 I think it was just a game. Okay, we're back, we're live, and we're doing global connections right now. We're studying pandemic politics and developing world here with Carlos Juarez, who joins us from Mexico. Hi, Carlos, nice to see you're smiling and sunburned face. Yes, Jay, managed to get outside today and got a little too much sun and didn't put my sunblock as, you know, I always get scolded by my wife and, well, there you go. But it brings out the redness in me. You know, I have a little bit of Irish blood in my heritage, so I'm kind of a chance to remind myself. But all is well and, you know, glad to reconnect, you know, as we do often with these opportunities to, you know, give some perspective. Here I am in Mexico City, and of course it is undergoing a lot of, well, a peak, you know, and like so many places, it's often hard to know what is the real data, what is the real information. Mexico has a very low, low percentage of testing going on. So in fact, you know, they know that the numbers that they released officially are very undercounted. And more and more, I think what you have to find for the truth is you got to go to these cemeteries or these, I guess places where they cremate people and then those people will tell you, hey, these are busy days, it's a tough time. Well, you saw what happened in the U.S. yesterday when they, or Trump redirected all the COVID information. Oh, yes, yes. He bypassed the CDC and gave it directly to himself so that he can tell you or not tell you or he can lie about it, which is probably what he wants to do and use it as a political weapon. But we're not going to have the same level of confidence in the numbers anymore. That's right. And, you know, for this kind of crisis, it is at first the health crisis. Yes, we have the economy, very important. But if you don't get this health crisis under control, the economy is going to continue to stagnate and be pushed back as we've seen now after several months, opening too quickly, too soon, and now the challenge of that. And so you've got to get a handle on that health crisis. And what I want to really say about that is that that requires confidence in the government. And when we look around the world, which places have done better, it tends to be places where people have a level of confidence that the government is providing good information. They will believe the recommendations and follow them, the political leaders. We've talked about this before, giving consistent message and communication. Instead, when you have mixed signals or maybe denials or sort of downplaying it or politicizing it, people get very, very nervous and skeptical. And of course, Mexico has a long tradition of, let's say skepticism and maybe criticism of the government for many years, very corrupt and maybe not accurate in its information. And it's hard to get rid of that legacy. But this is true, of course, everywhere, even the US with, of course, many mixed signals coming from the federal government, many people looking to their state and local authorities instead. So it's a real mixed bag. And the same happens throughout the world. Again, some places, even if you talk about India, this massive country that really in just a couple, four or five years, it's gonna surpass China to become the largest population. But India, a large place, very different regions, you have some places that are today peaking and obviously challenging. But you have others, some time ago, there was a lot of reporting coming from the Southern state of Kerala, which has always been one of the more developed parts of India, even though it's a poor underdeveloped part of the world, but it is a very strong healthcare system. And again, people who trust the government and have a sense of, I guess, understanding to believe when the authorities are telling them what they have to do. So that's part of the challenge, I think. You know, I think there's kind of a strange effect here. In this country, people have long held the view that in developing world, life does not mean that much. That the death of an individual is just not that serious a matter in these developing countries. And what's really interesting sort of an upside down kind of arrangement is that now, you know, we've lost 140,000 people. We have 3.3 or 4 million people who've been infected and there's gonna be a lot of deaths among that crowd. So after you watch this for a while, for weeks and months, and you see those numbers tick up and all these people, I mean, how long were to take you and me counting as fast as we could count to count to 140,000? It would take a long time. And so you say, oh yeah, the developing countries, life is cheap in these developing countries. How about in the U.S. where we don't seem to give a rip that 140,000 people have died at a miserable, awful, lonesome death? Who's cheapening life, eh? No, absolutely. And of course, I think increasingly we're seeing now where people throughout the world are now, it's hitting home, where people that you know that are in your family, now maybe just back to the developing world context. Of course, in general, we speak about places where the family is the key institution that is people rely less on the state or on their employment for a safety net. It is the family that is the support network. And in many places, this is being disrupted because, again, just as a case in point in Mexico here, it's very similar in other parts of Latin America, a very high percentage of the population is in what we call the informal economy that is they live day to day, they may sell you all little things they put out on the street that they'll sell, whether it's food or merchandise, that is they're not in the formal employment. Now, given the crisis here, like everywhere, a formal employment has been hit hard. So many people who have regular jobs are losing them. Many of those are now trying to go into the informal economy, which is already sort of saturated. And so it's a very, very tough situation. And here, I think in general, what we see across Latin America, many of the poor families are facing an impossible choice between obeying the quarantine measures or simply starving. That