The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady is probably the only writer I’ll miss if the Journal, as owner Rupert Murdoch threatens, becomes unavailable on the internet without a subscription. Not that I think O’Grady is a good analyst… exactly the opposite. She’s even a better barometer of what Latin Americans are NOT going to do than the Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer.   Oppenheimer accepts as gospel whatever the Latin American right-wing says, but sometimes the rightist win elections.  O’Grady makes shit up.

Her pernicious fictions about Honduras were accepted by the Obama Administration (or, at least, they were by South Carolina Senator Jim De Mint, and the Administration, for domestic policy reasons, was willing to sacrifice Honduran democracy in exchange for a rather unimportant vote on confirming state department appointees) but no one is buying her tales lately.

A recent O’Grady “analysis” of the upcoming Bolivian elections is described by El Gaviero as a

… factually challenged screed [which] fails on many levels, one being her deification of disgraced former Bolivian president Gonzalo “Goni the Gringo” Sánchez de Lozada (presently wanted in Bolivia for ordering the massacre of his countrymen and a defendant in the U.S. for said crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings).

Read his post.   The humiliating deconstruction of O’Grady’s thesis  by twenty United States, French and Bolivian academics is a masterpiece of invective.

You might expect ol’ hippies (er, young hippies) out in the jungle like Gav to excoriate capitalist tools (in the bad sense) like O’Grady — but good churchgoing mid-western Lutherans (aka “God’s Frozen People”) are supposed to be slow to anger… even by those circumnavigations about the periphery of veracity.

Tim’s El Salvador Blog is royally frosted by an 8 November 2009 O’Grady piece in which she claims that a split among congressional representatives of El Salvador’s far-right Arena party (the issue being investigation of fraud in an agricultural subsidy program) somehow is the work of Hugo Chavez.

You might have thought that this fear-mongering about El Salvador becoming a puppet state of Venezuela would have ended with the shut down of ARENA’s propaganda machine after the March elections, but not so for O’Grady. She consciously decides not to mention [Salvadorian President Mauricio] Funes 84% approval rating, the decidedly moderate measures taken by the government in the past 5 months, and the repeated statements by the FMLN leadership that they support Funes and have no difference in opinion with him. Sometimes when I see someone spouting such nonsense, I can’t resist responding.

I’m not going to embarrass myself by trying to quote Virgil in the original (not that I’m a Latin scholar in any way, though I’ve picked up a few phrases here and there), but the Roman poet immortalized a lousy writer of his day as one  “tolerated neither by the gods, nor by men or nor by book sellers”.   Mary Anastasia O’Grady will be remembered — if at all — in Latin AMERICAN letters as one “tolerated neither by men of God, nor by scholars, nor by book-sellers.” And that’s giving her more credit than she’s worth.

Mexico is the United States’ closest Latin American neighbor and yet most U.S. citizens receive little reliable information about what is happening within the country. Instead, Mexico and Mexicans are often demonized in the U.S. press. The single biggest reason for this is the way that the entire binational relationship has been recast in terms of security over the past few years.

From a neighbor and a trade partner, Mexico has been portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security. Immigrants are no longer immigrants, but criminals, “removable aliens,” and even potential terrorists. Latinos, mostly Mexicans, are now the largest group of victims of hate crimes in the United States.

Although Mexico-bashing has been a favorite sport of the right for years, this terrible conversion of Mexico, from an ally to a “failed state” and narco-haven in the media and policy circles, began in earnest under the Bush administration and has only intensified since then. The Merida Initiative and the militarization of Mexico are the direct outgrowth of the national security framework imposed on bilateral relations.

So argues Laura Carlsen, as a twenty year veteran of Mexican political analysis, a writer and — most importantly — a Mexican mother. Carlsen notes, as many of us with less time as analysts have also noted, the the so called Plan Merida was neither a Mexican initiative, nor does it involve actually supporting Mexican anti-crime activities with direct funding.

… Plan Mexico—as it was first called—has its roots in the Security and Prosperity Partnership that grew out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When the regional trade agreement was expanded into a security agreement, the Bush administration sought a means to extend its national security doctrine to its regional trade partners. This meant that both Canada and Mexico were to assume counter-terrorism activities (despite the absence of international terrorism threats in those nations)…

Although U.S. troops cannot operate by law in Mexican territory, the plan significantly increases the presence of U.S. agents and intelligence services, now estimated at 1,400, and of U.S. private security companies throughout Mexico.

The terms of the Merida Initiative sends the full $1.3 billion appropriated so far to U.S. defense, security, information technology and other private-sector firms, and the U.S. government. One hundred percent of the money stays in the United States since the plan prohibits cash payments to Mexico.

