The Elite

Roughly 3 percent of Mexico’s population belongs to the elite. Its members include top government officials, owners of large firms, managers of foreign corporations operating in Mexico, and administrators of public-sector firms such as Pemex.209

The Mexican experience with globalization and neoliberal economics resulted in an especially sharp concentration of wealth since highly profitable corporations were transferred to the hands of a favored few. In 1994, Forbes magazine found that the number of Mexican billionaires (as measured in U. S. dollars) had reached twenty-four, up from only one in 1990—a 2,400 percent increase. In the same four-year period, 1990 to 1994, per capita GDP increased by only 4 percent. At the time, the magazine commented, “Of the 358 people identified as billionaires in the latest Forbes

World survey, 24 were Mexican—a percentage out of all proportion to Mexico’s place in the world

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Economy.

PAN presidential candidate Vicente Fox received substantial support from business interests. Not surprisingly, once Fox took office, the influence of the business elite increased, along with that of the Church, to the detriment of the middle class, labor, and the peasants. Political scientist Denise Dresser commented on this influence:

Mexico has a dense, intricate web of connections and personal ties between the government and the business class. This ends up creating a government that doesn’t defend the public interest, that isn’t willing to go out and regulate in the name of the consumer. But it is rather willing to help its friends, its allies, and, in some case its business partners who thrive at the expense of the Mexican people.211

While the government institutes programs such as Oportunidades, many of its policies serve to concentrate wealth. It tolerates monopolies and duopolies, especially in telecommunications, which benefit a handful of owners. Its massive electric rate subsidy disproportionally benefits affluent owners of appliances and air conditioners. In 2002, the government spent five times as much on its electricity subsidy as it did on poverty eradication programs. Similarly, subsidies for gasoline and higher education mainly benefit the already affluent.212

Mexico never regained the share of the world’s billionaires that it enjoyed in 1994. Between 1994 and 2008, Mexico’s share of billionaires declined from 7 percent to 1 percent, not due to Mexico becoming more egalitarian but due to the rest of the world generating wealth more rapidly than Mexico. In 2008, of the world’s 1,125 billionaires, ten were Mexican.213