Tag Archives: Mexico

La Primavera Mexicana

25 May

I spent most of the month of April in Mexico waiting for something interesting to happen that I could write about in The Global Kiosk. I chatted about the upcoming elections with cab drivers, hairdressers, friends and neighbours, and everyone said more or less the same thing: that they were not going to vote for the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s Enrique Peña Nieto, but that he would undoubtedly win. Early surveys – the election is July 1 – also put him 20 points ahead of the next candidate down for the race to the presidency.

Then, in May, I come to Haiti – and interesting things start bubble up in Mexico. A bit of a kerfuffle for Peña Nieto at an elite university, the Ibero Americana. Okay. Maybe a bit of an embarrassment for a man who disdains education and use of the brain in decision-making, but no big deal. The young people shouting “Out Peña Nieto” were but a rabble-esque minority, said his campaign people and the self-styled pundits at the country’s main television news provider, Televisa. Let’s get on with our taking over the country again.

Then, as I say, the reactions started to bubble up, and seep into the national conscience. The tech-savvy Ibero students began to counter the image invented for them by the PRI and their wealthy mouthpieces at Televisa. They began to put out the real story on Twitter and Facebook and even made a short film – 131 Students of the Ibero Respond – that got more than 1.2 million views within a week.

Then the street protests began, with student marches in more than 20 cities on the 19th. Another big demonstration in the Zocalo of Mexico City the following day organized by the PRD contender, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – a candidate whom the students were clear about indicating they wouldn’t necessarily back. And then another big anti-establishment – for lack of a better word – demonstration last Thursday night.

Suddenly we are paying attention.

And the details to which we are paying attention are interesting: as a new article by my husband, Luis Porter, in U2000 points out, if the original rejection of Peña Nieto had occurred at the country’s largest public university, the UNAM, it would have died on the spot. People expect that kind of thing from the leftist hotbed it is supposed to be.

But the kids at the Ibero are the children of Mexico’s ambitious middle and upper classes. They study hard, work hard and want to succeed in life. (In every issue of business magazine Expansion’s annual list of the nation’s top entrepreneurs, almost everyone is an Ibero grad.) They aren’t used to being shoved to the sidelines with the suggestion they don’t know what they’re talking about or have been bought off by Peña Nieto’s opponents.

But it is now clear that this sense of youthful indignation is not confined to students whose parents can afford to send them to a private university. It is being felt by young people all over the country. They all want their vote to mean something. They are all fed up with being told what to think by a media empire (and how the on-going Rupert Murdoch saga now springs to mind as well) that trades in cheap sentiment and biased reporting in lieu of informing a populace so that it can make its own decisions. They are not buying the soap opera narrative of the young, good-looking politician with the actress wife and lovely family returning the country to the stability of days gone by.

In fact, there is much about the protests that remind me of the Occupy movement. Somewhat like Occupy’s “We are the 99%,” the movement in Mexico is calling itself “I am #132,” each protestor adding him or herself to the original group that pointed out that they had the right to voice an opinion, to demand more than good looks and mega-corporate backing as qualifications to run their country.

They’re not telling anyone who they should vote for, or even who they will vote for, only that times have changed. That they represent a new generation of Mexicans that has gone outside the traditional media to inform themselves, and that they care about the direction their country is going.

And it’s pretty clear that they don’t want a society where illegal immigration is the normal response to low wages or unemployment, where monopolies and duopolies hog economic activity, and public spending is a till filled with the many hands of the corrupt. They don’t want to be told that the July 1 election is already, as so often in the past, a fait accompli.

They are so far the sole indication that business as usual, whether by the dinosaurs of the PRI or any self-interested politician, is standing on ever more fragile legs in Mexico right now.

Is this the sign of  a Mexican Spring? We don’t know yet. But the power of mobilization the youth of Mexico have brought into play is, I think, something no one is going to denigrate, or forget, anytime soon.

OpCartel Update

4 Nov

Well the person kidnapped by the Zetas cartel in Veracruz has been released — apparently at about the time I was posting last night.
But with that person came a chilling message for Anonymous — something along the lines of of ‘we will kill 10 people for every person you name.’ So the group has decided not to reveal any of the information they have.
Now some people are calling the hackers everything from cowards to ‘accomplices’ of the Zetas.
But please — let’s get real. It is the job of the Mexican government to deal with this dangerous criminal gang – not a bunch of computer geeks. They say they got the information from a Mexican government website in the first place. And that means authorities already know exactly what it contains — but have decided not to do anything about it. So — who are the cowards and accomplices now?

Mexico’s drug cartels and the death of a poet’s son

3 Apr

Last Monday, police made yet another gruesome discovery along the margins of the Cuernavaca-Acapulco highway – the bodies of seven young people, including that of a woman. Among the dead was 24-year-old Juan Sicilia, son of a well-known Mexican poet named Javier Sicilia.

