The Mexican Revolution: Its Past, Present and Future

Written by Alan Woods
Wednesday, 14 July 2010



This year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the great events in modern history. On November 20th of 1910 Francisco I. Madero denounced the electoral fraud perpetrated by President Díaz and called for a national insurrection on 20 November 1910. This marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. Today, the conditions have matured for another revolution, this time with a mighty proletariat at its head.

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The Class Struggle In Mexico

Written by Alan Woods
Wednesday, 11 November 2009


Demonstration in defence of the SME workers. Photo by Frecuencias Populares

“Poor Mexico! So far from God, so near to the United States.” The famous words of Porfiro Díaz are truer today than at any time in the tempestuous history of this country. The crisis of world capitalism has hit Mexico hard. And its extreme dependence on the USA, which previously was presented as something beneficial to the Mexican economy, has turned out to be a colossal problem.

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Mexico, the U.S. and the Economic Crisis

By John Peterson
October 24, 2008

"Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States!" - Porfirio Diaz

There's an old saying that when the U.S. economy gets a cold, the Mexican economy gets pneumonia. For example, between 2000 and 2001, when the Internet bubble burst and the U.S. economy slowed from 3.7 percent to 0.8 percent, Mexico's economy went from 6.6 percent growth to zero, with devastating effects on the lives of millions of people. So what happens when the U.S. economy itself gets pneumonia? The deepening U.S. financial crisis is already having a violent knock-on effect around the world, and Mexico will be among the hardest hit.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon – considered by millions of Mexicans as illegitimate due to the blatant electoral fraud that brought him to power – has said that Mexico is no longer economically dependent on the U.S. and will therefore not be adversely affected by the crisis. Confronted with rising social instability and falling oil revenues, Calderon needs to put on a brave face and find a way to justify his government's increasing use of repression to maintain itself in power. Social discontent in the country is reaching the boiling point and a further hit to the Mexican economy could unleash an even bigger wave of mobilizations by the masses, with revolutionary implications. Unfortunately for Calderon, the reality is a far cry from his optimistic assessment.

According to Alfredo Coutino, a senior economist for Latin America at Moody's Economy.com: “Mexico is the most exposed economy to the U.S. recession.” And according to George Grayson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William & Mary in Virginia: “I think Calderon is sort of like a deer caught in the headlights of four onrushing tractor trailers.” How could it be otherwise when 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., and U.S. consumers and companies are cutting back across the board? Already, the U.S. economic crisis is having a devastating effect on millions of Mexicans (and Central Americans) living at home and abroad.

For decades, U.S. corporations shuttered factories and “shipped jobs off to Mexico” in pursuit of higher profits due to the availability of cheaper labor and weaker labor and environmental protections. Now factories in Mexico are being shut down and the jobs are being “shipped off to Asia.” According to the United Nations, from 1970 to 2007, Latin America's share of worldwide domestic product remained more or less unchanged at 5.7 percent, while Asia's share grew from 18 percent to 29 percent. Mexico's share of the world economy has now fallen from a 1980 high of 1.4 percent to just 1.2 percent. In other words, the region has stagnated for nearly 40 years, and even before the recent crisis, Mexico was on a downward spiral.

But these figures do not reveal the entire picture. Over the same period, the amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority has increased astronomically. This has led to the most unimaginable impoverishment of millions of Latin American workers, peasants and urban poor. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that the greatest inequality between rich and poor among OECD countries is precisely in Mexico, where the income of the wealthiest 10 percent of households is more than 25 times greater than the poorest ten percent. The world's third richest person, just behind Bill Gates ($56 billion) and Warren Buffet ($52 billion) is not someone from Germany, Japan, or the Saudi royal family. It's Carlos Slim, a Mexican, with an estimated $49 billion in assets – more than the annual GDP of dozens of small countries put together. Slim made his fortune when the formerly state-owned telecommunications monopoly was sold off and became a privately run monopoly – just as they now hope to privatize the state-owned oil industry.