is you've got to go out and make, whatever you can get by for the day, or despite the day-driven infection. And I've just been observing in here, like in Mexico, in general, people throughout the streets and are wearing masks and trying to adjust and the government is trying its best to put it out. But at the end of the day, a huge population has to travel on public transport, the buses are packed, people are not wearing masks. It's hard to get around that. Not everybody has the luxury of a home where they can just camp out and be alone. And then you've got, again, because of the family and the tight social structure, a lot of multi-generational families. So you've got older people, lots of younger population, and that's a recipe for a real disaster in some sense. So we're seeing, again, throughout the region right now, of course, Brazil is the real high point. It's the second largest after the US in terms of both cases and deaths. And as well, about 10 days ago, we saw the president, Jair Bolsonaro, he has tested positive. One of the, for another head of state, I think he had another test yesterday, he continues to be infected. But this is one of the leaders who of course has been criticized because of a very lax response and denying it and also not showing, you know, use of masks himself is taking a lot of criticism for that. So most challenges. Great leveler, great leveler. I mean, in the US, if you put somebody in the stress of a overpopulated household, and then you put that person in the stress of not having enough money and food and no job at all and no government benefits, which we have and are getting more of that. And what happens? Well, in the individual case, you get domestic violence, you get people roaming the streets doing crime. You get, you know, and the Black Lives Matter was about Black lives, but it was also about people who couldn't stand being cooped up anymore. Yeah, a lot of like a, like a festering boiling point, of course. Yeah, and I would bet you the same thing exists all over the world. I'm sure the same kind of risk and explosive possibility exists all over Latin America, South America. No, absolutely. And here, again, just to give you some of the data that's come out now, the ECLA, it's called the Economic Commission on Latin America. It's a UN agency based in Santiago, Chile, which basically reports on development issues, economic issues for Latin America. They are showing anticipating 45 million new extreme poor, you know, people that are, you know, basically in the last 20, 30 years, we've seen a gradual decline of that, of, you know, alleviating poverty. Today, this crisis is pushing many, many more back into that extreme poverty. We also see a decline in the region right now predicted to be about over 9%. It will vary by country, but a pretty substantial decline already, again, places that are facing difficulty just before the crisis, this is accentuating it. Then you have a situation with the United States because, I'm sorry, with Mexico, because of its proximity to the US, because of the integration of the economies, it's interesting to see that, you know, the push by President Trump and different states of the US to open and obviously get the economy going has also put a lot of pressure on Mexico, in part because there is a real interconnection and particularly the reliance on many Mexican supply chains for the auto industry, specifically, there's been a lot of pressure put on Mexico to open those factories because the US needs to get its economy going. So in fact, that political pressure from Trump has also been put onto the Mexican president, Lopez Obrador, very interesting about a little over a week ago now, the US and Mexican presidents had a meeting in Washington, President Lopez Obrador, the first time he left the country now in a year and a half, he's been in office, which is quite astonishing, not only that, but he actually flew on a commercial flight. He's a very frugal and sort of, you know, left wing populist and one of the things he did when he first came into office was he wanted to, or he has tried to sell the presidential plane to the previous president. They have a nice, one of those Dreamliner, Boeing 787s, obviously a pretty expensive machine. Well, he refuses to fly on it and he actually flies commercial airlines. So he had to take a flight on Delta to Atlanta, transfer, go to Washington. I mean, here's the head of state of Mexico, a place that has violent criminal organizations and everybody's already speculating, well, which flight is he gonna be on? There aren't that many flights these days, not that hard to figure it out, but he did the trip, he went to Washington, very surprising how it was relatively under the radar, not a lot of attention. Normally, this would have been a pretty big deal, a state dinner, you know, and for both presidents, a chance to take attention away from the pandemic and they went primarily to sign the trade agreement that went into effect July 1. This is the revised NAFTA, the US, Mexico, Canada trade agreement. Interestingly, Justin Trudeau from Canada, Boycott decided not to go. He, you know, given the pandemic crisis and perhaps as a snub to Trump himself. So it was the Mexican and US president signing, you know, this trade agreement. A lot of criticism here in Mexico, a lot of, you know, discussion because of course Trump comes to office or he launches his campaign five years ago with some pretty harsh words about Mexicans being rapists and building the wall. And a year ago, we saw tremendous pressure from Trump on Mexico to take on these caravans of migrants, right? And to seal the border. Otherwise he was threatening a massive tariff, you know, war. So many saw the Mexican president kind of going to sort of kowtow or maybe, you know, give Trump more credit, you know, more credit. Moreover, in a situation given the presidential election right now, it's almost like, why is he doing that? Why is he not choosing to meet with Joe Biden? Why doesn't he just wait until the election kind of gets determined to decide? But again, it was a lot of attention to that. But the leaders met and again, it was rather under the radar given so