A World of Opportunities by Luis Rubio

The Wilson Center's Mexico Institute is pleased to invite you to the book launch, A World Of Opportunities by Luis Rubio, Global Fellow & Advisory Board Member of the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute & President of Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI). 

As Mexico prepares for another electoral cycle in 2018, the Mexico Institute is honored to publish Luis Rubio’s third book on politics and governance in Mexico. Following on from A Mexican Utopiaand The Problem of Power, Rubio challenges the idea that the existing system, founded in the political realities of post-revolutionary Mexico, can address the fundamental challenges facing the nation. Instead it must be non-governmental organizations and civil society that drives change in Mexico. 

As Rubio himself argues:

“Over the past decades, Mexico has experienced an explosion of reforms: a change in the trade regime, which enabled Mexican consumers to have access to competitive and high-quality goods while enforcing a transformation of a large part of the country’s production facilities; the opening up of the political system to competition of equals among political parties, altering the ancient order and enabling the alternation of parties in power throughout all government levels; the approval of labor, tax, human rights, corruption, energy as well as judicial reforms. Each and every one of these amendments has influenced the way in which the country works within all of its components. What has not changed is the ensemble. The question today is how to achieve that process of change that Mexico needs in order to consolidate a transformation process that seems to have gone on throughout decades but never actually seems to have come to deliver something tangible for the everyday citizen. The book argues that, in the end, the fate of the country will depend on the strength of the links that the diverse social organizations – grassroots as well as the more analytical and intellectual ones – manage to establish between each other, a lot of which will depend less on their origin but on their ability to build bridges and create a foundation of mutual and permanent trust.