CARLOS Fuentes. Mexico's famous man of letters, has been mentioned as a possible future president of his troubled country. But the idea of becoming a Mexican Vaclav Havel is beyond even his imagination. He was described to me as "President of the Republic of Letters".
The author of The Old Gringo, which became a film starring Gregory Peck, was appalled at my suggestion. "No way, no way, was his reaction. Nevertheless he was ready with a manifesto. It is in stark contrast to Mexico's recent years of "free trade" and privatisation, which are widely considered to have discounted the majority of its 90 million people.
Over half of them are poor and 20 million of those are in abject poverty as the country suffers on from a 1995 economic crisis in which the peso lost 48 per cent of its value.
Will the chalice of power, of government and of the political system itself pass from the populist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), now in its seventh decade of continuous rule? This question occupies the elite and the suffering middle class, which lost heavily in the peso, crisis. Fuentes believes the PRI will come a cropper in elections on July 6th with "very heavy losses".
We were speaking just after he had accepted France's National Order of Merit for his contribution to arts and letters. Essayist, lecturer, at the most prestigious of universities in the United States, Cervantes Prize winner screenplay writer and author of 17 works, Carlos Fuentes was ambassador to France in the late 1970s. His most famous novel is here the Air is Clear (1958), a Marxist critique of human nature and an account of dissillusion with the 1910-17 Revolution.
At the end of his acceptance speech, at the elegant French embassy in Mexico City, he hit the hand that served the champagne and canapes. Taking up the issue of migrant workers, a hot one in Mexico now following the tightening of US immigration rules, he asked his hosts not to be racist, in their treatment of their own immigrants.
On the subject of immigrant workers in the cities and fields of Mexico's powerful neighbour, Fuentes believes: "The heart of the matter is that Mexican workers travel across the border in response to the demand of the US market. California produces one third of the nation's agricultural wealth, and 90 per cent of that wealth is harvested by Mexican hands. Exclude the Mexicans at the border and California will be in real trouble."
During the presidency of, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexico was famously called "the effect dictatorship by the visiting Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. He had to cut short his stay because of the furore his remark caused in the PRI ranks.
But Fuentes disagrees with Vargas Llosa's assessment. "Mexico is not `the perfect dictatorship'. It's an imperfect democracy and we are working very hard to make it a hit more perfect, he said.
In A New Time for Mexico, Fuentes traces his intense historical drama to the present day struggle between authoritarianism and democratic self rule. He spoke of building that bridge" (a hint of the politician?) between Mexico's two countries, "a rich, almost first world country at the top completely divided from the majority".
"I think this is a great country with a marvellous people with an enormous capacity for work. I would bank on the human and natural resources, especially on the human resources." He would give priority to education, employment, housing and health, "a basis on which Mexico can grow".
"I don't see how Mexico can grow on the basis of foreign investments that lead, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, to hasta la vista at the first sign of crisis.
Which brought us to the place in history of Ireland's best known Mexican, Carlos, Salinas, the vilified former president who led his country into the North American Free Trade Agreement enforcing greater contact with the old enemy to the north.
NAFTA was signed at the start of 1994, "the year of living dangerously", as Fuentes calls it. Gunfire from below proclaimed deep objection in the southern state of Chiapas to the marginalising effect of "neo liberal" economics on the Indian poor. This caught popular, even middle class, imagination. Official culture acknowledges a mestizo (mixed) memory of the Aztec, Mayan and conquistador civilisations.
Salinas is blamed for leaving power with an overvalued peso problem building into what would become a devaluation crisis the following year for President Ernesto Zedillo. The former president's lacklustre, though well regarded, successor is still doggedly following the Salinas free trade and privatisation policies.
Two high profile political murders, of Carlos Salinas's chosen successor and another of Salinas's former brother in law of which the former president's brother stands accused shook the cocktail of disaster.
So what will history say of President Salinas?
Salinas made the hopes of Mexicans rise so high that the let down has been tremendous and therefore he is everyone's favourite villa in . . . But I think things will even up. With that we will see the shadows and the lights of the Salinas government."
But what are the dangers of the rapid process of change in Mexico? With two generals arrested for drugs trade connections in recent times and with continuing social alienation, is there not a threat from the army?
"Could be. As things are going we are not lacing instability. I am very proud of the democratic process as it is developing. During the current Zedillo presidency alone the results in 29 governorship and other elections have been accepted as free and fair by the participants and 40 per cent of the country is governed by the [left wing Revolutionary Democratic Party and right wing National Action Party] opposition right now."
He agrees that the political stock of the PRI is now so bad that even if the party was declared the winner no one would believe it. "That is the problem: that the PRI might win and then democratically we'd have to believe the result."
"But there are many dinosaurs around," speaking of a handful of PRI billionaires who control many of Mexico's industries and many of the unashamedly pro PRI media. "Many people are not content with giving up power in a system that has lasted seven decades. It could create trouble, who knows? I hope they are not tempted because it would be disastrous for the country."
Asked to take up the theme of the intersection of the North American mentality, of mystery, and of the Mexican outlook, Carlos Fuentes says it is "very difficult" for Americans to understand Mexico, but in the opposite ease he allows a maybe to creep into, the evaluation of Mexicans understand in of the US.
I don't think there is another frontier in the world with such different Cultures, such different mentalities. It is far deeper than that between Ireland and Britain, which is already saying a great deal." He smiled.
"But we are destined to live together. Sometimes I think the US would like to see Mexico drift off to the South Seas somewhere. And the Mexicans certainly would like the US to drift off to the North Pole. But it is not going to happen. We are going to have to find ways of living together with a maximum of equitable dealing and justice and diplomacy and creativity and imagination.