As so often is the case with these mysterious deaths, it isn’t clear why Juan Sicilia was targeted, but I can’t help but wonder if it is because his father writes a column in magazine, Processo – Mexico’s only serious magazine, and only truly coherent source of information about the country’s drug cartels and their connections.

Everyone in Mexico, I feel, must be getting sick and tired of so much violence, so much disgrace. The shadows in which thousands of murderers operate and the complete disinterest of authorities in bringing the guilty to justice never seem to change. These deaths are just another tragic story, another opportunity to wonder how their families must be feeling, and when or how all of this will ever end. Mexico has become a nation, as Javier Sicilia himself put it, “with a rotten heart.”

These murders come just as Britain’s Observer has published a long and detailed piece about the Wachovia, a US bank now owned by Wells Fargo, and its shameless laundering of billions of drug cartel profits – the kind of cash that helps pay for the cruel deaths of criminal competitors and innocent bystanders alike.

The article (a must-read) quotes federal prosecutor Jeffrey Sloman saying “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.” It also points out how the bank, which got a $25 billion bailout from the tax-payer, paid a total fine that “was less than 2% of the bank’s $12.3bn profit for 2009.” Equally shocking is the amount of money Wachovia processed – almost $379 billion, about a third of Mexico’s entire GDP.

The murders also inspired my husband to write his column for an academic weekly called U2000 about the darkening prospects for Mexico’s youth. He teaches at a public his university, his students “the ones who have had the rare opportunity (in a country that leaves the majority of its youth out of the school system) to grow, to learn, to read other texts (neither those of the media, nor the cartels’ mantas and posters, nor the television news read out in that ambiguous tone pretending sympathy but that just ends up sounding idiotic) about what the human soul signifies, and how great is the capacity of men and women to realize projects and actions – transcendent ideas that, rather than leaving us ashamed, fill us with pleasure and pride.

Instead university and the society it mirrors kill our young people, stigmatize them, marginalize them, exclude them, impede them from arriving, impede them from working, close off the paths of the future, murder their hopes, their poetic sensibility and creativity, and condemn them to frustration, powerlessness and the hate that a society with decades of impunity and corruption generates.”

The poet too has spoken in public about his son’s death, saying that he will not write again.

News Flash! Global Food System Fails Millions

25 Feb

A recent article about a new report on hunger and food security caught my attention recently, just as work and the news of mass protests across North Africa have kept me from paying any attention to it. Not that the headline in the Guardian, or rather the deck, wasn’t compelling: “The existing food system fails half the people on the planet and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns,” it said.

Said report, handily named ‘Foresight,’ has called for a “transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution.” Wow. Its suggestions include the provision of technical support in more modern agricultural methods to poor countries, greater investment in GM crops and even animal cloning, all in an effort to beef up the amount of food the world produces. It also calls for better transport links and for cutting down on the vast amounts of food that goes to waste — anywhere from 30 to 50 per cent of everything produced. (To me, that would seem like the answer right there.)

But while it makes clear the imperative that increases in food production need to come without the corresponding increase in greenhouse gas, it also warns that organic agriculture “should not be adopted as the main strategy to achieve sustainable and equitable global food security.” (my italics)

So here is where many, including myself, start to find the short-sightedness in ‘Foresight’ (which was originally commissioned by a branch of the British government). While the U.N.’s Olivier de Schutter points out that hunger is not a technical question but a political one,  Devinder Sharma said the authors “call for radical change but they really want to intensify existing policies.”

In fact, the report acknowledges the concerns many have regarding corporate concentration in the global food business, but says that “there does not seem to be an argument for intervention to influence the number of companies in each area or how they operate…” (my italics again)

Nor could I find any reference at all, in the executive summary at least, on the need for land reform – to take land away from governments, companies and big private landowners and give it to landless peasants along with, yes, technical advice and good infrastructure.

This is odd considering that the summary does indicate that in poor nations like those of Africa, “agriculture provides not only food for households but also very important means of broadly based income generation.”

It cites studies showing that a one per cent gain in GDP from agriculture “generates a 6 per cent increase in overall expenditure of the poorest 10 per cent of the population, while the equivalent figure for GDP growth originating in non-agricultural sectors is zero growth.” So land reform does make economic sense.

Yet for all its headline-grabbing rhetoric, Foresight’s recommendations are really pretty conventional. Compare them to those of the eye-glazingly-titled  International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development; despite the boring name, that study does, for example,  see “increasing access by small-scale farmers to land and economic resources” as an “important option” for improving the lives of the rural poor.

Whether it’s planting ‘cade’ fruit trees around crops in Senegal or transforming urban wasteland into organic vegetable plots in São Paulo, personal experience has shown me numerous examples of peasant farmers themselves finding ways to increase production and enhance environments at the same time. From Indonesia to Africa and Mexico to Brazil, having sufficient land, fairer market access and freedom from expensive commercial fertilizers and pesticides have brought the poor not only better livelihoods and nutrition, but dignity.

