Mexico Revisited: Some Hidden Facts About Mexican History and Mexican Society--Part 4

In his 2010 book "Mexico: Why A Few Are Rich and The People Poor," University of California-San Diego Professor Emeritus of History Ramon Eduardo Ruiz revealed the following additional hidden facts about Mexican history and Mexican society:

31. "...By 1996, Wal-Mart...had scores of stores in Mexico...General Motors, Volkswagen, Chrysler and Nissan accounted for 80 percent of [Mexico's] export. It was cheap to assemble autos in Mexico and then ship parts and autos by truck or rail to the biggest market in the world..." (page 186)

32. "...Privatization [in Mexico] cost 400,000 Mexicans their jobs..." (page 187)

33. "...Thousands of Mexicans, unable to find decent jobs at home, fled to the United States. Each year during the 1960s, some 27,000 Mexicans had left; by 1999, that number had multiplied tenfold..." (page 188)

34. "Unwilling to help their poor, Mexico's elite had chosen to rely on Uncle Sam to give the [Mexican] poor jobs and to feed them, and equally important, to avoid a potential social explosion of the restless [in Mexico]..." (page 188)

35. In 2000, 10 percent of Mexico's labor force earned less than the minimum wage in Mexico.

36. In 2000, less than 20 percent of Mexico's labor force belonged to labor unions.

37. "...For the poor of Mexico, NAFTA has failed to deliver more jobs: half of the workforce is unemployed, underemployed or in the informal sector, and...no country in the world has exported more manpower than Mexico..." (page 206)

38. "An average of 450,000 people a year are thought to have crossed into the United States [from Mexico] during the early years of the 21st-century..." (page 206)

39. "Some 2.5 million workers had left their families [in Mexico] for jobs in the United States [in the early 21st-century], more than 16 times the rate for the 1960s, when only 30,000 Mexicans per year had fled northward..." (page 206)

40. "One fact [in Mexico] stares one in the face. The well-off [in Mexico] hate paying taxes, and Mexico has one of the lowest-tax rates in the world. Less than 1 percent of Mexico's local budgets are collected from property taxes..." (page 207)