HE IS 45 YEARS OLD but in many photos appears to be about 12: a boy dressed for a family wedding, in a black suit and red tie. With his pale skin, dark and moony eyes, and hair gelled into a pompadour, he looks very much like the hero of a locally produced soap opera. His name is Enrique Peña Nieto, and if the polls are any indication, in July he will be elected president of Mexico.
Peña Nieto is a member of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (a legendary oxymoron) known by its Spanish-language initials (PRI), which ruled Mexico between 1929 and 2000, the longest-running political show in modern history. Between 2005 and 2011, he was the governor of the State of Mexico, his term marked by infrastructure projects that created work, however temporarily, for thousands. Thousands of others less fortunate—many in the shantytowns that ring Mexico City—lived in poverty compared by the United Nations to Sub-Saharan Africa’s. Nearly all the surveys place Peña Nieto at double-digit percentage points ahead of his rivals in the rightwing National Action Party (PAN), which has presided over Mexico (most would say disastrously) for the past 12 years, and the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).
He is not infallible. Last December, when Peña Nieto was presenting a book he putatively wrote, México: La Gran Esperanza (‘Mexico: The Great Hope’), at the Guadalajara International Book Fair—the most important in the Spanish-speaking world—a journalist asked him to name three books that changed his life. His stammering response, posted on YouTube, lasted an excruciating four minutes. First he mumbled about novels he’d liked but whose titles he couldn’t remember. Then it occurred to him that, although he had not read the entire Bible, some passages of it were inspirational to him during adolescence. He mentioned how much he liked historian Enrique Krauze’s La Silla del Águila (‘The Eagle’s Throne’)—a novel written, in fact, by Carlos Fuentes.
He became further confused in a labyrinth of books and authors he could not recall, and asked people in the audience to help him out with details. Peña Nieto came up with titles of two bestsellers by Jeffrey Archer—a British author whose own political career was derailed by a conviction for perjury and a subsequent jail term. The politician’s smile and body language were unsettling, as if he thought the exercise was a joke.
Peña Nieto’s performance caused a furore in Mexico—if only among the elite. He was widely ridiculed in newspapers and social media. Those who defended him made matters worse. As a response to the mockery, his teenage daughter, Paulina Peña Pretelini, tweeted this message: “Regards to the bunch of assholes who are all proles and only criticize those who they envy!”
Peña Nieto is widely known as “Televisa’s candidate”—a reference to Mexico’s biggest multimedia conglomerate, which captures the lion’s share of viewers. Indeed, he has been defended on Televisa programmes. On a talk show, Tercer Grado (‘Third Degree’), presenter Adela Micha said that “being a voracious reader is completely irrelevant when it comes to governing well or badly”, while on the same show, Carlos Marin, editor of the influential daily Milenio, suggested that many people who made fun of Peña Nieto were similarly ignorant.
The truths that this incident tells about Mexico are troubling. Contrary to Paulina’s assertions, most of the people who made fun of Peña Nieto are reasonably well-educated—but Mexico is indeed mostly made up of “proles”. According to a report this January by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, 52 million Mexicans live at or below the national poverty level (about $130 per month, in a country where prices approach those in the US). That’s nearly half of Mexico’s population, and many millions more hover barely above the poverty line. According to the most recent statistics, half the working population earns $11 per day or less.
UNESCO statistics show that 93.4 percent of Mexicans know how to read. That doesn’t mean that all are exercising this ability. When I came here to live in 1990, a statistic much-bandied about said that, on average, Mexicans read a half a book a year. More recent studies place the figure at 1.9. If a book here sells 3,000 copies, it is considered a “bestseller”.
I have visited entire towns and even small cities in Mexico where there is no bookstore, not even a newsstand. If you are one of those people on or near the poverty level—more than half the impoverished are children—you will find books prohibitively expensive. An ordinary paperback costs about $16, while the daily minimum wage here is less than $4. Libraries are underfunded, woefully disorganised, and infrequently update their collections.
“Our education system has been replaced by TV,” says Sergio González Rodríguez, a columnist for the newspaper Reforma and author of various books on politics and culture. “People believe they are informed by TV and that reading isn’t important.”
Even worse, most working-class Mexicans cannot conceive of why they should read in the first place. My work as an investigator takes me to families who live on the outskirts of cities and in towns and villages, trying to eke out a living. Most young men I have interviewed have worked since childhood, shining shoes, delivering groceries, selling candies on the street, while girls help with housework almost as soon as they can walk. They go to primary and secondary school because they are obliged to by law, until they can go to work fulltime and help their parents, who are often spent by the time they are in their 40s.
These adolescents have few, if any, examples of people who have bettered their lot through education. There is virtually no social mobility; nearly all those who are born poor are condemned to remain so for the rest of their lives. Those who do manage to claw their way out of poverty traditionally have three channels: the first is hard work, most often by setting up a small business (the likeliest possibility would be to sell food from a stall on the street); the second is through criminal activity; and the third—sometimes linked to the second—is by going into politics. Mexican politicians earn higher salaries than their counterparts in the US and Europe, and the sky is the limit for those who use their influence to make corrupt business deals.
Since his appearance at the book fair, Peña Nieto has continued to make further gaffes. At recent public events, he demonstrated that he didn’t know what the minimum wage was, nor the price of a kilo of tortillas. His explanation for the latter lapse was: “I am not the lady of the house.”
At the end of January, he told a reporter that during his first marriage he had been a serial adulterer, and had two children out of wedlock. Novelist JM Servín pointed out that illegitimate children are “normal within the scheme of macho Mexican society”, and might even help Peña Nieto find support among male voters.
Peña Nieto’s first wife died under mysterious circumstances in 2007. During an interview, he claimed that he didn’t remember from what, but it was “something like epilepsy”. Plenty have speculated (without proof) that he killed her, or that she committed suicide. Still, these blunders, revelations and rumours have barely affected his standing in the polls.
Ricardo Cayuela Gally, editorial head of Letras Libres, Mexico’s most important cultural-political magazine, says, “The reaction of people in social networks show that people care” about Peña Nieto’s ignorance. However, his appearance at the book fair was only talked about in newspapers (read by few Mexicans) and on political chat shows with small audiences. “Most people in Mexico are disconnected from political life,” says Cayuela. “And then, of course, there are millions of Mexicans who don’t read, and don’t, or wouldn’t, care—including most of our politicians.”
Peña Nieto is wealthy, has fair skin, good looks and a beautiful trophy wife, Angélica Rivera, who is in fact a former Televisa soap-opera star. In his TV commercials, he is often filmed sitting in the back of a limousine in shirtsleeves with his necktie loosened, proclaiming his commitment to the people.
None of these symbols correspond to the reality of the lives of the ‘proles’, but they do to their aspirations—the kind of person they would like to be if they were not stuck in a life of harvesting beans, shining shoes, selling tacos and tamales, cleaning other people’s houses or washing other people’s cars. If Peña Nieto is elected, it will be because he represents that wish, that dream, regardless of whether he has ever finished reading a book in his life.