The Great Divide: The Challenge of U.S.-Mexico Relations in the 1990s - Hardcover

Barry, Tom; Browne, Harry; Sims, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802115594 ISBN 13: 9780802115591

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1994

Synopsis

Provides an incisive analysis of the relationship between the United States and Mexico, exploring such issues as economic development, immigration policy, and the drug trade

About this title

Reviews

The authors, research associates at the Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, an Albuquerque think tank, present a critical but dry assessment of the numerous issues confronting the U.S. and Mexico. Their first section repeats familiar stories about border life, describing migrants, drug-smuggling and maquiladoras (export-oriented assembly plants). Better is their account of the inevitable effects of cross-border pollution, and of how U.S. policy-makers co-opted environmentalist critics of NAFTA. Observing that Mexico's modernization has exacerbated inequality, the authors argue that trickle-down compacts like NAFTA must be accompanied by innovations that rebuild communities, defend workers, guard the environment and promote health. The U.S. and Mexico have moved closer in their official relations, but the authors note tartly that the U.S. does not fully respect Mexican sovereignty (especially concerning the drug war) and is not altogether committed to Mexican democratization. A brief conclusion reprises recommendations ranging from harmonization of wages and regulations to institutionalizing the roles of grass-roots groups already involved in cross-border relations.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An alternately helpful and debatable effort, by three analysts at the Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center in New Mexico, to elucidate the relationship between the United States and Mexico in the 1990s. The helpfulness resides in the sheer accumulation of factual material on a subject of increasing significance. The book is divided into four parts. The first is a close-up of the border region, ``a metaphor for the economic future of America,'' and the allied subjects of immigration, drugs (many of which come from or are funneled through Mexico to the US), and the maquila industry, which now numbers 2,000 companies. The second section considers environmental issues and is one of the better assessments of the extent of that problem. The third and fourth cover, respectively, economic and official relations between the two countries. Debate will arise because the authors sharply disagree with conventional economic belief in the advantages of free trade--the view of the Bush and the Clinton administrations, the Salinas government, and most official and unofficial commentators on both sides of the border--without providing anything persuasive in its place. They discern in both the US and Mexico ``falling real incomes, sharply increased poverty rates, rising long-term unemployment, widening gaps between rich and poor, infrastructure decay, and environmental deterioration'' and believe that ``global frameworks like GATT threaten to spread these...deficiencies throughout...the world.'' Rather unconvincingly, they suggest the solution to these problems is ``democratization of the decision-making process, compensatory financing, legal normative frameworks, and institutional innovations,'' while denying that these measures will create ``a welter of new institutions, laws, regulations, and bureaucracies.'' A useful compendium of important facts and issues confronting both countries; a less than convincing formula for their resolution. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The authors explore the complex relationships linking Mexico and the U.S., and place the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) within the context of these relationships as well as global economic trends. Rather than opposing economic integration, they seek to move it beyond a purely economic agenda. To represent the needs of workers, consumers, and the environment as well as businesspeople, they propose adoption of four "mechanisms": democratized decision making, compensation for those on both sides of the border who are hurt by free trade, new "international legal and normative frameworks . . . to help compensate for the declining ability of . . . governments and their citizens to oversee and restrain . . . transnational actors," and "representative and accountable [binational and trinational] institutions . . . [which would] account for the full social costs that will accompany the integration process." Even readers who find the authors' recommendations hopelessly utopian will find much useful data--on immigration, the cross-border drug trade, and maquiladoras, the environmental disasters along the border, and the history of the two nations' economic and political relationships--in The Great Divide. Mary Carroll

This new work from the Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center does for the international arena what senior analyst Barry's Mexico: A Country Guide (1992) accomplished for domestic politics; it offers an up-to-date primer of data and interpretations of problems having an immediate impact on U.S.-Mexican relations. The book focuses on three broad agendas--human rights, including the consequences of drugs and border employment in American factories; the environment, which is given one of the most useful, comprehensive overviews in print; and economic interdependence--and shows their impact on the official relationship between the two countries. Although its conclusion is too brief, this remains a highly informative fact book on the evolving U.S.-Mexico relationship. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
- Roderic A. Camp, Latin American Ctr., Tulane Univ., New Orleans
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802115594
• ISBN 13: 9780802115591
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 452