The Agony of Mexico: Bright hopes, dark shadows

Mexico is changing fast. Seventy years of authoritarian one-party rule have given way to a democratic multi-party political system. But the birth pangs of this new era have been manifested in political assassinations, and a rising wave of serious crime, as well as electoral reform and an export boom. NAFTA is bringing Mexico into a much closer relationship with the United States, but drug trafficking and illegal immigration remain sore points in US-Mexican relations.

This briefing outlines the history and evolution of present-day Mexico, with its rich Indian and Spanish heritage, and then studies the massive and agonising dark shadows of poverty, pollution, corruption and crime which have so far thwarted all the bright hopes.

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