Marilyn Berlin Snell and Nathan Gardels talked with him recently in Mexico City about how free trade with the United States might accelerate the opening of Mexican civil society - that part of society that is autonomous from the state, such as citizen ecology groups, independent political parties, free trade unions, the press or the church. Excerpts of his comments appear below. Mexico is a semi-liberal society. It's not a closed society, but not an open one either. Sometimes I love Dan Rather, not because he is some kind of genius but, compared to what I see in Mexico, he represents the open society in all its splendor.
Civil society is very weak in Mexico.
President Carlos Salinas dislikes the very idea of civil society. So, it is impossible, on the political front, for civil society to win any new space of freedom. Functional illiteracy in this country, after all, is around 70 percent. People never read a thing not a paper, not a magazine, certainly never a book. The market of readers in Mexico, I would estimate, is around 200,000.