Yearly Archives: 2019

Luis Rubio The Mexico-U.S. border is a peculiar world: part Mexican, part American and, at the same time, different from both. Above all, it is absolutely different from what it is imagined to be by Washington or Mexico City politicians. The border has come to acquire its own character due to its particular circumstances: the […]

Luis Rubio While Mexico sprints toward an uncertain, irreproducible and, certainly undesirable past, the rest of the world runs at a frenzied speed. It is not only the fact of proceeding in reverse, but also that the inherent risks regarding what is destroyed along the way implies that the country will forfeit the possibility of, […]

In memory of Manuel Medina Mora Luis Rubio The streets are clean, tourism has exploded, merchants seem happy and hotels are full. Oaxaca seems to have finally broken with its historical impediments and enjoys a new moment of peace and growth. If it only were so easy. The only thing that has changed is that […]

Luis Rubio The only thing about which there is no dispute is that the president is advancing pell-mell toward a growing concentration of power. Every step he takes and each decision he makes tends to eliminate competition, diminish or neutralize counterweights and cancel all sources of independence that he can. The manifest objective is to […]

Luis Rubio In 2018, the Mexican electorate shed the mask of the establishment’s dominant narrative and chose the candidate that promised to change the ruling axes of the country’s political and economic systems. Since the election, but especially since the congressional swearing-in on September 1, Morena’s groups and allies have acted less like an institutional […]

Luis Rubio When the vessel Andrea Gail set sail from the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in a desperate act to participate in the last great fishing expedition of the season, its captain and crew did not have the least idea of what awaited them in what ended up as the 1991 “Perfect Storm”: all of […]

Luis Rubio The risk of Mexico acquiring the Argentinian vice of being permanently stuck in a limbo of mediocre economic performance -worse than in recent years- with recurring ups and downs, as well as frequent financial crises is real and rises with the policies adopted by the current government. The coincidences begin to be too […]

 AMERICAS QUARTERLY – BY LUIS RUBIO | JULY 9, 2019    Mexico Carlos Urzúa’s unexpected decision to step down as treasury secretary was a warning – will AMLO listen? MEXICO CITY – In all my decades observing Mexican politics, I have never seen a public resignation like this one. On July 9, Carlos Urzúa announced in a letter that he […]

Luis Rubio All governments blame their predecessors for the woes that they find or for those with which they cannot deal. No novelty here: this is not my problem, but that of my predecessor. AMLO is an exception to this in not reproaching a government, but instead an entire generation –three decades of presidents and […]

Luis Rubio In her autobiography, African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston writes that “it is no longer profitable, with few exceptions, to ask people what they think, for you will be told what they wish, instead.” That is how we are at present in Mexico: advancing preferences and desires instead of building opportunities and possibilities. The […]