The Power and the Money

Mexico’s hydrocarbon sector is trouble. Let’s start with the big problem: for the first time ever, Pemex is losing money for the federal government. Here is where the federation gets its revenues, as a share of GDP:

Argentina is not known for having a large black population.

Being a country of Europeans is a deep part of Argentina’s national identity. The census stopped recording race in 1869. A bit more than 80 years later, when Josephine Baker visited, she was surprised at the absence of black people. So she

In the one lonely comment to my last post — which got a lot of readership but not a lot of interaction — wrote: “Argentina (plus its neighbour Uruguay to a degree) is another country ‘where the gap between what is and what realistically could have been is so large.’”

I’m not sure that I agree with that, but it is true that Argentines tend to compare themselves with Eur...