplinary public education campaign in the US to confront the myths, explain the challenges, and invite the public to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. It said: "Non-governmental Mexican and American organizations should be disseminating information about Mexico and its cooperation with the US. In addition, North American companies with interests on both sides of the border could launch a campaign to educate people regarding NAFTA."

Unfortunately, Mexico keeps its PR budget tied to the Ministry of Tourism, which is obsessed with variations on the anachronistic "Amigo Country" campaign of the 1970s. The Forbes article is an example not only of lazy journalism, but of Mexico's failure to explain and sell itself to its most important audience.

Criminally scandalous

Instead of smearing Mexico with facile alarmism, Forbes, supposedly a magazine for investors, should have been paying more attention to what became the real "next disaster", just down the street from their offices.

Bernie Madoff allegedly created, under the auspices of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a Ponzi scheme to the tune of $50 billion dollars. He was regulated as a "broker dealer", certified by the authorities, operating with impunity for more than 30 years. The SEC has been extremely effective at making the lives of ordinary investors more difficult by limiting third-party wire transfers for the sake of combating "money laundering", for example. But when it came to actually doing their job, which is "to protect investors", they have been criminally negligent. Not even in the darkest depths of Mexico's multiple financial crises did we see this level of brazen swindling as a result of astonishing government ineptitude. To wit, when Alfonso Romo went personally bankrupt, his brokerage, Vector, was deftly isolated from the mess and investors never lost even a minute's sleep. Who would have ever thought that Mexican authorities could teach their American counterparts a thing, or two, about oversight.

For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page

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