Let us now praise anonymous men
“… it would be as well not to forget the lesson taught by the mines’ graveyards, which contain but a fraction of the enormous number of people devoured by cave-ins, silicosis and the mountain’s infernal climate”, wrote a young Argentine doctor touring the Chilean copper mines in 1952.
While industrial safety standards have improved with technology since that time, demands for improvement have largely come from mine workers themselves — the owners (and investors) being reluctant to consider safety as a legitimate cost of doing business, and assessing production solely on the amount of metal produced, without thought to the miners, their families or the environment.
Whether the extractive industries are based on our wants or our needs is another issue — the assumption always having been that outsiders have some inherent right to underground resources found south of the Rio Grande River. One might dismiss the Argentine’s observations as dated, but consider these random factoids from Daniel Hernandez (Los Angeles Times):
- This month, five miners died in a collapse at a coal mine in northeast Colombia (link in Spanish).
- In August, while the 33 Chile miners were trapped underground, an explosion at a wildcat gold mine in a remote jungle in Venezuela killed six miners. Miners in the area said that the actual toll was 14 or 15.
- In June, an explosion at a coal mine in northwestern Colombia left 70 miners dead, one of the largest death tolls recorded in recent mining accidents worldwide.
- In February, eight miners died after an explosion at a coal mine in northern Peru.
- In 2006, 65 miners died after an explosion at a coal mine in northern Mexico (link in Spanish).
How much news coverage (even in investment and business publications) did the Colombian, Peruvian, Mexican and Venezuelan miners receive? And how are those affected by investors likely to respond to the indifference?
Chilean miners, who earn up to 2,000 dollars a month, and miners in Peru and Mexico, whose paychecks may be no more than 60 dollars a week, are demanding their share in the bonanza.
In Chile, a three-week strike in August hit the world’s largest copper deposit, and in Peru, neighbourhood protests paralysed Latin America’s biggest gold mine for several days last month.
Meanwhile, in Mexico a labour dispute between miners and the government continues after five months, and in Central America activists and residents want to block mining sector development.
According to the International Labor Organisation (ILO), mining produces the most fatal accidents and illnesses among its labour force. Furthermore, millions of people work in mining informally, without employment or health protections.
Yes, things have changed since Che Guevara first visited the Chilean mines. Still, without serious demands by the investors, don’t be surprised if it’s the Argentine doctor with an interest in industrial safety who is listened to by those upon whom the “first world lifestyle” depends.
Holy crap!
The men in skirts are getting skittish… from Ganchoblog:
Hugo Valdemar, a spokesman with the Mexico City archdiocese, requested that Marcelo Ebrard undergo a mental health exam.
And, not to be outdone, Guadalajara Archbishop Juan Sandoval Iñiguez explained why gays don’t bother him with the following logic:
They are a very small group, they can’t affect the whole of the nation, they are very small groups so regarding them, there’s no problem.
One suspects that he might be worried about the size of the gay population growing.
You know what they say about people who obsess over other people’s sex lives.
Free at last!
Deceit and corruption… and marijuana
Anybody who tries to hang on to America’s coat-tails is going to find himself up to his eyeballs in, well, deceit and corruption. This is the crookedest place on earth – and I never thought I would go that far, having been to many other countries at least south of our borders.
I realize Vidal is speaking of other matters (such as the absurd role corporate financing plays in U.S. politics, and the country’s imperial ambitions), but Felipe Calderón’s response to very probable passage of a marijuana legalization proposition in California perhaps illustrates “deceit and corruption” in a clearer way than discussions of esoteric philosophical concepts like republican virtue would.
“I think [the United States has] very little moral authority to condemn Mexican farmers who out of hunger are planting marijuana to feed the insatiable [U.S.] appetite for drugs,” Calderón is quoted as saying.
With a Rand Corporation study shows that the effects of California initiative will have a minimal impact on the Mexican marijuana export business, Mexicans have every right to feel deceived. Either our feared “cartels” (a term more properly applied to organizations like Microsoft or Google, which cooperate to dominate a given market than warring competitors) are not the economic powerhouses they are made out to be, and Mexican marijuana exports were never more than a minor problem for the United States, or it was never Mexican marijuana exports that were focus of U.S. intervention and subvention in this country.
