Democracy in Mexico—the Complex Roles of the United States: A Conversation with Sergio Aguayo

Sergio Aguayo was interviewed in his office at El Colegio de México in February 1999. I edited a transcript of the interview and invited him to make changes and corrections in April 1999. He returned the manuscript with extensive revisions in May 1999.	1
DAVID THELEN
DAVID THELEN:There are two areas we want to talk about: the project that resulted in your book Myths and [Mis]Perceptions and your work on human rights (particularly refugees and democracy).1	2
SERGIO AGUAYO:This is the tale of my schizophrenia. In different circles, I am frequently regarded either as a professor, an activist, or a columnist. On the one hand, I have now been a professor at El Colegio de México for twenty-two years, engaged in the typical activities that characterize a professorial existence. On the other hand, I have also been active in the promotion of human rights and democracy in many different ways, and I have written a weekly column for fifteen years now. This is not a result of any conscious choice on my part; it simply happened, as a consequence of personal decisions, external events, and accidents.	3
I was born in 1947, in a little town in the state of Jalisco and grew up there, in Guadalajara. As a youth—and a typical son of the Mexican Revolution—I believed in the regime, which seemed to promise both an education and hope for the future. This produced a well-developed sense of nationalism and a persistent distrust toward foreigners, especially those from the United States. Politics were a central interest from an early age; as a teenager, I joined a street gang committed to student activism.	4
My life was transformed, however, by the students' movement of 1968, which—combined with the repression of the 1960s and 1970s—posed serious questions regarding the legitimacy of the government. Briefly, I toyed with the idea of joining the guerrillas, something that was not unusual in certain Latin American circles during the 1960s. This was a decade of dreamers, a time when everything seemed possible.	5
Although I finally rejected that idea, many members from my political group did participate, only to be exterminated by government forces. Some were killed, others disappeared, and many remain psychologically maimed. I personally was a victim of beatings and torture. These circumstances eventually forced me to leave Guadalajara, which had become a very dangerous place to live (as a matter of personal revenge, I was sentenced to death by one of the paramilitary groups created by the government). Having heard of El Colegio de México, which had established a B.A. program in international relations and—this was even more important—provided scholarships for full-time students, I arrived in Mexico City in 1971, armed with a scholarship and the determination to remain there. This would be an extremely difficult fresh start. For the first time in my life, I was engaged in serious studies, and this was very, very painful. I worked day and night, both because I liked learning, and because I did not want to (and in fact could not) return to Guadalajara, ridden as it was with political and drug-related violence (it was then that the drug lords established themselves there).	. . .