In other words, what it does is ensure an expanding market for defense and security contracts, in an undeclared war that has no exit strategy in sight.

Suggesting, as Ms. Carlsen does, that the Mexican drug war was mostly a way of propping up the dubious electoral legitimacy of the Calderón administration may be somewhat an over-simplification, but there is no denying that militarization has been a human rights and social disaster.  Although she still puts faith in the Obama Administration’s willingness to reorient its policies towards Mexico and Latin America (which I tend to doubt will happen) she makes a couple salient points U.S. citizens and policymakers need to heed:

Militarization is not the way to deal with Mexico’s political crisis and infusing government money into industries based on blood is not the way to deal with the U.S. economic crisis.

Mexico should be a U.S. priority. But providing exclusively security-focused equipment and training to Mexico is like pouring gas on a fire.

Citizens in both countries stand to lose by viewing the complex binational relationship through the reductionist lens of national security. Critical issues have fallen from the agenda or receive merely lip service. Among them: trans-border livelihoods in the world’s most integrated borderlands, immigration, regional environmental threats, trade, and a sustainable energy future.

We must return the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the simple equation that a healthy neighbor equals better trade, security, and cultural relations.

Her entire article (which should be required reading for anyone living in Mexico, anyone concerned with Mexican issues, or paying taxes in the United States) , “Perils of Plan Mexico: Going Beyond Security to Strengthen U.S.-Mexico Relations“, is at the Council for International Polciy Americas’ Program website.

Really, why is anyone surprised that the U.S. Democratic Party is any more reactionary than the Republican Party when it comes to Latin American policy?

Via Honduras Oye!:

“I am surprised to see NDI joining the International Republican Institute in its efforts to legitimize another coup,” Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. “NDI has generally been less willing to support coups and anti-democratic regimes than has its Republican counterpart.”

It would get tedious to work out my thesis that both U.S. parties (and in any real sense, there are only two parties in the United States) are always going to have the same Latin American policy.  Neither have an internationalist outlook, like Christian Democrats or Socialists.  Both are based in 19th century “liberalism” (although the parties use the word in a different sense in the United States) and are more or less National Action parties (like the Gaulists in France, or PAN here) — more or less based in the idea that nationalism trumps ideology or economic theory, and the way things are is the way they should be.

Both U.S. parties have accepted the idea of exploiting the Americas going back to the Monroe Administration and it hasn’t changed any since then.  Oh, the days of gunboat diplomacy are a bit passe, and maybe the CIA is a little more subtle about it, but the intended results are the same.

As Richard Nixon said, “no one gives a shit about the place” — and, at least among the political elite, that’s always been true.  Consider that the Obama Administration nominated the disgraced former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, to a post where he can do even more pernicious damage:  Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (i.e., spy in chief).  Consider that democracy in Honduras was sold out by the Obama Administration to satisfy domestic political needs — specifically that of Senator Jim De Mint of South Carolina, and to move a former Bush state department figure into a more economically important job as Ambassador to Brazil.

Or look at continued (and expanded) support for the Uribe regime in Colombia… including overt military support.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Obama administration has made the world a better place (if only in jump-starting some long overdue mild reforms to the United States’ bloated economic system and in being a little more subtle when it comes to bullying their fellow nations in the hemisphere), but”change we can believe in” ends at the Rio Grande River.

It’s one of those great gross-out tales, supposedly only coming from the Heart of Darkness, i.e., Latin America:

Reuters (19-November-2009):

LIMA, Nov 19 (Reuters) – Peruvian police said on Thursday they had broken up a gang that allegedly killed dozens of people and sold their fat to buyers who used it to make cosmetics.

Four Peruvians were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, murder and trafficking in human fat.

The group stored the fat it collected in used soda and water bottles, which police showed reporters.

“We have people detained who have declared and stated how they murdered people with the aim being to extract their fat in rudimentary labs and sell it,” said Police Commander Angel Toldeo.

In addition to those taken into custody, police said they were searching for others who bought fat from the gang or might have worked with it.

Remains from some of the victims were found at a rural house in the region of Huanuco where the group worked, according police video.

Police said they were investigating 60 disappearances in the area that might be linked to the gang…

At first glance, it almost makes sense.  After all, it feeds into two basic cliches.  Either that those living in the jungle, or in Latin America, or the “third world” are savages who don’t have the same standards of decency WE do; or the decadent west are the ruthless exploiters and murders of the masses, all in the name of profit without honor.

