LONDON– Democracy has finally arrived in Mexico leaving only Cuba, among all the Latin American states, out on a distant limb. Yet the substance of the opposition’s victory is less tangible. Can the principal electoral victor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, who now stands a good chance of winning the presidency itself in the year 2000, deliver to the poor and dispossessed of Mexico, whose numbers and plight have so dramatically worsened in recent years, what the demagoguery of electioneering has seemed to promise? Indeed this is the question for all of democratic, free-market, Latin America, bar the continent’s one success story, Chile. Unemployment and the deep poverty it sustains is every country’s bain. “How long will the people wait for trickle-down to trickle down?” as Newsweek’s David Schrieberg tellingly asked recently. Even in the best of times Latin America has never been good at dealing with its poor. It is the continent...
