Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexico. Show all posts

February 7, 2008

Did Vicente Fox's foreign minister spy for Castro?

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda Gutman has been a long-time interest of mine. (Here's my 2001 VDARE.com article about this slippery fellow: "Mexico's Talleyrand").

In 2006, Fredo Arias-King pointed out to me that Castaneda's Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father, Mexico's UN ambassador, met her in New York City in the early 1950s, where she was a translator for Stalin's delegation. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister (2001-2003) was his older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental Gutman, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

On Monday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal has accused Castaneda of spying for Castro's intelligence service on his father, who was Mexico's foreign minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "Castañeda espió a México y a su padre."

Even though Castaneda is a frequent commentator in the American press, the American media, according to a Google News search, ignored the story -- after all, it's only a story about America's next-door neighbor -- except for the LA Times on Wednesday, which headlined Castaneda's denial of a story that nobody in America had been told about.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 17, 2008

Is this the next president of Mexico?

Mexican president Felipe Calderon just appointed his little-known 36-year-old chief-of-staff, Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo, "the quiet power behind the throne," to be Minister of the Interior, the traditional jumping off point for the Presidency, although now in Mexico there is a primary system, unlike in the good old days when the reigning president with his godlike (but term-limited) powers just picked whomever he felt like to be the next president.

In the U.S., Secretary of the Interior is a vaguely comic job, but in Mexico, like most Third World countries, it's the Big One. Traditionally, Mexico isn't as scary a country when it comes to disappearances and torture as some other Latin American countries ("Hey, at least we're not Guatemala!" could be the Mexican national slogan), nor is its Interior Ministry as formidable as the old Soviet Ministry of the Interior, which had a 200,000-man private army for overawing the Red Army in case it didn't feel like obeying Politburo orders. Still, it's definitely the coolest job in the Mexican government besides being President (although being Mexico City's police chief was a lot of fun in the 1970s for Arturo Durazo, a boyhood friend of President Lopez Portillo turned gangster's chauffeur turned civil servant, who parlayed his $1,000 monthly salary into an estate with 1,200 servants).

Still, you might be wondering why, 489 years after Cortez arrived and began turning Spaniards and Indians into La Raza, this bit of presidential timber looks so Spanish? Well, he is Spanish. Mouriño was born in Spain to a Spanish father and a mother who was a Mexican citizen. His zillionaire father moved the family to Mexico when he was seven, but he remained a Spanish citizen until 18. Nobody seems to know whether the Mexican constitution says a man of his birth and background can or can't be President. To paraphrase Johnny Tightlips on The Simpsons, "The Mexican constitution says a lot of stuff."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 28, 2007

Why I like Mexico's anti-Americanism

I mentioned below how much more American press coverage the Bhutto murder in far-off Pakistan has gotten compared to the assassination of Colosio (who?) in nearby Tijuana in 1994, even though the events were fairly comparable.

One legitimate reason for this could be that we really do meddle more in Pakistan than in Mexico due to Mexico's tradition of anti-Americanism that goes back at least as far as the 1846-48 war.

Personally, I like not being responsible for Mexico.

And it's not as if Mexico would be a better place if we had been allowed to meddle more. The most prominent example of American activism in Mexico in the 20th Century, Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson's conspiring in 1913 to oust the democratically elected president, mild-mannered Francisco Madero, helped set off the bloodiest portion of the Mexican Revolution. This suggests that we would have just made things even worse.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 10, 2007

Mexican presidential candidate wins Berlin 17-mile marathon

I've long argued that the LA Times should carry more news from Mexico, since it's not just relevant, but likely to be more colorful than the "What Next for the Law of the Sea Treaty?" thumbsuckers the newspaper traditionally specialized in. Maybe they're taking me up on my suggestion:

Former Mexican presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo made headlines in Germany, eight days after winning the Berlin Marathon in his age group.

"The Fastest Man of Mexico," said Monday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper, referring to the 55-year-old Madrazo's race time of 2 hours, 40 minutes and 57 seconds.

