Yearly Archives: 2023

Luis Rubio A myth is circulating around Mexico: that of presidentialism without counterweights. This is nothing new. Between the exacerbated presidentialism of yesteryear including the legislative paralysis in recent decades, and now the new model of unipersonal government, Mexicans display a propensity for conceiving of the governance problem in a pendular manner, the latter yielding […]

Luis Rubio In memory of Luis Alberto Vargas Governments come and governments go, but one thing always stays: corruption. The actors change, but the phenomenon is perennial. And Mexico is not the exception to this: in his 1976 book on Russia, Hedrick Smith* writes “I think”, Ivan says to Volodya, “that we have the richest […]

Luis Rubio While the candidacies advance the political risks increase. There are three factors that drive the possibility of the country having to confront critical situations during next year. The first is the most obvious of these: the presidential cycle, everywhere in the world, follows a natural logic that initiates its ascendent phase during which […]

Luis Rubio India advances uncontainable, but in an exceedingly peculiar manner, deftly skirting the obstacles imposed upon it inexorably by its extraordinary linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity.  An extremely complex and stratified society coming up against enormous barriers to progress, it has found innovative ways to break through fiefdoms, dogmas and ancestral practices. There is […]

Luis Rubio Between the seventies and the nineties, Mexico underwent an era of financial crises, the product in good measure of the laxity with which the public finances were managed: enormous deficits, huge levels of debt (mostly in foreign currency) and little attention to the profitability of the public investment. Between 1976 and 1995, Mexicans […]

Luis Rubio In the early nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Enrique Krauze explored the implications of those events on Latin-American countries, arriving at the conclusion that the last Stalinist would not die in the USSR, but rather in a university cubicle in Latin America. His sole error concerned the venue: the last […]

Luis Rubio “The stability of a democracy depends very much on the people making a careful distinction between what a government can do and cannot do,” stated the academician, diplomat and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Seeking what it cannot achieve implies “creating the conditions for frustration and ruin.” All societies procure finding an equilibrium between […]

Luis Rubio The “liar’s paradox” is one of the most amusing logic puzzles: If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the truth, which means the liar just lied. In today’s Mexico, lies become truths, corruption is purified and impunity flourishes, confusing both those who narrate daily life as well as those […]

Luis Rubio Radicals -of any stripe- tend to perceive themselves as being the advance party of a society that shares their truth and desires a thoroughgoing transformation, right away. But that notion clashes with an obvious truth: most people want nothing other than to live normally: work, enjoy security, educate their children and have the […]

Luis Rubio The brew is complicated in itself: an unsatisfied electorate, a culture hardly prone to reaching compromises and considering the rights of others, and a tradition devoted to dividing rather than adding up. The past years have displayed the best and the worst of Mexico’s primitive democratic culture and our scant disposition for venturing […]