Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most forgotten states, is finally getting a little bit of the attention it deserves. Guerrero is not Mexico’s poorest state, but this is largely due to the fact that Acapulco and a few other resort towns awash in cash skew the state’s average income upwards. Poor people living in rural Guerrero are as poor as the poorest Mexicans anywhere. Maternal mortality in Guerrero’s most neglected region, the hard-scrabble mountains that border Oaxaca, is four times the Mexican average. Dispersed populations often have to walk hours to receive education or health services.

Last year, the community of Mini Numa, in what has long been one of Mexico’s poorest municipalities (and Guerrero’s poorest), Metlatónoc, decided they had had enough. The municipality of Metlatónoc has never had a proper health clinic. The Fox administration made some advances on this front, donating a few trailers which have served as the health clinic for the last few years. Last year, when I visited the region, plans to build a US$100,000 clinic were finally under way.

However, people living in the small community of Mini Numa still have to walk as far as two hours to get services in the municipal capital. And they often find the clinic closed when they arrive. At least five preventable deaths occurred last year as a result of the combination of long distances and closed clinics. Arguing that the lack of a clinic in their community violates their right to health (and life), the community is making waves by filing a suit against the government, with the help of the widely recognized NGO Tlachinollan.

Guerrero’s poor are finally front page news in national newspapers, and the President has even been forced to respond by pledging to send doctors southward. But now what? The state of Guerrero argues that the community of Metlatónoc is too small to place a clinic there; the Secretary of Health only places clinics in communities of a certain size and distance from other clinics. Although this argument has tended to be dismissed, it is not without merit: there is no sense in building clinics in every tiny community or throwing up a new clinic every 5 feet. Doing so implies a huge resource investment and ambiguous payoffs.

The community of Mini Numa does not have a right to a health clinic. Nor does any Mexican. They do, however, have a right to decent health care. The question is how to provide it. It would be too bad if this case turns into a silly argument about whether Mini Numa deserves a health clinic. Mexico has many dispersed communities like Mini Numa. They cannot all have health clinics. A better solution to the problem of providing services to such communities would be to create a reliable, public, subsidized transport/ambulance system that could respond quickly to emergencies and transport families to the nearest clinic. This implies improved road and vehicle infrastructure. It is not cheap. But, unlike building a clinic in every backyard, it might be effective.

However, the rot, of which Mini Numa’s unfortunate deaths are a symptom, runs deeper. Even if families in Mini Numa could get to the clinic in Metlatónoc in a split second, there would often not be anyone there. This too happens all over rural Mexico. Why? Because Mexico has a faulty labor relations system and many doctors do not show up for work in poor rural communities. No one pays much attention to what these doctors do, and if anyone dares to question them, the union usually backs them up. Furthermore, health clinics in these areas often fall quickly into disrepair. Doctors don’t work to keep them up, and municipal presidents are busy buying off voters and investing in church bells. Mexico’s decentralized health system allows everyone to pass the buck when people die, as they have in Mini Numa, as a result of these failures.

The President can send a doctor. He can even promise to build a clinic in Mini Numa. These are band-aid solutions. Mexico, like many other countries, needs deep-rooted labor reforms, centralization of key health goals and responsibilities, major investments in infrastructure, and a creative set of regulations to deal with dispersed communities. Mini Numa’s brave attempt to use the courts to change Mexico is a golden opportunity. Let’s hope it isn’t squandered.

Last week, Mexico’s federal electoral institute (IFE) was up in arms over a “cloning” scandal. Mexican electoral law states that politicians may not “politicize” the implementation of government programs by advertising them alongside photos of themselves. A creative mayor in the town of Toluca, a Mexico city suburb (actually located in the neighboring state of Mexico), decided to get around the law by using a stunt double, or “clone,” as the press has been referring to it. When questioned about the use of the clone, the mayor opined: he doesn’t look that much like me….people say I am much better looking. The mayor has been roundly criticized for this end-run around election law, even by his own party, the PAN.

A few days after the scandal broke, Mexican daily REFORMA interviewed the man behind the mayor’s publicity campaign. The publicist explained that he had used a local citizen who looked somewhat like the mayor, and then applied the magic of Photoshop to improve the similarities. Manifesting some irritation with the line of questioning, he noted that Photoshop was de rigeur in most modern advertising campaigns.

