 Here we are with Global Connections. I'm Jay Finale, this is Think Tech. Today, we're going to spring off an article that was in Foreign Affairs. It was called Mexico's Dying Democracy. No Better Person to Discuss This Than Carlos Juarez, our old friend here on Think Tech at the East West Center. Carlos, welcome to the show. Now, Loha Jay, always a pleasure to connect. And of course, as you said, a chance to talk and reflect and understand a little bit of what's going on with our very important neighbor to the South, Mexico, this country that is so important to us. It's, of course, our closest and very valued partner for the US, 2,000-mile border, et cetera, et cetera. But it's off the radar often. We have so much happening in the world, of course, with Russia's invasion in Ukraine, endless other stuff, whether it's Middle East or Asia or Indo-Pacific, whatever. Mexico, it's a country that is going through a lot of change at the moment. And we want to talk about, you've mentioned there's a new article that just came out in Foreign Affairs Magazine, a very influential journal. And Denise Dresser, the author, is a Mexican political scientist. She's a public intellectual. And in this article, Mexico's Dying Democracy, she really sheds light on a pretty worrisome trend, this growing authoritarian populism, the variation in Mexico. And it matters because, again, Mexico is not necessarily a faraway place. It is our important neighbor to the South and second largest trading partner. But interesting dynamics, because it also reflects global trends. We see rather than polarization. Well, and trends in the United States. Yeah, of course. I was telling you, if you change a few of the nouns, it could be confused that this article actually is talking about the US of A. These trends are very, very concerning. They're concerning in Mexico, but they're also concerning as a statement of what might happen or what is happening here in the United States. So we should see what's going on in Mexico, because in a funny way, this article tells you that Mexico is a leader on the way into autocracy. Yes. And then let me put some context in that. Of course, Mexico has a, like many of Latin America's countries, have a tradition of authoritarian rule. That is, democracy is a relatively new thing. For Mexico, about 30 years, really the late 1980s began to see the erosion of what, until then, had been a very stable and strong authoritarian system. It was a one-party rule, a political party that was formed Mexico, like Russia. They had a revolution in the early 20th century, and it led to, by the 1920s, the establishment of a new political system, one party that dominated everything. And it was what we call a form of corporatism or clientelism, where every sector of society was weaved into this political party. It's often described as the perfect dictatorship, because it looked like a democracy. Every six years, you would have an election, there's a political party. That same party would even fund a few small parties to make it look like it was plural. But everybody knew in the end, 85%, 95% of the vote went to that same party. Well, the system worked for many, many decades. It provided stability after years of violence and conflict. But at some point in time, it is not democratic to have one party that governs, right? And so by the 1980s, you began to see pressures coming at the state and local level. And by the election of 1988, Mexico has a six-year term for president. In 1988, it came to really be a challenge to the system where a new candidate said, wait a minute, I would like to be president. Let's have a debate, a process. That election took place. It was likely to be fraudulent. It elected Carlos Salinas, who would become, of course, the architect of NAFTA in the early 90s. The election would also mark kind of like the end of that long-standing authoritarian rule. So fast forward quickly, I'm moving too fast here, but in the year 2000, was a political earthquake from Mexico. They had a presidential election that ended 70 years of one party rule. An opposition candidate wins. This opposition party, the Pan, sort of a right-of-center business party, becomes the next leader. Fast forward three more presidencies. And suddenly in the year 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his name is Andrés Manuel, his surname is López Obrador, but we know him as Amlo. He becomes president of Mexico. He had actually tried twice before and probably lost fraudulently in 2006, lost again in 2012, but in 2018, he wins with a very broad popular mandate, essentially a rejection of the very corrupt and the predecessor of him was a pretty ineffective president. Let me get this straight, Carlos. So the period of enlightenment was at the end of that 70 year period, which was around 2000 or so. And so it starts at 2000 and 2018, we have Amlo, and all of a sudden between 2018 and now, the thing has moved dramatically to authoritarian rule and various things, which we will discuss here now on the show. But what's interesting about it, if not frightening, is that you can have a democratic arrangement, an enlightened arrangement, even, and then all of a sudden in the space of four years, you can lose it. Isn't that what happened? Well, it is. And it shows you that democracy is fragile