Ashes to Pot-ash… or, up in smoke
General Pinochet must figure being dead is no reason not to have an after-life of crime. He hasn’t just been pushing up daisies.
From Sabina Becker:
A marijuana plantation has been found in a sector of a hacienda where lie the ashes of the ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, a property currently under legal sanction for illicit enrichment.
Lucía Pinochet Hirart, the oldest daughter of the former dictator, told the newspaper La Tercera that she was surprised by the finding, which occurred in March of last year but was only recently in the news.
“What might be going on at Los Boldos (the hacienda), we have no idea. It’s open, animals could practically get in. It’s half abandoned,” Hiriart said.
In a chapel at Los Boldos, 130 kilometres southwest of Santiago, the ashes of Pinochet, who died December 10, 2006, were interred.
The property was one of many owned by the former dictator, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. He was sanctioned under the law during an illicit-enrichment case which began before his death.
Pinochet was tried, and remained under house arrest in Los Boldos, where two of his daughters have also had mausoleums built, but he died before a judgment could be passed.
The case continues, however, and still affects various members of the Pinochet family.
Affects them… um… highly? Gives them the munchies?
Fast (and Furious) reactions to Fast and Furious
Well, this is something TEA partiers and Mexican lefties (and center-ies) and righties) all agree on: Fast and Furious was FUBAR.
Of course, for right-wingers in the U.S. the bizarre operation under with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms knowingly allowed guns to illegally cross into Mexico to see what happened (they were used to kill people… duh!) was a plot to pry those guns from their cold, dead hand. Bill La Jeunesse (whose name rang a bell… I finally remembered him from Syracuse University, where my roommate was the editor of a student news magazine, who would be swearing away in Sicilian every time he had edit one of Bill’s stories… something Bill has obviously mastered by now. Those Sicilian curses must have done the trick) and FOX News, has done a good job of following the “Fast and Furious” story … even if the motives for its coverage are as seriously misguided as the “Fast and Furious” was as a criminal investigation.
It’s obvious that the congressional hearings and “faux” outrage in the United States has more to do with discrediting the agency charged with enforcing the weak laws the U.S. has on gun-running, and with attempting to destroy any chance of reforming those laws.
The thrust of the reporting on this story (mostly from the right-wing news organizations, like FOX) may be suspect, but won’t (one hopes) get anyone killed, whereas the “criminal investigation” has led to a number of deaths here, and nobody in Mexico of any political stripe, can defend it. For us in Mexico, the issue is national sovereignty… as well as disgust with the United States (which can control neither its guns nor its narcotics habit) over but is blind to the destruction it causes here… and seeks to blame the victim for their criminal negligence.
For a trip to U.S. bizarro-landia, check out the comments on “Hot Air” (a right-wing U.S. website), where this video was reposted. It puts people in a quandry… unable to decide whether they hate Mexicans or the Obama Administration more. They try to square the circle by “logically” explaining why the American legal system is better, therefore the Attorney General of the United States should be sent to Mexico. And, somehow manage to work in an unrelated case involving the right of arrested foreigners to contact their consulate.
When I wrote Gods, Gachupines and Gringos, I was unconvinced that Felipe Calderón’s election to the Presidency was as legitimate as some critics (and even my editor) insisted. Although I can, with some justice, be called (as one Amazon.com reviewer put it), a “total lefty”, if I were in the future to write a second edition (don’t hold your breath) that included this present administration, there are some positive things that could be said about it: taking serious steps towards dealing with climate change, changes in the tax code and court system, and perhaps NOT being sucked into the U.S. financial disaster at the end of the Bush Administration (though that was more a result of having made financial regulatory changes after the Mexican financial melt-down of the early 1990s).
Calderón himself seems aware, though, that any discussion of his administration is not going to focus on those small steps (which — who knows? — may be seen as seminal ones in future histories) but on the “drug war”, which touched off a spiral of lawlessness, militarization and an erosion of civil rights. And — while it’s maybe us “total lefties” that have tied the administration’s prosecution of the “drug war” to an attempt to create legitimacy, questioning the legitimacy of Calderón’s election may not be out of the mainstream after all. The only question I would have in writing a hypothetical second edition would be whether or not I overlooked who may be the key figure in all this: Elba Esther Gordillo Morales.
Here I have been blithely assuming that the key figures in the 2006 election were the candidates, or at least the two main candidates, Calderón and López Obrador.
At the time, Gordillo — who in addition to her presidency of the teachers’ union, was a PRI Senator and a member of the Party’s Central Committee — had been purged in large part because of her close ties to Marta Fox and to Gordillo’s willingness to go against her own party’s platform in support of Fox Administration initiatives. After being tossed out of PRI, she set up PANAL, but was not that party’s candidate in 2006. PANAL received less than one percent of the national vote, but when López Obrador and his supporters contested the results, U.S. observers made the comparison to the Bush-Gore Presidential election of 2000. PANAL was not exactly analogous to the U.S. Green Party, which the Gore supporters suspected (rightly) was receiving help from Bush supporters to drain some support from Gore (it was assumed PANAL was designed to draw support away from PRI, which did extremely poorly in that election), but Gordillo was even more devious than we suspected.
Even if Calderón is seen in the future to have actually won (by less that half a percentage point), Gordillo is still the one who deserves the credit (or blame) for the result. It appears that PANAL was merely a devise for giving Gordillo (who by now was party chair) a legitimate “place at the table” in the electoral process, or to keep political operatives employed … paid through PANAL, but working for PAN.
Amazingly, this information comes not from some total lefty source, but from the editorially conservative (as in the regular columnists on Latin American affairs are Andres Openheimer, Jorge Castañeda and Mario Vargas Llosa) Madrid daily, El País. Demographer María de las Heras not only found that only 43 percent of Mexicans believe that fraud was not involved in the 2006 Presidental election (with 49 percent believing it was, and the rest unsure): the results coming from a poll about Gordillo’s political influence that followed her “cheerful” confession of having pedaled influence in the election to ensure her own continued political relevance.
To the surprise of friends and strangers alike, Professor Elba Esther Gordillo, leader of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), admitted openly and without embarrasment that in 2006 she negotiated electoral support with then candidate Felipe Calderon in return for a guaranteed number of government positions.
…
Five years after Calderón emerged victorious in the elections with only a 0.5% advantage, a high percentage (49%) of voters believe, rightly or not, that it was a Pyrrhic victory achieved by electoral fraud. Gordillo certainly does no favor by emerging as a key Calderón ally when she serenely confirms what was only suspected before: that she persuaded some PRI governors to tilt the election in favor of Calderon to the detriment of Andres Manuel López Obrador, who came up short a mere 250,000 votes.
(My translation, original article here)
Ms. de la Herda, notes that 59 percent of those surveyed feel Gordillo has had a baleful influence on the present government and that 63 percent believe that presidents should never trade government positions for electoral support. The pollster doesn’t see any immediate consequences for the 2012 election[*], but then… historically speaking (lefty or otherwise)… it’ll be around 2018 before there’s any way to know what it all means.
[*] Although this comment on the El País article, by “Miguel Angel G.” is probably typical of Mexican leftist (or at least pro-AMLO) reaction which may have some influence on voter thinking (or party propaganda) in 2012: again, my translation:
How pathetic is that today, 5 years after the monumental fraud of 2006 in which the PRI helped PAN to impose Calderón (23 years after PAN helped the PRI impose Salinas de Gortari) Mexican democracy is practically nonexistent. The real winner of the presidential election has been demonized, vilified and slandered to the point where some people have managed to impose a view of him that leads to genuine hatred of him, and of everything related to his supporter’s movement. The leadership of both parties have shattered the country, inventing a war to legitimize Calderón which has killed 40 000 people and caused thousands of disappearances, while trying to force through labor and social security reforms. We are promised continuity with the return of PRI (which in fact never went away) as a solution to all problems facing the country. Poor Mexico — so far from democracy, so close to fascism.
It wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without it
This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.
(Jack Kerouac)
Really old -time fun
Juanita Jean notes the dropping life expectancy of Texas women. “Thanks” to Rick Perry and Texas Republican policies (according to Juanita, who— being a Texan and a woman — has a dog in this hunt) in several counties women can expect to live a shorter life than their Mexican sisters:
Milam was the one Central Texas county where women lost longevity between 1997 and 2007 — 0.8 years. Women there had a life expectancy of 78.2 years in 2007 — lower than women in Estonia, Mexico, Cuba, Albania, Slovakia and Argentina.
Patsy Gaines, director of the Milam County Health Department, was not entirely surprised. Health services have been cut instead of expanded to meet the community’s needs, she said.
Texas probably would have seen a further decline if it wasn’t for the “Hispanic paradox”: persons of Latin American descent tend to have a longer life expectancy than others in the United States, with immigrants having an even higher life expectancy than U.S. born “hispanics” despite being more likely to be part of the economic or social groups that usually have a shorter life expectancies (i.e., the poor).
I don’t think she’d particularly want to, but perhaps Doña Mariana Bojórquez Angulo might be persuaded to move north of the border. Though, come to think of it, getting a passport for Doña Mariana might be a problem, since no one can locate a birth certificate, but if she did move to Milam County, she’d probably reverse the statistics on a declining life expectancy all by herself. Her 106-year old daughter is fairly certain the Mazatlan woman is around 125 years old.
Although a broken hip has confined her to a wheel-chair, the great-great-great-great grandmother is otherwise in good health, and plans to live to be 150. Hard work and sleeping soundly every night might have something to do with Doña Mariana’s longevity, but I’d venture the real secret is that she likes to sing … just for the sheer fun of it.
Photo of Mariana Bojórquez Angulo by Luis Brito, Noroeste
Maybe the “hispanic paradox” isn’t so much paradoxical as just something no one’s figured out how to measure. I still have the little red garnet I bought on the street in Mexico City from a guy in his 80s… mostly because when I asked if the three year old with him was his grandson, he gave me an amusing explanation of how red garnets were to guarantee one’s potency, and added that the three year old kid was not his grandson, but his son.
Probably not true (the part about the son, anyway), and I don’t think a five peso sale was going to make or break the guy, but he sure seemed to be enjoying himself.
Neither the trinket salesman nor Doña Mariana are exactly from the upper strata of socio-economic privilege, nor are most of the spry octogenarians and even nonagenarians I’ve run across in this country. And what keeps them going… and probably the quasquicentenarian[i] Mazatleca, too… is that they still find ways to enjoy their lives. They have fun.
[i] Yup… that’s a real word… which was a lot of fun to find, no doubt adding a couple of seconds to my life expectancy!
Royally amused
This is pleasant. The number of hits on this site got a 25 percent boost this weekend, thanks to Prince Albert of Monaco (and the new Mrs. Prince).
Yes, indeed, there is a connection between Emiliano Zapata and Prince Albert of Monaco… a tenuous one, but it does exist. Who knew there was such an interest in the descendents of de la Torre y Mier family of Morelos?
Itamar Franco
When Latin American presidents leave office, most people are relieved… even when they aren’t chased out, or —like Mexico’s Carlos Salinas —wise to take up residence abroad in a country with no extradition treaty… an ex-president in the Americas has to consider his career a success if he leaves office with more than a 30 percent approval rating. Itamar Franco, when he stepped down as Brazil’s president on New Years’ Day, 1995, had an approval rating of 90 percent.
Franco was an accidental president, having been elevated from the Vice-Presidency when Fernando Collor de Melo resigned rather than face impeachment (shades of Gerald Ford). As a Senator from Minas Gerais, Franco had made a name for himself in demanding honesty from public officials. He opposed constitutional changes that would have allowed President Sarney to extend his term in office during Brazil’s transition from a military dictatorship.
Collor and Franco — initially considered minor candidates, in a wide open presidential campaign — won a narrow victory with the support from the elites and conservatives as the best alternative to the expected winner, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva.
While Collor (and Franco) had campaigned on their reputations for fighting corruption, Collor was accused of influence peddling, by his own brother. In addition, the administration’s plans to bring the horrendous 29 percent per MONTH inflation under control which, with several changes in direction and procedure, managed to bring the inflation rate to 50 percent per month. Collor chose to resign, rather than face Congress, and Franco inherited… a mess.
As president, Franco turned to his eventual successor, Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in restoring Brazil’s currency though the creation of what was basically Monopoly Money A non-existent stable unit was used as the quoted price for goods and services, but you paid for those goods in services in real money, which at the time was the Cruzado Novo, which had replaced the Cruzeiro under Collor’s failed plan(s)… and then replacing the monopoly money value *and the Cruzado Novo) with a currency based on the monopoly money value with real money… the the Real: which, to the chagrin of the world’s economists worked… for real.
Also to the horror of the conventional economists, the over-valued (by design) Real allowed Franco and Cardoso turned neo-liberal “free market” solutions on their head. The point of the whole exercise in opening markets was less to sell off state businesses and increase exports as to keep Brazilian businesses in Brazilian hands, and to force Brazilians to develop new export opportunities. The new currency made foreign products cheaper (and brought down the price of Brazilian made goods). But, in opening the doors to foreign capital, the plan was to keep Brazilian industries in Brazilian hands, and plowed into Brazilian investments. Iron ore brings in cash, but it doesn’t create the kind of society a country that exports steel and Chevrolets and jet aircraft does.
While mourned on his passing this weekend by the financial press, Franco should also be remembered for his commitment to a Brazil for all Brazilians. Of German and Italian descent himself, he championed a more inclusive Brazil, both nationally (his chosen successor, Henrique Cardoso, was descended from slaves, and proud of it) and internationally (as a Senator, he pushed Brazil to break relations with racially segregated countries like, at that time, South Africa) and democratic stability.
¡Cerverza y liberdad!
A total of 26 people, mostly youths, were arrested by city police during the demonstration Thursday night on Paseo Olas Altas, protesting the implementation of the “Zero Tolerance” program which sanctions drinking alcoholic beverages in public.
Those arrested by the Preventative Police “Good Government Squad” were released after paying fines of between six and eight minimum wages.
Noroeste (Mazatlán, Sinaloa) 1 July 2011
I can think of better things to demonstrate against, but not being a drinker (something of a handicap in a cultural back
water with nothing but a beach and brewery to particularly recommend the place) the ridiculous “Zero Tolerance” law doesn’t affect me directly.
The new PAN Presidente Muncipal, Alejandro Higuera Osuno, aka “el diablo azul” (“the blue devil”, the PAN logo being blue and white), is described by Sinaloan political writer Jorge Luis Telles as the kind of politician who “wants to be the bride at every wedding, the baby at every baptism and the corpse at every funeral.” In short, ambitious (it’s no secret he is unsatisfied as the big fish in the small pond of municipal politics and harbors ambitions of holding state or national office) and greedy for attention. Although he campaigned as a reformist for the job he’s held twice before, Higuera’s base is the “piety wing” of PAN, and “moral reform” is the kind of thing likely to bring him the support from the base on a more than municipal level.
What’s scary isn’t that this is politics as usual, but that it is the usual political response. What I mean is that having been promised reform by the opposition (even if it included having to tolerate puritanical “reforms” like blue laws — we can’t buy beer on Sundays any more either), once in office, the “reformers” respond to even a minor challenge to their authority (and how much of a threat to the Republic, or even to public order were a bunch of kids demanding the right to drink beer on the beachfront anyway?) the same way the allegedly despised anti-democratic previous party did… with a massive show of force. Police units with Orwellian sounding names coming in and drawing weapons on a bunch of kids drinking beer is hardly a sales pitch for democratic reform… it’s the same sort of coercion they supposedly were campaigning against.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Not quite… the old boss didn’t care if you had a beer in public. And you can’t blame people for preferring the devil they knew to the “diablo azul”.
That other NAFTA country, eh…
A salute by Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie to the home and native land of Celine Dion, Justin Beiber, Pacific Rim Mining, Alberta Oil Sands … though it has its good points too.
A tip of the toque to Sabina Becker: May your polar bear be always aboot when you need to get from your igloo to the hockey game, eh.
The Legislature must be in session
The natives are… ridiculous
So… Matthew Morin of Cuernavaca (Call now: 777-235-2728) is a “native”… of … where exactly? Cuernavaca? Mexico? Beiberlandia?
Anyway, who would pay to learn to speak like Justin Beiber… in English or Spanish?
(Sombrero tip to Laura Martinez and Hazmeelchaingadofavor punto com).
A modest proposal
[P]robably the most important policies the United States can pursue, in addition to supporting Mexico and disrupting the flow of weapons, is to increase its efforts to combat money laundering and reduce and prevent consumption of illegal drugs, especially cocaine, in the United States.
Eric Olsen, Senior Associate, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Latin America Program – Mexico Institute.
From remarks at the Congressional Forum On Violence and Firearms Trafficking to Mexico (30 June 2011).
Maybe the best way for the United States to “support Mexico” would be to apply the “assistance” they provide us at home. Why don’t Mexico and the United States just trade tactics? We’ll supply machetes in lieu of AK-47s and 50 cals, invest the narco money here on something useful like… oh… rural development projects and irrigation instead of wasteful things like propping up banks and Wall Street investment firms and let the gangsters on the distribution end have a go at chopping off various peoples´ heads for a change.
mexfiles.net 