Unfortunately for Madrazo, it was a sarcastic jab. He was disqualified Monday by race officials after an investigation showed that the computer chip he carried went undetected at checkpoints along about a third of the 26.2-mile course. Madrazo appeared near the end of the race and was declared the winner of the "men's 55-and-over" category.

"We're disqualifying him," said a race spokeswoman Tuesday.

Marathon officials said there was no record of Madrazo crossing race checkpoints between the 12.4-mile and 21.8-mile course markers. A race video showed him bundled up in a windbreaker, hat and sweatsuit as he crossed the finish line, arms outstretched in an apparent victory salute. His weary opponents, meanwhile, soldiered past in shorts and singlets. ...

The paper found he ran the first half of the race at his normal pace. But over the more than nine miles missing from the computer record, Madrazo would have had to run faster than the world record holder to finish in his winning time.

The cheating allegation drew many wry comparisons here to the modern world record of seven decades during which Madrazo's Institutional Revolutionary Party managed to dominate elections. ...

Madrazo would not comment on the disqualification or the race, spokeswoman Addy Garcia said Tuesday.

"At this moment he holds no public office, and he is just like any other Mexican who doesn't have to give an explanation to anyone," she said.

Madrazo finished third in the July 2006 presidential election after being dogged by allegations that he had profited from a lifetime of public service under the PRI, as the former ruling party is known.

The PRI candidate Carlos Salinas won the 1988 Presidential election over the leftist candidate when "the computer went down" in the middle of the vote count. When it came back up, whaddayaknow? Salinas had come from behind to take the lead! So, the computer must have gone down during the crucial midsection when Madrazo made like a 25-year-old Kenyan.

The idea of a hailing a taxi for the middle section of the race is not exactly a new strategy in marathoning. In the most hilarious footrace ever run, the 1904 St. Louis Olympics marathon, among many other bizarre incidents, Fred Lorz cramped up halfway through, so he got in a cab and rode to the stadium to see the runners enter. And, hey, why pay for a ticket when I could just jog right in? Oh, look, they're all cheering for me! Well, those nice folks in the stands would sure be disappointed if I told them I wasn't really in the race anymore, so I'll just play along for the moment ... . At least that's how Fred made it sound after he was revealed to be a fraud just before he received his gold medal. But Senor Madrazo's ploy doesn't even meet that smell test. It's not like there was a vast throng cheering as the first guy in the 55+ bracket straggled in with a bunch of younger runners a half hour after the winner.

A reader writes: "I guess he felt that, 'Going through the checkpoints legally takes too long! I just wanted to have a better life!!'"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 24, 2007

All Quiet on the Southern Front

... gangland-style executions have surged, with the report counting 1,588 in the first half of 2007. For the full year of 2001, there were 1,080 such crimes, the report said.

Mexico's violence is often spectacular and lurid, with tales of street shootouts, decapitations and bomb blasts filling Mexico's news pages and airwaves. No place is immune, including the buildings of the country's news outlets.

In May a severed head wrapped in newspaper was left in a cooler outside the office of Tabasco Hoy in Villahermosa, where drug violence is on the rise. Grenades have been tossed into newsrooms from Cancun to Nuevo Laredo in the past 18 months. The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reported that Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2006, after Iraq.

On May 14, suspected drug traffickers on motorcycles gunned down Jose Nemesio Lugo, a senior federal investigator in charge of gathering intelligence on drug traffickers, in Mexico City's upscale Coyoacan neighborhood. Two days later in Sonora state, about 20 miles south of Arizona, a five-hour shootout between heavily armed commandos and police left 20 people dead.

The bloodbath continued unabated this month, with the assassinations of two state police chiefs. The first was Jaime Flores of San Luis Potosi state, shot in the head multiple times in front of his wife on Sept. 13. Then on Wednesday came news that Marcos Manuel Souberville, the state police chief in Hidalgo, had fallen in a hail of bullets during an afternoon drive-by shooting.

