by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That after Tangentopoli (rough translation: “bribe city”), the nickname for the cataclysmic political scandals that swept the country in the early 1990s, Italians seemed ready to usher in a new era of squeaky-clean government. But this was still Italy, after all, so they elected Berlusconi. Tangenti, which refers specifically to the big-bucks, high-level corruption practiced regularly by politicians, business tycoons, and organized crime, as opposed to the nickel-and-dime mazzetta everyone else specializes in, flourishes throughout Italy thanks to a vast state-controlled economy and a thoroughly entrenched system of political patronage in which all state jobs and contracts are treated as spoils of war by the dominant parties. Outraged as your average Italian citizen was by the extent of Tangentopoli, the fact is that most Italians, including many who are officially unemployed or disabled, habitually make their rent through the country’s hugely profitable “submerged economy,” made up of (1) businesses small enough to avoid taxes and union restraints and (2) businesses that don’t legally exist at all. This two-tiered system of criminality makes for a society that runs rather smoothly on the private level, thank you, and not at all on the public one. Keep the faith; a history of nearly continuous warfare and of domination by every variety of despot seems to have strengthened the country’s resistance to disaster and heightened its appreciation for crisis.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING AN ITALIAN: It all depends on where your date lives. In Milan, you may have an easier time getting reservations at fancy restaurants now than you would have back in the booming 1980s, when all northerners seemed to be rich and Italy became the West’s fifth-largest economy. But don’t count on it: Statistics that look grim for the country as a whole tend to ignore the huge disparity between Italy’s still-prosperous, industrialized, yuppified north and its largely unemployed, agricultural, donkey-riding south. The divergence of lifestyles is so extreme that the separatist Northern League, a party whose platform for many years centered on making northern Italy into an independent nation called Padini, is a political force none dare snicker at. (Since the adoption of the euro, the Northern League has shifted its focus from separatism to xenophobia and its targets from the thousands of southern Italian workers who migrate to the north in search of factory jobs to the thousands of Albanians and North Africans who do the same.) If your date lives in central Italy—in the regions of Tuscany or Emilia-Romagna—he or she will probably remain loyal to what’s left of the PCI, Italy’s Communist Party, now renamed the Democratic Party of the Left. Don’t start lecturing your date on the evils of Communism—the Italian version always functioned more as the workers’ rich uncle than as anyone’s Big Brother, and the PCI was virtually excommunicated from Moscow for failing to toe the party line. In the Mezzogiorno you can skip politics—or for that matter, conversation—altogether, provided you drive a fancy car. It might pay, however, to memorize the names of the local organized-crime branches—Cosa Nostra in Sicily, Camorra in Naples, ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia—to one of which your date probably owes his current job parking cars or making pizzas.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: Well, again, that will depend. In the north you should know something about Italian history, for instance, how to pronounce risorgimento (the s sounds like a z, the g is soft), the nineteenth-century struggle to get out from under foreign rule, overcome regionalism, and unify the country. You should know that Venice wasn’t always a mecca for honeymooners: Back when it was the trade link to the Orient, it was one of the world’s richest states and one of the few in these parts to resist enemy invasion. You should know a little something about Renaissance art, of course, especially if your date’s folks are Florentines, and you ought to be able to tell your Guelphs (supporters of the popes) from your Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Emperors). In other words, you may have to crack a few textbooks. In the south, relax. Italians on the whole read fewer newspapers than other Europeans, and the illiteracy rate in the Mezzogiorno still hovers between 20 and 30 percent. Here, however, you’d better learn to love your date’s family because you’ll be seeing a lot of them. For one thing, your date will almost certainly live at home, thanks to the chronic housing shortage. For another, familismo is still strong around here; a lot of people insist it’s what really holds the country together. But even familismo may be doomed: Thanks to those snooty northerners with their big-shot careers divorce is on the rise (although it’s still about a third of the U.S. rate), and Italy now has the lowest birthrate in the world. MEXICO
THE LAYOUT: South of the border—and no border separates, however laxly, two more contrasting standards of living than the U.S.-Mexico one. There’s a lot of contrast within Mexico, too: between tropical coastal lowlands and chilly inland mountain ranges; between a few huge, unmanageable cities (most notably Mexico City, the capital and, at close to twenty million people, the third-largest metropolis in the world, after Tokyo and New York) and tens of thousands of remote rural communities, still waiting for running water, electricity, and sewers; between a hard-nosed, entrepreneurial, sure-we-know-what-Prada-is elite, and a hard-pressed, blanket-wearing, maize- (or poppy-, where the drug cartels have taken over) planting Indian population larger than that of any other Latin American country. The Yucatán Peninsula, complete with Mayan pyramids and Hyatt hotels doing bad imitations of them, juts out into the Caribbean from Mexico’s southeast. Nearly all the oil—and Mexico has the world’s seventh-largest reserves of it—lies along the southern Gulf, not far away. Chiapas, the country’s poorest state, where, on New Year’s Day of 1994, perennially exploited Mayan Indians traded in their sombreros for wool ski masks and their guitars for submachine guns, nestles up against Guatemala. On the U.S. border are towns that, over the last couple of decades, have become cities, thanks largely to the assembly plants called maquiladoras. The two biggest, each with an adjacent U.S. partner: Tijuana (San Diego) and Ciudad Juárez (El Paso).