Then… some doubts creep in.  Why would one need “labs” — crude or otherwise — to render fat.  You need a big pot, some water and a spoon.  Secondly, who’d pay $15,000 U.S. dollars a liter for the stuff, as the killers claimed?

Dr. Julio Castro,   the dean of Lima’s College of Medicine, is quoted as saying “Hundreds of liters of human fat are obtained every day at cosmetic clinics, and disposed of” .   OK, I know enough basic economics to understand that the rarer the product, the higher the price, and there’s plenty of alternative sources of human fat. Maybe skinny Peruvian fat has some special ingredients we don’t know about.  Is it marketing?  Or just bullshit?

I don’t know the source of this map, but it shows the world’s countries proportional to daily caloric intake per person.  Peru (and all South America) is underweight, and Mexico (supposedly the second fattest nation on earth) isn’t as chubby you think:

In addition to  various Spanish language sites, the Mexican newspapers, and a couple of on-line wonkish foreign policy publications.  Mex Files  subscribes (via RSS feeder) to about two dozen English-language blogs.  Most are in Mexico, although that includes blogs from throughout the hemisphere.    Some are seldom quoted, but read regularly, and — if if not directly related to what is written about here — a joy to read.  Like Bob Mrotek’s wonderful and erudite “Mexico Bob Blogspot“.  Mexico Bob knows his history, his Mexican culture and a good eye for detail.  His posts are thoughtful and well researched — not something I can say about the two I’ve decided to drop from my RSS reader.

Borderlands Beat (not worth the link) is a cop site… all about the murder and mayhem of the “drug war”… and, so I’ve noticed, hopelessly inaccurate.  A recent post on a police assassination in my state seemed to think the either the “Port of Mazatlan” — or the whole state –  has a “mayor” named Mercedes Murillo de Esquer.  There is such a person, the head of a non-governmental organization concerned with safety and security issues, in Cuiliacán, but she has no official role in the municipal governments of either the MUNICIPIO of Mazatlán, nor of Navolato, where the crime under discussion occurred.  This is poor investigation for a cop, and even worse for a reporter, who at least should provide a readable narrative.

Less annoying perhaps, but also being dropped is one of those “My Life in Mexico” sites (that shall remain nameless and linkless to protect the innocent) that I had hope for.  The author is a dependent of the United States Embassy, but apparently happy to remain a clueless tourist.  At least, not knowing that Mexico is a major agricultural exporter, including fruit, she finds the fact that there is fruit fly control something to be tagged “only in Mexico”.  Please!

I’ll keep reading “Crooks and Liars” (a U.S. based “progressive” site) even though it seems to think Telemundo is a MEXICAN television network*.    Telemundo is a PUERTO RICAN corporation owned by the National Broadcasting System and MSN, both United States corporations.  Last time I checked, Puerto Rico as still a Commonwealth of the United States, and geographically an island in the Caribbean, not part of Mexico.

Some of the programming (especially telenovelas) are Mexican produced, and Telemundo stations can be picked up in a few frontier towns, but nope, not Mexican.  Maybe the “progressive” folks at Crooks and Liars can explain why they assume a woman speaking English with a Spanish-language accent is — ipso facto — Mexican, I’ll leave to smarter people than myself when it comes to the U.S. Latino experience.

Besides, while Mexican television news programs sometimes interview in English (Conservative journalist Sergio Sarmiento often interviews foreign newsmakers in English on his television program, La entrevista con Sarmiento) and there are a few English-language news broadcasts (notably Ana Maria Salazar’s radio program for Imagen Informativa, Mexican television has no interest in a washed up hack like Lou Dobbs.  Mexican Americans, and Mexican immigrants to the United States, yes.  But he’s irrelevant to Mexico, and there’s no reason for him to be interviewed by Mexican television.

Nor, apparently, to trust even “progressives” to get the facts right when they talk about Mexico.  Their hearts may be in the right place, but their brains are stuck up their ass.

* They must read The Mex Files… at least they’ve changed the text  to read “Spanish language network…” but letting the original error through a site that is, presumably edited, and written by David Niewart, who makes a name for himself as an expert on racism and the media, this was still boneheaded.

Philip Caputo has been writing about war and the corruption of war since his Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, first appeared in 1977.  As a Chicago Tribune reporter, that includes the generally bloodless — but highly corrupting — world of Chicago politics.

In the December 2009 The Atlantic Caputo turns his attention to the “War on Drugs” in Mexico.

I have a problem with the title — “The Fall of Mexico” — suggesting first that the Calderón-Bush-Obama Administrations “War” is central to the Republic (only to the present administration) or that the authoritarian streak in the present Mexican government is somehow a product of this war.