Many prominent Mexicans have sought refuge in the United States, but that is no guarantee of safety. Mario Espinoza Lobato, a businessman and city councilman from Ciudad Acuna, was gunned down Wednesday at his home in neighboring Del Rio, Texas, authorities said. He was an outspoken critic of the criminal gangs that he said had tried to kidnap him.

Kidnapping is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. The report from Congress indicates there are about 4,500 kidnappings a year, about a third of which are reported. Greg Bangs, head of the kidnapping and ransom unit at the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, said Mexico has rocketed past Colombia to become the world's ransom capital.

"Mexico is now very definitely No. 1 in the world in terms of the numbers of kidnappings,'' Bangs said. "Kidnappers are indicating how serous they are by sending parts of ears and noses and fingers and various bodily parts ... they didn't used to do that so much, but that seems to be more prevalent.''

Top officials here continue to insist their efforts are paying off even if the numbers don't show it. At a news conference last week, Medina, the attorney general, told reporters "there is a decrease" in organized crime murders.

But then Medina provided figures for "violent executions" in January and February — 175 and 208, respectively.

"They're going down?'' one reporter asked.

"I wish they were lower than last year,'' Medina responded. "But in the first months of this year there were more than in the same period last year.''

Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Committee on Security, expressed confidence in the government's crime-fighting campaign. He said pointedly that Americans should not be so quick to judge Mexico.

He described the country's violent crime wave as temporary, while in "cities like Detroit, Houston or Dallas, it has become a permanent thing.'' Rivera also called on U.S. authorities to do more to stop illicit firearms exports.

"That's what is killing us,'' Rivera said. "I think if look at the number of arrests, the number of drug seizures, the number of policemen who have risked their lives and who have been killed, I think it shows that our Army and local police forces are engaged in a frontal battle.'

My fellow Americans: One way you can help the good people of Mexico out is by not buying drugs. (It will also help the good people of American out, and yourself as well.)

By the way, Mexico also is being plagued by a Marxist terrorist-revolutionary group that has been blowing up petrochemical pipelines.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 5, 2007

Covering Mexico

The LA Times reports on the campaign for governor of the northern half of Baja California by former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon (whom I wrote about a month ago in VDARE.com):


He offers reporters drinks of his favorite tequila, custom-brewed by a Chinese-Mexican restaurateur and fermented with rattlesnake hides and penises of lions and tigers, which the father of 19 swears makes him virile.

On a recent swing through the Valle de Mexicali, Hank took the wheel of a van carrying 14 volunteers and screeched around tight turns, ran stop signs and blew through red lights. In the rush to keep up, one volunteer almost slammed the door on a woman trying to give Hank a letter.

Hank, 51, is PRI royalty, the son of Carlos Hank Gonzalez, an early party stalwart and former governor of the state of Mexico and Mexico City mayor who amassed a billion-dollar fortune and, according to legend, coined the phrase, "A politician who is poor is a poor politician."

The younger Hank moved to Tijuana in 1985 to run the historic Agua Caliente track, which features dog races. The enormous grandstand is the showcase property in an empire that includes shopping centers, hotels and off-track betting parlors.

Hank, who inherited half his father's wealth, estimates his worth has doubled to $1 billion in the last three years.

To many, he appears to spend every penny of it.

This year he flew in superstar singers Julio Iglesias and Luis Miguel to entertain at personal parties. He owns about 30 cars and a house in Vail, Colo. Three times a year, he throws open the doors at the racetrack for gift-giving extravaganzas. On Mother's Day, thousands of women cart home stoves, refrigerators and other appliances.

Behind his home he keeps an enormous private zoo. It has bears and lions, kangaroos and ostriches, and three rare white tigers. The zoo, which has 20,000 animals, isn't that impressive, Hank says. "Any sultan or guy in Africa has a zoo," he once said. ...In a comic book distributed to children at events, Hank is depicted as a caped superhero, Hombre H., a fearless crime fighter and protector of the poor.


Fun stuff.

