Will 2010 Be the Year the World Ends — for Mexico?

Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky’s actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it’s 2010, Mexico’s bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico’s 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico’s bloody, decade-long War of Independence in 1810.

You get the picture.

…Aside from inflated drug and guerrilla violence, another specter is unrest resulting from Mexico’s deflated economy. Given its enormous reliance on the U.S. market – and on remittances from Mexican workers there, which have declined sharply this year – the global recession has hit Mexico especially hard. Its GDP, in fact, will contract more than 5% in 2009, exacerbating unemployment as well as Mexico’s chronic poverty. A report this year by the Colegio de Mexico, one of the country’s top universities, warned, “A national social explosion is knocking at the door.” Said top Roman Catholic Bishop Gustavo Rodriguez, “We cannot separate the economic crisis from the violence and criminal crisis that we live day by day.”

Time