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Big industries are modernizing swiftly, and the Center of Research for Development, a Mexico City think tank, estimates that 40% of the country's industrial production now meets world standards. Even some smaller companies find they can compete. "I have 22 employees now, and a month ago I had only 12," says Jorge Hernandez Prieto, whose company is rushing to fill an order for scented candles from the Target store chain in the U.S.
A spending surge has swept through the middle class. Signs of the new consumer society are everywhere. Cruising the shopping malls has become a weekend institution, and Televisa, the Spanish-language entertainment conglomerate, in cooperation with the U.S.-owned QVC, broadcasts a home- shopping channel produced in Tijuana. People who never before had a car or a credit card now have both. The working-class suburb of Iztapalapa boasts a McDonald's and a Wal-Mart superstore, while the Mexico City slum Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl houses enough VCRS to support a branch of Blockbuster Video.
Along the 2,200 miles of the winding Rio Grande and land border with the U.S. the story is also one of sordid contrasts, but the people who live there and the thousands moving in are optimistic. "This is the best of two worlds," says Fadia Barraza, a university freshman in Juarez. "Life gets steadily better." At the maquilas, the sprawling assembly plants that produce goods for export to the U.S., parking lots filled with employees' cars suggest she is right.
^ Mexico's gross domestic product has grown from $2,525 per capita in 1989 to $4,324 last year, but the encouraging statistics are not what they seem. "Behind those numbers," development expert Alberto Diaz Cayeros wrote recently, "is hidden the sad reality -- which Chiapas has shown in its most extreme expression -- that Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world."
Agustin Lopez Santiz understands that all too well. He lives in the southern state of Chiapas, at the opposite end of the country from the shantytown where Colosio was shot. Santiz, 66, sits barefoot in the dust of Tuxaquilja, a village of 600 people, picking corn off a cob to feed his chickens. The earth is dry, rocky, infertile. Roads are ruts, and there are few public services. Looking down at the dirt, he says in a mixture of Spanish and Tzeltal, the local Indian tongue, "This is where we are from. We cannot leave."
His grown children, three of whom live with their wives and children in the farmer's small wooden house, also speak poor Spanish, which eliminates their chances of finding work outside subsistence farming. "There are no schools here," says a neighbor, Diego Mendez. "If we do not speak Spanish, we are lost." Lopez and Mendez are both skeptical about the government's promises to bring running water and electricity to communities like theirs.
Even if the government has the will, the local officials who control the town halls also control the flow of government money and, Mendez claims, use it to bolster their friends and freeze out villages that do not support them. It is an accusation heard throughout Mexico: public works money goes to cronies of the bosses.