Mexico has more to it than drugs and immigration

Mexico has been in the news frequently of late as the government carries out a crack-down on drug cartels and organized crime, the country’s murder rate is up, journalists have been killed for investigative reporting on drug gangs and our image internationally has generally been diminished by the tunnel vision of international news providers.
But there is more to Mexico than our long-running problem of immigration to the United States or the resurgent drug violence, there are many aspects to the country that both citizens and foreigners may not have known, such as in the realm of science and technological advancement.
Mexico is classified as a developing nation, but there is much innovation and invention taking place in the country, despite a ‘middle-income’ economy on the world stage, the capital city, Mexico City, is a hub of commerce and science. In fact, if Mexico City were its own country, it would be ranked 30th in the world for the size of its economy, according to recent Mexico news reports.
Mabe is one of the major global corporations headquartered in Mexico City, the company reported revenues in 2009 of $4 billion and employs over 21,000 people worldwide, what many may not realize about Mabe is not only that it is a fully Mexican trans-national corporation, but it also produces one in four of the home appliances sold in the United States.
The reason much of the American public may not know such a fact is because Mabe sells its products to large American corporations, such as General Electric, which then markets them under its own brand name. Mexico does not only export immigrants then, and similarly, its contribution to the world’s knowledge has been just as under-stated.
In the United States, where Mexico is seen as a corrupt, immigrant-producing beast it is probably not well-known that a Mexican inventor by the name of Guillermo González Camarena introduced color-wheel color television to Mexico at around the same time that the new type of broadcast was being introduced in the US.
This was in the 1940s, 1942 to be exact, when Camarena applied for his patent in the US. Mexico, far from being a developing backward nation, was keeping pace with the US. In other areas we out-stripped them. In 1887 the Mondragón rifle was patented by General Manuel Mondragón, it was the world’s first automatic rifle and was sold to over 15 countries around the world, including Nazi Germany several decades later, revealing the oft-nefarious nature of some technological achievement.
It was not until 1917 that the US would develop a strong competitor for the Mondragón, the now-iconic Browning Automatic Rifle or BAR. In this area it has not been Mexico’s inability to produce something new, or invent something revolutionary, but rather our failure to keep pace, to be consistent.
Going back further into the 19th century, there is another prominent name that appears in the history of Mexican science and technological achievements, Andrés Manuel del Río, a famous Mexican scientist who discovered the chemical element vanadium in 1801, but his discovery often mistakenly attributed to Nils Gabriel Sefström, who claimed to have discovered the element in 1830.
There is much that is wrong with Mexico, much work to be done, progress to be made in the areas of social services, education and human development. The crime situation needs to be brought under control, corruption in government stamped out and the Mexicans crossing the US border every year need to be given a reason to stay, but this can only happen by remembering that there is more to our country than what foreign news reports suggest.