Will America recognize how Mexico has changed? Will Mexicans recognize how Mexico still needs to change? Excerpted from “Mexico’s Future and Its Relationship with the U.S.,” June 1, 2011.

JORGE G. CASTANEDA ,Former Foreign Minister, Mexico; Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU; Author, Manana Forever?

The Mexico we built thanks to [our] traits of [national] character, as well as others, today cannot function with these same traits. For example, Mexican exacerbated extreme individualism – which goes way beyond American individualism [or] individualism anywhere in Latin America – is no longer compatible with Mexico having become a middle class society. The point of middle class society – where a majority of the population belongs to a broad lower-middle class on upward – is that people are pretty much the same. They all more or less dress the same, eat the same, work the same, sing the same, are the same. When people are all more or less the same, they cannot continue to have this strident extreme radical individualism that Mexicans have.

[In my book,] I go on to look at how Mexicans consistently refuse any form of direct confrontation, rhetorical or real; that is incompatible today with a full-fledged Mexican representative democracy, which we now have. Democracy allows you to resolve fundamental differences peacefully, not to eliminate them.

I [also] speak about the fear of the foreign, and the obsession with the past, to show how that has become incompatible now with one of the most open economies and societies in the world. With the exception of El Salvador and Ecuador, Mexico is the country in the world that has the highest share of its population living abroad. One out of every nine Mexicans in the world lives outside of Mexico – Mexican citizens. We have one of the most open economies in the world. In a country this open, how can you be as opposed and as intransigent in regard to the rest of the world in general, and the United States in particular?

Then I look at our traditional disregard for the rule of law, which those of you who know Mexico know is a fact. When we have [laws], we don’t like to respect or abide by them. If we can, we try to get around them. On many occasions we do this with proper laws. On many occasions we do this with stupid laws, which we’re very good at inventing.

I try to conclude, in the last chapter, why I think that it’s not impossible for Mexicans to change because we’re not going to change Mexico’s material reality. We’re not going to change the middle class society that we have, thank God. We’re not going to change our representative democracy, which took us so long to build. We’re not going to change our open economy and society, which we have for better or for worse, and is now irreversible. And we need to change, in terms of establishing the rule of law, but in order to do that we have to change the way we think.

We actually have a real-time experiment that shows that we can change: the roughly 12 million Mexicans in the United States who are radically different from Mexicans in Mexico. I’m referring to people who have come here recently, in the last 15 years. All of the traits that I’ve just described about Mexicans in Mexico changed dramatically. Mexicans in the United States change their attitudes toward the law, toward the police, toward security, and, most important, toward associative practices – working together with other Mexicans on anything.

On the drug issue

I share the view that a large part of Mexican elites share in private on this issue, but not in public. The only solution is the legalization of drugs. Ideally in Mexico and in the United States and in Colombia at the same time, all drugs; if that can’t be done, then some drugs in come places at some point; if that can’t be done, than at least one drug for starters and let’s see how it goes with marijuana. We were all very, very optimistic and hopeful about Proposition 19 because it would have been a tremendous detonator for change in the relationship between Mexico and the United States. Didn’t happen, but it might happen in 2012. Two former presidents of Mexico support this; Mexico’s most distinguished novelist, Carlos Fuentes, supports this; most of the Mexican business community, in private, supports this; most of Mexico’s intellectuals support this.

The real question is, What do we do in Mexico if the United States continues to refuse to legalize? Obviously at a federal level, there is not going to be any full-fledged legalization any time soon, but more and more states are de facto legalizing through medical marijuana. If California has a new proposition in 2012 and it does pass, then we are going to be placed in an incredibly difficult situation.

A few weeks ago I went to Canada and asked some friends there what [Canada] had done back in the ’20s when alcohol production and consumption was illegal in the United States but not in Canada. I said, “What did you do to make sure that no booze was produced and shipped from Canada to the United States?” They said, “What do you mean ‘what did we do’? We encouraged all the booze in the world to be produced here and we taxed them. We made a lot of money – the government and a few people like the Bronfmans and others, and they all did very well.”

The only country that makes a point by trying not to make money by helping somebody else pursue a silly policy, is us.

So, if we can’t do it another way, I’m increasingly inclined to think that Mexico [should] start moving unilaterally. We should say that we have scarce resources for law enforcement to protect people from the violence that affects them – kidnapping, extortion, automobile theft, home theft. We’re going to concentrate those resources on fighting that kind of crime, not on fighting drug trafficking. We will let the drug traffickers do what they have to do. Some people say, “But the drug traffickers are the kidnappers.” Okay, let’s go after the kidnappers. If you get a drug trafficker at the same time, that’s great; it’s a two-for. Sometimes you can be a drug trafficker-kidnapper and the guy who shakes people down, so then you get a three-for. But let’s go after that violence, not the other one.

What will the Americans do? It depends.

I heard a story – since it was told to me by someone I cannot mention, I can tell the story without giving the source – about a discussion between presidents Calderón and Obama, a couple of months ago. President Calderón began with a traditional Mexican litany about how the United States is not doing enough to reduce consumption, about how the United States is not doing enough to reduce weapons shipments to Mexico, illegal exports of weapons, and that as long as the United States didn’t do this, Mexico would never be able to truly succeed in its efforts. It’s a futile argument, but an accurate argument.

I’m told by someone who was in the room that President Obama responded by saying, “You really can’t say that, because we make an enormous effort to combat drugs in the United States. So much so that we have the largest incarcerated population in the world, by far, and most of the people we have in jail are in jail because of drug offenses. And by the way, most of them are Latino and black.” All of which is true. I think President Obama should have added, “By the way, this is not a very intelligent thing to do.” If someone should be sensitive to how ridiculous that policy is, it’s someone who is as intelligent and sophisticated as President Obama is. But the fact that someone like him, as intelligent and sophisticated and knowledgeable as he is, is using this kind of argument, shows you how absurd it is all becoming.