Of course, the use of technology to improve images is not normally illegal, so in this respect, the widespread use of Photoshop is irrelevant to the use of Photoshop in this case. On the other hand, the publicist, and the scandal itself, raise an important point: how useful are the strictures of Mexican electoral law in the face of changing technology, and given the nature of electoral politics? Today, it is a clone on a billboard; tomorrow, perhaps it will be technology that allows images to appear and disappear before anyone can bring them to the attention of the authorities. What if an army of clones was created to go from door to door to evade the advertising limitations? Does the government really have the capacity to monitor all of this? Should it spend valuable resources doing so?

Mexico’s electoral rules can seem extreme to the outsider. They were developed to undercut a history of hyper-presidentialism, authoritarian clientelism, and personalism. The banning of images, like the prohibition on sitting presidents campaigning in favor of their potential successors, is designed to “purify” politics. But many of these rules are reactionary. While they wisely try to move politics away from the past, they are based on a naive ideal of politics that exists nowhere, least of all Mexico. All around the world, voters take cues from other politicians about who to vote for, make decisions on the basis of the appearance and gestures of political figures, and credit or blame politicians for the things which occur on their watch, even if there is no way they could have controlled them (e.g., international economic factors leading to domestic economic crisis).

Voters are always confronted with a myriad of dimensions over which to make choices, and only a few politicians from which to choose. They economize on information in a variety of ways, many of which lead them to prefer personalities or style over policy substance. In this respect, they are just like ordinary people, who do the same when making choices about friends, business partners, and lovers. For better or for worse, this is how we are. Denying voters information about politicians, such as what they look like, or what programs they want to take credit for, or what other politicians support them, ultimately reduces voter capacity to use heuristics (or short-hands), and forces politicians to become ever more clever about getting around the rules. The result is that everyone spends more resources, but there is no reason to expect that the quality of politics will improve.

After all, politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the impossible. Voters will never have enough information, nor politicians enough capacity, to make elections entirely policy driven affairs in which voters choose the best menu over all relevant dimensions. Perceived qualities related to leadership, personality, demeanor, attitude and charisma will always matter at least as much as policy. Perhaps they should: if it is good enough for the voters, it might just be good enough for everyone else.

Yesterday, Mexican daily La Jornada reported that Mexico’s highest government auditor, the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (ASF), could not identify the use of billions of dollars in PEMEX profits in 2004 and 2005. The ASF accuses the government of opacity, discretion and possibly corruption in the handling of the national oil company’s funds.

Proceso, a national weekly magazine, reports last week that it is impossible to know, on the basis of available information, who won the 2006 presidential election. The report, based on a new analysis by political scientist José Antonio Crespo, demonstrates that, contrary to claims by judicial authorities, the number of irregularities in the polling place vote summaries far exceeds the margin of victory of the current president.

Several months after polling, the same could easily be said of the recent elections to renew the leadership of the PRD, one of Mexico’s three principal political parties. There are more reported irregularities from this internal election than there were polling places. The vast number of improprieties has made it impossible to know who actually won, and the party has been immobilized by this lack of reliable information.

At the state level, Veracruz governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán recently declared that state expenditures during his term would be embargoed for public access for the next six years. No one will know until his term is over how much the self-serving governor has spent on public relations to burnish his image, or the extra perks of office, like stipends for travel and food.

Mexicans have become accustomed to living with a blackout of important information. They observe shadows that indicate corruption, but rarely possess concrete data on the conduct of government. While Mexicans may have resigned themselves to this civic life of shadows, their democracy is crippled by such transparent failures of transparency. Information is the cornerstone of electoral democracy and democratic policy-making. It is also essential to protecting reputations, since an information vortex allows anyone to make accusations about anyone else. No reliable check on calumny exists to protect the honest, just as none exists to impugn the scoundrels.

Mexican democracy has made great strides in the last two decades. But great strides are still needed, particularly in the democratization of access to information.

Living in Cairo for a few weeks has exposed me to different aspects of Egyptian society and the question that seems to be continuously arising is what does it mean to be Arab?

History has tried all to often to lump this group of over hundreds of millions of people, often with nothing more than language in common, together in one targeted category. Living here one can quickly pick up the flaws in this identification system. The Egyptians, rich in culture with one of the oldest histories of nation, often see themselves as a separate group from the collective Arabs. They share almost nothing in common with the “Arabs” of the Gulf with their massive riches and wealth of oil and when visiting downtown Cairo it’s easy to see why Egyptians may resent being lumped together in the same category as those from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.

