Eagle Hill Discussion Forum: Mexico and the Upcoming US Presidential Election

Alan Riding is a Brazilian-born British journalist and writer whose career took him first to New York with Reuters, then to Mexico for The Financial Times and The Economist. In 1978, he joined The New York Times and, from Mexico, he also covered the Nicaraguan Revolution and the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. In 1984, he moved to Brazil, his base for covering the drug and guerrilla wars in Colombia and Peru, before returning to Europe in 1989. After five years as The New York Times’s bureau chief in Paris, he became the newspaper’s European Cultural Correspondent until he left the paper in 2007. Among his books are Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans; Essential Shakespeare Handbook and Opera, of which he is co-author; and And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.

For the best part of 70 years, the US could ignore Mexico in the knowledge that its one-party system would insure stability. Then, in 2000, this “perfect dictatorship” ended in an electoral defeat, bringing instability in the form of intense drug-related violence and tidal waves of immigrants from across the world trying to reach the US through Mexico. Six years ago, a leftist populist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, became president under the banner of a new nationalist party, known as Morena, which he sought to model on the old PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party. On October 1, his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, took office, pledging to continue her mentor’s controversial policies. Looking ahead, Washington can probably ignore the erosion of democracy in Mexico, but whoever wins the White House on November 5 will have to address the double border crisis of drugs and refugees. How President Sheinbaum responds to US pressure will determine the state of bilateral relations for the next six years. And how these and other issues such as bilateral trade are handled will unavoidably influence the outcome of next month’s and future US presidential elections.

Register for this discussion by emailing joerg@eaglehill.us by 10AM ET on the day of the event.