So, it's not true that the American media doesn't cover Mexico, but what's lacking is any kind of resonance in the NY-DC media echo chamber. This kind of south-of-the-border color gets dutifully reported upon, but that's as far as it goes in the press.

For example, while Jorge Hank Rhon is the out-of-control Sonny-Fredo member of the Hank family, his brother Carlos Hank Rhon is more the Michael Corleone-type, who has had ties to lots of big timers in American politics, including the President of the United States. But who cares about boring stuff like that?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 3, 2007

Israel v. Mexico in the media

Have you ever noticed how vastly much more attention is paid in the America press to Israel, a country of 6 million an ocean away, than to Mexico, a country of 109 million that shares a 1,952 mile border with us?

I'm not talking here about press bias for or against Israel or Mexico, just about the amount of coverage of the two countries in America.

For example, last year a leftist uprising that started among school teachers seized control of the big Mexican city of Oaxaca, a common destination for American tourists, and held it against federale attacks for quite a long time, but this seemingly interesting news created barely a ripple in the American media compared to the tsunami of reporting and commentating on Israel.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 24, 2007

Mexican Machismo

In 1979, I took a tour boat around Acapulco. The guide, a local lady, pointed at a house on top of the cliff overlooking the ocean and proudly announced: "The home of movie estar Yon Wen!"

After about five minutes, I finally figured out that "Yon Wen" was John Wayne.

The great cowboy actor was probably the most prominent Mexicophilic American of the 20th Century. All three of the Duke's wives were from Latin America (Panama, Mexico, and Peru), and he loved making cowboy moves in Durango in Mexico, which looked a lot more like the Old West than anyplace in modern America. The movie closest to his heart, 1960's "The Alamo" (which he produced and directed in an era when movie stars seldom did either), was highly sympathetic to the Mexicans.

As I mentioned in "Sunday in the Park with Jorge," I'm ambivalent about Mexican machismo. I admire it in some ways, but not as much as John Wayne did.

One of the oddities of mass immigration from Mexico, however, is that, when praising the magic of diversity, almost nobody in liberal white America ever expresses any John Wayne-like appreciation for the stark Mexican sex role divide. The whole concept that Latin culture exaggerates natural sex differences just doesn't seem to register in the mainstream media. Diversity is supposed to overcome stereotypes, not reinforce them, so bringing in more Mexicans must be a victory for feminists.

What's even weirder is that the diversicrats are right on the political impact of this. Mass immigration from Mexico ultimately pushes power into the hands of the nanny state and the feminist establishment because Mexican immigrant dysfunction justifies huge numbers of government and foundation jobs for social workers. Further, macho Mexican-American politicians and activists find their white allies on the feminist-aligned left. For example, LA's strutting mayor Antonio Villaraigosa long worked for the ACLU and has one of those silly gender-equal surnames combining his last name (Villar) with his long-suffering wife's (Raigosa).

By the way, a reader writes:

I've spent a lot of time working with Mexicans and spent a lot of time in Mexico. Your observations are right on the mark. I've always thought that the Mexican practice of the "Pinata" at kids birthday parties was typically "mexican" and particularly dangerous to boot. A blinfolded kid wildy swinging a baseball bat at a paper mache' donkey filled with candy while a whole bunch of kids wait just feet away to rush in and capture the candy........That is if the kid swinging the bat stops swinging the bat when the candy starts to fall out of the Pinata. I'm sure there has been plenty of cracked skulls and concussions as a result of that mexican funfest. But, hey!, que lastima! pobrecito! Traiga la nina al cuarto emergencia donde hay muchos gringos medicos. Todo es libre, tambien! (What a pity poor thing. Just take him to the emergency room where there are lots of American doctors. It's all free too!)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 16, 2007

The NYT promotes a North American Union

My new VDARE.com column is about a little-noticed Fourth of July op-ed in the New York Times arguing that going down the path of integrating America, Canada, and Mexico would be good for America.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 8, 2007

How Carlos Slim, World’s Richest Monopolist, Provokes And Exploits The Mexodus

My New VDARE.com Column: An excerpt:

How Carlos Slim, World’s Richest Monopolist, Provokes And Exploits The Mexodus

So, who is Carlos Slim, the new world's richest man? And why does he have $67.8 billion?