and things like norms that we take for granted, in some cultures and some political systems, it takes years to develop, United States, hundreds of years of developing, eventually even something like the norm of a peaceful transfer of power that was just taken for granted. You lose the election, you give it up, you move on. Well, this past election for the US, suddenly that got called into question and has eroded. And today we still have large populations who believe the election was a fraud. Let's move quickly to Mexico and say, well, clearly Mexico under a changing society, growing middle class, more connection to the global economy, but also persistent poverty, massive inequality. It's a very unequal society by any measure. People are frustrated, they want change. Now, interestingly, this political party, the PRI that I mentioned that ruled for 70 years, they were a very nationalistic party. They were broad-based and they provided, again, sort of a safety net for all of society. Now over time it eroded, it's not democratic, but you did have by the year 2000 and since then the development of new, more autonomous institutions like an electoral, basically an institute for the electoral system. Because before that, Mexico, basically, the party in power would count the ballots, much like in Russia, they have an election and basically the party in power counts the ballots. That's not an democracy, you need an autonomous independent electoral system. But that same system now has been eroded and the current president of Mexico has basically stripped its power, tried to install, you know, what we're seeing is the authoritarian playbook and we see it played out in many other countries of the world, whether it's in Hungary, Nicaragua, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, even the United States. Basically eroding, again, the institutions that are meant to be part of our democratic system. Another key part that's been very interesting for Mexico is the militarization, the role of the military has taken on a dramatic change. And again, too, we don't have time to cover it here, but traditionally Mexico had a military that was kind of removed from politics. And very different from other parts of central and South America where the military, you may have a memory of military coups, military governments throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 70s who had waves of them, not Mexico. Again, it was deep politicized. That all changed. By the 1990s, the drug war now popularized by the Nautical Series on Netflix, this changed in Mexico and the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, used the military to take on the drug cartels. And that changed everything. Suddenly today, we have a military and that has now been given more power, but is increasingly corrupt and has been penetrated by these powerful criminal drug cartels. But the president is essentially in a very curious way, now using the military for things that traditionally had not been. And it's a bit worrisome. Today, the military is operating a lot of areas outside of, or things that traditionally have been done by others. It's building airports, it's running the ports, controlling the customs, distributing money to the poor, implementing social programs, and even detaining immigrants. Again, these are functions that traditionally are done by civilian institutions. It's also done some terrible things, some sinister things, either in the open or behind the screen. Can you talk about the 41 students who disappeared? Yeah, 43 actually. Yeah, in the year 2014, it's been now eight years. In September, there was a dramatic violence, basically a group of students, young students that had been gathering, believe it was the state of Guerrero, I'm not mistaken, yeah, south of Mexico City, suddenly disappear. And it just typical in Mexico, the investigations just go awry and nobody knows anything. And years go by, they never find anybody. Well, this is eight years now. And finally, under this president, they have begun to uncover a little more, but it's clear that the military itself, the local political officials, everybody was involved. And the bodies essentially disappeared. And in gruesome ways, probably through, again, it sounds like a theater, but burning them, disappearing them with acid, who knows. But again, that became a rallying cry for many about really just the total lack of accountability, the impunity, the violence. And even to this day, it's still unresolved. Again, 43 students disappeared. Carlos, she talks about the decline of civil rights, the decline of the rule of law. Jesus, this is very troublesome given what we are seeing in this country as a step along the way, how people are arrested for prompt up charges and thrown in jail, including political adversaries. So under AMLO, this has taken on a very nefarious, sinister kind of image that you can be an ordinary person, but if you're on the wrong side of the tracks, you go to jail. Yeah, it is, it's troublesome. And it speaks to on some level, the personalistic style of governing that he has as a particular authoritarian leader, his rhetoric and his policy decisions have really put a lot of democratic norms and institutions at risk. It's very interesting, even to this day, four years into his