There’s no dark conspiracy involving secret iluminati meeting in smoke filled rooms, or the Bohemian Grove, in all this, but there was a willingness on the part of the United States to deceive Mexico. The Rand study merely shows that our supply — while economically important — is not a major factor in U.S. demand. HOWEVER… the self-deception practiced by the United States has allowed them to “off-shore” their own problem (assuming it is a problem) with the wide-scale use of narcotics and blame us… or rather, corrupt us into wasting blood and money on something not particularly important.
Of course, marijuana control is big business and there are several industries (everything from the police bureaucracies and private prisons to rehabs) dependent on the simulation of marijuana control and perhaps the retail and consumer end of things has a “body count” that makes our present phony-war look minor (U.S. statistics don’t seem to show deaths related to consumption — caused by things like child neglect, auto and industrial accidents, and stupidity: a person killed in a train accident blamed on a marijuana smoking engineer might be included as “drug-related” casualties, but its unlikely — and that would be unusual, and normal everyday “Bubba-cide” [fatalities related to idiocy], suicides, neglecting medical symptoms until too late, etc. certainly would not.
Maybe the U.S. — which is the major narcotics consumer — is right to foster those control industries. That’s for them to decide, and if they decide to legalize one narcotic in one state, it’s not for Mexico to say. Still, as Calderón suggested, it’s not then for the United States to insist that Mexico — deceived once by NAFTA into the destruction of its agricultural sector — can continue to attempt the willful destruction of a profitable agricultural enterprise for the convenience of those foreign industries.
Which is where corruption comes in. Mexico in general, and Sinaloa in particular, has always been labeled as “corrupt” in large part because elected leaders tolerated the business the U.S. consumers avidly supported. Luís Astorga, who — as far as I can tell — is the only Sinaloan historian to deal with this important part of our history (Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment [UNESCO, on line], and El siglo de las drogas[México:Espasa-Calpe Mexicana,1996] — has made a stong case in both of these works that official tolerance of the narcotics trade is not new, nor was it ever considered particularly corrupt. That the products were for export, and not the cause of any pressing social problems — and at times were even encouraged by the United States government — may have made narcotics dealers relatively wealthy and politically powerful, but there is nothing inherently corrupt in local business leaders having an outsized role in local politics… nor local politicians supporting (and benefiting from) a successful local industry.
The difference between Sinaloa and the marijuana-growing regions of northern California (where successful marijuana growers are also tacitly tolerated) is that marijuana CONSUMPTION isn’t — and never has been — a major issue. That is, our “corruption” is the result of changes in consumption that drove up demand, and made our growers more important than they should be. Astorga recently co-wrote (with David A. Shirk) an excellent “white paper” on “Drug Trafficking Organizations and Counter-Drug Strategies in the U.S.-Mexican Context” for the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies[1]. They write:
Major drug trafficking operations came to fruition in Mexico with auspicious timing. On the one hand, Mexico was experiencing intense processes of economic integration that opened new channels of commerce with the United States. The same factors that boosted legitimate economic activity in the NAFTA countries —the new global economy, in general— also benefited the “illicit economy” (Friman and Andreas 1999; Naim 2006). As is well documented, in this context, small, highly flexible, and loosely constructed global networks of criminals and terrorists can now share information, transfer and launder funds, and ensure “just in time” deliveries of contraband with astounding agility.In a “flatter,” “borderless” world, illicit non-state actors can outmaneuver and even challenge states, using the same financial and physical infrastructure, technologies, and organizational models of globalization…
Again, no conspiracy here, but we were the corrupted, not the corruptor — and when it comes to assessing the evil in corruption, Eve may have taken the first bribe, but the one who offered the bribe but the one making the offer was “The Evil One.”
But even more deceptive, and more corrupting than just the economics has been the effect on our democracy. Calderón’s legitimacy (and many say his dubious election) was rooted in support for the U.S. “War on Drugs.” Many say the erosion of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement (which has been called a creeping coup before) and the only half-hearted push for necessary changes in our legal system (shunted aside in favor of the anti-narco crusade), not to mention the damage to Mexico’s reputation as a stable, imperfect but functional society has been horribly damaged… “thanks” to what many believe was the the deceit and corruption that allowed for Calderón’s elevation to Los Pinos.