Slim isn't an out-of-control maniac like Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon. The only scandals clinging to Slim's name are business-political, not personal. He embodies the Mexican ruling class at its best.

Which still isn't so hot.

Although not an innovator, Slim is a competent businessman and manager. He likely would have gotten rich in even the most honest country. He's a bit like baseball slugger Barry Bonds, who was the best player of the 1990s, even though he avoided steroids through the 1998 season. But once Bonds combined his natural gifts with performance-enhancing drugs, he quickly turned into the greatest hitter in history. Similarly, mix Slim's financial skills with Mexico's crony capitalism and you get the richest man in the world.

As New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote of Mexico in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, "Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power." It's worth examining how the master plays the game.

The Mexican-born son of a prosperous Lebanese Christian merchant originally named Yusef Salim Haddam, Slim made his big move in 1990 during President Carlos Salinas' corrupt privatization binge (which was enthusiastically endorsed by the elder President Bush). He bought the government's telephone monopoly. Interestingly, Slim's telephone monopoly was written into NAFTA, negotiated during Bush I, granting Slim a decade without foreign competition.

Andres Oppenheimer, a Pulitzer Prize winner of the Miami Herald, reported in his entertaining book on the Salinas debauch, Bordering on Chaos:

"Salinas offered their buyers sweet regulatory deals… he offered them … a series of behind-the-scenes government favors that would guarantee the profitability of the new owners' investments."

Oppenheimer goes on:

"Salinas authorized spectacular tariff increases without demanding corresponding improvements in the telephone service. In 1991, Telmex was allowed to increase telephone rates by 247.4 percent, while wages that year were allowed to rise by 18 percent."

Of course, such a deal came with a price tag. On February 23, 1993, President Salinas invited Slim and the other 29 richest men in Mexico to dinner, where he shook them down for campaign contributions to the ruling PRI party of 25 million American dollars each—$750 million!

Slim wasn't fazed by the demand, merely suggesting that there was a more discreet way to do this. Oppenheimer writes:

"Telecommunications magnate Slim … supported the motion, adding only that he wished the funds had been collected privately, rather than at a dinner, because publicity over the banquet could 'turn into a political scandal.' In a country where half the population was living under the poverty line, there would be immediate questions as to how these magnates —many of whom had been middle-class businesspeople until the recent privatization of state companies—could each come up with $25 million in cash for the ruling party."

The PRI has been out of power in Mexico City since 2000, but Slim has kept his monopoly. The New York Times reports that Slim "used his influence over the government to fight off attempts by competitors—including MCI and AT&T—to get a piece of the Mexican market." [Prodded by the Left, Mexico's Richest Man Talks Equity, By Ginger Thompson, June 3, 2006]

According to The Economist's 2006 survey of the Mexican economy:

"Telmex still [has] 94% of landlines, 78% of mobile services and 70% of the broadband internet market … If Mexico were the United States, Telmex would have been broken up years ago. But Mexico is Mexico. Telmex is merely one of the more egregious examples of the widespread rule of oligopoly."

Slim's accumulation of $3,000 for every family of five in Mexico has sapped the country's economic growth. Connecting more people via telephones is perhaps the surest way to grow a backward country's economy. But Slim's monopoly keeps the price high by world standards:

"Forbes reported that the average monthly phone bill for a small business in Mexico is $132, compared with $60 in the United States."

In the NY Times article noted above, Ginger Thompson pointed out that Guillermo Ortiz, head of the Bank of Mexico, estimates that due to monopolies like Slim's:

"Economic growth is one percentage point less than it could be with real competition. There are not enough jobs to keep workers from migrating to the United States and investment is being driven to countries like Brazil and China.”


One percentage point lower growth may not sound like much, but it adds up. George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen points out:

"Had America grown one percentage point less per year, between 1870 and 1990, the America of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990."

