Mexican Shock

One of Mexico's leading progressive critics, Castaneda (Utopia Unarmed) offers a savvy challenge to his home country's ruling elite and to Americans who believe an economic bailout will salve Mexico's wounds. Mexico, he reminds us, remains far more polarized than its mostly middle-class neighbor, and, as he warned presciently, free trade without attendant democratic and social reforms will not modernize Mexico. Now he advises his comrades not to fight for NAFTA's repeal but to mold it ``into an instrument for growth with justice''; that would require the government to help civil society flourish by freeing unions and ending the television monopoly, among other reforms. Castaneda offers detailed but accessible accounts of the Chiapas crisis, the 1994 elections and the factors contributing to Mexico's December 1994 economic collapse. He believes Mexico is in neither transition nor crisis but a state of slow deterioration. To break out of that, he observes pessimistically, there are no forces--only the institutional power of government--strong enough to steer Mexico on a new course. (Nov.)