In the past, Mexico’s revolutions and internal wars have all been eruptions stemming from deep social problems. They unleashed enormous destructive power and took decades to run their course.
There are those would say that present-day Mexico is an example of the famous phrase of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (about Sicily of the Risorgimento) that everything has changed so that everything may go on just as it was.
A few months ago, I engaged in a public dialogue at Princeton with Mario Vargas Llosa, whose novels explore the troubles and horrors of Peru and Latin America.
Reform movements have triggered many revolutions in Mexico. Those put forward by President Enrique Peña Nieto since his inauguration in December 2012 are not likely to set off a violent uprising, but the negative reaction to some of his proposals is intense — and promises to become much stronger.
In almost every country, the availability and exploitation of oil are essentially economic issues -every country, that is, except Mexico, where it is a matter of secular theology.
With its terrible brutality and its death toll of nearly 60,000 lives in four years, the current Mexican drug war recalls two other periods of violence across the past two centuries of Mexican history.
On Sunday, about 45 million Mexicans (roughly 60 percent of eligible voters in a population of 110 million) are expected to choose their next president.