Despite some missed chances, I can’t say some things have gone badly for me, work-wise. I have college friends working in warehouses in the United States, and colleagues cleaning floors or attending tables in Chile. And the last I heard, my former editor at the newspaper where I did my internship is now a janitor in Peru.

I understand why they have left, along with many of my friends and relatives, and over 10 percent of the country’s population.

For the most part, the lives of Venezuelans who have departed are relatively easier than the grand majority of those who have stayed. Life here is famously marked by food shortages, hyperinflation, rampant violence, and a decrepit infrastructure that leave many of us without power for hours. Running water is erratic. And as time goes on, all of these problems have only deepened, making even the most basic activities increasingly difficult to endure.

Yet, here I am, writing these words, struggling with daily blackouts and a feeble internet connection. I’ve been writing since I was very young; it helps me to organize my ideas, express myself, and try to understand the world around me. Though I never imagined myself as a journalist, at the same time I never saw myself doing anything but writing. In my career reporting, I’ve found an energy and urgency that I never felt with fiction. Something like Venezuela constantly challenges you; you don’t get easy, simple answers.

I think what I write helps a little, because Venezuelans need narratives now. Both inside and outside the country, we are always having to explain ourselves over and over—even as we face a situation that we ourselves can’t quite grasp. This sense of confusion has only increased in the past few months, with the country falling into a constitutional crisis that has put us in the international spotlight.

On January 24th, the day after the speaker of the nation’s legislature Juan Guaidó took over the presidential post after the legislature declared it vacant, I was flooded with messages. Some were from people I’ve never met before, including a message from a journalism student in California asking what everyone else is asking: Why is this happening to Venezuela?

Now, despite tension having died out since the failed military uprising led by Guaidó on April 30th, the question remains.

According to the government headed by President Nicolás Maduro—and the explanation I see and hear again and again on state media and pro-government outlets—all our problems come from acts of sabotage, and from a strategy of U.S. imperialism against the Bolivarian Revolution and Maduro, who was appointed by Hugo Chávez on his last public appearance.

I can see why it sounds plausible enough. Latin America’s history is one that has been defined by colonialism, imposition, and exploitation, and Venezuela has been no exception. In the last century we have been bound economically and culturally to the United States, a process propitiated by and impossible to untangle from oil, which today remains the country’s main revenue source.

But if I have learned anything about journalism, it is that if you know how to write a news story you don’t need to lie, you simply omit. That’s the problem with easy answers and one-size-fits-all narratives: you ignore, disregard, or move things just a little bit to make the story work.

In the past, the majority of private media companies were very critical of Chávez and Maduro. With time, some outlets were sold to Chavismo-allied business people, while others were forced out of the business. And a few simply became compliant, wary of straying too far from the government’s official version. The vague, euphemistic phrase “an irregular situation” has almost become an icon of self-censored news in today’s Venezuela.

Outside of a few websites, there are virtually no nationwide outlets most people consider reliable. Instead, Venezuelans seeking a version of reality other than Maduro’s rely heavily on social media where fact and truth are always in danger of being supplanted by immediacy and bias. Newscasts from Miami and Colombia on YouTube, message groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, and a constant feed of communities on Facebook and Twitter are how people get breaking news, for better or for worse. You get up with this sort of news, go to bed with it, and you check it through the day as a reminder that you’re not alone in this tragedy.

I see some of the same distortion and ignorance when it comes to international news about my country. On one side, you have Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump championing the Venezuelan cause while taking the chance to dust off the old bogeyman of socialism—loosely defined as everything to their left—to paint anyone against them with the same brush, while curtailing sensible and necessary reforms in their own countries.

Things don’t exactly fare better on the other side. Many on the left supported the Bolivarian Revolution in its early years, and some still do, either for ideological affinity, economic investment, or a bit of both. For many in this position, my country is an uncomfortable truth, which is better dismissed, ignored, or left alone and out of sight. Others choose to defend the revolution to the very end, arguing that—despite its flaws, excesses, and abuses—there’s no better alternative in this time and age.

Venezuela, therefore, is either a bogeyman or a punch line. But this, too, is a simplification where I have taken out or left out facts to make my point.

For the 90-plus percent of people in my country who live in poverty, the statements of Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Putin, or a bunch of Americans in a Washington, D.C., embassy are alien and distant.

When you spend a good deal of your time living with blackouts and obtaining food, water and other essentials—in other words, surviving—you don’t have the privilege of thinking too much about the future.

I can’t help but turn to history to try to make sense of this situation and maybe find some glimmer of hope.