much other news, particularly about the pandemic and the economic downturn in so many places. Well, you know, Trump controls the agenda. He controls the press on that sort of meeting. You know, he could have made a rose garden love fest out of it or not. And it looks like not. Why? Why did he put the lid on it that way? I mean, I think he tried to, in fact, they did have a signing ceremony at the White House there. And I found it interesting, you know, Trump has a very famous signature, you know, very big and bold with his black pan. The Mexican president was kind of small and many people were looking at, well, there is the difference right there. You know, Trump has got to be big and bold and, you know, he loves to show off the signing of it. But here again, you know, the Mexican president and his team, obviously, they had to put the best spin on it. It was a way of showcasing their diplomacy and the president defending Mexico's national interest. But in the end, it was, you know, this trade agreement, important as it is, kind of modernizing NAFTA, is not likely to have a huge impact right away. The two economies continue to be deeply integrated. That is not changing. But it goes back to what I said earlier, given the pressure in the US to open the economy, that same pressure is being put on Mexico to keep the supply chain of parts and, you know, Mexico and the US have a massive flow of trade that goes both ways. And interesting that these two leaders, both of them populists, but from different angles, Mexico's leaders are very left-wing populists, very frugal, austere. Trump, of course, with his gold bathroom and maybe more, you know, the billionaire lifestyle that he comes from. They are night and day, and yet they came together in a curious way to celebrate this new agreement that's moving forward now. Well, that takes us to the whole notion of pandemic politics in the developing world, the title of our show. And I would like to ask you, you know, what kind of an effect is the pandemic having on politics? Is it elevating these populist or dictator type of leaders? What is it doing? How is it changing the existing order? Yeah, I mean, there's no simple answer to that. I think it will vary. Of course, leaders, and the Mexican president in one of these, he was one who took a lot of time to sort of be denying it and pushing off and kind of making it seem as if it wasn't as bad as it has been. And so he's taken some criticism about that in the early stages in particular. He was very much in denial and so took criticism for that. But I would say this, I mean, on one hand, I think you see civil society beginning to question the government when they're seeing mixed results, the government is trying to downplay maybe the seriousness, whether it's in India, whether it's in Brazil and Mexico, many different developing countries. I think what we see again and again is the role of social media. It could be valuable to give us information, but it can also spread a lot of misinformation there or distorted information. And it's often so hard for us to get good, accurate information. Moreover, in general, the developing world is a place where you don't see a whole lot of testing compared to developed countries in the North. New Zealand, I think, has one of the highest percentages like South Korea. So the reality is that the numbers that they do reveal are simply not true. And so a lot of people grow very skeptical about that and it breeds a lot of criticism that the government is not being honest and upfront. So again, it also accentuates already, social tensions that have been there. Latin America in particular is long characterized by a lot of inequality of income and racial and ethnic divisions. And at the end of the day, the wealthier elites, more European, tend to have a bigger home, a second home and have the ability to kind of weather this, obviously not worried so much about their income. The majority of the masses are the ones who obviously are dependent on their families. Yeah, I think you put your finger on something really important. Probably, and you talked about the people in Chile, I think, about how there are more people now. I mean, poor people coming around. And so I think the whole experience in a given country, a given jurisdiction accentuates disparity because COVID splits people. You can afford to stay at home and not worry about work or food or you have to go to work and get in a crowd and be concerned about being infected. That's a huge disparity. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of highlighting already things that have already been there. More generally, you could say, if we look at the last 20 or 30 years in the developing world, in Latin America, many parts of Asia, in Africa, there's been a pretty substantial improvement of quality of life that is the very poor, I'm speaking, a lot of that has improved. We're seeing with this crisis that many are kind of slipped back into that. So we're gonna see the very poorest are gonna find themselves. And here, the social tensions are gonna flare up. As always happens, they're gonna take it out on the political leadership. So we might anticipate in the next couple of years, a lot of people looking at the response of their respective governments and saying, you know, you didn't do it. And so they're gonna want to change. There's gonna be a pressure to get them out. Because unlike maybe a handle, whether we look at some of the East Asian cases or of course, you know, New Zealand and the Prime Minister there that has been, how it is a very successful model, those are places where the government is, let's say gaining more, you know, more popularity, more legitimacy, not so in many of the developing countries. It's gonna be more likely to see pressure for political change. Well, it's a challenge in any country. The United States, Trump has not met the challenge. And whether his base agrees or not, the fact is objectively by the numbers, he hasn't met the challenge. But I'm happy to hear that in other countries, maybe not a lot of other countries that people feel the government has met the challenge. And that's very interesting because that is a political