Monthly Archives: September 2011

Aaron Copland, one of the great American composers of the past century, told the story of browsing in a bookshop one day, when he noticed a woman buying one of his books, “What To Listen for in Music”, together with a paperback edition of a Shakespearean play. As the customer left the shop, Copland stopped […]

“The decisive step toward democracy”, says Prof. Adam Przeworski, “is the devolution of power from a group of people to a set of rules”. The rules and principles on which the functioning of Mexican democracy is based are many, but they have never achieved the supremacy that is the essential requisite for democracy. This does […]

Luis Rubio One of my teachers, Roy Macridis, was fond of saying that public policy, in particular that which is relative to foreign policy, should be evaluated not for its objectives but for its consequences. The theme that especially grieved him was the Vietnam War, concerning which his pithy affirmation was that the United States […]

In the guise of Sherlock Holmes, many Mexicans ask, where is the narco-capo of the Potomac? The fact that the narcotics market in the U.S is such an important and central factor in the flow of drugs through Mexican territory has led to the conclusion that the ways and means of narco functioning in both […]

The film Sarafina!, starring Whoopi Goldberg, takes place in the South Africa of the Apartheid. Whoopi plays a teacher who attempts to instill a sense of dignity and a spirit of freedom in some children who suffer from an impenetrable climate of discrimination. Although this was a remote and distant place, radically different from ours […]