On Monday, Mexico celebrates the centennial of the birth of Octavio Paz. There have been public readings of his poetry and an international conference to discuss the ideas that stirred his imagination throughout his long life.
Venezuela is not my country. I have no blood ties to it; I only began traveling there less than a decade ago. Yet, I have found myself emotionally entangled in its freedom struggle.
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.
Few in the United States recognize that the Mexican-American War (1846–48) was Washington’s first major imperialist venture. Fewer still would understand why future U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant would come to see it as the country’s most “wicked war.”
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.