[More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 3, 2007

Bill Gates no longer world's richest man

In the recent immigration debate, one of the clichés that was hardest to shake was the assumption that Mexico is a terribly poor country. In reality, it's above the world average in per capita GDP (measured in purchasing power parity terms).

Now comes words that Mexican telecom monopolist Carlos Slim has blown past Warren Buffet and Bill Gates to capture the top spot on the World's Richest Man chart, with $67.8 billion. Considering that most of Slim's wealth comes from operations within Mexico, while Gates extracts money from around the world, and the Mexican economy is only 1/11th as big as America's, then Slim piling up a nest egg equivalent to $3,000 per family of five in Mexico is quite a feat.

As the great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, “Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 1, 2007

That's reassuring!

From an op-ed in the NYT entitled "What Mexico Wants" by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda:

Fortunately, most of the [Kennedy-Bush] reform proposals represent a very good deal for Mexico, however questionable they might appear to the Latino community in the United States. The current Senate package greatly resembles what President Vicente Fox and I proposed back in 2001, in meetings with President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. ...

There are three Mexican objections to the bill as it stands.

First, it has unduly harsh enforcement provisions at the border and the workplace, which will undoubtedly generate abuses and mistreatment. Still, if every Mexican in the United States who arrived before Jan. 1, 2007, is legalized, enforcement inside the United States, including discriminatory raids, will become redundant. And if nearly everyone who wants to go north can obtain a guest-worker visa, there will be no need to cross illegally and face rough treatment at the border.

A second objectionable feature is the steep fines and fees in the Senate bill: up to $5,000. While this is not cheap, it’s also not much more than the “coyote” charges to smuggle a migrant across the border.

The last objection is more substantive; it is, in fact, a potential deal breaker.

Uh, Mr. Castaneda, I was under the impression that the bill was under consideration by the United States Senate. Under the Constitution, Mexico is not represented in America's Congress, so it's not a party to the "deal." On the other hand, maybe you know something about whose interests are actually represented in my Congress that I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if you do.

The Senate voted last week to cut the number of guest worker slots to 200,000 from 400,000. The earlier figure would have allowed roughly the same number of workers who now cross illegally to obtain guest status. But if the final law has too few slots, it will not end illegal immigration, but simply perpetuate the status quo.

What’s good for Mexico is probably good, in the long term, for the United States as well; on this one, at least, Mexican and American interests coincide.

What's good for Mexico is good for the America. Yup, that's reassuring.

By the way, here are three more interesting things about Castañeda that I only learned last year from Fredo Arias-King even though I read almost everything about Castaneda published in English back in 2000-2001, when he became Vicente Fox's foreign minister.

1. He is known in Mexican newspapers "as 'El Guero' ('the Blond One') for his fair complexion."

2. His Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father met her.

In 2002, Bianca Vazquez Toness wrote in the Princeton alumni magazine:

"His father, PRI member Jorge Castañeda de la Rosa, was once foreign minister. His mother, a Russian Jew and naturalized Mexican, met her husband while working as a translator at the U.N. in New York. Young Jorge’s pedigree gave him advantages unavailable to most Mexicans: He grew up a polyglot between New York and Geneva, perfecting his English and his French, while his father served as Mexican ambassador to the U.N. He enrolled at Princeton in 1970...

His doctorate gave him clout upon returning to Mexico at age 25, but his family connections opened the door to the political elite. Castañeda, a political science professor at the national university, called himself a Communist, but that didn’t stop him from moonlighting for his father, who was appointed foreign minister in 1979. The son convinced his father to abandon Mexico’s historically anti-interventionist policy. Calling on contacts made during his school days in France, the younger Castañeda helped negotiate a joint recognition with France of rebel forces in El Salvador, much to the dismay of the U.S., which supported the government in the civil war against the Marxist guerrillas.


3. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister was his Soviet-born older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

Isn't it remarkable how little the American press tells us about the men who have run Mexico?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer