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 Editorials | Issues | November 2006 
Ranks of the Rich Grow in Mexico
 Jeremy Schwartz - Houston Chronicle
Their bodyguards aren't allowed inside Le Cluv, Mexico City's most exclusive nightclub. But the fabulously wealthy patrons who make it past the doorman don't need to worry; a team of retired military officers handles security in the nightspot.
Once inside, 20- and 30-somethings drink $300 bottles of rum, lounge on leather sofas and watch flat-screen TVs inlaid in the club's marble pillars.
"The people that come here travel a lot to Europe, to exclusive places in the United States," said Carlos Granados, owner of Le Cluv. "So you have to give them something even better than what they're used to seeing. Here you're like, 'Am I in Mexico, or where am I?'"
While poor migrants grab most of the headlines from Mexico, the ranks of the country's rich are growing at a rapid and largely unnoticed pace.
According to the British market research firm Datamonitor, the number of Mexicans with more than $384,000 in liquid assets will jump 50 percent between 2004 and 2009, from 50,000 to 75,000 in this country of 107 million.
But the disparities between rich and poor haven't closed, despite the promises of outgoing President Vicente Fox's administration.
Statistics show the inequalities are still among the highest in Latin America. In Mexico, 47 percent of the population lives on less than $4 a day.
Islands of luxury Mexico's wealthiest residents inhabit a parallel universe of fortified mansions, posh shopping malls and separate movie theaters. They go to the United States not to work illegally, but to shop or attend Ivy League universities.
They live in surreal mini-cities of gleaming, geometric towers. And most are breathing a big sigh of relief that next week conservative Felipe Calderon will be sworn in as president and not his bitter rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who vowed to end the privileges of Mexico's elite.
Experts say the expanding wealth comes mainly from the growth of manufacturing and exports under the North American Free Trade Agreement and the burgeoning telecommunications and banking industries.
"There are people who live in bubbles," said Guadalupe Loaeza, author of several books detailing the lives of the very rich, adding that there are some who don't even know downtown Mexico City. "They go to the markets like tourists, like gringos. Downtown seems like Calcutta to them."
The walls of separation Physical separation is a hallmark of wealth in Mexico, where high walls often form a barrier between rich and poor.
On the outskirts of Mexico City, billionaire Carlos Peralta is building Latin America's largest upscale housing development, called Bosque Real. Its slogan is "Welcome to the First World," and it is built around a golf club where memberships cost $120,000.
Bosque Real's theme is simple: Live here and you may never have to leave. Peralta is planning schools, supermarkets and even a power plant behind the high walls. Security includes a private police force, infrared cameras and a strict visitation policy requiring all visitors to be registered in advance.
Kidnappings and carjackings are common in Mexico City, and those with money seek to protect themselves with high gates, bodyguards and chauffer-driven cars.
"There won't be a safer place in Mexico, not even Los Pinos," Alvaro Matute, Bosque Real's spokesman, said of the Mexican White House.
Poverty close at hand But as hard as Bosque Real's designers have sought to insulate their wealthy residents, they won't be able to escape completely. The makeshift homes of the poverty-stricken town of Naucalpan creep up to the very edge of Bosque Real's guarded walls.
According to the United Nations, wealth in Mexico continues to be concentrated in the hands of a few. The country's richest 10 percent control 35 percent of the nation's wealth, while the poorest 10 percent have 1.6 percent. That means wealth is more concentrated than in the United States, where the top 10 percent holds 30.5 percent of the wealth.
The result in Mexico is two competing worldviews, known as naco and fresa.
In a nutshell, fresas are usually preppy rich kids, more interested in American culture than Mexican. The naco sterotype is of a less-educated and darker-skinned person who likes Mexican wrestling and street tacos.
That division, more than economics or politics, may better describe the spiritual separation that emerged over the summer between followers of Calderon and Lopez Obrador.
A popular online cartoon, Fresa y Naco, has become a hit on the YouTube site. It bitingly exposes the differences between the two Mexicos.
The character Fresa, which means strawberry in Spanish, has pale skin, peppers his speech with English phrases to sound cool and recoils when he hears Mexican regional music.
Describing the protest camps that Lopez Obrador set up in Mexico City over the summer to dispute the election results, he is apoplectic.
"I can't drive my BMW to downtown," he exclaims. "We should go camping in Colorado instead, at least there the nacos won't be rebelling against us."
There weren't many self-described nacos on the roof of the Camino Real hotel last month at Fashion Week Mexico, a showcase for designers.
As club music thumped, Mexico's beautiful people stalked the roof, smoking cigarettes, talking on their Nextels and sipping flavored waters.
At that altitude, the shantytowns crawling up the surrounding hills become sparkling jewels and downtown Mexico City takes on a futuristic quality.
For a certain segment of the young and wealthy, Mexico City is an oyster waiting to open: filled with chic restaurants, poolside hotel parties and exclusive art openings.
"Mexico is the land of opportunity," says Rodrigo Peafiel, a promoter of exclusive Mexico City parties and member of a successful water-bottling family. "The U.S. used to be, but it's going through a crisis. Mexico is a young country, more open, more experimental, more sexual, more risk-taking."
Pricey goods abound And more Mexicans are actually able to afford the glittering garments parading down the runways at Fashion Week. With the passage of NAFTA, the availability of luxury goods has soared in Mexico.
Just off of Avenue Presidente Masaryk, the Rodeo Drive of Mexico, sits the Mulsanne luxury car dealership. Inside is the crown jewel, a bright yellow Lamborghini Murcielago that sells for $300,000.
The manager, Jeronimo Irurita, says the luxury car business is tied tightly to the whims of the daily news: a rash of kidnappings will send sales plummeting (although his fleet of bulletproof cars do better in those times).
But worse, he says, is the threat of a left-wing government.
"If the left had won, many of my clients would have moved to Miami," he said. "This business would have disappeared, or it would have changed to cheaper cars."
With Calderon's victory, business picked up nicely, and the yellow Lamborghini sold quickly to a Mexico City businessman, he said. |
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