Yearly Archives: 2010

Referring to the end of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the revolution is an amalgam of former party officials, quasi-democratic KGB officers and black market operators that today concentrate power and represent a dirty hybrid never seen before.” We in Mexico have our own fair collection of hybrids that explain many of the contrasts […]

While we here in Mexico are, literally, eaten up inside by trifling infernos and washerwoman infighting, the world moves ahead with extraordinary celerity, creating and changing realities and futures in its wake. Whoever has observed the dynamic by means of which many of the pillars of worldwide stability have changed over the past two years […]

“The devil is in the details” counsels an old refrain. In the case of the political reforms that are being debated at present in the public forum, something very peculiar has taken place: from a rotund negative for reform, we have proceeded to the logic that what is important is to approve a reform, any […]

In a bitter exchange between a Soviet police commissar and an intellectual described by Elie Wiesel in his play The Madness of God, the commissioner demands his listener to speak up and take a public stance to criticize his brethren on the grounds that “the word was given to man to use it and express […]

In his famed television program ¿Qué Nos Pasa?, Héctor Suárez showed us up, but he was unable to change the reality. The gist of the program was to place our incongruities on exhibit, above all, our disinclination for problem solving. Our difficulties are known to everyone, they are easy to identify, and it does not […]

“Politics according to John Kenneth Galbraith, is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” The problem for President Calderon is that in the absence of a government strategy, he is unable to distinguish one from the other. In its early years, his administration sowed what they could but now that he is […]

The U.S. border has always been a reason for substantial concern with respect to the rulers of the federal government. Distant enemies, distant enmities, in close proximity to the traditional foe -and the historic loss of territory- the borders have adopted the myths and realities that are often difficult to understand for those of who […]

In reflecting on British politics, Bertrand Russell said that generations of voters follow a predictable pattern that inexorably leads to frustration. They first vote for the party of their dreams, only to find that they do not find the solutions that they seek there. Therefore, they vote for the alternative, in the belief that this […]

Nehru, the great Indian statesman, said that “the moment has arrived, something that rarely takes place in history, when we take leave of the old and proceed toward the new, when an era ends, and when the cry of a nation, long suppressed, achieves its expression”. If ever there were something that unites Mexicans, it […]

According to Ambrose Bierce, a famous satirical writer of the nineteenth century, alliances are “the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.” Now that we are in electoral-alliances season, Bierce is worth remembering not only for his wry appreciation of […]