A learning experience
Dana Frank (The Baffler) on the “Vocabulary Lessons” that one wishes one didn’t need to learn here in Latin America.
I learned the vocabulary of true evil, full of hissing sounds: amenazas de muerte (death threats), sicarios (hired assassins), asesinos (killers), and asesinatos (assassinations). In English, I had nuanced discussions with my various 
editors about which deaths of opposition activists qualified as “assassinations” and which were merely—merely—“killings,” as in “more than three hundred killings by state security forces.” Every day, reading the Honduran papers, I was assaulted by a long barrage of verbs—ultimar, matar, liquidar, tirotear (to shoot up), ametrallar (to machine gun)—all of which meant to kill, including ultimar a machetazos (to slice up with machete blows).
[…]
I got an op-ed into the New York Times criticizing U.S. support for the ongoing coup regime. In response, I got letters on behalf of Miguel Facussé, the biofuels magnate, threatening to sue me for difamación de carácter (character defamation). Letters to the Times from the Honduran Ambassador to the United States and from a former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras attacking me were reprinted in the derechista (right-wing) Honduran newspapers. I had to cancel my upcoming trip to Honduras, and thought I might never return. I learned No te aflijas (Don’t get upset) from a friend who wrote me that “When things calm down you can come back.” Another wrote, in English, “Now you know a new word, desterrado”—exiled. But what I felt was just a tiny inkling of what the real exiles, thousands of Hondurans, were going through.
Finally, there were the things for which there were no words in either English or Spanish. What did I say to my close, beloved friend when his daughter and son-in-law were shot and killed in one of those incidents of “random violence” that happen when there is no functioning judicial system, the police are largely corrupt, and you can kill anyone you want and nothing will happen to you? What did I say to another close friend, who’d been sheltering a young victim of domestic violence, when drug traffickers who were tight with the abuser showed up one day and told my friend she had twenty-four hours to leave the house and no one from her family could ever live there again, and she had to flee across the border to Mexico, with no money? What did I say to the sweet, loving young man who finally found a good job in his cousin’s new shop, and six months later the gangs showed up and demanded a tax, and she said no, and after five days they came back and killed her, and he lost his job in her shop, and the family lost all their investment? For every word I learned, there was a new horror, a new atrocity report to write.
(Sombrero tip to John Donaghy)
Another agricultural export
With the neo-liberal regime in Mexico having systematically destroyed the rural economy, it’s possibly good news that at least one Mexican agricultural export is growing. Alas, it’s opium poppies.
Over the last 13 years (since Vicente Fox’s election), the amount of land under cultivation for poppies has grown 181% to 12,000 hectares. While Colombia was the #1 producer and exporter of heroin in the Americas, Mexico has taken the lead.
Colombians claim the drop in their own production is due to declining demand in Europe, however it may be that the Mexican producers have more experience in the trade (Sinaloa has exported opium and opium related products since the 1880s) and Colombian exporters just haven’t been able to find new markets.
Isn’t “free trade” wonderful?
Bad to worse….
I have said very little about the U.S. Immigration “reform” bill…basically because — like so many of the “reforms” proposed here in Mexico for one thing or another — it’s not a reform in the sense of an improvement, but merely some kind of change, generally for the worse.
From: An Anti-Immigrant Bill Masked as Reform, Justin Feldman (Counterpunch, 26 June 2013):
The reform bill would create a bleak future for millions of undocumented immigrants. To kick off the post-reform era, ICE would be required to organize a massive deportation campaign, rounding up 90 percent of all immigrants who overstayed a visa in the previous year. As it progressed, day-to-day life would become significantly more difficult for undocumented people than it is currently.
Once all legitimate businesses adopt the E-Verify employment authorization system required under the proposal, more immigrants would end up in dangerous, unregulated jobs where they are misclassified as independent contractors for the shadiest of companies. If a worker presented a fake Social Security number to her boss, she could be imprisoned for five years.
Undocumented immigrants are currently issued driver’s licenses in nine states, but they would likely lose that privilege under reform. The immigration bill requires that state licenses comply with the REAL ID Act and other federal regulations restricting identification cards. If a state does not comply, most of its residents would be forced to obtain a US passport solely for work authorization purposes. That is more than enough incentive to guarantee states will restrict driver’s licenses.
There is also the matter of the border. Before the Hoeven-Corker amendment, the bill was set to infuse an additional $6.5 billion into militarizing the US-Mexico border. But under the amendment, which is so bad that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer initially expressed support, that number comes to well over $40 billion.