While Caputo, of course, is going to focus on the “drug warriors”, their victims and the “collateral damage” of this war, he — like most writers — only focuses on the Mexican side of the border region.  He never seems to venture further south than Nuevo Casas Grandes, a couple of hours south of Columbus, New Mexico.  At most, he’s talking about a frontier “war”.  This isn’t to say that the people living along the border are not part of the “real Mexico”, but that the social conditions along the frontier are not necessarily those of the majority of Mexicans, nor that everyone along the border is affected with despair and hopelessness (Mexicans have a sense of black humor which accounts for some of the grafitti Caputo quotes as meaningful).

Caputo’s premise that the “War” is has created repression and corruption (or has allowed it to flourish), seem to put the cart before the horse.  Although Calderón’s electoral victory is problematic, he did receive a little over a third of all votes in the 2006 Election, campaigning on an authoritarian “law and order” platform that presupposed state sanctioned violence.  The border region strongly supported PAN, so there is no denying that there wasn’t already support for a heavy-handed “solution” in search of a problem.

While “corruption” has risen (at least by the standards of Transparency International) under this administration, the increase in perceived corruption may be independent of the “drug war” excesses.

Neither of which is to say that Caputo’s article is off-target.  It isn’t.  Consider WHO the casualties are in this “war”:

Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats. The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be.

And, I’d add, a good number of those military casualties have been the victims of “friendly fire”, plane and truck accidents and the like.  Perhaps, the “war” should not be seen as “asymetical warfare” — or even a police operation gone amuck — but, as Caputo quotes Gustavo de la Rosa, the former Chihuahua state ombudsman for Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, as saying, as a creeping military coup:

… the president, elected in 2006 by a margin as thin as an ATM card, called out the army not merely to fight the cartels and eliminate a threat to national sovereignty but to consolidate his power and confer legitimacy on his presidency. “Calderón wants to show the Congress that the military is with him,” de la Rosa said. “And the military promised to support Calderón in exchange for being allowed out of the barracks, because the army wants to govern. Chihuahua is an experiment. What is happening here is in essence a military coup, a regional coup.” To support this contention, he cited a change he has had to make in his own work. Under normal circumstances, he would file complaints of abuse with the state governor, but now, he said, “the governor is ineffective, so I have to go to General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, the comandante of the 5th Military District.”

The militarization of Mexico is noticeable.  Calderón is the first president to be regularly photographed in a military uniform since Manuel Ávila Camacho, who was a real Army General, and was the president during a declared war (the War against Nazifascism, as it’s styled here).  Ávila Camacho also demilitarized the government (being the last general to serve as President) and — while the military certainly has been used for political repression since the Second World War — the generally high regard for the military in Mexican society rests largely on its apolitical and non-aggressive missions: resource and environmental protection and disaster relief.

And, give Vicente Fox his due… he overtly toned down militarism, going so far as to try canceling the annual Revolution Day parade in Mexico City — succeeding in at least making the patriotic (and impressive) exercise less a display of firepower and military might, as a celebration of sports and health.  After all, we’re talking about a nation where the tanks and missiles and scarily-armed paratroopers are impressive, but the crowds cheer for the Army cooks, the navy nurses and the kids in the Servicio Militar Nacional carrying shovels and seedlings.  And where the national service requirement crosses most 18-year olds minds as meaning clerking in a government office, or going door to door as a census taker or planting trees… not carrying a gun.

That anti-militarist strain is coming to the surface.  It’s not so much weariness with the “war”, nor the occasional admissions that the Army is being used to repress not just some gangsters, but political and social dissent as well that is making people turn from the military solution.  It is one factor in the rejection of PAN and President Calderón at the polling booth, and a likely factor in a return to the “corrupt” but more mainstream PRI (or a compromise left candidate) in the 2012 Presidential election.

What will not rein in the military are renewed U.S. “demands” for “human rights accountability” in the funding for the Merida Initiative.  As I explained when the issue was first raised, the Mexican objection is that such strings would require Mexico to centralize its police — and major constitutional changes that would simply entrench the Federal government’s present attempts to reverse the trend toward wider democratic and citizen participation and leave it in the hands of “experts” in the Capital.

The U.S. financed “war” in Colombia has not improved human rights, nor spread democracy in that unhappy nation.  While Colombia’s situation is complicated by a sixty-year old civil war that has gotten mixed in with that nation’s best known illegal export, “human rights provisions” have a way of corrupting the central power to create the illusion of “progress”… and to create their own upside down logic — making dissent, on paper if not reality, equal to criminality, to meet the demands that repression is progress in creating human rights.