Last year, I visited Berlin and saw the remains of the Berlin Wall. Different parts of the Cold War’s most apt and enduring symbol have been used for different things. On one end there’s a memorial, lest you forget how this country was divided, and on the other an art gallery, where the former symbol of oppression now displays, among other things, the famous kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and German Democratic Republic leader Erich Honecker. Tourists gathered in front to take selfies as if it were the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum.

In Berlin’s Mitte, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie, a small wooden shed that served as a gate between the East and the West. Now it’s surrounded by McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Street vendors sell you old Soviet caps, pieces of the wall in small plastic cases, and other tokens that celebrate the victory of Western liberal democracy.

There, tacky actors in military uniforms waved U.S flags and took pictures with American tourists, who were unable to hide a certain triumphalist smugness. I couldn’t help but think of the East Germans who, in 1989, gathered in Alexanderplatz, protesting for freedom, peace, and democracy, risking their own lives for what they believed in.

Is this the kind of future for which they fought? And what is the meaning of a society’s suffering anyway? Maybe it’s all cyclical, and in the long run there are times of peace and plenty and times of hunger and chaos. Maybe, whether we like it or not, nations and individuals are simple subjects to major forces beyond their control, like leaves in the wind.

Maybe, the most simple and dispiriting notion of all, there’s no meaning in suffering. It just happens. But we continue fighting back in the hope that what we achieve with our struggle will retroactively provide it with some meaning.

The post Neither Global Leaders nor Local Residents Have a Narrative That Fits Today’s Venezuela appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was. I recently visited Brazil’s dusty Wild West town of Xapuri to look into the legacy of Francisco “Chico” Mendes, most famous defender of the Amazon rainforest and an inspiration to a generation of environmentalists–most notably Marina Silva, who may be the next president. How Brazil treated the memory Mendes–and his assassins, who have brazenly returned to their nearby ranch like characters from an old cowboy film–might provide a glimpse into the nation’s concern for environmentalism and activism, and maybe also into the candidacy of Silva.

In the 1980s, Mendes had rallied rubber tappers and indigenous people in the Amazon to forcefully resist the encroachment of farmers and cattle ranchers, who were clearing a football field-sized swath of forest every second and spewing carbon dioxide pollution into the atmosphere. Mendes is an official national hero and a world-recognized activist, so I thought it was reasonable to also expect him to be revered in Xapuri.

“Chico Mendes has been a symbolic force for people all over the world,” the international environmental advocate Casey Box told me. “Other nations see him as a major force against industries and pushing back against aggression. He’s had a global reach.”

But in Xapuri itself, I couldn’t even find a postcard of Mendes for sale. While Box said he recalled seeing an indigenous activist in Indonesia wearing a Chico Mendes T-shirt, the only Brazilian I’ve ever seen wearing a Mendes T-shirt was a staff worker at the Casa Chico Mendes Museum, which is where the activist was blasted by a 20-gauge shotgun in front of his wife and children days before Christmas in 1988.

“Visitors to the museum come from mostly other countries because the population from Brazil doesn’t really recognize the fight,” the museum worker told me.

I would later relay all this to Sergio Abranches, a Brazilian social scientist and environmental writer, who was unsurprised. “Chico Mendes is absolutely more popular outside Brazil,” Abranches told me. “You’re more likely to find people who know about Chico Mendes at a university of the United States than at the University of São Paulo [Brazil’s top college].”

The unclear memory of Mendes reflects a larger indifference toward the environment and underscores the improbable rise of his protégé, Marina Silva, who has become the candidate of change amid Brazil’s social unrest and economic recession. If elected president, she is expected to continue his fight and provide new support for activists in the world’s most dangerous nation to be an environmental activist.

“Marina Silva’s presidency would make Brazil an extremely robust and important global environmental leader,” said Steve Schwartzman, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, who knew Mendes and also worked with Silva. “It would have enormous consequences.”

Brazilians go to the polls Sunday, and a second-round runoff is expected on October 26 between Silva and the incumbent, President Dilma Rousseff, who has recently lengthened her lead. The Amazon is a central election issue. Rousseff is an aggressive supporter of new roads and hydroelectric dams through the forest, while Silva wants stricter environmental oversight and support for renewable energy such as solar and wind.

But it can be hard to get Brazilians concerned about the Amazon, even if it covers an area eight times the size of Texas and accounts for more than one-third of Brazil’s landmass. About 90 percent of the population lives elsewhere, and their only contact with the world’s largest tropical rainforest comes when using the electricity generated from its dams. Surveys have shown a recent decline in environmental concern among Brazilians—coinciding with a 29 percent increase in Amazon deforestation, with an area the size of Delaware cleared last year. Half of all environmental activists killed anywhere in the past decade were murdered in Brazil: More than 1,500 Brazilians have been killed trying to protect the Amazon rainforest since the death of Mendes a quarter century ago, including 15 last year.

