Editor's Note : Mexico is one of the most—if not “the most”—important country in terms of its daily impact on the lives of US citizens. Trade, investment, energy, narcotics, security, pollution, tourism, academic exchanges, crime, legal and illegal migration, family ties, cuisine, media attention, and political campaigns (in both countries) are among the factors that enhance the salience of our “southern neighbor” to the well-being of America and Americans. Not only does the 2,000-mile long US-Mexican border constitute the world's longest frontier between a developed and a developing nation, but Mexico's highly porous, violence-ridden, corruption-infested 755-mile interface with Guatemala and Belize constitutes a virtual “Third US Border” through which hundreds of thousands of people pass annually en route to the United States ( Grayson 2006 ). Twenty years ago it was said that “democracy exists 364days a year in Mexico—it's only absent on Election Day.” Giving credence to Mexico's status as “the perfect dictatorship” 1 was the government's blatant manipulation of the 1988 presidential contest on behalf of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, candidate of the Tammany-Hall-like Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) over Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, PRI apostate and nominee of the center-leftist front that evolved into the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). The standard-bearer of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) finished third. Mexico's significance to the US accounts, in part at least, for the jubilation expressed by pundits, politicians, and political scientists to the mid-2000 victory of the PAN's Vicente Fox Quesada over PRI and PRD competitors, an apparent affirmation that the ancient Aztec nation was surfing on the “third wave of democracy” ( Huntington 1991 ). Known as the “Marlboro Man” because of his 6-foot-5-inch height and craggy good looks, the PAN competitor trumpeted the imperative of change during his campaign, castigating the hapless PRI candidate for the nation's real and imagined ills. …
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May 1, 2023
Andrew Paxman 
Open Access