International currency markets have been in turmoil over the last few weeks, and the Mexican peso has fallen to new lows. The drop is comparable or even greater than the 1994 devaluation of the Mexican currency. For the first time since 1998, the Mexican Central Bank has been forced to sell dollars ($11.2 billion worth) in order to prevent the total implosion of the peso. The official rate is now roughly 14 Mexican pesos per U.S. dollar, although in some parts of the country, especially along the border, it has fallen as low as 17 to 1 on the street. This represents a steep drop in value, especially after several years of relative stability at between 10 and 11 to 1. There was even talk of the “super peso.” This is now finished.

According to reports from the border, retail sales have plunged. In the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Genaro Alonso Tavera, the former president of the an association of money exchange outlets reported business was down 30 percent. This has also led to a dramatic decrease in traffic from Mexico into the U.S., which is already affecting businesses on the U.S. side who depend on Mexican shoppers to stay open. In addition, consumer prices rose 5.47 percent in September from a year earlier, and are expected to rise further in October and November.

In other words, Mexican workers' purchasing power is being squeezed by both devaluation and inflation. An item – for example a kilo of tortillas – that cost 10 pesos just a few months ago, now costs 15 pesos or more. That's a colossal increase in the cost of living. This alone is a recipe for a surge in the class struggle on an even higher level than in 2006, when the struggle against the electoral fraud, several major strikes and student mobilizations, and the Oaxaca Commune shook the country from top to bottom. Those momentous events are just a hint of what's to come in the coming period. Even more serious confrontations between the classes are being prepared: the backs of the Mexican masses are against the wall and they have no alternative but to struggle.

The two most important sources of income for the Mexican economy are PEMEX, the nationalized oil industry, and remittances from Mexicans living and working in the U.S. However, oil prices have fallen from $147.27 a barrel in July to under $70 in mid-October. This, combined with falling demand and overall production due to crumbling infrastructure, corruption, and mismanagement, means a fiscal disaster is looming. Other export commodity prices are also falling and tourism is expected to drop as well. Calderon is moving might and main to force through the privatization of PEMEX, as a way of injecting cash into the economy – and above all to further enrich the Mexican capitalists and foreign oil companies. From Wall Street to Mexico City, within the limits of capitalism, whether it's nationalization or privatization, it's all about stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

As for the other pillar of the economy, Mexicans living in the U.S. sent home 12 percent less money in August than a year ago, the largest drop since the Bank of Mexico began tracking remittances 12 years ago. This amounted to $1.9 billion as compared to $2.2 billion a year earlier. In the first 8 months of 2008, $15.5 billion was sent home, 4 percent less than the same period in 2007. Some 11 million Mexicans live in the U.S., forced to emigrate here in search of work as whole swathes of the country have become an economic wasteland. Entire families, neighborhoods, and even towns are entirely dependent on these monies for their very survival. Now that source is drying up.

In times of economic crisis, immigrant workers are among the hardest hit. Already badly paid and with few if any labor or legal protections, they are among the first to be laid off, are increasingly swindled out of money owed for work performed, and are being rounded up like animals and deported by the thousands in increasingly aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Immigrant workers are being used as scapegoats for the economic crisis, to divert attention away from the real cause of the economic crisis, of the millions of foreclosures and layoffs: the capitalist system itself. They are also being punished for daring to rise up against decades of super-exploitation and discrimination in the “immigrant spring” of 2006.

From Oct. 1, 2007 to Aug. 31, 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted 1,172 work-site raids across the U.S. Hundreds of raids on homes and neighborhoods are not included in these figures. One raid alone, in Postville, Iowa, resulted in the detention of 389 immigrant workers. This single raid cost more than $5.2 million to prepare and conduct, not including the expenses incurred by the Department of Labor or the federal attorney general (more than $13,300 per detainee). This is nothing less than a campaign of state terror (using workers' tax money) against one of the most vulnerable layers of the working class.

And yet, millions of Mexicans and other Latin Americans have no choice but to emigrate to the U.S. Simply put, the situation facing them at home is even more dire. As the crisis deepens, millions more will be forced to flee the dead end that capitalism has led to in most Latin American countries. The raids, deportations, increased border patrols, layers of walls and checkpoints, and massive detention centers are also a pre-emptive blow against the Latin American revolution, which will not respect the artificial borders drawn up by imperialism. There is nothing the capitalists on both sides of the border fear more than the united international working class.

