EDITOR’S NOTE

It’s lunch time at The Crescent Club and one by one the hosts are introducing themselves. If we don’t quite catch their names we have printed bios for backup:

Jaime Alatorre, president of the Mexican Investment Board (Ph.D. in economics, University of Texas); Aliza Chelminsky. vice president of the MIB (Georgetown); Fernando Chico Pardo, general director of the Inversora Bursatil brokerage firm (M.B.A., Northwestern); Jorge Lankenau Rocha, chairman of the board, Grupo Financiero Abaco and Banca Confia (M.B.A., Wharton); and John Rhoads, chairman of the board of a brokerage firm he founded (UCLA, USC).

I shouldn’t be surprised by these pedigrees. After all, Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is rarely identified in the American media without “Harvard-educated” before his name.

All of this would mean nothing-or much less-if the last few years in Mexico hadn’t seen real political change.

But for me, the most telling example of Mexico’s turnaround isn’t this sharp, young team making its sales calls on behalf of a country not known for its financial stability.

Nor is it the intriguing new international business opportunities, which Dallasites like Armando Gallardo have landed (see page 58) and which are critical to Dallas becoming Texas’ new business hub for Mexico.

It is instead Francisco Cruz’s story, one much smaller in scope, that speaks to me because it speaks to a change that is more philosophical than mercantilistic. It has deeper roots in Mexico’s past and portends more for Mexico’s future.

Five years ago, Cruz was one of a determined team putting out a weekly newspaper in Juarez to counter the views of the government-controlled paper. I remember the newspaper’s office: one desk, a few chairs and a table, one typewriter and a Macintosh computer in a worn, tired space.

On the weeks that staff members were paid-and many weeks they weren’t- Cruz received the equivalent of about $20 to $25. But for three years they stuck with their mission-exploring government corruption, drugs and misuse of state money while wrestling with an underlying fear of what the government might do to them if it wanted to.

Flash forward to spring 1992, and Cruz is in Dallas covering a free trade conference for an institution he once scorned: Notimex- the government-run news agency that sells stories to hundreds of television stations and newspapers across Mexico and Central America.

And he is doing his job on his terms. “I write everything that I think is going to affect people-from economics to death row,” says Cruz. “I have never been told what to write. That is what I like most. They respect the work I have done.”

So much so, that his move from Texas to Miami in late July was tied to a promotion. While based in San Antonio, Cruz was a one-person bureau, working out of his apartment; in Miami, he’s the bureau chief, with a real office and responsibility for two other staffers and coverage of Latin America.

Over the last few years, I’ve sensed his disbelief about how much has changed so quickly. Recently he put his days in Juarez in the most basic of contexts:

“At times I did not have money to eat.”

Cruz knows the poverty of Mexico that most Dallasites only glimpse in Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta. But he has also witnessed the first wave of a revolution, and I’m not sure many Dallasites have yet taken notice.

It is difficult to believe that a country for so long mired in poverty and political upheaval can save itself. And it would be naive to say that investment opportunities and journalistic freedom are all that is neces sary. But Dallas would be foolish to ignore the message or the messengers.