California’s legalization seriously undermines Calderón perhaps more than Mexico itself. That — by some accounts — might be a benefit in itself, but perhaps there is another silver lining in all this. Inca Kola News recently noticed a slight trend towards LESS Mexican exports to the United States. While — as some of his astute commentators (the Inca and his commentators usually being econo-nerds) suggest — at least part of the decline is due to falling oil exports and possibly more Mexican products being considered as other than exports (under NAFTA and DR-CAFTA provisions). Apparently, the export data does not include narcotics (but should) which might make our foreign trade look even more tilted towards the United States than is healthy.
Unable to justify persecution of the growers, and assuming the United States maintains its corrupting and deceitful insistence on Mexico’s erradication of this particularly desirable export, it would be a fruitful time to look at other exports, less dependent on a deceitful and corrupting market.
[1] A sombrero-tip to Maggie’s Madness for finding this important study.
Safer schools
In the last year 7.6% of students between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were pregnant, labeled “a serious problem” by Secretary of Public Education Alonso Lujambio , when announcing an expanded program an expanded public school program to promote condom use and “responsible sexual activity.”
(Milenio)
Mexico is something of a model for sex education and public access to birth control, so in itself, there is nothing radical or particularly surprising about this joint Public Education and Mexican Institute of Social Security (“social security” in Mexico having a much broader mandate, including public health, than U.S. readers might be tempted to think) policy. What does make it noteworthy is that Secretary Lujambio is being pushed as the more conservative choice among the PAN leadership as a possible presidential candidate in 2012.
Also worth mentioning is that this does nothing to assist those who have left school by age 14 (all too high a number, and one that appears to be rising under the present administration), and the same study showing the high pregnancy rate among students also reports an alarmingly high incidence of reported sexual harassment, the proposed program is said to address that.
Of course, for those who look to the United States for their clues on how things are done (or ought to be done), “responsible sexual activity” sometimes is an euphemism for “just say no” and indoctrination in a single model of sexuality. Neither of which work.
The tweet heard round the world
“Today is Columbus Day. To celebrate, go visit your neighbor, give him smallpox, and move into his house after he dies.”
(jedijunkie)
Round, round, get around…
Yet another line of the new “Metrobus” system for Mexico City — this one from Buenavista to San Lazaro — could mean less auto traffic through the Centro Histórico, as well as fewer buses and taxis clogging the narrow streets.
Going by the history of the first three Metrobus line projects, the estimated 650 million peso price tag probably turn out to be hopelessly optimistic, there are likely will be a search for litigants by PAN to delay the project (and Televisa will run long sympathetic news segments on the travails of the litigant who finds the construction project a human rights abuse) and then it will be built… and people will use it. And the opposition press will have screaming headlines about how dangerous it is the first time some idiot drives the wrong way down the metrobus lane and smacks into one. And everyone will use it.
Up and coming
… There is the manmade moon, a glowing white globe emblazoned “Carabineros de Chile,” an absurd little art installation in this place that needs no police, where everything is free, where millions of dollars in TV equipment sits out all night unprotected, where everyone is focused on one thing.
The famous Atacama silence? Don’t talk to me about silence. Because I won’t hear you over the Chilean cumbia from the first camp by the bodega, the seven (countem!) gasoline-powered generators out back of the BBC camp and, audible for kilometers, Plans A, B and C, roaring and grinding and bashing bedrock to powder. This isn’t a place for silence. This is a working mine. The ore is not 8 grams per ton of gold nor 1% copper sulfate, but 33 bodies of living human flesh, walking and driving around a half mile under our little foggy village.
Setty Southam, “foreign press badge number 422”, reports on the media circus that is Camp Hope, Chile as we anticipate the imminent rescue of 32 trapped Chilean (and one Bolivian) miner.
En el pueblo donde nací…
John Lennon would have been 7o yesterday.
Here’s Mariachi Cabos to toast the occasion:
Lèse majesté
While I am not offended by people who disagree with me, and generally am tolerant of those who post irrelevant comments, claiming the owner of this site doesn’t know Mexican history based on some Cantinflas film and repeating his tedious references to “corruption” when the post was merely about remarks by various political figures of note is extremely bad manners. Although the person uses a “Hispanic” surname in his email address, he apparently is unaware of the importance of good manners in Mexican culture. The Mex Files being, first and foremost, an exposition on Mexican culture, as site administrator I would be remiss not to uphold Mexican propriety, and have awarded the commentator the first ever listing on the Mex Files’ Askimet “comment blacklist”.