It’s even harder to get Brazilians concerned about the Amazonian state of Acre, birthplace of both Mendes and Silva. Bordering Peru and Bolivia, Acre is the most western state in all Brazil, three time zones away from the skyscrapers of São Paulo and the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. To say Acre is remote, sparsely populated, and inaccessible is an understatement. Mention it to a Brazilian and they’ll likely reply: “O Acre não existe” (“Acre doesn’t exist”). I flew into the tiny state capital of Rio Branco and connected with a friend researching Brazilian environmental policy–her excellent Portuguese made up for my language fumbles–and we took a three-hour taxi ride west over pot-holed roads to Mendes’ quaint little hometown, Xapuri.

Acre’s landscape is still scarred by massive deforestation. Cattle pasture and farmland stretch to the horizon in every direction, and little forest was visible until we neared Xapuri. Outside town is the Seringal Cachoeira, a protected area where Mendes woke early every morning to collect latex from rubber trees. His cousin, Nilson Teixeira Mendes, still works on the reserve as a guide showing visitors how rubber tappers would walk the trails and tap the trees. Nilson told me his life was also threatened during the 1980s, when he and Marina Silva participated in Mendes’ so-called empates, when groups of armed rubber tappers would forcefully dismantle the camps of deforestation crews.

“We were threatened because of having helped in the protests,” Nilson said as we walked the hard-packed jungle paths of Mendes’ old stomping grounds. “There were people pursuing me because of having helped Chico.”

The empates were a turning point. Mendes had banded together indigenous peoples with rubber tappers and other extrativistas–forest-dwellers who harvest sustainable products—into a recognized group that could vocally oppose deforestation and land grabbing. “That was a great advance,” said Philip Fearnside, a longtime researcher of the Amazon and friend of Mendes. “Now you had an alliance between the two groups with similar interests.”

Mendes wasn’t charismatic, but he was understatedly charming and diplomatic, skills recognized by international groups looking for a figurehead. In 1987, several U.S.-based environmental groups flew the genial Brazilian to Washington, D.C. to convince the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and Congress to support the creation of extractive reserves. It worked, and the exposure helped Mendes receive several big international awards that brought international scrutiny of deforestation in the Amazon—and later helped add pressure on the Brazilian government to find and prosecute Mendes’ killers.

The memory of Mendes was strong back at the Seringal Cachoeira, ground zero in Acre’s environmental fight. But in Xapuri, I found an ambivalence toward Mendes and a chilling regard for his killers. It’s a cozy town with a collection of colorful food markets and stalls along the Rio Branco river, a winding tributary of the Amazon that once carried the region’s harvest of rubber down to the state capital and onward more than 1,000 miles northwest to the industrial hub of Manaus, and from there another 900 miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

Mendes’ death is eerily retold in Xapuri at his old wood-paneled home—hardly more than a shack—preserved as it was the day he died. Bloodstains are still on the kitchen wall where the 44-year-old was shot, with signs describing the scene in the first person as if the ghost of Mendes is retelling his death. ”I was coming close to the door and got shot in the chest,” reads one placard.

The shooter was Darci Alves Pereira, who had been assigned the job by his father, the rancher Darli Alves da Silva. Both went into hiding, and were only found months later amid international pressure on President José Sarney to investigate and prosecute. Each was sentenced to 19 years in prison. They escaped three years later and were on the loose for more than three years. Recaptured separately in 1996, they each still got early release, and seem to have returned to Xapuri with a sense of defiance.

The Alveses today shop at a general store operated by Francisco Ramalho de Souza, a participant in some of the first empates and a past president of the Rural Workers’ Union of Xapuri, a post Mendes also held. I asked if there was any tension with the Alveses. “Nobody is dying,” he responded. “We don’t want more problems.”

Down the street from Mendes’ old house is the Hotel Veneza, where I stayed the night. The drab concrete building was also a refuge for the reporters and television crews who descended on Xapuri following his assassination, according to the 1990 book The Burning Season by The New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. “After a while,” Revkin wrote, “the woman who ran the Veneza learned that Americans do not like heaps of sugar brewed directly into their coffee, as is usual in the Amazon.”

That woman, Lindaura Viana, has apparently returned to her old habits. She’s run the Hotel Veneza for more than four decades, and brews a super-sweet coffee for anyone staying at her pousada. She seemed amused by my visit to Xapuri, but she wasn’t shy about telling me her opinion of Mendes. He provoked people, she said. He lost his campaign for state representative in 1982 and later for town mayor because people didn’t like him, she said.