So while Wall Street panics and the billionaires receive billions in tax-payer dollars to bail them out, millions of working Americans are losing their homes, jobs, and hopes for the future. But for people living just across the border in Mexico, things are even worse. And for the millions of undocumented immigrant workers and their families already living in the U.S., the walls are closing in – literally. The “immigration crisis” and the general economic convulsions are at root part of the same problem: the organic crisis of the capitalist system. All workers' interests are the same, no matter where we were born. In the coming period, the ruling class will do its best to divide the working class along lines of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, etc. The only solution is working class unity and militant organization and mobilization against the real enemy: the capitalists and their system.

With a global economy comes global economic crisis. The U.S. and Mexican economies are tightly interconnected, and what happens in one country has a direct and profound effect on the other. The Mexican working class has been ground down for decades by the death agony of the system. Entire areas of country are out of the government's control and thousands of civilians killed every year in the crossfire between the government and the narco-traffickers – it's often hard to tell which is which. Some bourgeois analysts even warn the country is on the verge of becoming a “failed state” like Afghanistan or Pakistan. This, right on the border of the most powerful country on earth. The choice facing the Mexican masses is truly one between socialism or barbarism.

But there is another side to the story. The epoch of world capitalist crisis is also the epoch of world revolution. The Mexican masses have shown time and again that they have not forgotten the heroic revolutionary traditions of the past. In recent years, millions of Mexican workers, peasants and youth have mobilized to improve their lives, to defend Social Security, to defend public education, against electoral fraud, to stop the privatization of oil, and for better wages and conditions. In the coming historical period, the Mexican working class, along with their U.S. class brothers and sisters, will move again and again to change society. Together, we will succeed in ending the horrors exploitative system of capitalism once and for all.

John Peterson

Stratfor: The Russian Resurgence and the New-Old Front

Stratfor is an intelligence group, made up of people formerly from government intelligence, who still have contacts. This piece is interesting, because it identifies the motivations of all the players, particularly in the Americas, and their relationship with Russia. I didn't know before reading this, why US imperialism, continues with the "War On Drugs." I have disagreements with this post in details as Chavez's relation to FARC, and not mentioning Colombia in this analysis. The writer is not Marxist, and this isn't a Marxist analysis. That is not Stratfor's job. Still this is a valuable analysis.

By Peter ZeihanK
September 15, 2008

Russia is attempting to reforge its Cold War-era influence in its near abroad. This is not simply an issue of nostalgia, but a perfectly logical and predictable reaction to the Russian environment. Russia lacks easily definable, easily defendable borders. There is no redoubt to which the Russians can withdraw, and the only security they know comes from establishing buffers — buffers which tend to be lost in times of crisis. The alternative is for Russia to simply trust other states to leave it alone. Considering Russia’s history of occupations, from the Mongol horde to Napoleonic France to Hitler’s Germany, it is not difficult to surmise why the Russians tend to choose a more activist set of policies.

As such, the country tends to expand and contract like a beating heart — gobbling up nearby territories in times of strength, and then contracting and losing those territories in times of weakness. Rather than what Westerners think of as a traditional nation-state, Russia has always been a multiethnic empire, heavily stocked with non-Russian (and even non-Orthodox) minorities. Keeping those minorities from damaging central control requires a strong internal security and intelligence arm, and hence we get the Cheka, the KGB, and now the FSB.

Nature of the Budding Conflict

Combine a security policy thoroughly wedded to expansion with an internal stabilization policy that institutionalizes terror, and it is understandable why most of Russia’s neighbors do not like Moscow very much. A fair portion of Western history revolves around the formation and shifting of coalitions to manage Russian insecurities.

In the American case specifically, the issue is one of continental control. The United States is the only country in the world that effectively controls an entire continent. Mexico and Canada have been sufficiently intimidated so that they can operate independently only in a very limited sense. (Technically, Australia controls a continent, but with the some 85 percent of its territory unusable, it is more accurate in geopolitical terms to think of it as a small archipelago with some very long bridges.) This grants the United States not only a potentially massive internal market, but also the ability to project power without the fear of facing rearguard security threats. U.S. forces can be focused almost entirely on offensive operations, whereas potential competitors in Eurasia must constantly be on their guard about the neighbors.