Really,what’s passed the Senate is more a military spending bill, than an immigration bill.
Pardon my puritanism
Deborah Bonello (Mexico Reporter) posted on her Facebook page a question that has frankly flabbergasted me:
I watched a posh Mexican drop 20,000 pesos on a ‘pomo’ of tequila last night in a Condesa store. That’s nearly 2000 bucks. Money to burn, or just good taste?
Really… 2000 dollars in a country where the median household income is 4500 dollars? I don’t care how fine the tequila is, or how lovely the pomo … that’s seriously fucked-up.
Snow(den) job…
A bit off-topic for me, but the popular U.S. news-site “Buzzfeed” put up an “exclusive” breathlessly claiming the Ecuadorian government “spent half a million dollars on an Israeli-made “GSM interceptor” in a deal brokered by a U.S. middleman,” and added — for good measure — a bunch of “secret” documents.
Uh… sure.
It’s hardly a secret that Ecuadorian security has invested in various forms of communications security and intercept: the Ecuadorian daily Hoy wrote about these national security purchases on 26 July also… but that was 26 July 2010.
While the purchases mentioned in Buzzfeed are more recent, they were allegedly from an Israeli company through a Delaware corporation that appears to be owned by (and sharing an office with) the shadowy Moroccan- U.S. real estate investor (and one time smuggler) Joseph Chetret.
The government of Ecuador could buy such software without the cloak and dagger of going through middle-men (Israeli security firms work openly, and there is no reason they wouldn’t sell such equipment to the Ecuadorian security agency), and — the price being said to be a half million dollars — that doesn’t sound like they were buying anything exactly in the super spy agency budget range. One forgets that there was an attempted coup in Ecuador (said to be U.S. sponsored) back in September 2010, and the government has had to beef up its monitoring of genuine subversives. Half a million dollars doesn’t buy “NSA style monitoring equipment”… it buys, if anything, the stuff shown in the contract… off the shelf servers and standard monitoring equipment (like any police department has) to me.
Other writers (who have the patience for this sort of thing) notice odd dates in the contracts, including one signed in November 2013.
What makes the story still more dubious is that the source appears to be Alek Boyd (Re Edward #Snowden: read the info about Ecuador Assange’s Wikileaks will not publish) who claims he makes his living by doing “do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm.” I believe he means “due diligence”.
What Boyd had been diligently doing (to give him his due) is trying to remain a relevant Although written in English and published in London, Boyd’s “Vcrisis” was at one time taken seriously as an anti-Hugo Chavez/anti-Bolvianian site. Generally ignored outside of right-wing English speaking media circles, Vcrisis (and Boyd himself) were never taken seriously by academics or policy wonks, and VCrisis eventually faded away (the last post was in October 2011).
While I was never much paid attention to Boyd (and, his hard-on for the late Venezuelan leader was pretty much peripheral to this site’s focus anyway), Boyd apparently floundered around looking for a leftist to serve as the bete noir of his remaining readers, finding him in Rafael Correa. The Snowden incident — and, with rightist attempts to smear Snowden not quite working (Snowden himself appears to be generally to the political right … reportedly an “libertarian” and Ron Paul supporter — a not uncommon political position among computer geeks), going after a leftist government that is willing to give Snowden asylum has a certain cachet for bottom feeding “pundits” like Boyd.
Boyd claims “Wikileaks will not publish” the documents he purports are the smoking gun of some nefarious Ecuadorian operation. The reason could be that, as Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson said, “No one in our team recognises having been approached with such material as you describe.”
Why am I not surprised that no one at Buzzfeed questioned the validity of their information? Once again, the U.S. media is woefully — or willfully — ignorant of what happens below the Rio Grande… and may have been taken in by some guy in London.
An iron curtain has descended across the continent…
… of North America:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Tuesday said that an amendment advanced by the Senate would leave the U.S. with the “most militarized border” since the fall of the Berlin Wall and pave the way for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform.
“The legislation concerning beefed up border security removes any validity to the argument that border security is not sufficient,” McCain said of the amendment from Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) in an interview on CNN.
“I mean this is not only sufficient, it is well over-sufficient. We’ll be the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s why I think this amendment was very important,” he added.
Sen. McCain: US will have ‘most militarized’ border since Berlin Wall, Daniel Strauss, The Hill (25 July 2013)
mexfiles.net 