I asked Viana what she thought of the rancher Darli Alves and his family, and she shrugged. “They’re hard workers,” she said, adding that they were family friends. Her son told me he could set up a meeting.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had expected a statue of Mendes in the town center, a street named after him, a modest tourism industry built up around the memory of a man whose martyrdom triggered a best-selling book, an Emmy-winning film, and even a song by Paul McCartney, and another by Maná. But this was like going to Martin Luther King’s hometown and getting an earful about the civil rights activist’s extramarital affairs and alleged communist ties, mixed with sympathy toward his killers.

I waited all the next day for that meeting—but in the end, her son said he couldn’t get in touch with the Alveses after all. But why not simply go and knock on their front door? I hired a taxi for the trip back to Rio Branco, and told the driver, Lucas da Cruz, that I wanted to make a stop along the way.

As we rolled out of town, I asked da Cruz if he knew of Darli Alves. He nodded. I asked if he knew where Alves lived.

“Yes, up here,” he said. “My wife is his sister.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror and laughed, seeing my surprise. “He’s a good man,” da Cruz added. “A hard worker.”

I asked if we could make a quick stop, but da Cruz said his brother-in-law wasn’t home. He dialed his cell phone to call Alves, but got no response, and said he’d try again later. He pointed left out the window at a closed gate to a dirt road through an open field: Alves’ ranch.

I asked if Mendes ever came up in discussion at the family dinner table—and it’s a big table, so to speak, as Alves is said to have had some 30 children with numerous wives, which da Cruz confirmed.

“He says he didn’t kill Chico Mendes,” da Cruz told me. “He says Chico Mendes killed himself. He looked for death. I agree. Chico Mendes wasn’t what people say. In reality, he was a drinker. He drank a lot of cachaça.”

A local lawyer named Carlos Almeida was also traveling in our taxi, and he interjected. “Everybody has a different story to tell about his life,” Almeida said. “All of them are true. The local image of Mendes is not positive. But there’s a good image from people who know how to separate his life from his work.”

“Wasn’t he a hero?” I asked.

“Hero of what?” our driver replied. “I don’t know why so many Americans come to see Chico Mendes’ house. There’s nothing to see here. Nothing that matters.”

Several days later, da Cruz came back with an invitation to return to his brother-in-law’s ranch: Alves had said he would speak with me for a fee of $20,000.

Had I met Alves, I’m unsure what I would have asked. Perhaps: Who are you voting for on October 5?

Marina Silva might not have been the oddest answer. The Amazon would be central to her policy, but she’s also made a pro-agribusiness congressman her vice presidential candidate—perhaps showing something that she learned from Mendes about creating alliances, and also signaling a truce between environmentalists, ranchers, and farmers, that Brazil is big enough for all of them, even in tiny Xapuri. Among those people campaigning on Silva’s behalf, in fact, is one of Alves’ own sons.

“Marina could change the narrative of Mendes,” said the sociologist Abranches. In so many ways.

The post Why Don’t Brazilians Care More About the Amazon? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The economic benefits of hosting massive sporting events like the World Cup (awarded to a country) or Olympics (awarded to a city) are disputed, but there is no denying that physically hosting thousands of athletes, fans, journalists, and corporate sponsors—and virtually hosting a TV audience in the billions—provides governments with a unique opportunity to showcase their countries for weeks on end. This type of exposure can bolster host countries’ reputations and expand their international influence. Of course, governments aren’t the only ones happy to soak up the spotlight: so too are anti-government protesters eager to embarrass the sporting event’s hosts and make their grievances known around the world.

Back in the late 1960s, Mexico’s Olympics-World Cup moment was a recipe for disaster from the start—even more so than Brazil’s. Following a series of tumultuous coups, revolutions, and rebirths in the 19th century, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) brought needed stability to Mexico. But with each president handpicking his successor for four decades, the once-progressive party degenerated into an old boys’ club. Whenever groups protested—from urban labor unions to rural peasants—PRI leaders co-opted them into the party machinery. By the 1960s, the Mexican state had become a highly authoritarian one-party dictatorship.

With the Olympics approaching, the government sought to project an idyllic, postcard image of Mexico as a resurgent nation, the grandeur of its ancient civilizations coupled with a modern, 20th-century flair. But not everyone was eager to go along with the government’s narrative. 1968 featured exuberant, revolutionary student uprisings around the world, and by seizing the international spotlight, Mexico City’s student movement struck at the heart of the ruling PRI.