presidency, literally every morning he starts with a press conference that can go on for one to two hours, sometimes more on and on. And it's open and transparent, but it's also, at some point, he uses these often to just simply criticize everybody and anybody that criticizes him. And he denies the legitimacy of any opponents, calling them traitors to the country. Again, using language that is really, again, eroding the civil discourse. And if a journalist is there questioning him, it becomes kind of like what we saw happen even under Trump with press conferences where it just turns into a little shouting match and very, well, just very uncivil, you could say. And Dresden talks about it as theater. Yes, it is a political theater. One of the techniques of achieving autocracy is creating daily theater. Exactly, yeah, I know, and it is. And of course, Mexico has a long tradition of sort of aspects of, I think it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Columbia who called it magical realism. But it's this, often living with myths and pushing again, and part of it is stems from even just, again, the plight of many people in Mexico is a pretty tough environment. The social injustice, the poverty, and how you deal with that often, you just have to make, I don't know, like you said, even like a form of political theater, but it is, she calls it pedestal politics, I think. It's a daily act of political theory, she refers to a performative presidency where he spins a tale of heroic fight against the privileged elites, and those are one of his biggest, anybody who is the mafia of power, he calls them, perverted feminists and corrupt experts. And so everyone is conspiring against the public. And here again, you hear this again and again, he alone can represent the will of the pure true people. His rhetoric is very simple. He sees a very seismic shift and it's not a mere course correction. And just to put this into context, when he came to power four years ago now, he has used the term the fourth transformation for Mexico. He sees his view, he's got a vision of really kind of like one of these watershed moments. Mexico won its independence from Spain in the 1810 period, early 19th century, that was the first. It had a liberal movement under President Benito Juarez, my main seq at the late 19th century, Abraham Lincoln's pen pal, and then the revolution of 1910. These are cataclysmic events. Well, he sees his presidency as the fourth transformation, getting rid of the old, but again, the curious thing is what we see is a lot more of the old coming back. Even the economic policies giving primacy to the oil company, which is sort of the most ineffective and indebted oil company in the world. He's investing heavily in a new oil refinery built by the military. And then using again sort of the democratic knowledge, just to give you an example, one of the things he's done quite effectively is using referendums. And it almost sounds like a playbook out of, let's go into the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine and see what the people want. He's done that for several initiatives in Mexico. Let's have a referendum where my political party chooses the participants and sets up the ballot and counts it all. And there's fraud in there too. It's a joke. It doesn't represent sort of like an actual, again, you don't have an independent authority that's counting the ballots. And so you get the results you want, but it erodes trust and it creates distrust. And yeah, so it's a worry. Was he the one who used the phrase, let's make Mexico great again? Well, I wouldn't say he used it directly, but many have attributed it to him, make Mexico great again. And in that, in his case, he would fight against the deeply ingrained corruption and eradicate persistent poverty. Now, interestingly, in the name of that agenda, he has removed checks and balances, weakened autonomous institutions, and he has seized discretionary control of the budget in ways that are just, any authoritarian would be quite pleased in terms of what he's done. Again, I would go back probably one of his biggest legacies is gonna be this issue of basically militarizing the country in a dramatic way. And this is a real about face. He came to office, he had a campaign slogan that was, what was it called? Abrasos, nobalasos, hugs, not bullets. We're just gonna all hug and get along. Well, he has given the military a lot of new bullets and power and control, again, over many areas. And that same military is increasingly tainted with some corruption scandals that was even a bizarre incident. I don't know if you remember this, a couple of years ago, the U.S. government arrested the former defense minister of Mexico. Oh, sure, in New York. And got him and then within a couple of days, he was handed back over kind of just silently, like, well, okay, and you know. And then he was released. He was released in Mexico when it was all like a technical this and that. And yet they had pretty detailed evidence that this guy was in the pocket, like some previous high ranking officials of the cartels. So it was a weird thing because again, Mexico suddenly got him back and then they released him. Even to this day, the U.S. government was like, what? You know, we went out of our way to, you know, and then, and