A mother eats lunch with her children in a rural Mexican school, as part of one of the programmes that fall under the umbrella of the Crusade Against Hunger. Credit: Government o Mexico

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 5 2015 (IPS)

While most of Latin America has been reducing poverty, Mexico is moving in the other direction: new official figures reflect an increase in the number of poor in the last two years, despite the billions of dollars channeled into a broad range of programmes aimed at combating the problem.

The negative impact of the 2014 fiscal reform, poorly-designed and mismanaged public policies, sluggish economic growth, and family incomes that have been frozen are all factors underlying the rise in the number of people living in poverty in the region’s second-most populous country, according to experts consulted by IPS.

“We have some well-designed social programmes, but many others have got off track,” said Edna Jaime, the head of México Evalúa, a think tank on public policies. “They claim to fight poverty and foment employment, but they have no effect. Many are captive; they serve political clientele instead of the public,” she told IPS.“If productivity and wages don’t go up, poverty won’t be reduced via the route of incomes. The provision of social services like healthcare, education and housing must be guaranteed, as well as more rational and better designed budgets for anti-poverty programmes and policies.” – Edna Jaime

The criticism is focused on initiatives like the Programme of Direct Support for the Countryside (PROCAMPO), which will shell out some four billion dollars in subsidies this year – money that will mainly benefit big agroexporters in northern Mexico, even though the programme was initially aimed at helping small-scale farmers weather the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in effect between Canada, Mexico and the United States since 1994.

Other targets of the criticism are the over 15 billion dollars a year in subsidies for gas and electricity, because they benefit the bigger consumers.

In Latin America’s second-largest economy, some seven billion dollars a year go into 48 federal programmes focused on production, income generation and employment services.

A similar amount goes towards financing Prospera, a programme to foment social inclusion – formerly known as Oportunidades and praised by international development agencies – and Seguro Popular.

Prospera is a conditional cash transfer programme which offers families cash grants conditional on school attendance and regular health checkups for children, while Seguro Popular extends health insurance to people not covered by other social security services.

According to the latest survey by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), published Jul. 23, 55.3 million people live in poverty in Mexico – three million more than in 2012 – equivalent to 46.2 percent of the population of 121 million.

Of the total number of people in poverty, CONEVAL found that 12 million have incomes of less than a dollar a day, and another 12 million have incomes of less than two dollars a day.

Mexico runs counter to the general trend as one of the few countries in the region that have not been successful in reducing poverty, along with Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2014.

“Mexico is one of the few countries which, instead of reducing poverty, saw the progress made in the past decade grind to a halt. The elements that have hindered progress are the not so high economic growth, and the fact that spending does not have a redistributive effect,” the coordinator of the UNDP report in Mexico, Rodolfo de la Torre, told IPS.

Beneficiaries of one of the subsidies for farmers receive the assistance in a rural town in Mexico, as part of the Prospera social programme aimed at reducing poverty. But despite the billions invested in the war on poverty, the problem has grown in this country in the last two years. Credit: Government of Mexico

The expert said the momentum behind some of the anti-poverty programmes has let up, “which means they have started to lose their effect on reducing poverty.”

The poverty measurement takes into account a number of factors: coverage of basic services like education, healthcare, social security, housing and food, and family income.

On Jul. 29, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) downgraded its forecast for GDP growth in Mexico this year from 3.0 to 2.4 percent – too low to generate the one million new jobs needed.

With respect to income, the current minimum wage of roughly five dollars a day is one of the lowest in Latin America, according to the Observatory of Wages at the private Ibero-American University in Puebla, in the central Mexican city of that name.

The rise in poverty highlights not only the shortcomings of Prospera, but also of the National Crusade Against Hunger, conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto`s flagship programme, which targets people living in extreme poverty and suffering from malnutrition.

The aim of the Crusade, which is concentrated in 400 municipalities and involves 70 federal programmes, is to reach 7.4 million people, 3.7 million of whom live in urban areas and the rest in the countryside.

But Jaime said implementing the strategy “is a very complex task” because of its design and multisectoral structure, and the risk of falling into clientelism. “There are instruments for assisting the poor that have proven themselves to be more effective. The Crusade has not had the desired success,” she said.

Jaime’s think tank México Evalúa, which forms part of the Citizen Action Against Poverty network, has publicly expressed its concern about the initiative ever since it was launched in January 2013, a month after Peña Nieto was sworn in.

For De la Torre, it hasn’t been an outright failure. But, he added, “this is a wakeup call to revise how it functions.”

“The entire burden of poverty reduction cannot fall on one programme,” the UNDP expert said. “Health and education policies also have a role to play. If new resources are not invested, the strategy is not going to bring about a shift in the focus on poverty reduction.”

As of early August, the government had not yet announced the Crusade’s specific targets for this year.