A sudden wave of police brutality sparked student marches in 1968. Protests began in the summer and continued into the fall—when Mexico City was to host its Olympics—growing larger as time wore on. Eventually 200,000 students gathered at the zócalo, Mexico City’s main public square. The students particularly concerned PRI officials because they demanded political liberty, not political patronage. They condemned the government for using “terror tactics” to suppress political dissent and chanted: “México—Libertad. México—Libertad. México—Libertad.” In the student protest, the one-party system faced its most serious challenge yet.

Finally, on October 2, just 10 days before the opening ceremonies, some 10,000 students gathered at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in a part of the city known as Tlatelolco. Amidst chants of, “We don’t want the Olympics, we want a revolution!”, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz decided to flex his muscles. Specially trained security forces for the Olympic Games stationed themselves around the entrances to the plaza to seal in the crowd. A green flare shot up in the air, lighting the square. A red flare shortly followed. As the surprised crowd looked up, a hail of bullets turned the peaceful student protest into a massacre.

Tlatelolco, once a thriving pre-Columbian market and then a cultural landmark featuring architecture from Mexico’s ancient, colonial, and modern periods, has since become synonymous with Tiananmen Square and other tragic episodes that speak to unhealed wounds and untenable impunity. That bloody night 45 years ago, when Mexican government troops slaughtered an undetermined number of people (researchers at the National Security Archive have identified 44 victims, but estimates range as high as 300), remains shrouded in mystery. Mexico’s state-controlled press spun the story, claiming that student snipers fired first. Unlike what happened at Tiananmen, no single picture has captured the moment for future generations.

Perhaps the subsequent Olympic Games in Mexico City dimmed American memory of the massacre. To the extent that Americans recall the 1968 Olympics at all, they probably think only of African-American track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing on the podium, raising black-gloved fists during the national anthem. Or maybe this forgetting was simply the product of another era, when the absence of 24/7 cable news and social media could allow governments to keep even relatively open outrages fairly contained. It was certainly an era of handy narratives to assuage American audiences: Mexico’s Díaz Ordaz administration claimed repeatedly and unabashedly that Soviet, Cuban, and even Chinese communists were behind the protests. Although the CIA subsequently concluded that there was “no firm evidence that Communists instigated the present crisis,” domestic instability in Mexico was not a welcome development for the United States, no matter who was behind it. So, there were no condemnations from the international community, no public outcries, and the Olympics went ahead without further incident.

The massacre at Tlatelolco, though it became a potent rallying cry for future activists, did not spark a sudden great awakening in Mexican society, either. Despite deepening disillusionment with the ruling PRI, the march to greater political freedom and democracy developed very slowly over the ensuing decades. Finally in 2000—over 30 years after the Tlatelolco massacre—Vicente Fox, a member of the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), was elected president of Mexico, bringing the PRI’s seven-decade reign to a close. While the PRI is back in office, what happened that night at Tlatelolco remains a taboo subject, one that haunts the country and belies the nation’s claims to have resolved its past.

A half century has passed, and the discontent in Brazil is unfolding in vastly different domestic and international political contexts. Yet the specter of Tlatelolco still offers a cautionary tale, a chilling example of how tragically things can turn when governments and protestors clash in the heat of the international spotlight.

The post Brazilian Protestors, Take Note<span class="colon">:</span> This Could End Badly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On all fronts, Cuba has lost its luster. For all of the romanticizing of Ché and Fidel, no one can pretend that the impoverished Caribbean island nation is still a model for anything apart from depriving a nation of freedom for half a century. Standing in line at airport customs in Mexico recently, I was reminded of the extent of Cuba’s collapse when I read signs admonishing returning travelers from Cuba to be mindful of cholera symptoms.

With that sort of record, it helps to have a hostile “imperio” to scapegoat, especially when it imposes an embargo and threatens regime change. But the United States is becoming a less convincing villain in this drama. In real life, the consequences of antagonism toward el imperio nowadays seem to be minimal, even if the NSA might choose to spy on you. As Hugo Chávez and his allies have proven, you can mock and bash the U.S. all you want. As Brazil has shown, you can successfully thwart American policies for the region at every turn. When Secretary of State John Kerry announced last month in an address before the Organization of American States that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Latin American dignitaries weren’t sure if they should applaud—probably because they assumed that era was over long ago.