The idea that the Merida Initiative was for Mexico’s benefit is nonsense.  The money goes to business interests in the United States.  The tools for repression fo to the present administration in Mexico and the rest of us live with the results.

Although the news of the gruesome murder of a Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, a cross-dressing Puerto Rican teenager — seen as a test of new hate-crimes laws in the United States — received extensive attention in both the Latino/a and gay media, the Latin American press gave more coverage to the upcoming nuptuals of José María De Bello and Alex Freyre, scheduled for the first of December in Buenos Aires.

De Bello and Freyre will be the first legally married same-sex couple in SOUTH America, although not in Latin America.  Coahuila state in northern Mexico has had same-sex marriages since Civil Registar Civil Registrar Alberto Villareal of Saltillo issued a marriage license to Karla López and Karina Almaguer on the first of Februrary, 2007.

It appears that marriages in Coahuila are legal anywhere in Mexico, making de facto same-sex marriages legal, and there haven’t been any problems or really any news about this since then.  If the Federal District — which had already passed a bill granting limited rights to same-gender couples (Sociedades de convivencia) came into effect the month after Coahuila’s marriage law — also, as expected, passes a full marriage law, there will probably be a push-back by the Federal legislature, as there has been in the Dominican Republic, which changed its constitution to read like that in some U.S. states, defining marriage as between “one man and one woman”.

The Dominican Republic, of course, has always taken its cues from the Colossus of the North, and Puerto Rico is under the United States flag.  Mexico’s was the first to change its constitution to specifically mention rights for sexual minorities, and as constitutions have been amended throughout Latin America, rights are slowly being given legal recognition.

An  article in the February 2009 Foreign Policy argues that Latin American gays — being in nations not traditionally Protestant (as is the United States) nor Islamic (Guyana, which is 12 percent Muslim, being the only place in the Americas where Islamic tradition plays any role in political discourse), are more likely to achieve social equality than elsewhere:

What explains the great Latin American awakening? Among the obvious answers is regime change: It helps that the region is no longer authoritarian, because gay rights rarely expand under such conditions. It also helps that the region is solidly urbanized and that Latin American cities are becoming more globalized and richer; gay life thrives in wealthy, cosmopolitan cities. It helps that the region is not Muslim or predominantly Protestant, because countries where these religions dominate — for example Arab or Anglo-Caribbean countries — tend to have the least gay-friendly legislation.

It also helps that gays and lesbians — being de facto outsiders — were prominent in human rights and democratic change movements in Latin America, and in the countries where there were recent organized struggles to achieve change — Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela — those now in control of government “dance with thems that brung ‘em” as the late Molly Ivins would say.

What’s considered “gay culture” is largely an urban phenomenon, though of course, gays and lesbians are everywhere.  Still, urbanization and gay rights seem to go hand in hand, and the more urban the population, the more likely governments are to legally recognize gay rights.  Within Mexico, it’s the Federal District (Mexico City) where gays have the most political clout (the first openly lesbian deputy was Patricia Jimenez, a PRD suppliente, appointed to her seat basically as a gesture for the organized gay and lesbian support of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ campaign for District Governor in 1992), and PRD controlled states (except Coahuila) where equal rights legislation has advanced the furthest.

One oddball statistic used to measure the growing political and social clout (and tolerance) for gays and lesbians is a count of the number of businesses which openly solicit business from sexual minorities per thousand inhabitants.  By that measure, Quito and Montevideo are more “gay friendly” than New York City!

Though, “He’s a Montevideo Boy” just doesn’t scan right.

OK, so I’m showing my age… I still like Pet Shop Boys.

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke
You gotta understand
It’s just our bringin’ upke
That gets us out of hand

Two thousand, four hundred and seventy-five posts ago, The Mex Files  started life as another one of those “my life in Mexico” blogs … but I got over it.

I seldom mention my private life, not just because it’s rather dull, but because I don’t think it’s all that instructive or enlightening when I’m talking about the politics, culture and history of a  “normal” country not my own, but usually misrepresented in my own.

That said… I seldom deal with the police at any time.  I did get a traffic ticket from a transit cop for not wearing my seat belt (and settled on the spot) a few months back, and once translated for a tourist needing police assistance in Mexico City after being taken by the infamous “Mexico City scammer“, but in the course of my rather mundane existence, today was the first time  in my life in the allegedly dangerous Republic of Mexico I’ve ever had to call a cop.

