Sunday readings: 10 August 2008

Tlatelolco 1968, Beijing 2008

As CHINA cracks down on dissidents in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, The Unapogetic Mexican can’t help but think of the slaughter at Tlatelolco.

Even if we don’t know all the facts of Tlatelolco, or exactly what is going on in China from our vantage point, or the particulars of any of the violence that proceeds, trails and surrounds our grand and fraudulent symbols https://mexfiles.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2548of international family. Because anywhere the People gather to express their voice, the government—be it communist, democratic or otherwise—will be infiltrating and disturbing the cohesion and strength of that voice, finally using violence with no real hesitancy or remorse. And wherever these games go, the hosting governments will have to deal with this, and I imagine more and more. Because the People’s issues and voices—now increasingly outlawed, punished, minimized, or sent to Fenced-in ‘Free Speech’ areas—do seek a hearing, will always seek the public eye. And the unsettling juxtaposition of profit, spotlight, and ignored oppressions will always cause this confluence of energy and tumult. This is our modern-day Olympic Games Carnival settling down uneasily into a world where war and class divides are hurting so many.

Just beneath the surface

I’ve always thought cocktail parties were a step above Hell… apparently, this is literally true:
(Jack Chang McClatchy Newspapers)

SANTIAGO, Chile — During the darkest years of this country’s military dictatorship, Mariana Callejas was an up-and-coming writer and the hostess of the era’s most glamorous literary salon.

Chile’s leading authors trekked up to Callejas’ hillside mansion every Thursday night to talk literature, have a few drinks and sometimes dance until the next morning.

…

As the literati danced and debated upstairs, Chilean intelligence officers were downstairs torturing dissidents and manufacturing the toxic nerve agent sarin in a secret laboratory.

McJustice.

Speaking of crack-downs, The New York Times’ Julia Preston on the criminal trials of the 300 people arrested in Iowa who were tried and convicted in just three days:

“It does make it look like the prosecutor and the judge have worked it out ahead of time and made it a fait accompli,” Professor Bibas said. “The defense can think the judge is behind this.”

The Agriprocessors hearings have become a national test case for the Bush administration’s crackdown strategy of bringing criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught in workplace raids. Until recently, most illegal immigrant workers, if they had no prior records, were swiftly deported on civil immigration violations.

Tijuana is the End of the World as we know it.

Michael Hemmingson reviews the history of violence in the border city for the San Diego Reader:

A mile east of the Tijuana International Airport is an area police call El Fin del Mundo, the End of the World, where drug-cartel assassins dump their victims. Both Mexican and American citizens have been found there. On December 18, 2004, according to Sergeant Tom Bulow of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, San Marcos resident Noé Chávez García was lured to Tijuana by two acquaintances who shot him several times and left him in this corpse-disposal zone. He survived his wounds to tell his story to the FBI and Mexican officials. His is a rare case — he lived.

“A total of more than 4,800 Mexicans were slain in 2006 and 2007,” reports the Washington Post on March 16, 2008, “making the murder rate in each of those years twice that of 2005. Law enforcement officials and journalists, politicians and peasants have been gunned down in the wave of violence.”

“What affects one side affects the other,” Mayor Jerry Sanders tells USA Today on February 5, 2007. “We’re literally one region with a fence down the middle.”

Translations that dare not speak their name.

Sexual attitudes and definitions seem to be culturally determined. With the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City this last week, some attention is now being focused on Mexican culture’s much more fluid definition of “gay” and “straight.” I disagree with some of Marc Lacey’s contentions in his New York Times article, “Vulnerable to H.I.V., Resistant to Labels” (like a lot of U.S. writers, he talks about “machismo” without defining what he means.  If he means “sexism”, there’s a good English word for it.  If he means, as the Academia Real defines it, “things predominately done by men,” that would cover men having sex with men).  However, the whole article is worth reading:

Here in Mexico, where the 17th International AIDS Conference is taking place this week, some hombres que tienen sexo con hombres, or HSHs, as they are called, consider themselves gay. Some swear up and down they are straight. Many fall into the gray area in between.

“Sexual identity is a very complex thing,” said Hector Carrillo, a professor of human sexuality studies at San Francisco State University who has done research in Mexico. “We like to think that once someone figures out their sexual attraction, they will fit into the categories we’ve created. But life isn’t like that.”

H.I.V. and AIDS are concentrated in Mexico among men, particularly those who have sex with other men. While the H.I.V. prevalence in the general population is 0.3 percent, among men who have sex with men it approaches 15 percent.