Meanwhile, CONEVAL is to present its medium-term assessment of the strategy in December.

With a grim economic outlook, and the government holding tight to its austerity policies, the experts suggest redesigning the structure of the budget and reviewing the management of social programmes.

“If productivity and wages don’t go up, poverty won’t be reduced via the route of incomes,” said Jaime. “The provision of social services like healthcare, education and housing must be guaranteed, as well as more rational and better designed budgets for anti-poverty programmes and policies.”

In the view of the UNDP, Mexico cannot wait for economic recovery to fight poverty.

“The way spending is channeled towards the neediest must be modified. The funds don’t reach the poorest of the poor; the programmes are not sensitive to regional deficiencies or deficiencies affecting particular groups or individuals,” De la Torre complained.

The UNDP is preparing studies on public spending on children, to identify in which stages of life there are budget gaps, and on the evolution of human development and the labour market’s contribution to that development.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Joaquín Roy
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, Mexico, Nov 1 2014 (IPS)

Mexico can charm, irritate, wound, inspire and confuse the casual visitor as well as the informed researcher. But no one is ever left indifferent by it. Mexico leaves an indelible mark.

To understand it properly, one has to assume that there is not one Mexico, but many. This is partly what made Lesley Byrd Simpson’s book ‘Many Mexicos’ a famous bestseller in the 1960s; it is still required reading for travellers and academics alike.

Joaquín Roy

One Mexico appears to be caught in a time warp. Another is cruelly open to nearly all the evils and tragedies of the present age.

One lives in the past, while the other is not sure of its place in the future. One exudes peace and happiness. Another is systematically killing itself. One is generous, the other takes delight in robbery and corruption.

All the versions of Mexico have been exposed to view by the tragedy of the disappearance and probable massacre in late September of more than 40 young rural schoolteachers in the state of Guerrero.

A diabolical combination of hunger and poverty with private and government corruption, linked with drug trafficking, has contributed to this atrocity. The education profession which could have provided a modest corrective to Mexico’s endemic inequality – and that of the rest of Latin America, the world’s most unequal region – has instead become its victim. “One Mexico appears to be caught in a time warp. Another is cruelly open to nearly all the evils and tragedies of the present age. One lives in the past, while the other is not sure of its place in the future. One exudes peace and happiness. Another is systematically killing itself”

After turning a blind eye to countless past complaints, the crimes of illegal detention, kidnapping and extortion have now blown up in the face of three layers of government (municipal, state and federal). The authorities expected that the idyllic Mexico would once again cover up the reality of the vestiges of what Mario Vargas Llosa aptly called “the perfect dictatorship” – now the title of a blockbuster movie.

A remnant of the mirage of “the end of history” proposed by Francis Fukuyama, Mexico today is a stubborn exemplar of the endurance of the apparently eternal Mexico that refuses to disappear.

The services rendered by the populist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the United States, by maintaining domestic order in a country that might potentially develop into a second Cuba of over 100 million people, have achieved its reinstatement after surviving two six-year terms of the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

The economic reforms instituted by the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who affects a modern image with Kennedy-esque overtones, appear to be castles in the air. A new airport for the capital city, a high-speed rail network and a spectacular proposal for private participation in exploiting energy sources are to perform the miracle of launching Mexico definitively into modernity and progress.

The rough underside of Mexico has reminded the president that things are not so easy. Insisting on the validity of all the national myths does not appear to be sufficient to erase the serious shortcomings of one of the few countries in the world with a character and a solid history of its own. 

Mexico vies with Brazil for the leadership of Latin America, and rivals a handful of nations around the world in terms of international presence. It boasts remarkable banking activity which acts as a magnet for investments and the development of technology parks.

Its streets and highways are jammed with traffic, including a surprising number of high-end cars. But most of its citizens have no alternative but to walk or take crowded buses to get to work, a process that takes up a scandalous amount of their time in return for insulting wages.

However, Mexicans seem to be more optimistic than citizens of many other countries in the rest of the world, displaying a strong sense of loyalty on national holidays, when they wave enormous flags and even hoist them above the crosses on the tops of churches.

It is repeatedly said that Mexico is eternal. The Olmecs, Aztecs and Mayas are claimed as part of the nation. A decorous veil is drawn over the colonial and imperial periods, but there is generous and serious recognition of the Spanish contribution after President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) welcomed Spanish exiles to the country.

Mexico is a varied civic community modelled on inclusiveness and individual decision-making, not based on ethnicity, blood ties or religion. Mexico is the future, without renouncing the heritage of the past.

But undying loyalty reaps an unacceptably meagre reward. Recently, the Mexican government set the daily minimum wage at about five dollars. Across the border, U.S. President Barack Obama announced an hourly minimum wage of 14 dollars.