A free press belongs to those that own the press, and a free website belongs to the person who pays for (and maintains) the website. Le site, c’est moi.
Mexican Messiah or Mexican Mahatma?
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
(M.K. Gandhi, 1919)
Aguachile, who both in his cyber-persona and under his real name is a well-regarded academic expert on Mexican politics, and generally writes from the left side of the discussion, is highly recommended for your RSS feed. He seems to have soured on Andre Manuel López Obrador lately, but I’m not sure AMLO’s political moves are the result of “twisted logic on the value of democratic representation and institutions“.
Although the PRD, like other left-wing movements, has a tendency to form circular firing squads (and AMLO and his followers are firing away as merrily as the rest), the “twisted logic” was simply a skilled use of party rules… which may be “twisted”, but no more undemocratic than any party maneuvering by a dissident minority. The event in question was a coalition that might have been electorally sensible but party rules required support of two-thirds plus one of the delegates voting in favor… and — wise as the decision might be — finding one third plus one delegates to oppose the proposition is democratic.
When I wrote Gods, Gachupines and Gringos shortly after the 2006 election (my cut-off point), I said “…the López Obrador alternative presidency appears to be nothing more threatening than a “think tank” and training school for future leaders.” That the founder and leader of the “think tank” is still active shouldn’t be all that surprising.
The dramatic actions — the street demonstrations, the public inaguration of the alternative presidency, and the trappings of a government-in-waiting may have looked somewhat silly but … unlike U.S. “think tanks”, supported by wealthy donors (who expect the product to support their own thoughts), it was a brilliant way to create a populist think tank… or at least the perception of one. And, while the overt AMLOista factions within the Chamber of Deputies has more or less been absorbed by other factions, the “alternative presidency” has been the source for some of the more progressive legislative and political initiatives of the last few years… and an impediment to some of the “neo-liberal” ones.
More importantly, although probably unintentionally, it has also forced would be AMLO rivals like Marcelo Ebrard to carve out their own progressive or populist agendas — one thinks here of Victoriano Huerta’s administration, which instigated extremely progressive reforms in labor and tax codes, as it tried to wean support away from the heirs of Madero during the early Revolution. And, if not his rivals, at least some in his party, have learned their lessons — and adopted AMLO’s famed ability to put together unlikely coalitions (George Grayson’s “hit piece”, Mexican Messiah, can’t avoid looking in awe at Lopez Obrador’s brilliance in working with the Catholic Church, Carlos Slim, informal vendors unions [often quasi-criminal organizations], the prostitutes union and others on revitalizating the Centro Historico during his tenure as the Federal District Chief). That the lefter-left-right coalition candidates did so well in state elections throughout the country owes much to AMLO… who opposes party coalitions with the right (not working coalitions with them on specific issues).
Certainly, AMLO has made political blunders — think of the Juanito fiasco, where AMLO supported a “ringer” from the Workers’ Party in a Delegacion election to stand in for his own preferred candidate who was denied her place on the party slate by political maneuvers based in the “twisted logic” of party rules. The eminently unqualified ringer won, but refused to play along, and had to be forced out of office. And, there are “personality clashes” — AMLO in what we know of his private life is probably the most abstentious Mexican politician since Lazaro Cardenas… or perhaps Benito Juarez. AMLO — with his insistence on non-violence and “republican virtue” has often compared himself to Francisco Madero and M.K. Gandhi… both politicos who ended up shot, but both today considered saints. Saints are not fun to hang around with… and while I’m not going to question the sincerity or patriotism of any public figure, a good number of Mexican politicians, even on the left, are all that comfortable taking a pledge to “virtue”… implying not a vow of poverty, but at least a vow of “austerity” and restraint.
Still, the man is a hero to millions, many of whom are not particularly interested in electoral politics. Electoral political organizations — with their “twisted logic” — sometimes thwart democracy through their procedures (as may have demonstrated in the reported results of the 2006 presidential election). In itself, going around the electoral system is not anti-democratic in itself. The “teabaggers” movement or anti-war demonstrations in the United States are not electoral, but have always been considered legitimate democratic activities. Democracy is more than electoral rules and running for office.
I’ve been noting from time to time since the 2006 election, AMLO never really disappeared, although he was generally frozen out of the mass media. Lopez Obrador himself has been campaigning — almost non-stop it seems — in rural areas and “under the radar”, covered in provincial media, and by alternative media — bloggers and on-line journals (including one of my main news sources, the on-line SDPNoticias).