THE SYSTEM: Don’t be fooled: Until the elections of 2000, Mexico was about as much of a democracy as one of those West African soldier states. In fact, with the Soviet Union’s demise, the country’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, became the longest-governing (since 1928), most entrenched (the “revolutionary” part of the name has been, in some circles, a reliable laugh-getter since at least the 1930s) political party in the world, never losing a national election and, until the 1990s, never losing an election at any level at all. Being perpetually assured of a solid majority in both houses of Congress and the backing of nearly all of the country’s thirty-one governors endowed Mexican presidents with almost mystical powers, in the tradition of Aztec emperors, Spanish viceroys, and Latin American strongmen everywhere. One difference: The president has to step down after six years. That was never a problem for the PRI, thanks to a quaint local custom known as the dedazo, translated as both “the pointing of the finger” and “the tap on the shoulder,” which allows the incumbent president to name his party’s candidate to succeed him. In July of 2000, however, a confluence of bad vibes inside and outside the PRI caused the system to break down, giving a narrow but wildly celebrated victory to Vicente Fox of the opposition Alliance for Change. Fox’s election prompted much dancing in the streets and euphoric promises of reform but, blocked at every turn by the PRI, which still dominates both houses of Congress and numerous states, the president hasn’t been able to get much real work done. The framers of the 1917 constitution weren’t thinking in terms of checks and balances. As of this writing, PRI hard-liners look good to make a comeback in the presidential election of 2006.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That the jury’s still out on whether hopes for genuine democracy—whatever that is—are sinking because of the ho-hum performance of a president who was expected to spin maize into gold overnight or because Mexico’s constitutional structure is not especially democracy-friendly. It certainly isn’t set up to turbocharge an economy that
’s still crawling toward first-world status on its knees, carrying a blanket and a basket of flowers on its back. (One example economists invariably cite: the fact that Mexico sits on huge oil and natural gas reserves but has to import energy from the United States because the law restricts private investment in the energy sector and the government can’t afford to finance exploration.) Keep in mind that Mexico is desperately dependent on foreign trade, especially on trade with the United States, which buys close to 90 percent of its exports. It takes about five minutes for a downturn in the U.S. economy to shut down factories throughout Mexico’s industrial north and send foreign capitalists running in search of better-fortified accommodations. Unfortunately for the government, that’s just what happened in 2001, less than a year after the new administration took over. Meanwhile, the proliferation of little “Made in China” labels on everything from binoculars to bobble-head dolls strikes fear in Mexican hearts, and somehow the knowledge that if they had managed to keep their jobs they’d be making three times the hourly wage of their Chinese-peasant counterparts hasn’t sufficed to keep a quarter of a million unemployed factory workers happy.