expression of how the coronavirus works in a given society. If people come away with a more confidence in the government, a better feeling about their leadership, that is really something to be studied. So why is it, why is it, what happens in those developing countries where people feel greater confidence in the government? They like, what is it, what can we learn from them? Here, and maybe I'm gonna cite the example here in Mexico, while the president has often taken a lot of criticism for being aloof and maybe not taking it as seriously, there is an individual who's like the main sort of, COVID czar, a public health professional who daily is presenting information. And so I think a lot of it is that ability to convey good information data and kind of reassure people. And this particular leader that I'm mentioning, he has, well, like everything, he's got some detractors, but in general, he is seen as a very serious scientist who's kind of giving, and I think as people see that, they begin just as you might in the US. I mean, we see the debates in the US over, Dr. Fauci and now he's being sidelined by the president, but to the extent that you have leaders, political leaders and public health professionals who are leading the dialogue and giving the direction, I think people will follow that. I mentioned in Southern India, the state of Kerala, this was, again, not, it's a bit of an anomaly, but it's a place where people have trust in the local government because they have a healthcare system, again, even in a developing country that has been quite solid, quite effective and innovative. The other thing is that countries in the developing world don't have the resources, they don't have the capabilities of maybe first world countries. So they have to be a resourceful, they have to be more innovative in some ways of how to do that. And different examples everywhere, either learning how to create temporary hospitals or even developing new equipment on their own and not depending on the outside world. So we see some of that. I think what we're gonna see a real challenge in the coming six, 12 months, once we begin to see vaccines and a program to address that, it will be a challenge because there's gonna be a race in the US and the wealthy European countries are gonna have more power and capability to do that in their own. And for the poor developing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, poor countries in Central and parts of South America, who is gonna help cover that cost? Is the US, is Europe gonna help to develop that? Because in the end, this is a global issue that for Europe and the US cannot be solved unless we also address it in the developing world. You can't expect them to do it on their own. I know this is a long shot, but this reminds me of manganese nodules. At the ocean bottom around the world, there's an incredible storehouse of manganese in the form of nodules. The problem is that people have to learn how to collaborate to mine them. And that hasn't happened yet. It's every country for itself. And the international rules don't, nobody respects them. It's a problem because ultimately it'll be damaged to the environment. So it's the same thing here. Are these countries actually collaborating or are they not? In the beginning, several months ago, Trump was found to have tried to suborn a German pharmaceutical research company that was working on a vaccine and he was trying to pay them billions and trying to steal away, cockroach their best medical researchers. And Angela Merkel stepped in and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And the researchers, to their credit, the researchers themselves said, no, no, no, we're not doing that. But what Trump was trying to do is he was trying to get the thing on a nationalistic basis. He was trying to get it out of Germany and into the United States where he would not share it. Maybe he'd try to make money on it. It's hard to say where that billion was gonna come from. They was gonna use to pay them off. So now we have a similar situation with Putin who is hacking into the vaccine research facilities in the US and the UK and other places trying to get an advantage. And I think there's a race like with the Manganese nodules. There's a race to see who can get their hands on this thing because everybody realizes that if you have to give it to nine billion people over and over again, the initial dose would be a couple of doses. And then we don't know how long it's gonna last. I mean, before you need another one, another regimen. And so there may be many shots times nine billion people, okay? And that's gonna mean a lot of money, a lot of money. So the stakes are high and I think there's a competition going on and it is a nationalistic isolationist kind of competition. No, along those lines, I think what we are seeing and it follows this pattern of a, in many ways, a challenge to the liberal international order that we've had for so many decades after World War II, cooperation, coordination, you know, even post Cold War by the 90s, 2000s, the world was more or less cooperating more, growing regionalism, of course. But this pandemic now I think has shown people or countries maybe in this case are kind of turning inward and looking out for their own interests a more of a doggie dog world. And this is characteristic of, again, rejection of multilateralism, very pronounced of course in the US under Trump, but also a challenge of cooperating. But the Europeans instead in general still, you know, obviously have that capacity and maybe they have a long tradition of coordinating policies. But even in the peak of the crisis, we saw a lot of countries kind of left on their own or looking, you know, without having help from some of their neighbors. But boy, this is one of those cases where in the end, certainly the public health experts will tell you, you cannot do this on your own. You need to be coordinating with what's happening in other countries, given the mobility now, right? Now things are slowing down in terms of travel, but the mobility of people and the movement of goods and commerce, all of that spreads not only goods and people, but also