The only thing that could threaten U.S. security would be the rise of a Eurasian continental hegemon. For the past 60 years, Russia (or the Soviet Union) has been the only entity that has had a chance of achieving that, largely due to its geographic reach. U.S. strategy for coping with this is simple: containment, or the creation of a network of allies to hedge in Russian political, economic and military expansion. NATO is the most obvious manifestation of this policy imperative, while the Sino-Soviet split is the most dramatic one.

Containment requires that United States counter Russian expansionism at every turn, crafting a new coalition wherever Russia attempts to break out of the strategic ring, and if necessary committing direct U.S. forces to the effort. The Korean and Vietnam wars — both traumatic periods in American history — were manifestations of this effort, as were the Berlin airlift and the backing of Islamist militants in Afghanistan (who incidentally went on to form al Qaeda).

The Georgian war in August was simply the first effort by a resurging Russia to pulse out, expand its security buffer and, ideally, in the Kremlin’s plans, break out of the post-Cold War noose that other powers have tied. The Americans (and others) will react as they did during the Cold War: by building coalitions to constrain Russian expansion. In Europe, the challenges will be to keep the Germans on board and to keep NATO cohesive. In the Caucasus, the United States will need to deftly manage its Turkish alliance and find a means of engaging Iran. In China and Japan, economic conflicts will undoubtedly take a backseat to security cooperation.

Russia and the United States will struggle in all of these areas, consisting as they do the Russian borderlands. Most of the locations will feel familiar, as Russia’s near abroad has been Russia’s near abroad for nearly 300 years. Those locations — the Baltics, Austria, Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia — that defined Russia’s conflicts in times gone by will surface again. Such is the tapestry of history: the major powers seeking advantage in the same places over and over again.

The New Old-Front

But not all of those fronts are in Eurasia. So long as U.S. power projection puts the Russians on the defensive, it is only a matter of time before something along the cordon cracks and the Russians are either fighting a land war or facing a local insurrection. Russia must keep U.S. efforts dispersed and captured by events as far away from the Russian periphery as possible — preferably where Russian strengths can exploit American weakness.

So where is that?

Geography dictates that U.S. strength involves coalition building based on mutual interest and long-range force projection, and internal U.S. harmony is such that America’s intelligence and security agencies have no need to shine. Unlike Russia, the United States does not have large, unruly, resentful, conquered populations to keep in line. In contrast, recall that the multiethnic nature of the Russian state requires a powerful security and intelligence apparatus. No place better reflects Russia’s intelligence strengths and America’s intelligence weakness than Latin America.

The United States faces no traditional security threats in its backyard. South America is in essence a hollow continent, populated only on the edges and thus lacking a deep enough hinterland to ever coalesce into a single hegemonic power. Central America and southern Mexico are similarly fractured, primarily due to rugged terrain. Northern Mexico (like Canada) is too economically dependent upon the United States to seriously consider anything more vibrant than ideological hostility toward Washington. Faced with this kind of local competition, the United States simply does not worry too much about the rest of the Western Hemisphere — except when someone comes to visit.

Stretching back to the time of the Monroe Doctrine, Washington’s Latin American policy has been very simple. The United States does not feel threatened by any local power, but it feels inordinately threatened by any Eastern Hemispheric power that could ally with a local entity. Latin American entities cannot greatly harm American interests themselves, but they can be used as fulcrums by hostile states further abroad to strike at the core of the United States’ power: its undisputed command of North America.

It is a fairly straightforward exercise to predict where Russian activity will reach its deepest. One only needs to revisit Cold War history. Future Russian efforts can be broken down into three broad categories: naval interdiction, drug facilitation and direct territorial challenge.

Naval Interdiction

Naval interdiction represents the longest sustained fear of American policymakers. Among the earliest U.S. foreign efforts after securing the mainland was asserting control over the various waterways used for approaching North America. Key in this American geopolitical imperative is the neutralization of Cuba. All the naval power-projection capabilities in the world mean very little if Cuba is both hostile and serving as a basing ground for an extra-hemispheric power.