so it was a little bizarre incident. But really, back to the main point, it's just this process of, again, instead of reigning in the army, he has unleashed it and given it roles that again, traditionally are not meant for the military. Even today, there's a new airline that is being proposed. Get this. And he's getting the Cubans because Cuba has a national airline as well to sort of have the military now run this new airline. It's interesting. So this, it's a playbook, again, right out of the Cuban and literally getting Cuban advisors to help do that. So it's, you know- Well, can you achieve a better economy using the military and corruption as you have described? Or at the end of the day, does the economy take a hit on this? Has he done anything of value for Mexico? Well, you know, the key point is that you've seen really a reluctance of some foreign investment to come back in and it's mostly to do with his energy policy. He's had a very mixed bag of really some policies and more specifically that it's gonna be challenged under the, you know, NAFTA agreement because he is giving, he's changed the rules to give like more favoritism to Mexico's national electricity company. And again, violating some of the terms of the free trade agreement. So it's becoming a, you know, rather than, well, it's becoming a tense issue right now. And it's playing out in some dispute settlement mechanisms that the US MCA, the NAFTA renegotiated NAFTA agreement, it was signed in 2020, the United States, Mexico, Canada agreement as it's called. And it has these new mechanisms for resolving some disputes. And so, yeah, it's playing out in that way. But again, I would just say the overall sense is that his policies have kind of harkened back to the 1970s, you know, giving primacy to again, oil production when Mexico could and should be a leader in a lot of alternative and even, you know, solar energy. But he is kind of giving primacy maybe to the traditional more state led investment. So it's a mixed bag. Carlos, can you talk about the relationship of Mexico with the United States under AMLA? Yeah, that's an interesting point because we recall that when Trump came into office, he of course had some very strong anti-immigrant sentiment and statements that, you know, angered many. But in a curious way, AMLA and Trump had a pretty good friendly relationship. They met a couple of times. And even though, of course, Trump bullied and, you know, strong armed AMLA into having to take on a more aggressive stand against the, remember those caravans of migrants sealing the southern border. Well, Biden comes into office and it's a more complex relationship. They're engaging Mexico more on many issues, human rights, you know, environmental issues. And in a way, it's more annoying for the Mexican president because with Trump, at least as long as, you know, he didn't do anything, you know, Trump would go away. But now there's more engagement. John Kerry, of course, has already had several visits to Mexico trying to sort of, you know, address some common areas of interest, but it has been frustrating and difficult. But maybe again, the bottom line is that I think with the U.S. relations, it's so delicate and there's so many levels and layers going on that part of me wants to say there's a lot of continuity. And today the relations are so complex that again, at the state and local level, you have deep interdependence between and in the business community. But I want to separate that from the presidential relations, which are important, but they're different. And so today I would say that the relations are somewhat tense between Biden and AMLA indeed. And even Kamala Harris who's had several visits to Mexico, you know, she's addressing the Central American migrant issue. But let me just add to that, that AMLA is a president of Mexico. We've had many recent presidents who are kind of globally oriented, you know, speak English or are more engaged with the international community, not AMLA. He does not speak English, he doesn't travel abroad. He's literally had maybe two trips since his presidency and not interested in global issues. So he's not, you know, he's not too interested in diplomacy, you could say. But he's now, four years' interest presidency, he has two more years. So this is an interesting time where now he's looking at, you know, the tail end, what is the legacy gonna be? And Mexico again, six year, no reelection. So they're about to have an election in two years. That's right now, the agenda is looking at that. Who's gonna follow? And I would say this, that in the past, Mexico had a one party, this PRI. They had a party that had a set of values and you know, let's say what it stood for. Today, it's less about the party and it's more the personal rule of this AMLA. It's a personalistic authoritarian rule, a cult of personality. And that's problematic because the day he leaves, well, what follows is it's gonna be someone else. Well, can he run again? Will he run again? No, no. Will he run again even if he can't run again? It would require a constitutional change that is not in the cards. Even though he does have a majority, it would be a super majority needed and just, I don't see that in the cards now. So instead, he's gonna try to help someone who's gonna continue his legacy. There are two likely or expected candidates to follow him. His current foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, very worldly internationalist type of guy and the current mayor of Mexico City, a woman. And they're both from his party and they are sort of the expected candidates to succeed him. Both of them, I would say are a bit more competent than him. They're pretty well educated and worldly. I mean, if you consider expertise, any value. And so it'll be interesting to see how that transition plays out because Amalo is such a prominent sort of figure and cult of personality that it's hard to imagine him just passing on the reins. Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing comes to mind is, I've come to feel that the road to autocracy is a one-way street. In other words, when you move in that direction, it's hard to turn it around. You imply, though, that there could be someone else who comes in as the next president of Mexico, however selected and could be more enlightened. Is it possible that the road to autocracy that Amalo has created or has advanced on could be reversed in Mexico? Yeah, I mean, I wanna think so and I wanna hope so because right now it has been eroding, it has been backsliding. I mentioned the two right now, the top likely candidates, Marcelo Ebrard, interestingly, he's a son of, well, he's an, I wanna say grandson of French immigrants who came to Mexico in the late 19th century, a large diaspora from sort of in the textile industry. So he's got this kind of French heritage. The other is Claudia Scheinbaum, she's the mayor of Mexico City, a very competent earth sort of climate scientist. I think she was part of the panel that won the UN climate science piece Nobel Prize, whatever. But the point is that she's the mayor of Mexico City, quite popular and very competent, you know, scientist. And she's got a very, you know, German last name, very much again, part of the Mexican elite. And so I kind of mentioned that because of Mexico, of course, this current president, he's kind of very populist, you know, man of the people and, you know, those and he hugs all the poor, he's very popular with the poor. These other two, they're more from the traditional elite and they don't have that same degree of either, I wanna say authoritarian tendency, but maybe not even that, more the populist charm. They're competent leaders in their own right. And so part of me thinks that, yeah, maybe they can bring back, and they are both, you know, progressive leaders, left of center, which I think Mexico needs, the country really has a very deeply unequal society. But Amlo, even though he is a leftist, unfortunately he's a leftist of the sort of the authoritarian populist demagogue variation and in the end, it kind of comes full circle. He ends up being a bedfellow with Donald Trump over time. And we look and compare, we haven't talked a lot about, you know, other authoritarian, you know, leaders that we've seen throughout the world, whether it's in Turkey, Venezuela, Philippines. I would add to this the role of the military. I mentioned it a few times and this is something that is different from Mexico. And yet in many authoritarian regimes, maybe it's in Indonesia, South Korea, even Philippines, the military as an institution has often been a very powerful political actor. Traditionally, not in Mexico, but that has changed. And today that military, more powerful, more resources is not as easy to send back to the barracks. So that's the worrisome trend. So what does this mean to the rest of Latin America? You know, Mexico in its own way has been a leader. It's big, it's close to the US. It has more ties with the US than any other Latin American country has. And it's had a tradition, at least for a time, being a democracy and successful. But now with this and the descriptions that Jester makes in the article is pretty chilling. He goes through every possible implication of what AMLO is doing and how all these institutions are changing under their feet. This is nothing exempt from the changes that are happening under him. And it's pretty scary. So the question is, how does that affect other countries, including other autocracies or would-be autocracies south of the Mexican border? Yeah, it's a good question, not a quick answer. I would just say because we have this idea that Latin America is, if it's this single monogamy, of course, there's a lot of variation and you have some countries pretty well institutionalized, vibrant or more vibrant democracies. And I'm thinking here, maybe places like Chile, to some extent, even arguably Uruguay and Argentina. I guess I'm gonna say this, that today Latin America has enough variations of authoritarian rule that we can't just speak of it as left or right. You have several that are on the left, but different types. Some that are more, I would say, maybe traditional left of center, sort of social democrat type. And we see a few of those today, the new leader in Peru, no, no, no, not Peru, sorry, in Colombia, the new leader in Chile, who is a young guy that's had a bumpy start, but I say that because I don't see these as the extreme authoritarian type. Mexico's amno is a curious variation because it's almost like he's more in common with Bolsonaro, although he's from the right in