Keep an eye on the left-wing mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose popularity and staunch opposition to just about everything the current administration stands for make him a promising contender in the next presidential elections. Another force to contend with: the Chiapas-based Zapatistas, most often represented by the charismatic Subcomandante Marcos, still looking good in that ski mask, who fiercely opposes globalization, privatization, commercialization, and the tendency of the country’s elite to treat its indigenous peoples like pack animals.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A MEXICAN: If you’re hanging in Mexico City, where intellectuals—and worse, economists—are still sought-after dinner-party guests, the terrain will seem familiar enough: a semiformal business of dark suits for the men and regular visits to the colorist for the women, against a backdrop of your date and all his colleagues jockeying for a seat next to your date’s boss when they bring out the brandy and cigars. On your way home, watch out for cars with dark-tinted windows cruising close to the curb, and don’t stop to give directions to anyone wearing a lot of gold chains. Kidnapping is big business these days, with the number of abductions annually nearly rivaling that in Colombia, and you don’t even have to be rich to be snatched and held for ransom anymore. We won’t get into how to behave if your date is living in a cardboard box somewhere outside the city proper, but we will mention that Mexico City— where oxygen-starved motorists have fatal heart attacks sitting in highway underpasses at rush hour, and not only ozone and sulfur dioxide and other industrial pollutants but microscopic particles of fecal matter often hang suspended in the air—is no longer the destination of choice for many poverty-stricken but optimistic migrants, who may head instead for a provincial city like Guadalajara or Aguascalientes to avail themselves of the state agencies the government relocated there in a desperate attempt to keep at least a few Mexicans out of the capital. Or they might still try the cities of the border, of which Tijuana is just the biggest, where, in the maquiladoras owned by GE and Xerox and Sony and Panasonic, electronic components and a lot of other stuff arrive duty-free from the States and are assembled by sweet, and single, young girls from all over Mexico (girls are held to be more docile, more dexterous, and more willing to work for eighty-five cents or so an hour without feeling a compulsion to join the union), then shipped back, again duty-free, to whichever humongous transnational sent them down in the first place. For a while the system made everybody money and employed señoritas, even if it was grinding, no-future work. But the big companies soon discovered that labor was even cheaper down in the Mexican boonies or, worse, in China, and moved their operations accordingly. Meanwhile, there are the hundreds of girls, some from maquiladoras, others waitresses or students or flower sellers, but all poor and powerless, whose murders have gone unsolved in the border state of Chihuahua for so long that by now everyone assumes that the state government—or at least the local police—must be involved. So when you meet your date, treat her nicely.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: We’re going to assume your date’s parents are Indians, or at least mestizos (of mixed-blood, Indian-and-Spanish descent), if only because virtually all of Mexico is—30 percent simply Indian, 60 percent mestizo. As a rule of thumb, the more purely Indian someone is, the more likely to live in Mexico’s so called Deep South—though there are also plenty of Indians in the valleys around Mexico City—and the more likely to be living in poverty. Attención: Race is a shifting category, more about culture than color, in much of Latin America and both mestizos and purebred Indians may be, exhausting as it sounds, attempting to pass for European, speaking Spanish rather than, say, Nahuatl, wearing shoes instead of sandals, and living in the capital, where they make a show of preferring tortellini to tortillas. But back to the milpas, the cornfields the real Indians have been endowing with magical powers for centuries (they wouldn’t be caught dead growing the wheat the Spaniards brought to the New World). Landownership is a whole thing with a long history all over Mexico, a country where there’s far too little of it and where you either live grandee-style on tens of thousands of acres or you take your humble ejido, the plot the government—finally, after years of promises and some real whoppers—handed you to farm, collectively, alongside Pedro and Pablo and Luz, a plot so dry and rocky you could break your hoe, and perched on the kind of nearly vertical hillside even goats regard with skepticism. Under the circumstances, it’s a big challenge to feed yourself and your eleven children, which is precisely why everybody, quite possibly including your date’s ancient-looking-even-though-not-yet-forty parents, is always leaving home for a few months to tidy up a kitchen in Beverly Hills or harvest a few dozen acres of tomatoes just outside Fresno, then hurry home with a wad of greenbacks just in time to get in the maize and the beans. Speaking of north-of-the-border matters, your date’s parents aren’t likely to have forgotten how, in the Texas and Mexican-American Wars, the United States grabbed half of what was then Mexico; it doesn’t help that, in the intervening century and a half, the land has