Yeah, I know… Mexican police are represented as being — by definition — a bunch of sleazy, overweight, lazy, crooked bastards.  I’m not one of those pro-police guys by nature, but it’s worth noting that … in my experience… Mexican coppers — like cops everywhere in the world — mostly just do their job.

At least a couple hours a day, I’m in the bookshop that supports the small publishing company that pays the pittance on which I eke out my modest living.  Because the bookshop depends on the tourist and expat trade, a good part of mi patron’s day is spent answering questions or posting comments on the various bulletin boards.

Some guy posted about his appearances in a local bar, making a deal of the fact that he was a foreigner, and should be supported on the basis of that alone.  Which is fine, I guess  — ya gotta have a gimmick –   but with one of the people who steers business to us regularly being the wife of a local musician who doesn’t eat if the tourist places are hiring non-union, non-legal performers, it’s an issue for El patron of personal, as well as local interest.   El patron posted something about how he boycotted — or suggested boycotting — those places that hire “under the table” foreign entertainers.  The upshot was the guy who plays in the bar sent threats suggesting he had “friends” to take care of the situation (what situation?  Damned if I know) to both the wife of the Mexican musician and el  patron.

Of course, its idiotic to claim one has criminal “friends” in a foreign country, especially as our homegrown Sinaloa criminal class deals rather harshly with wannabes cutting into their trade.  Much more so than the musicians union or the immigration folks (and, anyway, there’s an amnesty for illegals, if the guy is illegal, and all he has to do is pay the fine and prove he’s the required person for that particular job).  Ni modo… while I once had a cyber-stalker and was advised to take even emailed threats seriously,  Mr. Wannabe-scary-dude in a rather… um…. “testicularly-challenged”.

Although, if he is legally working as a musician, the theoretical boycott wouldn’t affect him, and — while its true that damaging ones business reputation is actionable in this country, there was no harm, no foul until the dude sent in his wife to DEMAND an apology for… apparently her inability to read English and making her mother sad… her mother I guess owning the bar where Mr. Not-so-tough performs (badly, if the youtubes of his act are reliable).

… Which mission she undertook by walking in on a Thursday afternoon during the tourist/snowbird season.  And — screaming about the need for apologies.  Out of control people are not conducive to business at any time… especially when a foreign client of the publishing house is also on the telephone.  Especially when they’re talking to a guy with a hearing aid (el patron… I could hear Señora Sin-huevos just fine… from the back room where I was sorting paperbacks.  And, it did make me a tad testy when she tried to claim I was an illegal alien that could be deported… that would seem to be an attempt to damage El Patron’s business reputation, but then, I’m not a member of the Mexican Bar, so wouldn’t make assumptions).

When, after asked to leave three times (in English and Spanish… and very loud Spanish, too) by two people, and about twenty repetitions of her same “demand” (though by now it was difficult to figure what the demand was for),  it was about time for an intervention.

So, I sauntered down to the corner kiosko, where the young, healthy, fit, trim, clean-cut officer was briefed on the situation, mounted his bicycle, rode down to the shop and did — surprise, surprise…  what cops are supposed to do:  placed himself between Señora Wannabe-bad-dude and El Patron (who has a minor physical condition that makes it hard for him to stand up), patiently tried to explain to the Señora that this was neither the time, nor the place for making a scene, and … as everyone had said… if she believed she had a legal case, it was a matter for an attorney.  And on and on and on the Señora would have gone (getting more melodramatic and teary with each verse), as the officer slowly eased her towards the door, calmly reviewing her “evidence” (a printout of the allegedly offensive email) and — at least getting her to the point where a customer could walk in, shop and do business.  And get her the heck out without swearing at her, or whacking her with his baton or tasering her (though that fashion in police dispute resolution has yet to catch on here).

Not really a big deal, but worth posting just as a reminder that Mexico is as normal as any other place.  People can be dicks (and some dicks are missing a standard complementary pair of accessories and have to send their wives to pointless confrontations)  anywhere, and cops are called out all the time everywhere to deal with them.  And do their job.

On a “meta level” (or, maybe in a standard Mex Files post), I’d add something about how this just illustrates my contention that focusing crime prevention and police resources on the “drug war” and stinting on normal, every day police work is a mistake;  how dangerous it is to send young soldiers to act as policemen;  and how much better it is to have local policemen (familiar with local weirdness, like disputes over expat message board posts) working out of your local kiosko, and with a handy-dandy mountain bike, than a national police operating out a distant capital.  But, then, this is just a post about my boring daily life.  So I won’t talk about that.