The U.S. Gulf Coast is not only the heart of the country’s energy industry, but the body of water that allows the United States to function as a unified polity and economy. The Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi river basins all drain to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The economic strength of these basins depends upon access to oceanic shipping. A hostile power in Cuba could fairly easily seal both the Straits of Florida and the Yucatan Channel, reducing the Gulf of Mexico to little more than a lake.

Building on the idea of naval interdiction, there is another key asset the Soviets targeted at which the Russians are sure to attempt a reprise: the Panama Canal. For both economic and military reasons, it is enormously convenient to not have to sail around the Americas, especially because U.S. economic and military power is based on maritime power and access. In the Cold War, the Soviets established friendly relations with Nicaragua and arranged for a favorable political evolution on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Like Cuba, these two locations are of dubious importance by themselves. But take them together — and add in a Soviet air base at each location as well as in Cuba — and there is a triangle of Soviet airpower that can threaten access to the Panama Canal.

Drug Facilitation

The next stage — drug facilitation — is somewhat trickier. South America is a wide and varying land with very little to offer Russian interests. Most of the states are commodity providers, much like the Soviet Union was and Russia is today, so they are seen as economic competitors. Politically, they are useful as anti-American bastions, so the Kremlin encourages such behavior whenever possible. But even if every country in South America were run by anti-American governments, it would not overly concern Washington; these states, alone or en masse, lack the ability to threaten American interests … in all ways but one.

The drug trade undermines American society from within, generating massive costs for social stability, law enforcement, the health system and trade. During the Cold War, the Soviets dabbled with narcotics producers and smugglers, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to the highland coca farmers of Bolivia. It is not so much that the Soviets encouraged the drug trade directly, but that they encouraged any group they saw as ideologically useful.

Stratfor expects future Russian involvement in such activities to eclipse those of the past. After the Soviet fall, many FSB agents were forced to find new means to financially support themselves. (Remember it was not until 1999 that Vladimir Putin took over the Russian government and began treating Russian intelligence like a bona fide state asset again.) The Soviet fall led many FSB agents, who already possessed more than a passing familiarity with things such as smuggling and organized crime, directly into the heart of such activities. Most of those agents are — formally or not — back in the service of the Russian government, now with a decade of gritty experience on the less savory side of intelligence under their belts. And they now have a deeply personal financial interest in the outcome of future operations.

Drug groups do not need cash from the Russians, but they do need weaponry and a touch of training — needs which dovetail perfectly with the Russians’ strengths. Obviously, Russian state involvement in such areas will be far from overt; it just does not do to ship weapons to the FARC or to one side of the brewing Bolivian civil war with CNN watching. But this is a challenge the Russians are good at meeting. One of Russia’s current deputy prime ministers, Igor Sechin, was the USSR’s point man for weapons smuggling to much of Latin America and the Middle East. This really is old hat for them.

U.S. Stability

Finally, there is the issue of direct threats to U.S. stability, and this point rests solely on Mexico. With more than 100 million people, a growing economy and Atlantic and Pacific ports, Mexico is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that could theoretically (which is hardly to say inevitably) threaten U.S. dominance in North America. During the Cold War, Russian intelligence gave Mexico more than its share of jolts in efforts to cause chronic problems for the United States. In fact, the Mexico City KGB station was, and remains today, the biggest in the world. The Mexico City riots of 1968 were in part Soviet-inspired, and while ultimately unsuccessful at overthrowing the Mexican government, they remain a testament to the reach of Soviet intelligence. The security problems that would be created by the presence of a hostile state the size of Mexico on the southern U.S. border are as obvious as they would be dangerous.

As with involvement in drug activities, which incidentally are likely to overlap in Mexico, Stratfor expects Russia to be particularly active in destabilizing Mexico in the years ahead. But while an anti-American state is still a Russian goal, it is not their only option. The Mexican drug cartels have reached such strength that the Mexican government’s control over large portions of the country is an open question. Failure of the Mexican state is something that must be considered even before the Russians get involved. And simply doing with the Mexican cartels what the Soviets once did with anti-American militant groups the world over could suffice to tip the balance.

