Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted on October 07, 2008.
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Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Mexico: paying the price of American excess?
In Mexico, the thought seems to be that the entire world is now paying the price of excess in the United States. On the front page of the El Universal daily, columnist Macario Schettino writes that “What we are living now is a speculative bubble that is bursting. During this decade, the Americans thought they were richer than they were and they spent above their capacity to pay.”
Like the rest of the world, the financial crisis is pummeling Mexico. We’ve already written about projections of massive job losses south of the border. Now we find a decimated peso and Mexican companies gasping for breath. Since June 30, Mexican companies have watched their value evaporate: the beer giant Grupo Modelo has lost a quarter of its value on the Mexican stock market. Cemex, the highly successful concrete company, has lost nearly half its value.
Meanwhile, the peso on Monday had its worst fall since 1995, sparking scary memories of the disastrous peso devaluation that stunted the country’s growth for a decade. The dollar is now at about 12 to 1 compared to the peso. A few weeks ago, it was trading at 9 to 1.
And compounding problems for Mexico is the fall in the price of oil, which accounts for about 40 percent of the nation’s budget. Mexico did not take advantage of oil when it was trading at record highs earlier in the year, but you can bet it will feel the pain of lower prices.
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Documentaries rule Morelia Film Fest
I feel a little like a vampire having spent the last two days almost entirely inside darkened movie theaters at the Morelia Film Fest. For two days we lived off of popcorn, movie hot dogs and bags of smuggled candy, as we watched about a dozen movies, highlighted by a string of brilliant Mexican documentaries. There were some big budget premieres thrown in - Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” biopic and the Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” stood out - but the real gems had very small budgets.
The best of the lot was “Los Ultimos Heroes de la Peninsula (The Last Heroes of the Peninsula),” a movie about five boxing champions who rose to prominence in the 1970’s and 80’s in the same sun-blasted Yucatecan city of Merida. The movie, by filmmaker Jose Manuel Cravioto, chronicles the fighters’ rise from poverty to international stardom and back to grinding reality in Merida. All of the fighters have seen their fortunes disappear - through booze, women and unscrupulous promoters. We meet characters like Juan Herrera, who once fought an 11-round championship fight with a dislocated shoulder (truly painful viewing) and who now drives a taxi. The movie is carried by the fighters and their humor, pride and honesty. In one heartbreaking scene, a former champion gets lost showing the film crew around a few blocks from his house. But despite the boxers’ all-too-human shortcomings, we learn what their brief rise to glory meant to their city and its people.
“Intimidades de Victor Hugo y Shakespeare” (thanks to a reader for suggesting this one) is another excellent, and truly bizarre, documentary. It’s about the filmmaker’s grandmother who ran a Mexico City guest house in the 1990’s and her strange relationship with one of her guests. A closeted homosexual, the guest may or may not have been a serial killer who terrorized the city’s women. The owner of the guest house, it seems, will forever be tormented by doubt.
Finally, there was “Nino Fidencio From Rome to Espinazo,” a fascinating look at a new, quasi-Catholic religion emerging in northern Mexico. Based on the child-like healer known as Nino Fidencio who lived in Nuevo Leon, the religion now has a legion of followers among the region’s poor, who find it more immediate than the Catholic Church.
The best of the film festival is coming to Mexico City later this month and hopefully will make it eventually to Austin. Catch it if you can.