That Castro shared the speakers’ podium in South Africa was an unfortunate nod to the nostalgia felt around the world for the heroic David of an island that stood up to the Goliath hegemon across a narrow stretch of water (and that stood up for Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned). Mandela’s fidelity to the Castro brothers (defended here by my colleague T.A. Frank) may be understandable, but it is also a betrayal of the universal democratic values Mandela espoused. For 11 million Cubans, there is nothing endearingly David-like about the Castro regime; it’s just one interminable nightmare.

But back to the handshake, which the Obama administration neither planned nor seems to regret. Obama took some heat from the right over the gesture, but not much more than he takes from the right for having breakfast each morning. The White House line is that the handshake was the polite thing to do under the circumstances. But it’s also true that antagonism between Washington and Havana has mellowed over the past year, and the bilateral relationship is becoming less and less about governments and more and more about interactions between people.

Cuba has made it easier for its citizens to travel abroad, and the United States has made it easier for Cubans to obtain multiple-entry visas and go back and forth. Washington has relaxed (although, shamefully, not eliminated) the ban on travel to Cuba. And the Obama administration has lifted limits on the amounts of cash U.S. residents can send relatives in Cuba. This advances two goals: it helps ordinary Cubans, and it makes them less dependent on their government. (I should disclose here that the New America Foundation, where I work, is developing communications technologies to help connect Cuban citizens to the outside world and to each other, with the support of U.S. government funding.)

The other big impetus for the recent thaw was the Castro regime’s surprising decision to keep Edward Snowden out of the Americas, frozen in Moscow. It’s not clear what Havana’s motivations were, but Cuba’s government asked Russian authorities at the last hour to keep Snowden off his connecting Moscow-Havana Aeroflot flight last July—and you can draw an implicit line between that decision by the Castros and the handshake in Johannesburg. The thaw is also evidenced in closer dialogue between both governments on prosaic matters like postal service and shared law enforcement concerns.

Not that we’re ready to kiss and make up. Much like those long-running soap operas that can’t resolve all plotlines lest they go off the air, the United States and Cuba can’t bring themselves to normalize their relationship. For the Castro brothers, such a move would mean the end of their great scapegoat. That is why the regime continues to hold onto Alan Gross, the USAID contractor jailed for bringing telecom equipment to Cuban groups. If Cuba really wanted improved ties, Gross would have been reunited with his family long ago.

The Obama administration, for its part, remains stuck in its outdated, surreal, and counterproductive framework for Cuba policy. The core fallacy underlining our approach is that the United States must either keep the embargo in place or else become fast friends with Cuba. But the United States has full diplomatic and commercial relations with plenty of countries ruled by undemocratic and obnoxious regimes (see China), and we rightly defend such engagement. Embassies are go-betweens, not friendship bracelets.

Meanwhile, critics of current U.S. policy, both at home and abroad, often end up as apologists for the Castro regime, working hard to minimize its abuses. It shouldn’t be so difficult to stake out a position where we call two spades two spades: Cuba’s regime is awful, and our policy in response is counterproductive. The sad reality is that with Obama facing so many competing, and seemingly more urgent, challenges overseas, Cuba policy drifts along through inertia, in a way that serves the Castro regime’s purposes.

The United States is correct to insist that Cuba not be given full-fledged membership in the hemispheric community until it lives up to the Inter-American Democratic Charter—much the same way countries that fall short on the democratic scale can’t join the European Union. But we will stand on firmer moral ground to make this case if we drop the embargo and forge diplomatic ties, and the United States will then be in a better position to empower Cuba’s people and civil society.

In other words, just because Obama shakes hands with Castro, it doesn’t mean he’s about to take a selfie with him.

The post When Did Cuba Stop Being Sexy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Eventually, the newspaper decided enough was enough. Instead of having drug violence bleed throughout the entire newspaper, El Heraldo created a separate new section, “Justicia,” which contains all the gory violent news.

“Now it is up to the reader: You can revel in the latest violence and follow it closely, or you can choose to do this,” Contreras said, as he slipped the “Justicia” section out of that day’s edition on his desk and tossed it in the garbage can.

That conversation stuck with me, and El Heraldo’s new approach parallels how the broader Mexican society has dealt with the drug violence ever since President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came into office a year ago: by putting things in perspective and moving onto other things.

Peña Nieto, a former governor of the state of Mexico, has proven masterful at walking a fine line between continuing the war on the cartels and ceasing to seem consumed by it. His predecessor, Felipe Calderón, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), seemed able to focus on little else besides the drug war in his six years in office, making the struggle look all the more daunting to the public.