In many regards, Mexico as a failed state would be a worse result for Washington than a hostile united Mexico. A hostile Mexico could be intimidated, sanctioned or even invaded, effectively browbeaten into submission. But a failed Mexico would not restrict the drug trade at all. The border would be chaos, and the implications of that go well beyond drugs. One of the United States’ largest trading partners could well devolve into a seething anarchy that could not help but leak into the U.S. proper.

Whether Mexico becomes staunchly anti-American or devolves into the violent chaos of a failed state does not matter much to the Russians. Either one would threaten the United States with a staggering problem that no amount of resources could quickly or easily fix. And the Russians right now are shopping around for staggering problems with which to threaten the United States.

In terms of cost-benefit analysis, all of these options are no-brainers. Threatening naval interdiction simply requires a few jets. Encouraging the drug trade can be done with a few weapons shipments. Destabilizing a country just requires some creativity. However, countering such activities requires a massive outlay of intelligence and military assets — often into areas that are politically and militarily hostile, if not outright inaccessible. In many ways, this is containment in reverse.

Old Opportunities, New Twists

In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega has proven so enthusiastic in his nostalgia for Cold War alignments that Nicaragua has already recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two territories in the former Soviet state (and U.S. ally) of Georgia that Russia went to war to protect. That makes Nicaragua the only country in the world other than Russia to recognize the breakaway regions. Moscow is quite obviously pleased — and was undoubtedly working the system behind the scenes.

In Bolivia, President Evo Morales is attempting to rewrite the laws that govern his country’s wealth distribution in favor of his poor supporters in the indigenous highlands. Now, a belt of conflict separates those highlands, which are roughly centered at the pro-Morales city of Cochabamba, from the wealthier, more Europeanized lowlands. A civil war is brewing — a conflict that is just screaming for outside interference, as similar fights did during the Cold War. It is likely only a matter of time before the headlines become splattered with pictures of Kalashnikov-wielding Cochabambinos decrying American imperialism.

Yet while the winds of history are blowing in the same old channels, there certainly are variations on the theme. The Mexican cartels, for one, were radically weaker beasts the last time around, and their current strength and disruptive capabilities present the Russians with new options.

So does Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a man so anti-American he seems to be even a few steps ahead of Kremlin propagandists. In recent days, Chavez has already hosted long-range Russian strategic bombers and evicted the U.S. ambassador. A glance at a map indicates that Venezuela is a far superior basing point than Grenada for threatening the Panama Canal. Additionally, Chavez’s Venezuela has already indicated both its willingness to get militarily involved in the Bolivian conflict and its willingness to act as a weapons smuggler via links to the FARC — and that without any heretofore detected Russian involvement. The opportunities for smuggling networks — both old and new — using Venezuela as a base are robust.

Not all changes since the Cold War are good for Russia, however. Cuba is not as blindly pro-Russian as it once was. While Russian hurricane aid to Cuba is a bid to reopen old doors, the Cubans are noticeably hesitant. Between the ailing of Fidel Castro and the presence of the world’s largest market within spitting distance, the emerging Cuban regime is not going to reflexively side with the Russians for peanuts. In Soviet times, Cuba traded massive Soviet subsidies in exchange for its allegiance. A few planeloads of hurricane aid simply won’t pay the bills in Havana, and it is still unclear how much money the Russians are willing to come up with.

There is also the question of Brazil. Long gone is the dysfunctional state; Brazil is now an emerging industrial powerhouse with an energy company, Petroleo Brasileiro, of skill levels that outshine anything the Russians have yet conquered in that sphere. While Brazilian rhetoric has always claimed that Brazil was just about to come of age, it now happens to be true. A rising Brazil is feeling its strength and tentatively pushing its influence into the border states of Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as into regional rivals Venezuela and Argentina. Russian intervention tends to appeal to those who do not feel they have meaningful control over their own neighborhoods. Brazil no longer fits into that category, and it will not appreciate Russia’s mucking around in its neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, Stratfor published a piece detailing how U.S. involvement in the Iraq war was winding to a close. We received many comments from readers applauding our optimism. We are afraid that we were misinterpreted. “New” does not mean “bright” or “better,” but simply different. And the dawning struggle in Latin America is an example of the sort of “different” that the United States can look forward to in the years ahead. Buckle up.


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