Today is the 94th anniversary of the judicial murder of Joe Hill, executed by a Utah firing squad 19 November 1915.  Hill, a Swedish immigrant (born Joel Hägglund in the 1870s — no one seems to be certain), while working as an itinerant laborer throughout the U.S. west, was also an entertainer, songwriter,  and — most dangerously — an IWW organizer. Charismatic and handsome, Hill’s labor organizing skills were a threat to the mining company management, and several attempts had already made to silence him.

Having been treated for a bullet wound in Park City, Utah, on the night of 10 January 1914 — as were at least six other men — he was fingered as the killer of a store keeper and ex-policeman who was killed during a robbery that night. Hill claimed he was shot by an irate husband while in bed with the man’s wife, whom he refused to name, and even by the forensic evidence available in 1914 Utah, could Hill’s wounds have come from the murdered man’s gun.  Nor did witnesses to the robbery-murder say that the killer looked like Hill. Nor did Joe Hill own a gun.

However, as Hill wrote “Owing to the prominence of [the victim] there had to be a ‘goat’ and the undersigned being, as they thought, a friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, an IWW, had no right to live anyway, and was therefore duly selected to be ‘the goat’.”  The dubious nature of the evidence against him led to calls for clemency (from, among others, President Woodrow Wilson), but he had unwisely, and against the advice of his attorneys, had that late Victorian attitude about protecting a lady’s reputation. And made another lady’s reputation…

NGD, a Canadian gold-mining company is “cooperating with Mexican government authorities and pursuing all legal appeals after the company was notified yesterday that it must suspend mining operations”, at Mineria San Xavier (called Cerro Cerro San Pedro  in company press releases) in San Luis Potosí –

Otto at Inca Kola News – who posted about the closure this morning — wrote in his subscription-only Latin American commodities investor newsletter “IKN Weekly” had suggested there were problems with the Canadian firm’s investments last weekend:

It is up to the individual investor to decide whether NGD suits his or her portfolio, but in this case I’ll venture to say that I would not be a shareholder in New Gold for the forseeable future. That’s just me. Enough said.

The mine closure follows complaints from citizen groups and Greenpeace that the company was not just damaging the environment and illegally working in protected forest areas, but — according to an article in the 13 June 2009 La Jornada, NGD was involved in several corrupt schemes to illegally acquire land from “falsos ejidatarios” in the 1990s.  In what was billed as a liberalization, collective farms (ejidos) were broken up into private ownership plots under the Salinas administration — the result being not that the owners of the small farms (which were only productive when cooperatively farmed) were often pressured or cheated into selling off valuable properties to outside investors. In NGD’s case — at least according to the complaints — this went one step further, sending in “ringers” to make claims on the land.

AND… in what’s an under-reported story even in Mexico … leaders of dissenting farmers and environmental activists, were assassinated.  Since 1999 Pro San Luis Ecológico has been seeking to annul the company’s mining permits, thwarted (or so ) by the Fox Administration and various PAN officials in the state who assisted NGD in shopping for “friendly jurisdictions” to hear the legal claims.

IN June 2004, the Ninth Tribunal (equivalent in a U.S. system to the Federal District Court) ruled in favor of citizens and against NGD, on the grounds that the company’s land claims were flawed.

A separate October 2005 ruling — this time from the Federal Tribunal for Fiscal and Administrative Affairs (TJAFA, for its initials in Spanish) — based on complaints from SEMANAT, the Secretariat of the Environment — ordered the government to cancel NGD’s environmental impact statement.

According to Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, a researcher for the Colegio de San Luis who wrote the Jornada article, the mining company — actively colluding with the state and federal PAN administrations — went court shopping for a friendlier jurisdiction to fend off the inevitable. This latest ruling — from PROFEPA (Mexico’s Environmental Protection Agency) carries out the court order, annulling a re-issued Environmental Impact Statement. However, the company is telling investors that:

“This is a continuation of a decade of challenges from a group of individuals largely from outside the area who are opposed to the mining operations at Cerro San Pedro. We are taking all possible steps to respond to challenges to our legal ability to operate the mine, and believe that we will resume full operations” says New Gold CEO Robert Gallagher.

In other words, they’re still court shopping.  Otto is the go-to guy for investments, and I’ll not comment on the feasibility of throwing more money at the problem.  The larger issue seems to be that a very outside the area group (the Canadian company) is complaining about “challenges from a group of individuals largely from outside the area…” — which means basically scientists, environmentalists and water quality experts called in by the local farmers and residents opposed to the mine — having been thwarted by Mexican courts for so long,  with the active collusion of the political leadership, is looking to change the rules of both the democratic and judicial process.