Brazil. And yet others, here's another quick thought and I'm thinking out loud is that, Mexico, of course, is a big brother. It's the largest Spanish-speaking country, like Brazil, it's a major power. But I wanna say that curiously, I think other countries are looking increasingly less to it as either the model or the, I don't know, or the one to follow. And what I mean by that is that increasingly, they're just looking at their own region and their own systems and less Mexico. Because Mexico has many ways been a unique, a sui generis, genesis, I'm sorry. It didn't follow the same patterns of other countries where, again, the role of the military, the military coups that were so common in South America, not Mexico. Mexico developed this unique one-party system that others probably wish. Maybe the closest would be the Communist Party in Cuba, where, you know, a long party rule. But that system broke in the year 2000. So now we've had this kind of country in transition becoming democratic, which is healthy, just like other parts of Latin America. But let me see, a final takeaway would be just the trend we see everywhere in the US and in South and the Central Americas, polarization of politics increasingly to the left, to the right, and you don't have a very effective sort of middle-range, moderate political party system. And unfortunately, Latin America does not have a long history of sort of party politics, democratic politics. So all these democracies are relatively fragile and we see the erosion. And Mexico is one more example. Really, it's really too bad because Mexico could be, this is a geographical concept, it could be the capstone of all of Latin America. It could be a leader that could bring all the Latin American countries together. I mean, geographically, theoretically, but it isn't doing that. And I suggest to you that what Amlow is doing to Mexico is taking it further from a position of leadership of Latin America. Do you agree? I agree, and I think the key point you meant, or the takeaway here is that he has not been a very regional or global leader. In other words, he has not taken the leadership mantle of Latin America. He could have been, hey, and in a curious way, that lack of his interest, his lack of any global or even regional interest has left him less effective as a leader. Because Mexico, just by virtue of its size and population, its popular culture, it's a powerful country for Latin America. It has a lot of influence through its soft power and its sheer size and its economy and whatnot. But it's not taking, it's not leading. It's sort of just looking inward at the moment. And meanwhile, the other countries are kind of going on their own or maybe looking elsewhere. I think that would be a way of putting it. The one thing we haven't talked about, which we should talk about, is the effect of the women's protest, women's groups, the political effect of those groups and civil society organizations in general under Amlow's government. Can you talk about that? Absolutely, and I think actually this article we've made references to, and he speaks a lot to that, really the erosion of civil society groups. And this is, again, this is democracy. This is suddenly people voicing their concerns, calling attention. And Mexico has a terrible, terrible problem of violence and violence against women. Basically, you made a reference earlier what we have an average of 11 women are killed every day. And it really is, I guess, worrisome because as Professor points out, interestingly today, one of the most sort of thorns in the side of Amlow are feminist organizations that have really been disappointed by his lack of either addressing human rights issues. And even I think the article makes a comment how now when they have protests in the big center of Plaza, the government has to put up these steel barriers in front of the National Palace. That never existed before. So the protests have gotten more violent. And I think I made a reference to this actually about a month ago, this particular author. She's a public intellectual, well-known activist. She was protesting in the central square of the Socalo and literally got harassed and chased out by a group of thugs that were supporters of the president calling her a traitor, they called her a burguesa, like a bourgeoisie and blah, blah, blah. So it's just a very ugly environment. I mean, you know, if you, and it has eroded again the trust of what are the role of civil society groups? Because in democracies, that's, you know, that's where you have voices coming out. And when you suppress that, it's not a good sign for, again, democratic system. In the context of sort of a First Amendment approach, freedom of speech, which seems to be under attack in Mexico, which is under attack in Mexico, those associated with freedom of religion. Mexico is a Catholic country for the most part. How does Ambrose do with the Catholic Church? You know, well, and this is curious because it's not spoken a lot about it, but interestingly, he is often referred to as an evangelical Christian. In other words, he's got a part of him and yet it's not openly, and people don't always understand it in the same way we often do in the US, sort of the Protestant evangelical. But I would say this, the evangelicals have had a tremendous