A Name Change in Mexico Won't Solve the Big Problems of Poverty, Job Growth and Drug Wars Tony Castro - VOXXI
go to original December 1, 2012

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon submitted a bill to the Mexican Congress for Mexico’s name change to officially be Mexico alone instead of its official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. When Calderon came to power six years ago, he set goals to alleviate poverty, create jobs and increase public safety. As he winds up his term on Saturday, Dec. 1, 2102, Calderon leaves Mexico with fiscal stability that saved the country from collapse during the world’s economic crisis, but with far greater violence, very little change in poverty levels and anemic job growth. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo)

On Saturday, Felipe Calderon hands over the presidency of Mexico to Enrique Peña Nieto and heads off to a fellowship at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard University.

The irony of the recent president of Mexico moving on to a sabbatical not just at Harvard but at the most cherished education institution in the United States could not be greater.

Just last week, nine days before stepping down from office, Calderon made an announcement in which he appeared to be renouncing American hegemony, a word you rarely hear anywhere except at places like Harvard or in intellectual foreign affair magazines.

Calderon said he was submitting a bill to the Mexican Congress for Mexico’s name change to officially be Mexico alone instead of its official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

“Mexico doesn’t need a name that emulates another country and which none of us Mexicans use on a daily basis,” Calderon said.

Mexico’s name change, which would require long analysis and then passage by both houses of the Mexican Congress, has about as much chance as Mexico has of ending the drug violence that has killed at least 60,000 Mexicans in the past six years.

Calderon, of course, was merely articulating the frustration Mexicans have had for generations - the lament that their country is “so far from God, so close to the United States.”

It is a relationship that has fostered longstanding ethnic, cultural and racial animosities on both sides of the border that political leaders from each country have attempted to mend but with little success.

Mexico’s name change and the reality the country faces today

There is no denying the influence that the United States has historically had over Mexico, far beyond the similar name that the Mexicans chose when they won their independence from Mexico in the 19th Century.

Mexicans have long felt that the U.S. “stole” a great chunk of their country when it acquired Texas and much of the Southwest, but those are residuals from war, whether in the Americas or in the Middle East and make great fodder for intellectual disagreements and little else.

The reality today is that Mexico is a country at war with itself - 60,000 violent deaths, after all, underscore if not a revolution then certainly a revolt against the way of life, political and social, that has marked that country’s history in the past century.

As bad as the distribution of wealth is in the United States, a point that was roundly debated in this past American presidential election, it is a kingdom of heaven compared to the hellish one-sided economic conditions in Mexico in which the wealthy have long prospered like old world patrones and the bright among the increasing millions of poor have looked to the only way out of poverty.

Few would condone the violence in the economic revolution that the drug cartels have wrought, but it is now as much a part of Mexico as the eagle eating the serpent in the Mexican flag.

Perhaps the questions we should be asking now are: Who is the serpent and who is the eagle?

And not under what country’s name they exist.

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