yes indeed it is...
many a Swiss national has expressed that they would wish to have a tenth of the common border with the most powerful economic power on earth...
or ... they say... so far from god, and yet so close to the USA... -g
Mexico is a bizarre place... corruption, which is inbred in the place as a 'way of life, has its origins way back in its history... but to understand how it affects in our world, you may want to read this book, of all people, an Argentinean writer living betwen Mexico City and Miami, Florida.
Andres Oppenheimer
20th-century-history-books.com
and his knowledge seems to expand to other places of Latin America...
20th-century-history-books.com
His book: Bordering on Chaos (about Mexico) is well written and amazingly, it captures the character of the different segments of its society, i.e. the corrupt polititians, the all-mighty-incredible wealthy industrialists, the union leaders the middle class businessmen and how they interact in order to advance in what seems an incomprehensible chaos.... and how the events of the mid 1990'2 threw the country into a worsening nightmare...
some of the stories are quite unbelivable but true..
here are a few more of his writings...
keepmedia.com
and this... just a thought....
you think the "migrant worker" economy is worth peanuts?
.. think again... how does 30 BILLION $$ sounds ?
Hey... no somos MACHOS... pero somos... MUCHOS... -gggg
andres oppenheimer - THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT: Newest political weapon: migrants' money
by Andres Oppenheimer | Mar 28 '04
There is a new phenomenon in the Americas that could have a major impact in future Latin American elections: the use of the estimated $30 billion in remittances from migrant workers in the United States as a political weapon.
It's a new electoral strategy that helped El Salvador's government-backed President-elect Tony Saca win by a landslide in last weekend's elections. That strategy may soon be used by candidates in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and other countries that are highly dependent on funds sent by migrant workers in the United States to their relatives back home.
Throughout the Salvadoran campaign, the ruling right-of-center ARENA party claimed that if hard-line leftist candidate Shafick Handal of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) won, there would be a rift in Salvadoran-U.S. relations. That, ARENA officials claimed, would result in massive deportations of the 2.3 million Salvadorans in the United States and in a disruption in the estimated $2.2 billion a year they send home.
A typical pro-Saca television spot that aired repeatedly in the closing days of the campaign showed a middle-class Salvadoran couple receiving a phone call from their son in Los Angeles.
"Mom, I wanted to let you know that I'm scared," the young man says. "Why?" his mother asks. "Because if Shafick becomes president of El Salvador, I may be deported, and you won't be able to receive the remittances that I'm sending you," her son responds.
Salvadoran officials said in the closing weeks of the campaign that, thanks to the ruling party's good relations with the United States, the Bush administration has repeatedly renewed the Temporary Protective Status for tens of thousands of undocumented Salvadorans in the United States, and that this would end if Handal became president.
El Salvador's ruling party got a little help from its conservative friends in Washington. Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo, R-Colo., said in Congress before the election that if the FMLN won, "it could mean a radical change" in the U.S. policy on remittances to El Salvador. Senior Bush administration officials were not that specific but confirmed that a leftist victory would hurt U.S.-Salvadoran relations.
Did the Bush administration interfere in the Salvadoran election? Not more than China and Cuba, Salvadoran President Francisco Flores told me in an interview. Handal's top campaign official later confirmed to me that China's Communist Party had sent donations of computers, T-shirts and other campaign trinkets for the campaign.
At any rate, the government's scare campaign worked wonders: Saca won with 58 percent of the vote, against 35 percent for Handal. Until a few weeks earlier, the two were almost tied in the polls.
One could argue that the Salvadoran election was a unique case. First, El Salvador is the country that depends the most on U.S remittances: About 28 percent of its adult population receives money from its U.S.-based relatives, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Second, Handal was a political dinosaur of the old left, whose anti-Americanism turned him into an easy target for Saca's campaign strategists.
But U.S. remittances have become so important for millions of Latin Americans, especially in the poorest regions of Mexico, Central America and northern South America, that they will definitely play an increasingly important role in the region's domestic politics.
Consider: 18 percent of all Mexican adults -- or about 13 million people -- receive a total of nearly $12 billion a year in remittances from their relatives in the United States, according to the IDB figures. Twenty-four percent of adults in Guatemala receive remittances, 16 percent in Honduras and 14 percent in Ecuador, the IDB figures show.
The percentages tend to drop the farther south you go, but even in the southern tip of the hemisphere, the percentage of people receiving money from Miami, New York or California is growing by leaps and bounds.
So get ready for a new step in the globalization of politics. The explosion of the U.S. Hispanic population will have a growing political impact on the tens of millions of Latin Americans who are receiving monthly checks from the North. What we saw last week in El Salvador was only the beginning.
Copyright © 2003-2004 Knight Ridder. All rights reserved.
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