growth in Mexico as in other parts of Latin America. But the Catholic Church, you know, interestingly, different times in Mexico, it was very much a bastion of conservatism and at times linked closely to the government for stability purposes. Today, the role of the Catholic Church is not what it had been before. And I would say it's not a particularly big angle of it. Mexico is liberalizing and moving to liberalize abortion and things like that. But going back to the feminists that you spoke about a moment ago, it is interestingly because he doesn't seem to understand and cannot control and has not been able to suppress this. And so you have a situation where today, women in Mexico are angry and rightfully so, given the tide of femicide that is sweeping. They have a lot of frustration that the government's response to many murders and it has intensified, he seems to be impervious and disdainful of their demands. So it's a messy situation. And today, Mexican feminists are more energized and more combative than ever. And they're trying to reframe the public debate in favor of their rights and against this militarization. And let me add that one more thing. Again, the militarization, I haven't mentioned it, I'll finish with this though, but under the new Lomelo, he created a brand new National Guard. And interestingly, it was modeled after the Italian Carabinieri. It's kind of like a police force that's national because of course the police are very corrupted in Mexico, as you could expect. But this new National Guard was meant to be kind of like a civilian controlled force. That is gone away. And today, this new National Guard has been placed under the Defense Ministry and any pretense of it being a civilian agency is gone. And so this is one of the concerns again that you don't have effectively institutions that can address law enforcement because military is very different from law enforcement. And law enforcement, it requires investigation, rules, laws, that's not happening. Instead, you have a militarization and that's- Shades of Mussolini evokes for me. You know, one thing about this article, and I think you had the same reaction that I did about it, is that there's a lot of revelations in here. Things that you might not have been aware of that have either happened recently or have happened below the radar. You lived in Mexico until a couple of years ago, or quite a few years. Quite some time, yes. And I'll bet you there were things in this article that you didn't see living on the ground. And so what it suggests is a kind of a vacuum in the global press on what's going on in Mexico. We see it in foreign affairs, but we don't see it in the times or the post. We don't see it on Reuters. What's going on? And why is there this vacuum? And will the vacuum be filled? And will you and I have another show about this? You know, you've touched on so many important points there. And you know, I spent, as you mentioned, I came back from Mexico about a year and a half ago. I was there off and on about four or five years. And one of my frustrations the whole time there was how can I find good information, accurate information, you know, information that's not just completely, and I never could. I kept looking and asking. I mean, there were a few minor sources of, you know, good quality journalism, but very difficult. And even today, back outside of Mexico, I'm hard pressed to find stuff about Mexico. Exactly. You can look at the Washington Times and there's rarely anything. Or if there is, it's a little violent story here or there. You don't have a lot of coverage over this very important country. Now, Foreign Affairs is an influential magazine. It's written by, I mean, it's read by, you know, intellectuals, foreign policy geeks, but it is influential. And, you know, Denise Dresser, I said at the outset, she's well known in the international community. She's known in Mexico today more because she is a thorn in Amla's side. She has been a tremendous critic and he has singled her out in some of his morning press conferences as part of the corrupt, you know, neoliberal mafia, this or that. At the end of the day, she is putting the torch under him and holding him accountable in a very dramatic way. So it's interesting to see it play out, but it is worrisome, again, very worrisome because I saw this actually in the last days I was in Mexico, he began to take on the academic community. And Mexico had long established this council sort of for science and technology, maybe the equivalent of our National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, gives out grant money, you know, brings together the expert academic community. Well, he has completely trashed that and eroded, again, any pretense of, again, you know, science experts and so on. So for, you know, for those in the expert community, it's tragic, it's pretty sad because again, Mexico, as difficult as it is to do what it does, suddenly it's just, this is two or three steps back and that's gonna take time to recover. Tragedy, as all moves to autocracy are in the 21st century. Thank you so much, Carlos. Carlos Juarez of the East West Center, Aloha and I hope to see you again soon. Aloha Jake. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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