Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yucatán has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great, sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. It makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. In fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways. Back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatán beer or a foreign beer, and a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatán. Why doesn’t Yucatán leave? I think that it came extremely close. In fact, there’s a moment in the 1840s when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatán to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatán stay? I think it’s because of the absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatán is profoundly racially divided. It’s one of the few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. You have a plantocracy, in some ways, like the US South before the Civil War. You’ve got a relatively small white plantocracy centered in Mérida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle. While the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it’s still not at the point where you would get, for more than a couple of years, a really joined-up independence movement spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula. Now more recently, Mexico has a reputation for being very violent, but Yucatán is especially peaceful. There are years where it’s had a lower murder rate, I think, than Finland. Why is that part of the country, after this chaotic beginning, after independence, recently so peaceful, and so safe? Again, a good question. It, I think, explains broader patterns of drugs and violence in Mexican history. The first is that foreigners in Mexico have carte blanche, or what in colonial times we call a fuero. Foreigners are untouchable. Because much of Yucatán, the Yucatán economy centers on tourism, the Riviera Maya, Cozumel, et cetera, there’s an awful lot in these key populated coastal strips of foreigners. Killing them is bad business. Stability is better for business anywhere. In Yucatán, there’s more of an imperative for that. That’s one. The other is that it has ceased being what it used to be, which is a major transit and transshipment route. When I proposed to my wife on a beach in Quintana Roo, we could go out at 8:00 a.m. next to Tulum, when Tulum was a small dusty town. We could go out, and twice a day, we would see small planes coming up from Central America. We knew perfectly well as they headed north up through Quintana Roo that this was a drugs run. As a transshipment route, it has been far surpassed. That other great reason for violence is absent.…

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