Cheap Labour? Or cheap life…

17 May

Alicia Cordoba lives in a house with bare cinderblock walls and a cement floor, divided from a small and very basic shop by a curtain made from an old sheet. The shop provides a precarious living; thick on the ground of Mexico’s urban streetscapes, especially in poor neighbourhoods, they offer snacks, soft drinks, soap, bleach, batteries and other prosaic things people need, items that earn the shop owner a peso here, fifty centavos there. This dark and unlovely shop, like so many others,  is a survival mechanism more than a business.

Alicia and her late husband, Concepcion Garcia, thought they would do better than this eventually, as he signed up to work at a greenhouse in Leamington, Ontario, for $7.25 an hour. Prior to that, Concepcion made about $80 a week in Mexico City, parking and washing cars. But a lot of the young men in Cujinco, the town where they lived with Alicia’s parents, were leaving for jobs in Canada through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, and in the year 2000, he went too.

Working 70 hour weeks at Amco Produce, Concepcion was able to bring home enough money to buy a lot and build a basic structure for his wife and their young son. But one day sometime in the summer of 2003, the pesticide machine he was using came apart, spraying him in the face and upper body. Another Mexican working there, Francisco Garcia, says Conception wasn’t allowed to go clean up. He did apparently at some point see a doctor, but by the time he flew back home in October, Alicia’s husband was extremely ill. He had terrible headaches and began to hemorrhage from his left eye. He went several times to clinics in Mexico, but in early February 2004, died. His death, says Alicia, left her “depressed, in debt and really really bad.” Barely scraping by, she has tried to claim some kind of compensation several times but to no avail. Because he was a temporary worker, no one has taken any responsibility for her husband’s workplace accident.

In fact the only people who have tried to help her is the United Food and Agricultural Workers Union, a union to which Concepcion didn’t even have the right to join. They gave her 5000 pesos to sew and embroider cloth bags which they sell, and that money allowed her to open the shop. But the lack of protection for temporary foreign workers in Canada remains. With almost 200,000 of them coming to Canada from all over the world in 2008 alone, one has to wonder how many more Alicias are out there, trying as best as they can to deal with their bad luck, government hand washing and corporate shirking of its legal obligations.

Mexico’s Judiciary Defies Reason — Yet Again

3 May

 

Teresa and Alberta sold rag dolls just like these in Santiago Mexquitlan market.

 

Back in Mexico and doing research for both an article and a new book, one particular news item has caught my attention. It has to do with the recent pardon two indigenous women from Queretaro received from Mexico’s Supreme Court. Teresa Gonzalez, 25, and Alberta Alcantara, 31, had been charged – incredibly – with kidnapping six Federal Investigation Agency officers back in 2006. Even more incredibly, they were actually found guilty.

Set up as frontline police in the fight against corruption, the AFI was a well-paid elite force that was supposed to do a better job than the myriad local and national police forces that suffer from such a great lack of confidence here. In March 2006, however, a group of them invaded a small marketplace in Santiago Mexquitlan with neither uniforms nor warrants, and began to confiscate the vendors’ goods without handing over the corresponding documentation. In other words they went in to harass or rob the vendors, who reacted angrily and attracted the attention of local state police. Months later, the AFI arrested Gonzalez, pregnant at the time, and Alcantara,  along with another woman, Jacinta Francisco, who happened to be walking by. She managed to not so much prove her innocence as have a judge believe it and was freed last September.

But Gonzalez and Alcantara were found guilty in spite of the officers’ conflicting testimony, the failure of one to them to even show up – and in open defiance of all logic – and given 21-year prison sentences.

The case, while far from unique, exposes serious problems in Mexico’s policing and judiciary. The AFI was disbanded and reformed under a new name last May, after it was found that about one third of its members were involved in crime. As far as the judges and Attorney General staff who found merit in the bizarre accusations, they continue in their positions. Both bodies are referred to by Refugee Board members as examples of state protection as they routinely turn down Mexicans seeking asylum in Canada. In fact, it is significant that neither of the women have been declared innocent, merely pardoned and freed. 

The real evidence here shows how both policing and legal protection continue to be totally arbitrary in Mexico. The poor are at greatest risk of injustice, but in the end, no one is immune. While organized crime continues to indulge in violent mayhem and Mexico’s governors continue to swear by the integrity of their ‘institutions,’ more and more Mexicans will fear for their lives and flee for somewhere safe. But as Canada turns down more than 90 per cent of refugee claims, and refuses to stop calling Mexico a “non-refugee-producing country” they are not likely find help from a nation that once seemed to pride itself on doing the right thing.

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