Allow Foreigners a Real Stake in the Land : Mexico: The ownership ban, while historically and emotionally viable, must be eased to foster development.

No matter what we Mexicans do, the image of our country--no matter how it changes, whether positive or negative--is projected in much the same way: univocal, monolithic, undifferentiated.

Look back a decade. We were portrayed as a country mired in debt on an enormous scale, a financial and economic wreck.

Glance back just one year. Mexico’s economic turnaround was touted by the American and international press as miraculous. Investment--at least paper investment--continued to flood in.

Fast-forward to the end of 1994 and the first several months of 1995. Now we Mexicans are painted as fiscally incompetent, politically corrupt, socially chaotic. The process of change is ignored. Even changes that are strongly in place are discounted.

Again and again, Mexico--one of the world’s largest and most diverse nations--is presented in monolithic terms.

One example is the view that Mexico is unalterably isolationist and nationalist to a fault. Ignored is the debate that is developing over changing a constitutional prohibition against foreigners owning land in our country. Outsiders are skeptical, convinced that Mexican xenophobia is universal and everlasting.

That view is distorted.

We do love our country. We do have a profound sense of our history. If a Mexican stands at the center of the border of my state, Sonora, with the United States, no matter where he looks in the 180-degree arc that defines the north, from extreme northeast to extreme northwest, he sees vast tracts that were once part of our country--Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California--a vast landmass that makes up a significant, economically powerful portion of your country.

Those who fought in our revolution were painfully aware of what we had lost. And as those who framed our 1917 constitution wove the awareness and pain of that loss into the document itself, so too is it woven into the soul and consciousness of the Mexican people.

The constitution provides that Mexico’s lands and waters and natural riches belong to the Mexican people. Article 27 specifies that no foreigner may own land within 100 kilometers of the border or within 50 kilometers of our coast. There are ways around the proscription, although it is absolute with respect to residential property. Non-Mexicans can set up a Mexican corporation and buy property for non-residential purposes. Foreign individuals can gain rights to land for residential use via special land trusts, but they can’t own that property.

Viewed from the outside, this may seem an isolationist position. Looked at from within, it can appear a reasonable response to history.

Many Mexicans today look at the restriction on land ownership and shake their heads. Many believe that it is outdated and outmoded; that it stifles economic development and, equally important, sends a message that we are a closed society. But they are disinclined to make their position public or move for change for fear that they might be perceived as something less than patriotic.

Nevertheless, it is time to reconsider. Fear that foreigners, by owning Mexican land on which to establish homes or businesses, somehow have the power to undermine our sovereignty may have had validity in another epoch. No longer.

Times have changed. Americans or Canadians or Germans armed with beach blankets and sun block and cash to invest in a winter home are hardly a threat. A multinational corporation willing to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into capital investment seems something other than a danger. No country that is developing its economy and industrial base--not the United States in the 19th Century, not Germany or Japan after World War II, not Mexico today--can do so effectively without large infusions of foreign capital.

If we make it difficult, if we maintain barriers--even barriers that can be circumvented--many potential investors will look to other countries where it is less burdensome to invest. Or they will look to purely financial investment and speculation in our economy.

We must ask ourselves: Who is helping Mexican sovereignty? Is it the short-term speculators who undermined the peso and cut its value in half in a matter of weeks? Or is it the long-term investor willing to sink tens of millions of dollars into development, into plant and equipment that will create employment and economic growth?

My state would certainly benefit from such a change, as would half of the other 30 states in our country. So would the national government and the people as a whole.

Obviously we must keep the best of our traditions, but we must look at ways to modernize, for we face some awesome challenges: finding and implementing solutions to our economic problems, combating and extinguishing poverty, providing an array of opportunities for our people, modernizing the factors of production. If we do not open further, we cannot meet those challenges.

We find ourselves in a very difficult situation, but difficult times present opportunity. When things go well, there is less willingness to change and to find solutions to underlying problems.

Many of the problems we face result from our failure to act forcefully and in a timely fashion in the past. My fear, and my strong belief, is that if we do not act now, in a world that is moving as quickly as it is, we will be left behind. We must risk making changes now because it is more dangerous not to.