Media and masks

A must read is “The media doesn’t get Latin America” by Argentine editor Rodrigo Orihuala in Wednesday’s The Guardian (U.K.).  A short excerpt:

…Too bad then that such a great part of the US media seems totally out of touch with the region and misinterprets and mis-explains regional politics. The crisis in Honduras has underlined this several times over.

To focus support for Zelaya’s ousting on his alleged drive against the law is to lose perspective of what it means for Latin Americans to see military boots marching into presidential palaces. Military intervention in political life is weighed by Latin Americans in a way Americans are mostly unable too, for the simple reason that Americans have been fortunate enough never to suffer it. Therefore, to analyse Latin American political affairs and behaviours solely through the prism of American experiences, values and ideas is wrong.

In Latin America, even columnists of well established centre-to-right newspapers who consider Zelaya’s administration a flawed one see the coup against him as a step back in the years-long process to consolidate democracy in the region…

It’s not just Honduras, and not just this one issue, of course.  Orihuela provides plenty of examples of where U.S. (and British) media — even CNN en Español — just “don’t get it” when covering Latin American issues.

One reason what was intended as a cultural blog morphed into as much a news and political website as anything is the sheer lack of decent background coverage on just this one Latin American country.  Sometimes, it’s relatively minor, as in yesterday’s Washington Post article about a priest caught up in the narcotics conflict in Michoacan.  When The Post writers say, “Last week, as he drove two reporters through “tierra caliente,” the heavily conflicted region dubbed the hot land,” we’re left with the impression that “tierra caliente” is somehow a name applied because of the narcotics war, and not what the region has been called since the 16th century.  The Michoacan lowlands have a steamy climate.  That’s all it is.

While I might wish that Steve Fainaru and William Booth hadn’t referred to the  tierra caliente as “an intimate, complex world of communal violence,” as opposed to just “an intimate complex world of communal life”, I give them credit for getting a little off the beaten track, but disappointed that they hung the story on  “gringo-centric” assumptions:

How to confront this kind of violence against the state was a central topic in talks between President Obama and Calderón during their talks in Guadalajara this week.

Mexicans would say, “it was?”  Although Obama made some comments on narcotics control (as did Harper and Calderon),   it was not central to this conference, nor intended to be.   The Post would have you believe Michoacan’s problem with feuding clans of meth makers (somewhat like old West Virginia moonshiners) had highjacked a discussion on coordinating climate change legislation, exchanging public health information, border control technology and trucking regulations.

It’s not only the “mainstream” that does this.  Being an unapologetic Mexicanist, I thought it slightly off-kilter when Nezua the Unapologetic Mexican used the conference to riff (and riff well, as usual) on the United States’ own responsiblities for creating the narcotics and migration problems.  All true, and his piece is highly recommended too.  It just seemed that — as with the Washington Post article on tierra caliente priests — that events in Mexico are shaped to fit into the U.S. meda mold… which is rather narrowly defined by drugs and migrants.

Even those who “know Mexico” sometimes fall into the trap of writing based on non-Latin perceptions (myself included).  Patrick Corcoran, a quasi-mainstream guy (but one who lives in Mexico)  has been doing an excellent job of following the political and legal discussions on military human rights issues on his “ganchoblog“.  He doesn’t see military violations of civil rights as nearly the same dange I do, and said so — based on a statement by Barack Obama — writing “I personally don’t know anyone who voices fear of the army.”

And, as Rodrigo Orihuela pointed out in his Guardian essay, Latin Americans fear their armies for good reason… that includes Mexicans.   Perhaps Patrick never met anyone who was a student in Mexico City ca. 1968.  Or a street vendor in Oaxaca a couple of years ago.  Or lives in rural Sinaloa.  I know plenty of otherwise well-adjusted, professional, highly successful Mexicans who when confronted by someone in a military uniform give all the symptoms of someone experiencing fear.

On a lesser scale, perhaps,  many, including myself,  don’t “fear” the army, but are not at all comfortable around well-armed youngsters in uniform.  And, in any community near a military base, anywhere on the planet, you’ll find people who fear for their daughters’ safety.

Not the “mainstream media,”  not the alternative press, not the conservative pundits are necessarily wrong when they write about Latin America, specifically Mexico.  But they can’t always see they world they describe.  Mexico is not only the land of Lord Tezacatlipolca, old “Smoking Mirror”  (or as I always style him,  “He who fucks with your head”), but the world of the mask and cyclical history.   What happened in Tlatelolco in 1968 echoes in Juarez in 2009 — but wearing now not the mask of “Communism” but of “Narco-terrorism” — and both deflecting the reality of complex social and economic conditions.  And — even if we intuit we are looking only at the Smoky Mirror of reality — we focus on our own reflection, relegating all too much to the periphery.