only gotten primer. Try to make an end run around the entire nineteenth century, and extol the 1910-1917 revolution, which wasn’t, as it’s so frequently portrayed, an entirely good thing, but it did break the power of the old aristocracy, produce a constitution, and get the Church more or less off people’s backs. You can also try praising Mexico’s cultural record, beginning with the Aztecs and the Mayans and the Toltecs and—a slight gap here—segueing into the famous twentieth-century muralists, most notably the revolutionary Diego Rivera; also, his cult-figure wife, the surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. Since it’s unlikely that your date’s parents can read, you won’t get very far trying to launch a discussion of Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, but the parents have quite possibly caught a glimpse of local-hero architect Luis Barragán’s huge three-faced multicolored concrete towers in the middle of the highway outside Mexico City while they were hitching a ride north to the border. NICARAGUA
THE LAYOUT: The biggest country in Central America, with plenty of variety to the landscape—mountains, lowlands, virgin forests, two huge lakes, and a torrid, swampy Caribbean coast. Most of the human action, however, takes place on a little volcano-studded strip of land between the mountains and the Pacific. (The Miskito Indians, who consider themselves a nation apart from Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans, have traditionally claimed a big chunk of the Caribbean coast as their turf, but even many of them were forced, in the early 1980s, to pack up and resettle on collective farms in the west.) Nicaragua is one of four Central American countries—the others are Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala; Panama and Costa Rica have their own problems—that are so bound together by climate, history, social conditions, and the fact that they all share an isthmus trapped between two culturally distinct continental giants, that what happens to one can’t help rattling the others. As a re
sult, observers, both inside and out, have had reason to view the area as prime domino-theory territory. During the 1980s, it was Honduras, Nicaragua’s northern neighbor and the only Latin American nation even poorer than it is, that became the main staging area for the CIA-directed contra war against the Sandinista government. On the other hand, in the late Nineties it was the president of Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s relatively prosperous, demilitarized neighbor to the south, who initiated the peace process that finally ended the war.
THE SYSTEM: A struggling democracy. To appreciate the current system, you’ll need the backstory, and it is, as your grandmother might say, a doozy In 1933, when the U.S. Marines finally pulled out, after hanging around for a decade protecting U.S. commercial interests, they left Anastasio Somoza in charge of the National Guard. Before you could say “Latin American dictatorship,” Somoza had turned the Guard into his personal militia, arranged for the assassination of his rival, General Sandino (the guerrilla leader for whom the Sandinistas were named), and made himself president. For the next forty-five years, the Somoza clan ran Nicaragua more like a shady family business than a country. Finally, in 1979, after much guerrilla fighting, Sandinista revolutionaries managed to overthrow the Somoza dynasty. Elections held—and, according to some admittedly cranky Western observers, rigged—in 1984 put the revolutionary hero (later known as revolutionary strongman) Daniel Ortega in the presidency, sharing leadership with a nine-member Sandinista directorate. Things would have been tough enough even without interference from the north, given the fact that a bunch of underage guerrilla fighters were suddenly faced with turning the Somozas’ family-owned sweatshop into a functioning economy. Given, too, the uneasy marriage that had made the revolution in the first place: middle-class professionals and businessmen hoping for moderate reform on the one hand, Marxist ideologues vowing a radical transformation of society on the other. Add to that a decade of virtual embargo by the United States and of ferocious, unrelenting attacks by U.S.-backed contra rebels, and you have the mess that is Nicaragua today. In 1990, an electorate fed up with civil war as a lifestyle—and convinced the United States would never take its foot off Nicaragua’s neck as long as the Sandinistas remained in power—voted to replace Ortega with a hybrid right-centrist government headed by Violeta de Chamorro, widow of a (what else?) martyred newspaper publisher. Chamorro’s administration, which included a weird mix of political elements ranging from former National Guardsmen to former Sandinistas, soon lost nearly all of its original supporters and has, paradoxically, been propped up for some time by Ortega’s defeated Sandinistas, who still controlled the army and police and who remain to this day Nicaragua’s strongest political force, despite the fact that no two Sandinistas have agreed on anything for years. Two subsequent elected presidents, both from the Somoza family’s old political party, also failed to accomplish much (although one managed to become the first Latin American ex-president ever to be jailed for corruption), and as of this writing, Ortega’s hat is in the ring again for the next presidential election. Everyone agrees that the country is a mess. The good news is that it’s a democratic mess. The voting age is sixteen.