The young people in society seem be in the heat of this debate the most often. Some vehemently believe that the common language of Arabic unites them with most of the other nations in the Middle East while others equally aggressively disagree and believe that the Egyptians are a brand of their own and advocate for more national pride. Some feel that religion, Islam, ought to be the uniting factor, but there is certainly no consensus there. Identity sometimes overlooked as a trivial issue, matters significantly here and how politics in the region play out. It separates foreigner from native and rich from poor.  Is there such thing as an Arab? And what does it mean to be Arab? I hope someone figures this out soon…

In Japan, the first days of May are ripe with national holidays. Most take advantage of this “Golden Week” to travel, spend time with relatives, or enjoy a much-deserved break from the tasking day-to-day of the salaryman. This year, 30,000 citizens chose to spend their time contributing to an undertaking considerably more daunting than the Japanese workweek: protecting Article 9, the war-renouncing clause of Japan’s constitution.

They were drawn together by the Global Article 9 Conference, a three-day event held in the cities of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Sendai. Organized by the Japanese non-profit “Peace Boat”, The Global Article 9 Conference attracted not just Japanese, but participants from all corners of the globe. It coincided with recent moves taken by conservative politicians to amend the constitution and facilitate deployment of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) abroad. Organizers sought international support for their fight against constitutional revision, insisting that the principles enshrined in Article 9 should be adopted by other states committed to global peace. The Conference’s many guest speakers, including Nobel Peace Laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire (1976), Wangari Muta Maathai (2004) and Jody Williams (1997), supported this message.

The Global Article 9 Conference was noteworthy not only for its passion and energy, but also as a mirror of current growth of anti-war advocacy in Japan. As the government picks up speed and threats to the Japanese constitution intensify, citizens are organizing en masse against remilitarization. Peace Boat is one of many interest groups formed since the year 2000 to advocate for retention of Article 9. With the cause neglected by opposition parties and courts, such groups assume the burden of blocking the vehement revisionism of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, in a nation where advocacy organizations have historically been discouraged, scrutinized and regarded with suspicion, will Peace Boat and its allies be able to meet the challenge?

Article 9 of Japan’s constitution explicitly bars the state from maintaining a military and from the “use of force as means of settling international disputes.” The provision, drafted by U.S. officials after World War II, loses some of its explicitness when translated into Japanese. Shortly after the end of U.S. occupation, General Douglas Macarthur encouraged Japan to develop a defense force of its own, emphasizing that such a body would not conflict with Article 9. Conservatives eager to restore Japan’s military independence agreed. The result was the JSDF, which has grown to be one of the best-funded forces in existence. For many Japanese, and especially those old enough to remember the horrors of World War II, it represents a disturbing move toward remilitarization and a blatant breach of the constitution.

Until the 1990s, the JSDF never operated abroad. With the onset of the First Gulf War, however, international pressure mounted (especially from the United States) for Japan to participate more fully in multilateral security measures and UN peacekeeping operations. In response, legislation was passed in 1992 that empowered Japanese troops to act as peacekeepers given five conditions: a standing ceasefire agreement, consent of the host nation, operational neutrality, the use of force for immediate self-defense only, and the withdrawal of the JSDF if any of the above conditions are violated. Since then, Japan has deployed its military following case-by-case approval of a “special measures law”. One such law was the Special Measures Law on Anti-Terrorism. Passed in 2006, it allowed Japan to provide logistical support to the United States and Coalition forces in the “War on Terror”. The law was repealed after opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a majority of seats in the upper house of parliament in the July 2007 election.

Pressure for revision rose during the premiership of Abe Shinzo, who resigned last summer amid scandal caused by lost pension records. Before leaving office Abe obtained passage of a law that calls for a national referendum on revision to be held as early as May 2010. Current Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo takes a more reserved stance on the issue, but with a deadline set pressure has mounted on Japanese antimilitarists to organize a united front capable of blocking revision.

Opposition parties are not viable vehicles for doing so. They rarely win. Since its establishment in 1955, the LDP has enjoyed almost uninterrupted majority in both houses of the Diet, as the legislature is known. In moments when majority is untenable, the LDP constructs coalitions with weaker parties to maintain de facto leadership. Despite the LDP’s tendency toward rearmament, its politicians are consistently elected because they have historically proven themselves capable of managing the economy.

