north america

The upcoming issue of Time features Mexico’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto, on its cover. That has made the magazine more than a few new enemies. But it’s the accompanying front-page headline that really clinched the Mexicans’ ire: SAVING MEXICO.

Reforms to Mexico's energy sector were signed into law late last year. The legislation proceeded rapidly from President Enrique Peña Nieto's announcement of the reforms in August, to the negotiations among the major political parties during the fall, to voting in both houses of Congress, resulting in a majority of the 31 state legislatures changing the Constitution. For the first time in 75 years private participation will be permitted in Mexico's energy sector, not only in oil and gas, but also in electricity and power generation.

Hell seems ever more liable to bust loose in western Mexico’s Michoacan state, with heavily armed civilians squaring off against feared meth-producing gangsters who’ve had the run of rural hamlets and towns for years. The self-defense militias, at least some of them accused of connivance with criminal rivals of the local Knights Templar gang, have been working to encircle the Templar-dominated city of Apatzingan since last summer.

January 7, 2014

The day that 17-year-old Israel Arenas Durán disappeared began, like most, with his mother making him breakfast. He ate with his father and 15-year-old brother, Irving, at a small wooden table outside the family's single-room home, overlooking the plant nursery they run in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leó.

The result is what we academics call premature closure, or what policy makers call a failure in due diligence; basically an unwillingness to consider all of the potential options, the risk and the consequences of a particular course of action. In this newspaper and elsewhere, I have addressed the reasons why a foreign policy that is not open to public scrutiny lacks both accountability and legitimacy.

In 1993, Vice President Al Gore made the unprecedented move of debating businessman and former presidential candidate Ross Perot regarding the merits of the North American Free Trade Agreement on CNN's Larry King Live.

Pass through the gates of the Bombardier plant in Querétaro and you leave the Mexico of potholed roads and blaring horns behind: welcome to a strangely serene place called North America. In the car park neat lines of vehicles all face the same way—almost unthinkable elsewhere in Mexico.

Mexico's senate unveiled an historic energy bill Saturday (Dec 7) that goes further than expected to break the state's monopoly over the oil and gas industry. After months of negotiation between the ruling PRI party and the largest opposition party PAN, a bill was finally brought into the senate over the weekend. The right-wing PAN appears to have come out ahead with a pro-market bill.

Pages