Posted on 03/15/2002 2:59:20 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) - Nestled among jagged mountains 120 miles south of the Texas border, this city in many ways is everything Mexico is not: It's modern, the residents are university graduates and you can drink the water.
Monterrey is also what anti-globalization activists fear, with its suburbs, mini-malls and U.S. chains.
When world leaders converge on Monterrey next week, Mexico will be presenting this industrial metropolis as the poster child for how to develop the third world.
Monterrey is playing host to the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, an unprecedented world summit on how to combat poverty and redistribute wealth around the globe. Fifty-two heads of state are expected to attend, including President Bush and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
U.N. spokesman Tim Wall said Mexican President Vicente Fox chose Monterrey to show world leaders its economic success "rather than a scenic place with great cocktails."
"Monterrey is not what you would call a great town for tourism, it's not a center of colonial architecture, it doesn't have a beachfront, but it's an economic powerhouse," Wall said. "It's the home of Latin America's first steel mill, it has manufacturing, trade, commerce, high-tech industries."
With more millionaires per capita than any other area in Mexico, the Monterrey metropolitan area of some 3 million people boasts the highest standard of living in Mexico.
Wages for laborers can be as much as five times higher than in the rest of the country - where the urban minimum wage is $4 a day - and the people of Monterrey study an average of three years more than other Mexicans. The crime rate is among the lowest for Mexico's metropolitan areas, and its police are considered among the least corrupt.
The city is home to Mexico's richest businesses, including Cemex, the world's third-largest cement company.
Dotting the green mountains outside the city are sprawling estates with swimming pools, helicopter pads and horse stables. Versace and other world-class designers have stores here.
Mercedes and BMWs zoom to strip malls and supermarkets. Many residents spend weekends at beach homes on Padre Island off the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and have adopted English words like "shopping."
But some anti-globalization activists say the glossy image is nothing more than a Hollywood prop.
"The restaurants are McDonald's, Los Kentucky (Fried Chicken), Los Carl's Jr.," said Marianela Madrigal, a Monterrey resident who is coordinating an anti-globalization meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. summit. "We are very Americanized. Little by little we are losing our own culture. We're losing our Mexican identity and instead absorbing the values of North Americans, which are well, consumerism, yes, consumerism and that's about it."
In many ways, Monterrey looks like a mini-middle America. At one busy intersection, Applebee's and McDonald's fight for attention against advertisements for Quaker State oil and Hampton Inn. Along the highway from the airport, a giant billboard features a smiling family under the words: "Now houses in front of Wal-Mart!"
"This is not an example to follow," Madrigal said. "The wealth is still concentrated among the upper class, and the poor here are spending an unlimited amount of money on things to keep up. I met a family who bought 20 or 30 stuffed animals because they were in fashion, but they lived in a shack. They spend their money on this rather than nutritious food, better homes and education for their children."
Patrocinio Vera, 35, came to Monterrey with a duffel bag of clothes and a willingness to work hard. Six years later, the stout Mixteco Indian man from Oaxaca - one of Mexico's poorest southern states - said life is better here, but far from easy.
Vera, who plays in a traditional Oaxacan music group at restaurants, bars and parties, has been able to buy a small plot of land and a van to cart his band's instruments.
But he lives in a cement hovel. Raw sewage flows down a dirt canal past his front door.
He said he tried to find a factory job, but no one would hire him because he has only a few years of schooling.
"I like it here because my sons have the chance to study, to do better than me," he said. "That's the only way to end poverty, to escape this sad life. Working hard is not enough. It's not fair to have to sacrifice so much and still have nothing. We just want to live like the people in the city who use their money to have fun."
It is a third world city that runs on corruption...perhaps that is what they want for America
It is beautiful with huge extremes of worth..the VERY wealthy and the poverty of the "middle class"
I loved it and it's people.I would like to return someday on another mission.
But it is no model city to live in..
By the time global taxation is a reality, and accepted, transfer of power to the UN would have been completed so smoothly, none of us will have noticed.
But isn't it evil companies that entice them to spend their hard earned money!?
And President Bush is one man. That makes two. Don't want no UN scum toruring mexico back into the last century.
Fox is forming alliances with the people the old government stepped on hard. Entrepeneurship is growing. But if the fascists and UNists start trying to impose THEIR will on Mexico, it won't be long before we will be the ONLY ones standing, and that is not a pretty picture.
I have a question- Assuming this article is an accurate portrayal of Monterrey, is it possible to get all of Mexico to be this way or not? (If so, that would seem, to me, to be a way to stem the northward immigration flow)
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