Opposition parties also have a reputation for abandoning their pacifism when politically convenient to do so. This happened to the former Japan Socialist Party, a longtime supporter of Article 9, which dropped its absolute stance on the issue to ally with the LDP in the 1990s. Likewise, the New Komeito Party, despite its Buddhist roots, has currently put aside the issue of pacifism to engage in coalition.

Things could be changing. The July 2007 election brought an unprecedented majority for the DPJ in the upper house of the Diet. Although the LDP still retains control of the premiership and the more powerful lower house, the DPJ has used its new position to block a variety of legislation, including the Special Measures Law on Anti-Terrorism. Yet, so far the constitution has not been a driving concern of the party, which seems more interested in advancing its position in Japanese politics.

Courts are similarly ineffectual. In general, the Japanese judiciary resigns itself from political debates. It is not an effective auditor of policy. This is especially true of Japan’s Supreme Court, which ruled years ago that the military issue was “too political” for review, even where the constitution is concerned. The Supreme Court also places tight restrictions on which cases can be considered as constitutional claims. As Craig Martin notes in a special for the Japan Times, “using the courts to review government deployment of troops is all but impossible.” This is ironic, considering that one of the strongest lobbies in support of Article 9 is the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.

Regardless, in recent years there has been an increase in lawsuits filed over the unconstitutionality of the JSDF. Usually these cases are dismissed without much thought. But every rule has its exceptions. Recently the Nagoya High Court chose to overturn its decision to dismiss such a case, ruling that the deployment of the JSDF to Afghanistan and Iraq is, indeed, unconstitutional. The court did not find, however, that any of the 1,100 plaintiffs were warranted compensation. Nor did it mandate that that the government consider withdrawal of troops. Although some peace activists herald the decision as historic, the ruling is unlikely to impact the practice of government.

With opposition parties and courts out of the picture, the burden falls on civil society organizations to pick up the slack. This is not a position for which they have been historically well equipped. Japan’s civic landscape is still very colored by its Confucian roots, which emphasize that individuals should put aside personal concerns to strive for the greater public good. In Japan, disputes are generally dealt with by seeking consensus; it is uncommon for people to wittingly assert their interests over others. As such, advocacy organizations are often regarded with suspicion as they, by definition, involve the declaration of one group’s beliefs against those of other members of society.

Regulatory barriers also exist. In order to register for corporate status, necessary to receive tax-deductible donations and other such benefits, civic groups must adhere to a somewhat arbitrary criterion of “public interest” determined by bureaucrats.

Recently Japan’s public sphere has opened somewhat, creating a space in which groups like Peace Boat can operate. With the puncture of the ‘bubble’ economy, citizens’ faith in their government has been shaken. As a result, fringe political issues such as remilitarization are attracting more attention, as evident in the growth of anti-war advocacy in recent years. The rise of the Internet has been especially significant. Many pro-Article 9 groups rely on websites to coordinate events and spread their message to potential supporters. Recent legal reforms have been influential as well. Inspired by volunteer outpour following the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, in 1998 the Diet passed the NPO Law that notably lowers the bar for corporate status.

Youth are more ambivalent on the issue of Article 9, because they do not harbor the same memories of postwar hardship as their elders. The LDP aims to capitalize on this divide; Abe’s law lowers the voting age from 20 to 18 for the referendum. For the peace movement to succeed, younger generations need to be convinced of the imperative of blocking revision. Organizations such as the Japanese Youth Association recognize this necessity and focus their advocacy on younger citizens.

Although Japan’s peace network is robust, it is fragmented. Anti-war organizations do not always collaborate with each other. The Article 9 Association, which boasts over 5,000 regional branches and the membership of several prominent intellectuals, acts as an umbrella organization for peace groups. Nevertheless, it did not endorse the Global Article 9 Conference because it was not carried out under its auspices.

Peace Boat should be commended for the Global Article 9 Conference. If Article 9 is to be retained, though, more action is needed. Anti-war activists are faced with many obstacles, including ineffective opposition parties, sheepish courts, and a historically restrictive public sphere. If they truly desire to influence government, they must unite and inspire others, especially youth. Otherwise, Article 9 as it stands today could become a thing of the past.

It wasn’t supposed to work like this. India is finally developing, unhindered by the old “license raj” and unhinged from the perennially disappointing “Hindu rate of growth.” And economic growth is supposed to bring all things good—modernity, meritocracy, freedom and more democracy. Traditional hierarchies—like caste—are supposed to be getting weaker. Why then was the nation’s capital suddenly in the grip of caste-based protests once again last week?

A caste-group based in Rajasthan, known as the Gujjars, has brought a little bit of mayhem to New Delhi in the last few days, squatting on the Mumbai-Delhi railroad tracks, and disrupting train service into the city. Conflict between the Rajasthani state government and the Gujjars has resulted in over 40 deaths, and the resignation of the state’s police chief—this year. This conflict is not new, however. Last year around this time, Gujjars battled other caste groups and the state government and the police left a similar number dead. A committee was set up to deal with the underlying grievances, and the conflict temporarily subsided. The committee made recommendations, but nothing was done. Unsurprisingly, the conflict is now back on the front-burner.

So what do the Gujjars want?

In India, in spite of all the loose talk about reform and modernization, what an Indian gets is still as much about who they are as what they have done. Caste members are eligible for certain government programs and jobs, as well as educational opportunities, based almost exclusively on their caste identity. Caste, however, is a bit of a morass. There are substantially more castes in India than anyone knows what to do with. The British made a go at categorizing them into broad categories, such as upper, lower, backward, and “scheduled” (referring to untouchables). But no one in India has ever fully agreed with anything the British did, and of course, in addition to the British taking on an impossible task, they also made a hash of it.

The Gujjars are classified as “backwards,” or what are poetically known as OBCs (“other backward castes”). This doesn’t give them as many job opportunities as being classified as “scheduled tribes” (ST) would, so they have been demanding a reclassification. Curiously, the Gujjars are actually demanding that they move down the traditional caste hierarchy in order to be able to access better opportunities. Other low caste groups don’t want their categories to get too crowded, so they have resisted. The state government doesn’t like the idea of having to provide benefits to a group that never had them, so they have resisted. The result has been bloody conflict in the streets.

India is a fast-changing economy and society, but the salience of caste has not necessarily decreased in recent years. In some ways and in some places, it seems to have actually increased. This is in part because of the overaweing presence of the state in India today, even after liberalization. It is in part because economic growth does not necessarily lead to the elimination of traditional identities, as modernization theory predicted, or as the conventional wisdom suggests. While Delhi itself may not be the most caste-centric place in India, peripheral caste-based conflict can easily permeate city limits, as it did last week, reminding the country’s elite that “modern” India is not suddenly unmoored from the past.

The United States has recently begun to eye India as a key strategic partner and a counter-weight to China. If India and the United States are going to work together, both countries need to understand something about the domestic political pressures facing elites when they sit down to bargain internationally. Most Americans don’t have a clue how the caste system works in India. It’s not too late to start reading up.

Mexican daily El Universal reports today that this May is the bloodiest month in the last five years in Mexico, with 370 deaths so far attributable to organized violence.  In May of 2007, there were 198 such deaths.  The number has been rising steadily since at least 2005.   

The Mexican state’s war on drug cartels has resulted in a striking number of high-profile executions of late; the most spectacular was the assassination of the head of the national police force, Édgar Millán Gómez, at his Mexico-City home on May 8.   The killing of top officials in Mexico City lends a patina of enveloping chaos to the struggle, though the nation’s capital is probably still substantially safer than the states which concentrate the most violence: Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Guerrero. 

The question, of course, is: can the Mexican state win this war?  Those who believe in the current strategy will claim, as the President has, that, in war, things often get worse before they get better.  The increased violence is a sign, they argue, that the drug lords are getting desperate.  Opponents contend that the current strategy is simply making Mexico ever more violent, and is unlikely to have any long-term impact, since the drug problem goes beyond any single cartel or cartel leader.  Knock one off, or throw him in jail, and the struggle will go on much as before.

Perhaps the real issue is not whether the state can win, but whether it can reinvent itself.  The war in Mexico is really an internecine struggle of the old sort, among state and non-state elites, all with connections to illicit trafficking.  It has been alleged that the murder of Millán Gómez, for example, was an inside job, involving either current and/or former officials.  Former Mexican officers frequently work with drug cartels, and corruption is rife inside of the current corps of officers as well.   

Purging state institutions and re-founding them is in fact a much harder problem than the metaphor of “war” suggests.  The government has hired new recruits and tried to clean up the police force, but the rot is deep.  If the Mexican state were willing to truly purge itself, there is no question that the violence would continue to get worse before it got any better.  Are Mexicans prepared for that?  Or will they ultimately prefer to revert to the uneasy truce between state and cartel that has long defined control over various parts of the country?  The 2009 mid-term elections will probably tell.