Peña Nieto understood that Mexicans desperately wanted to change the subject, to place boundaries around the issue much like El Heraldo has done. This hasn’t meant an abandonment of efforts to take on the drug cartels, but simply a decision to treat this as a subject properly delegated to security and law enforcement officials, while the president focuses on bigger topics like education, energy, and the economy. Peña Nieto has conveyed this to Washington, too, and on separate trips to Mexico City this year, both President Obama and Vice President Biden went out of their way to avoid the subject, talking instead about the importance of the two nations’ economic relationship.

Peña Nieto’s shift hasn’t just been cosmetic. The change of subject has been substantive as well. Defying the conventional wisdom that presidents should focus on one or two priorities at a time, Peña Nieto has unleashed an ambitious reform agenda, allying with opposition parties in Congress to push hard for an education reform that diminishes the power of the national teachers’ union, new antitrust laws that threaten the power of telecom and media monopolies, and a political reform to make elected officials more accountable.

And now, this week, the Mexican Senate has passed the administration’s most important proposed reform—constitutional amendments aimed at allowing significant private and foreign investment in the oil industry for the first time since it was nationalized in 1938. The measure still requires approval of the lower chamber of Congress and a majority of the states.

To call the energy reform an effort to boost Mexico’s economic competitiveness is both accurate and a massive understatement. For decades, Mexico’s oil has been almost sacred, a substance to be extracted only by Mexicans—all under the umbrella of the country’s state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex. Changing this is only the latest step in a far larger project of tackling the national neuroses standing in the way of Mexico fulfilling its potential.

This is no small matter for the United States, culturally, demographically, and economically tied to Mexico to a degree most Americans do not begin to appreciate. Mexico’s underlying potential as our North American partner is enormous. Our southern neighbor, with its 110 million people, is already the second-largest buyer of U.S. goods, our third-largest trading partner overall, and an important source of imported oil. As the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, turns 20, Mexico exports more manufactured goods than the rest of Latin America combined. The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute has found that 40 percent of all Mexican exports heading north across the border include value-added content from the United States (the equivalent figure for China is only 4 percent), a testament to how integrated the two economies are as a single manufacturing base. Goldman Sachs predicts that, by 2050, Mexico will be one of the world’s five largest economies (it currently ranks 14th), with a GDP of nearly $10 trillion.

Peña Nieto’s proposed energy reform, much like the education reform that preceded it, has triggered demonstrations on the streets of Mexico City, orchestrated by Pemex’s powerful unions and elements of Mexico’s demagogic left, which view any tinkering with the status quo as a betrayal of immutable principles of Mexicanidad.

Peña Nieto’s approach has been a surprise to the many who viewed the president’s party, the PRI, as the reactionary guardian of the status quo. After all, the PRI ruled Mexico in authoritarian fashion for most of 20th century, and it cynically opposed many of the current proposed reforms when it was in opposition. But Peña Nieto, a telegenic politician consistently underestimated by the nation’s chattering classes, is fond of comparing his reforms to Nixon going to China.

The energy legislation is more ambitious than many expected, allowing foreign oil companies to partner with the Mexican state on a profit-sharing basis, along the lines of what Brazil’s Petrobras and other more modern state-owned oil enterprises do around the world. The trick is finding a framework that will attract foreign capital, desperately needed to expand deep-sea exploration and production, without appearing to cede sovereign control over the nation’s mineral resources. Mexico’s oil production peaked in 2004 but has gone down 25 percent since, in part because the federal government treats Pemex as a piggy bank to balance its books rather than as a capital-intensive business that needs to reinvest a healthy share of its profits into its operations. Mexico has also slipped from second to third in the list of foreign suppliers of oil to the United States.

Prospects for changing the energy status quo are not bad. Mexico has changed dramatically since the passage of NAFTA two decades ago, abandoning a closed, socialist orientation to become one of the most avid free traders on earth, and its proximity to the United States is starting to reap greater dividends, as China loses its competitive edge as an alternative manufacturing base.

The country still has its share of formidable problems, including the ongoing drug violence, underperforming schools, regions of persistent poverty, and, worst of all, endemic corruption at all levels of government. But its deepest psychological challenge may be to close the gap between what the country has become and how it sees itself. The most common nationalistic instinct is to cling to the identity forged during Mexico’s early-20th-century revolution, that of a victimized Latin nation forever forced into a defensive crouch against the colossus of the north. But that is just one anachronism among many. As Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote, Mexico has a dysfunctional commitment to the preservation of all historical periods, so that “no one Mexican time is completed … but can remain a subverted Eden to be alternatively returned to and forgotten.” It’s a narrative of a colony exploited by Cortés and all who followed him.