No wonder, then, that Mexicans vote with their feet and are drawn inexorably to the magnet of the United States. With more than 40 million Mexicans living north of the Rio Grande, the unity of the body politic is an illusion.

If this nation depends on the labours of rural schoolteachers of indigenous extraction being paid barely subsistence wages, who are discriminated against, forcibly disappeared and massacred, the project of Peña Nieto and the new PRI is Utopian. Many Mexicos will continue to coexist side by side. For how long? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Ahead of President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, experts here are expecting that security will take a back seat to issues of economic cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Credit: cc by 2.0

But some Washington advocacy groups are sounding alarms about shifting away too soon from critical security and rights concerns.

“A lot of the focus is going to be on economics,” President Obama told reporters Tuesday. “We’ve spent so much time on security issues between the United States and Mexico that sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs on both sides of the border.

“We want to see how we can deepen that, how we can improve that and maintain that economic dialogue over a long period of time,” he continued.

This shift is notable, as issues of security, law enforcement and combating crime formed the backbone of U.S.-Mexican relations during the previous Mexican administration.

“Even before [former Mexican President Felipe] Calderon took office, it was part of the discussion with the U.S., and the U.S. and Mexican administrations went on to develop a close and complex relationship on security matters,” Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin America programme at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

President Obama is slated to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto later this week before meeting with Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

“President Obama having a visit [early in his second term] symbolises the importance of Mexico to the U.S.,” Chris Wilson, an associate at the Mexico Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

The United States is Mexico’s largest trading partner, and the two countries engaged in nearly 500 billion dollars worth of trade in 2012. Much of that trade is in what are known as intermediate inputs, referring to semi-finished U.S. goods that are finalised with Mexican resources, a process seen as increasing the competitiveness of both countries.

Remittances sent home from Mexican immigrants living in the United States are also a substantial factor in the countries’ economic ties, totalling more than 20 billion dollars last year.

The upcoming summit’s focus on economics squares with a narrative gaining traction in media coverage and academic circles in recent years that paints a picture of an economically booming Mexico.

“During the administration of Calderon, the perception of Mexico in the media was largely one of drugs and violence – the headlines about Mexico were about drugs and trafficking, organised crime, gruesome violence,” Wilson recalls.

“But the new [Mexican] administration has come in at a time when economic growth is pretty robust. They are trying their best to shift the narrative of Mexico by talking more about these economic issues: the reforms that are happening in Mexico that will promote growth, new investments coming into Mexico that will promote growth.”

Development’s Achilles heel

Still, for a country like Mexico that is still struggling with issues of citizen security and rampant crime, many suggest that economic growth would have to start from the bottom, with more robust social programmes and safety nets, before the international community becomes too optimistic about economic and trade booms.

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America programme at the Wilson Center, calls Latin America “far behind” in developing policies that might leverage inclusive growth.

“There is not a sense of shared responsibility … when your social policy is remittance, when your lack of social policy is permitted,” she told reporters on Friday. The region, she said, needs “a widespread recognition of the role the private sector needs to play in paying taxes, improving government … [and] institutions.”

In a telephone interview with IPS, she noted that the U.S. relationship with Central America is likely to remain more focused on security concerns.

“There is a growing consensus in the development community that sustainable growth can’t and will not happen unless levels of violence are brought under control,” she told IPS.

The World Bank recently called citizen insecurity the “Achilles’ heel of development” in Latin America.

Members of the U.S. Congress and advocacy groups here are also wary of turning a blind eye to human rights concerns in Mexico.

“The dire human rights situation in Mexico is not going to solve itself,” Maureen Meyer, a senior associate for Mexico and Central America with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group, said in a statement.

“As the bilateral agenda evolves, it is critical that the U.S. and Mexican governments continue to focus on how best to support and defend human rights in Mexico.”

In a press release issued last week, WOLA expressed agreement with a letter from 23 members of Congress to Secretary of State John Kerry that stressed that “[t]he human rights crisis will not improve until there are stronger legal protections, increased human rights training for Mexico’s security forces, and more government agents held responsible for the human rights violations they commit.”

Even as the focus of U.S.-Mexico relations turns to economics, there is no broad agreement on how exactly a shift toward trade relations will strengthen the “economic competitiveness” of both countries.

“Part of the challenge is that we have this term, but we have a laundry list of issues that could fit into that term,” the Mexico Institute’s Chris Wilson said.

“What we still don’t have is a coherent agenda or a way in which the leadership from the top level can engage the public or business community or civil society … and create something more [meaningful],” he told IPS.

Border leading into the desert at the Mariposa port-of-entry. Credit: Jeb Sprague/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

The electoral and political stars are aligning in ways that offer the United States and Mexico major opportunities to substantially deepen their cooperation, particularly on trade, energy, and immigration, according to a report released here Wednesday by a special commission of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD).

With Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto taking office at virtually the same time as Barack Obama begins his second presidential term, the two leaders have four years to address some of the most difficult and longstanding bilateral challenges, according to the report, entitled “A More Ambitious Agenda”.

Like a longer one on the same subject released two weeks ago by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars here, the IAD report comes at a particularly auspicious moment, given both the strong performance of the Mexican economy and the apparent willingness of long-resistant Republicans in Congress to make key compromises on immigration reform.

These include finding ways to legalise the status of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., more than half of whom are believed to be Mexican.

“There is an enormous amount of optimism right now in the bilateral relationship, and the reason of that is because there’s an idea that this is a new beginning,” said Duncan Wood, co-author of the Wilson Center report, entitled “New Ideas for a New Era”.

“There’s optimism about the Mexican economy and the real potential for immigration reform in the United States,” he told IPS.

“So you have the opportunity for a much more positive dialogue, particularly when you compare it with what we saw during the (Felipe) Calderon administration, when the primary focus was on security, violence and death. There’s now an opportunity to reframe the relationship, and I would say the economic issues lead that.”

The IAD report highlights Pena Nieto’s proposed reforms of Mexico’s energy sector which, among other things, could result in the exploitation of its huge deposits of shale gas and oil. This would not only assure the country’s status as a major oil producer, but also “bring North America closer than ever to energy independence”.

In addition, the “decisive role” played by the Latino vote in the November elections here has propelled immigration reform to the top of the U.S. political agenda for the first time in a generation, according to the commission which was co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

Hills also serves as IAD’s co-chair, along with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

“(T)he prospects are better than they have been in decades for a sensible reform of U.S. immigration policy – which should produce significant economic gains for both nations while easing a long-standing source of bilateral tension and mistrust,” the report concluded.

While opportunities for breakthroughs may be less obvious with respect to their approaches to fighting drug cartels and the violence that has killed an estimated 60,000 people in Mexico over the last six years, the cooperation between their security and police agencies has reached unprecedented levels.

“This is the right time to reassess the (U.S.-backed) Merida Initiative, reinforce efforts to shrink U.S. drug use, and stop the flood of weapons (from the U.S.) into Mexico,” according to the report.

It also noted the Obama administration’s willingness to discuss alternative approaches to the “war on drugs”, as well as recent initiatives, both within the U.S. and Latin America to consider legalising the production, sale and use of marijuana.

Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, bilateral trade has expanded by some 500 percent, making Mexico Washington’s third largest trading partner amid predictions it could overtake Canada for the top position within a decade. At the same time, Mexican-Americans now make up more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and seven percent of its electorate.

The report calls for the two nations to pursue three “high-priority goals. On the economic side, the two countries should work to make their shared labour markets more efficient and equitable; create a more-coherent North American energy market; and co-ordinating with Canada in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with selected South American and East Asian nations.

“There’s a perception that the Pena Nieto government can get things done,” said Wood, who noted that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country for 71 years, “knows how to reach a consensus” in contrast to Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN), whose 12-year reign ended in December.

On the immigration front, the U.S. should implement an expanded and predictable temporary labour programme for both professional and low-income workers, ensuring a larger flow of legal migrants whose homes would remain in Mexico.

In addition, immigration legislation must include a pathway for undocumented immigrants here to legalise their status. Such a step, according to the report, “could hugely benefit both the U.S. and Mexican economies,” in part by increasing both tax payments to local, state and federal governments and remittances sent to Mexico.

Given the results of the November elections and the pressure on Republicans to ease their opposition to any such “amnesty” scheme, such reforms are considered more likely to pass the Congress than at any time since the last major immigration reform in the mid-1980s.

The challenges posed by public insecurity, organised crime, and drug trafficking and abuse “may be the most harrowing test” for both governments, according to the report, which recommended that they should jointly review Washington’s policies toward illicit drugs and firearms, whose export to Mexico has fuelled the violence there.

Pena Nieto should follow through on campaign pledges to create an elite federal police force that would sharply reduce the role of Mexico’s military in the anti-crime campaign, while Obama should allocate significantly more resources to prevention and treatment programmes that help reduce demand for illicit drugs, it says.

The report’s recommendations to consider U.S. drug policy reform and legalisation of marijuana – as well as reassessing the five-year-old security-assistance programme, the Merida Initiative – were welcomed by Laura Carlson, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy as “bright spots” in the report.

But she expressed disappointment that the commission “repeats the formulas that have led to increased poverty under NAFTA and made Mexico one of the most unequal nations in the world.”

“That this group would come out with a recommendation of …more free trade, more privatisation, more guest workers, more oil drilling is not surprising,” she told IPS in an email. “But it’s particularly hard to swallow when no mention is made of poverty alleviation, shared environmental crisis, human rights or corruption on both sides of the border.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.