I won’t make a comment on it here — but worth noting — is that “Tranparency International” has new rankings for its always interesting “corruption index”.  Mexico has become a lot more “corrupt” under the present administration, despite its claims to be the clean team.

While there has been a small movement among the “crypto-Jews” — the descendants of the conversos who made up a large portion of the early Spanish emigration to the New World — to “reconvert” to the religion of their ancestors, but whose ethnic background is as mixed as anyone else’s in this country, we tend to think of Mexican judaism as a totally European phenonoma, not, as with Roman Catholicism, a belief system that could be incorporated into indigenous culture.

Haim F. Gazuli, writing on Beth Hatefutsoth – the website of the Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (Tel Aviv, Israel) — writes:

It is widely assumed that small groups of descendants of crypto-Jews who fled the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition during colonial times and sought refuge in remote regions of Mexico, where they lived among the native people of the country continued for many generations to keep alive in secret, the remembrance of their Jewish origins. Living and intermarrying with local population brought about their full assimilation, and only rarely a few old Jewish practices and beliefs persisted while their significance was totally forgotten.

…

Sometime during the 1850’s some native Mexicans who believed they were descendants of crypto-Jews decided to return to Judaism. Prominent among them was Ramón Jiron of the town of Morelia in the State of Michoacan. According to oral traditions he died at the hands of his neighbors after it was discovered that he abandoned Catholicism. According to other version he run away from home after refusing to submit to his father’s wish and become a Catholic priest. To escape the persecutions he, or only his widow along with their children and a young man called Manuel Tellez, fled to the town of Real de Oro, and then to the nearby Pachuca, in the State of Hidalgo. Eventually the group and their descendants founded Venta Prieta, then a small agricultural settlement in the outskirts of Pachuca.

Although following the liberal Constitution of 1857, the freedom of religion was introduced in Mexico, the native Mexican Jews of Venta Prieta as well as in other parts of the country, did not make public their beliefs and practices. Francisco Rivas Puigcerver, himself of crypto-Jewish origins, came to the defense of the native Mexicans Jews already in 1889 in a series of articles he published in his periodicals. After 1917, following the promulgation of a new, more anticlerical Constitution, the mantle of secrecy that covered many native Mexican Jews started to loosen as they began establishing organized communities as well as entering a gradual process of learning and return to mainstream Judaism. Francisco Rivas was instrumental in coordinating an umbrella organization for some 3,000 native Mexican Jews who lived mainly in Venta Prieta, in the State of Hidalgo, in Mexico City, and in other localities. The Kahal Kadosh Bnei Elohim community was established in Venta Prieta in 1920.

First reports containing details of the ritual practiced by “Indian Jews” may be found in Francisco Rivas’ periodicals. In his El Sabado secreto he wrote about Indians living in isolated villages who married among themselves only, prayed to God calling him by his old Hebrew name and observed the Shabbat. During their religious ceremonies the prayers were first recited in Hebrew from a sefer and then translated into Spanish.

Not so much hostile to the outside world as self-effacing, the community was visited in the late 1930s by photographer Ida Cowen (I’m trying to get the museum to scan a few photos) and was served by U.S. immigrant rabbi for several years. Rabbi Lerner retired in 1999, and the community has split into two congregations, one Orthodox and one Conservative. Leslie Tellez, who wrote a short article on the community for Mexico Insider in April 2009 had trouble finding people who even would admit the synagogues existed, let alone that they had congregations. Elizabeth Téllez, president of the Comunidad Mexicana Israelita el Neguev Venta Prieta, explained to Leslie Tellez (no relation, as far as I know) the self-imposed obscurity of this Mexican community:

“A lot of people have taken advantage of the community, when in reality they don’t know us,”Téllez said, adding that she’s heard stories of people not affiliated with the temple trying to raise money for Venta Prieta. “We don’t need any promotion. Mexico and Israel, they accept us.”

Téllez said that a rabbi traveled from Mexico City to lead their services each Friday and Saturday and that a few Venta Prieta families had moved to Israel. Other facts she would allow to appear in print: The temple, a stone structure with a Star of David etched into the window, was their third. Families paid for it and the recreation hall with their own money. About 150 Jewish people lived in Venta Prieta, Téllez said.

She showed me a black-and-white photo of the congregation, dated 1938, before politely ending the conversation.

“This is how we’ve always lived,” she said, “and this is how we’re always going to live.”

With the United States (and no one else) ready to recognize elections held under a “government” — that theoretically is not recognized by the United States — the Honduran Embassy in the United States makes a suggestion — Just don’t do it!

(A vote is a vote FOR the coup.  If you vote, you fall into the coup-monger’s trap)