Whether Mexico can tackle the necessary educational, political, and energy reforms to meet its challenges is a test of whether the country is ready to align how it governs itself with its new reality as a prospering democratic member of the North American community. The fate of the energy reform in coming days will say a great deal—not only about the fate of its oil production in years to come, but also about the extent to which our neighbor can get over its historical hang-ups, and take its rightful place in the world.

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On July 1, barring some unexpected development, Mexico will vote back into the presidency the authoritarian PRI, the cynically named Party of the Institutional Revolution, which governed Mexico for seven decades, until the year 2000.

That the famously corrupt PRI can be competitive after being so thoroughly discredited during its final years in power is an impressive, if tragic, tribute to the failures of Mexico’s democracy. Powerbrokers in Mexico’s 32 states, after 70 years of authoritarian rule, remained obstinately resistant to the rule of law. The left, unlike in many other Latin American countries, never offered a compelling alternative for middle-class voters. And, worst of all, the current administration never managed to stem the rising violence associated with the drug trade.

The stunning comeback of the PRI heralds what political scientist Denise Dresser has aptly termed the “Putinization” of Mexico, as in Vladimir Putin. Millions of Mexicans yearn for the good old days when competent, ruthless people had the country under control. The PRI’s mastery of power (predicated on the novel concept of depersonalizing its control by switching out its president every six years) was called the “perfect dictatorship” by Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. Robert Caro, America’s bestselling chronicler of how power is exercised, would have found it inspiring.

It helps that Enrique Peña Nieto, the 45-year-old PRI frontrunner and former governor of the state of Mexico, is one of the more disciplined and talented campaigners roaming the planet in 2012. (His movie-star looks don’t hurt.) Peña Nieto is indefatigable in his assurances that the new PRI is not the old PRI and that there’s no going back to less democratic times, even as his record–and the presence of so many dinosaurios within the PRI–belies such claims. One of the more picaresque Peña Nieto gambits has been to issue a manifesto proclaiming that he will respect the constitution–and then hold a public ceremony to have the manifesto notarized. He must really mean it! How reassured would you feel if Mitt Romney went around the country pledging to respect the Bill of Rights and putting on a show of having his pledge notarized?

Mexican college kids, appalled by the PRI’s comeback, have occupied social media and taken to the streets calling for a “Mexican Spring.” Trouble is, Mexico had its spring in 2000. Free elections are not the issue; popular sentiment is. Polls show the candidate of the left, former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, running some 12-15 points behind Peña Nieto in a three-way race. (Lopez Obrador came awfully close to winning in the last presidential election, in 2006, but then refused to accept the results and threw a spectacular and costly temper tantrum that included massive street protests and his self-proclamation as the country’s “legitimate president.”)

Josefina Vázquez Mota, the conservative PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) party’s candidate now that President Felipe Calderón is reaching the end of his six-year term, has an appealing personality, but she has proven a weak campaigner with an incoherent, ever-changing pitch. She hovers about the 25-percent mark, slightly behind López Obrador, in most polls. That leaves the PRI.

To some degree, disaffection with post-PRI rule has been unfair. Certainly, the PAN deserves more credit than it gets for its economic record. Mexico’s middle class has expanded rapidly in recent years, with more and more people gaining access to affordable mortgages, car loans, and other forms of consumer credit while enjoying stable incomes. The last dozen years have been free of the economic implosions that were common during the last two decades of PRI rule.

But this is overshadowed by all the daily headlines of the violent mayhem–which has claimed nearly 60,000 victims in the last six years–surrounding the fight against the drug cartels. That’s a major reason why the bad old PRI is looking not so bad after all. Peña Nieto says the war must continue and that there is no possibility of making an under-the-table peace deal with the cartels, but he adds, a bit obliquely, that he will wage the war more effectively. I’m reminded of Richard Nixon in 1968 and his secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.

In truth, no one imagines an escalation on the part of the Mexican government. When the PRI ruled the entire country, drug lords abounded, but there weren’t turf battles between federal, state, and local governments governed by different parties. For most Mexicans, that arrangement looks appealing in hindsight. They feel the current war is one that the Americans outsourced to them to fight, and they prefer to vote in the PRI and have it outsource the war right back across the border.

As the novelist Carlos Fuentes always reminded us, Mexican culture has a near-mystical ability to accommodate the co-existence of all tenses. It’s a good fit for the ideological elasticity and resilience of the PRI’s “institutionalized revolution,” which can appear to be all things to all people. Yesterday is now tomorrow–in a country where the unresolved past, the chaotic present, and the unrealized future haunt each other in real time, or rather, in tiempo mexicano.

Andrés Martinez is the editorial director of Zócalo Public Square and a vice president at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of Angélica Rivera de Peña.

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