THE debate

It really isn’t all that big a deal in Mexico, and I’m surprised the Mexican press had anything to say about it, but with all the news in the foreign press, I suppose it eventually was going to come up.

I’m referring of course, to “urbanist” Andrés Lajous being quoted by the BBC and picked up (free?) by Huffington Post, over a supposed “debate” over a statue of late Azerbaijani dictator Heydar Aliyev popping up in Mexico City.

Azerbaijan and Mexico have a few commonalities… besides being a non-European culture with a European overlay, they produce a lot of oil and have a large economic power with nuclear weapons on their northern border. That their first president, the bronze.memorialized Heydar Aliyeza was a soviet era secret police official isn’t worth more than a shrug, given that they were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and the biggest chunk of that old union … Russia… is run by a ex-secret policeman, Vladimir Putin. Anyway, with a few notable exceptions, going back to the days of Benito Juárez, Mexican foreign policy, has been to stay out of the internal affairs of other nations.

It was sort of an accident of history that Mexico was the first country to exchange ambassadors with Azerbaijan, which is why the oil-rich Turkic-speaking country paid for a park in Mexico City, and shipped over the statue of their great leader.  No different really than a corporation paying for a park or public facility in the U.S. and wanting naming rights.

Lajous — whose attempts to become politically relevant through the old PSD (one of a string of parties Dr.Simi’s niece, Patricia Mercado, attempted to get on the ballot) fell through spectacularly in 2008 — is an occasional writer for Nexos, and other Mexican publications, so should know that a debate usually means there are two points of view under discussion.  maybe he has a few interesting things to say, but there’s no debate to speak of.  OK, it’s a butt-ugly monument, to an odious dictator, but a park is a park.  Debate over.

Anything else worth debating?