Recently the UN openly expressed their “immense frustration” with the response of the Burmese government to the cyclone that hit the nation several weeks ago. While they are exactly right, the government in Burma is doing a terrible job of assisting their people with the devastation of the cyclone, I would just like to take a moment and express my immense frustration with the United Nations.

Recently the BBC exposed that UN peacekeepers in the DR Congo were not only arming violent militias, but also smuggling gold and ivory from the DR Congo. The UN condemned the BBC’s revelation of this scandal citing that calling the UN out on their faults would only make them more ineffective. Well new reports from today reveal that peacekeepers in the Ivory Coast, Sudan, and Haiti were found to be abusing children. A thirteen-year-old girl reported that she was violently gang-raped by 10 UN peacekeepers in addition to various other crimes mentioned.

Staying silent about UN corruption will NOT make these problems disappear. I hate feeling frustrated with the UN because I am one of the few who truly believe they are a vital institution with the power to provide great help to our world. Calling the UN out does not remove its legitimacy, but staying silent about their various crimes will weaken the institution and only prove to the critics that UN isn’t strong enough to deal with their own issues let alone the conflicts of the international world.

American historian, professor, and long time social critic Howard Zinn once said, “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.”

Resistance, such a meaningful word, with so many implications for so many people is the root of civil disobedience, resisting the injustice that society has put forth and resisting the system that requires change. Resistance comes in many forms. While non-violent resistance rarely makes headline news it is the most powerful force in affecting change in this world. Violent resistance on the other hand may shock the world in to paying attention, but will de-legitimize even the noblest of causes. Violent resistance strips people of their compassion and leaves both sides starved.

Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi are only a few examples of heroes who started these movements and while their actions lacked violence they certainly had a powerful force. I am fairly certain that their struggle was even greater than those wielding weapons and bombs, but somehow their message was much more powerful.

In society today with the lines so blurred between right and wrong it is hard to distinguish who the “real” heroes are. Is it the soldier returning from the war in Iraq? Is it the protester fighting for human rights? Or is it the “conscientious objector” who makes the brave decision to not fight at all? In a world where choosing not to fight can be more punishable than committing human rights violations while in service all of these individual acts of resistance are more important than ever. Groups like Courage to Resist, the Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Breaking the Silence lend the voices that society so desperately needs in order to critically reexamine ourselves and move forward. The conventional war heroes are exhibiting new levels of bravery by using their words to move society. While Mandela, King, and Gandhi are all appropriately credited for their movements their strength was only derived from the people who supported them.
For too long our greatest problem has been civil obedience and it’s time to stand behind those who resist.

Perhaps the hottest topic in Mexican domestic politics right now is the potential reform of the country’s national oil company, PEMEX. At least, it seems hot. Yet, a new survey released today shows that the Mexican public, while somewhat divided, is mostly ignorant of the reform, which was proposed by the president in April. A full 44 percent of respondents in a poll for El Universal, a major Mexican daily, were unsure of their position on the issue.

The reform of PEMEX is undoubtedly a complex matter about which rational people might have mixed feelings. Elites have tended to try to simplify that complexity by positioning along a classical divide: statists versus neoliberals. Statists (represented by the leftish PRD) have rejected the reform, arguing for continuing state control at current levels, and liberals (represented by the PAN) have embraced greater opening to the private sector.

Sadly, after months of speculation about the reform, a full month since the president introduced his bill, a burlesque takeover of the Congress for the purposes of extending debate on the bill, and major opposition rallies led by Mexico’s leading opposition figure, AMLO—after all of this, there is little evidence that the public is anymore informed about what the PEMEX reform entails than they were before. Interestingly, the press and the public seem to be relating the reform to the price of gasoline for the average consumer, an indication that the broader ideological debate between neoliberals and statists is an overblown conflict between elites that the public does not completely buy into.

Whatever else one may think about the reform of PEMEX, the astonishingly hollow level of understanding and debate about possible reform is an indictment of Mexican democracy. After months of media coverage, it is incredible that so few Mexicans have an opinion about the most important reform item on the country’s current political agenda. But don’t blame the public: blame the politicians. After so many months, they have still failed to present the public with a set of clear, reasonable arguments, for or against reform.   Here’s hoping that as the debate accelerates over the next few weeks, that begins to change.