As everyone who watches Mexican television — or follows Mexican news — already knows, three Federal Policemen were lynched, two burned alive on national television Tuesday. The local police did not intervene and already everyone is accusing everyone else. 33 participants were arrested y esterday, but foreign reports are just coming out now… and, predicably, even the New York Times (Lynchings of Policemen Ignite Outrage at Violence in Mexico ) misses a lot of the story.
a href=”http://mexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/tlahuac1.jpg” mce_href=”http://mexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/tlahuac1.jpg” title=”tlahuac1.jpg”>
Foto: Jorge Carballo/El Universal
San Juan Ixtayopan Pueblo is 139-4-A on my Guia Roji… about as far geographically and culturally as you can possibly get from downtown Mexico City.
I’ve been out that way, but never in this particular pueblo … it’s a rural traditionalist community slowly being surrounded by suburbia. For those looking for the “real Mexico”, communities like this are part of it. They are part of the time-warp you sometimes find in Latin America, where traditionalism and moderity exist side by side. The traditionalists are a bit lost in the modern world … and as in other traditional communities in transition, drug abuse, alcoholism and violence are realities.
The victims were federal narcotics cops which — the reports that an unnamed mother suddenly fingered these guys as kidnappers” (as in the NYTimes report), or as child molesters, makes me think this was a “setup” by narcotics dealers. Parents anywhere in the world will fight for their kids. I lived in a U.S. city where a neighbor of mine was badly beaten before being rescured by the police because he was mistaken for a wanted child molester (the poor guy fit the general description and happened to take his second car — the same kind the molester was known to drive — to pick up his kids after school). In the “real Mexico”, justice can be kind of rough.
I’d argue it was the media and the conservatives that laid he groundwork for this. Conservatives — PAN and Televisa, etc. — have seized on every incident of missing children and schoolyard drug dealers (not acceptable, but the kinds of things that happen in any population this size) to push their political agenda, and undermine the legitimacy of the leftist DF administration. The local government — meeting parental demands for security — makes a big show out of school security. School kid now wear badges including not only their photo, but that of the person authorized to pick them up after school. And the teachers– and school security personnel — have to check the kids in and out. Picking up one’s kids is a tense situation, and people are wary of outsiders — like federal plainclothes cops hanging around watching the school. Add that this was a very closed community under threat by outsiders, where even the DF police are “outsiders” … this was a perfect opportunity for and any narco wanting to get rid of the feds.
I’m certainly not going to justify barbarism, nor claim “well, that’s life in the big city”… but it wasn’t “mindless savagry” or some dark soul of Mexico on display either. Some of the reports I’ve read give the subtle sense that Mexicans are savages. Not at all: human beings who feel threatened are savages.
2 responses so far ↓
Behold, I show you a mystery — in three parts… « The Mex Files // 26 November 2006 at 10:38 pm |
[...] As the politicos spin Everybody is blaming everybody else for the lynching. Of course. The Feds blame the local cops (who, apparently, warned the feds two weeks before the event that their “undercover” operation was making the neighbors very, very nervous). Their latest rationale is that they weren’t looking for drug dealers… they were looking for … TERRORISTS. Of course. Well, a couple misguided youths who set off a small bomb a couple of years ago and blew up a trashcan that broke a bank’s windows had some relatives that live down that way… so – of course – the feds stormed San Juan Ixtayopan, kicking in doors and dragging people off to the carcel. They had videos after all. And who is the first guy to go on trial? The guy who was barricaded in his house with a TV reporter the whole time. Of course!Fox has to blame … oh, somebody. He’s fired the fed police chief, and our local police chief for good measure. No real surprise there, though handing the guy his pink slip during a press conference at least made it look like something’s being done.The newest twist is the old “use and customs” defense. This goes back to Cortés – local communities had the right to their own “uses and customs” as long as they practiced the Catholic religion and didn’t challenge the King of Spain. The King is long gone, and we haven’t had a state religion since 1859. But, to make peace with the Zapatistas, “use and customs” was put back in the Constitution a few years ago. Alas, “uses and customs” aren’t always nice little things like colorful native ceremonies, but also things like chasing born-agains out of your village, and voting for the PRI and… beating the crap out of coppers with video cameras outside your local school. That’ll need some rethinking. [...]
Send in the marines? « The Mex Files // 13 May 2007 at 4:47 pm |
[...] Secondly, Mexico already has para-military police. The whole point of replacing the old Federales with the Policia Nacional and the Policia Judicial Federal was to get rid of corruption and put professionals under military control. The PNP officers come from the military academies and are supposedly professionals. I haven’t heard any suggestion that they just be better armed and trained. And, in the Federal District (that hotbed of socialist experimentation these days) the old fashioned approach of following the money trail, cracking down on laundering and gun running has been paying off handsomely, as in the meth lab seizure. And has been cleaning up its police department by just making basic reforms like prosecuting corrupt cops, paying a living wage and upping the physical and educational requirements. Marcelo Ebrard made his bones as a political figure by bringing his unlikely background as a social worker to Mexico City’s police commissioner. If you remember, when the Fox Administration tried to discredit the DF police, it backfired horribly… [...]