disease. And so these pandemics, we've known that they were gonna be here with us for years and they are gonna be continued challenges in the future. Today it's COVID-19, you know, in five or 10 years there may be others. Ultimately, let's hope that we can draw some lessons for this, both the shortcomings of not cooperating, but also the lessons that we can learn and help, you know, different countries get over this. I should say lessons, you know, I'm not sure that we are, we may be aware of these lessons, but whether we are actually implementing these lessons is another question. And, you know, like for example, when Trump says, I'm not gonna support the UN, when he shoves off from the World Health Organization, it's more than just the money, it's more than even just one country being nationalistic. He's sending a message around the world, let's not collaborate. And one organization in the world that tries to collaborate among nations is the United Nations. So, you know, I think the damage is extraordinary. It's far beyond what it seems to be. And my question to you is, are we getting closer to learning and implementing that lesson, or are we getting further away? Well, yeah, and I think as you said, I mean, I don't think at this point we're drawing those lessons. I mean, there will be, you know, an effort to reflect and try to draw that out. But I think just as you suggested right now for the US and its role right now, exiting the World Health Organization, I mean, this has just seen by everybody as a disaster. This is not the time to do that. No, there may be reforms that WHO needs to make or the US can, you know, somehow address though. But ultimately, again, this is not the time to be running away from that and trying to solve this on your own. I think it underscores a view of the United States as the country that we used to look to as the leader and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, you know, founder of what maybe in the late 40s. This was always the top, public health agency of the world. Today it's losing credibility. It's been politicized and just the announcement you said at the outset where now Trump administration is gonna be having hospitals report directly to HHS bypassing CDC. That is a politicization of a politicization. I can use that word, but basically it loses credibility. And again, CDC has long been sort of like the hallmark of this is how you organize a public health agency. Today it's looked at less as the model. Yeah, and look at Fauci. I mean, he's been working a campaign against Fauci and Fauci, I mean, most people recognize Fauci as authoritative and credible. But if he keeps on doing that, you will see Fauci's name erode. Repetition is the mother of study. If he keeps on attacking Fauci, has his minions attacking Fauci in a week or two or three Fauci will look so good. Just the way Trump works. Anyway, we only have a minute or two left and I wanted to offer you the opportunity to try to come to some kind of general conclusion about the effect of the pandemic on politics, both on a national level and on an international level. What would you leave with people as a takeaway, Carlos? Well, I think it's simply accentuating things that have already been happening, whether it's in inequality and justice, domestic violence, these kind of issues. Even increasingly, we're seeing things like the drug cartels here in Mexico. They haven't stopped operating and doing what they do and we have still high levels of insecurity. So in some ways it's exacerbating a lot of what is already there, increasing the disparities. It's a real challenge. Having said that, I will say this, I think there are also many examples that we often don't see enough of them at the micro level, small communities kind of coming together. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, we spoke about this idea, well, people are getting to know their neighbors and for the first time and maybe not enough of that has happened, but I do see in many places a sense of this has been a game changer, clearly, a paradigm shift. So people now have to start thinking more about their local immediate communities because it's a normative thing. But I think, Carlos, my last question to you, we're almost out of time. Will this kind of disruption, this kind of, what do you wanna say, this kind of new politics, new politics locally and globally, will it lead to war? I think not so much between nations. In fact, the days of interstate wars is pretty much behind us. Within some places, yes, you're gonna see tensions and divisions, again, exacerbating those differences. And even you can see in the US, I mean, the racial injustice and so on has been exacerbated and people, the pandemic has just created tension and sort of a boiling point so that other issues now are suddenly gonna be coming up. So I do see them, the tensions and violence, but more within states and within regions, not so much between countries. Although, again, the United States, I think this crisis has further alienated and pushed the US outside of the global leadership. Well, yeah. Well, part of the reason for my question is our degraded relationship with China. From, say, before Trump till now, our relationship with China has essentially come apart. And it's really worse every day. And China is nobody to be trifled with. Whatever the pandemic may be, they are a strong and economic power. So I worry about that and you're right. I mean, there are changes in the world and you wouldn't see a classical war either. You'd see some other kind of war, a trade war, which we're in already, and maybe a electronic war. Yeah, the cyber war, what you mentioned earlier, the Russians hacking into now all this stuff. I mean, they're just wanting to muddy the waters and confuse everybody more. That's a sad situation. I will clarify it. I know we will and a couple of weeks time, we're gonna wrestle with these issues as they have evolved and we'll clarify it for the benefit of you, me and anyone watching. That's right, great. Well, always great to reconnect and share some thoughts on this never ending changing world. But thank you again, Jay. Thank you again, Carlos, Aloha. Aloha.