With these points in mind, I’m not at all surprised that AMLO is back in the news, and that there has been a concerted effort to discredit him… again. And, again, it seems to be backfiring. Felipe Calderón has been widely condemned — from the left, right and center — for his own “twisted logic” in recycling his old — and by now obviously false — accusation that AMLO was — and is — a danger for Mexico. AMLO, as on so many occasions before, has simply turned the accusations to his own advantage — used the “twisted logic” , if you like, of his persecutors, to open those persecutors to more stinging criticism.
From Gancho:
Aguachile mentioned how it was inappropriate for Calderón to return the Danger for Mexico topic, and reiterate its message once more. True enough, but it was also politically silly, as the skillful response from AMLO demonstrates:
…I have never called Calderón a danger for Mexico, despite the fact that
30,000 Mexicans have lost their lives thanks to his ineptitude and
irresponsibility.
Oh, snap!
Gancho adds AMLO’s reply was “not entirely fair”, but since when is politics is about being fair? To quote another Gandhism, “First they mock you, then they attack you… then you fight them.” And, sometimes, as with Gandhi, you win… just not the way you expect.
Mario Vargas Llosa, et al.
¡Felicitaciones a Maria Vargas Llosa!… winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2010 and — as far as we know — the first Nobel laureate to have punched out another Nobel laureate. As noted in the CNN article that linked to the Mex Files, Gabriel Garcia Marquez did NOT send a twitter reading “now we’re even” (something noted in a CNN article, and linked to my post on the infamous February 1976 Palacio de Bellas Artes Vargas Llosa-Garcia Marquez Literary Heavyweight Bout.
Left (top to bottom): Mistral, Asturias, Neruda. Right (top to bottom): Garcia Marquez, Paz, Le Clézio
Vicente Fox … who once said his favorite Mexican author was some guy named José Luís Borges… did send an e-mail to Vargas Llosa, congratulating him on joining the august company of other three Latin American laureates… Colombian-born Mexican resident Garcia Marquez, Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1990) and Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges. At least Fox got the writer and his nationality right for a change, but there are now six Latin Laureates, Borges not among them.
Ah well… Fox was unique among Mexican presidents for — shall we say — “philistine” taste in literature, but to merely point out that Borges never received his Nobel Prize (reportedly because of his support for military dictators in his country), the Mexican press should be ashamed of itself for missing so many other Latin American laureates, most with Mexican connections.
The Mexican connection of two Chileann laureates — poets Gabriela Mistral (1945) and Pablo Neruda (1971) and Guatemalan novelist, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967), were overlooked . Perhaps Fox only meant laureates who had lived in Mexico, in which case he rightly listed Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez (but not Borges, who never lived here — and wasn’t a Nobel Laureate in any case), but should have included Mistral (who worked for the Secretariat of Public Instruction with José Vasconcellos for many years and whose canon includes several Mexican poems) — and perhaps both Asturias and 2008’s Laureate, J.M. Le Clézio –who, although his language is French, and his nationality is Mauritian, made Mexico and the Mexicans central to his literary and anthropological writing and study.
Asturias was the Guatemalan Ambassador to Mexico in the late 1940s and his first novel and recognized master-work, Hombres de maiz (“Men of Maize”) was written in Mexico, dealing with Mayan customs and beliefs, although reflecting conditions in our neighbor to the south.
The new club kid — Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa is something of a bête noir among Latin Americanists, given his overt political support for neo-liberalism in the region, and his political activities in his native Peru. He was a presidential candidate for the neo-liberal and rightist coalition in Peru in 1990. Of course, to be fair, Neruda was a Stalinist, so I don’t think it’s quite right to judge literary activity by political coloration. Still, where one can read Neruda, Mistal, Garcia Marquez, or Paz without reference to their politics, Vargas Llosa — as a political novelists — has to ground his fictions in political assumptions, which in his case, are conservative. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t worth reading One of my favorite books on Latin history is Fiesta del chivo (“Feast of the Goat”) a conventionally structured historical novel on the overthrow of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. His 1982 La guerra del fin del mundo (“War at the end of the world”) — another historical tragedy, dealing with the destruction of a millenialist cult that rebelled against the government in 1880s Brazil.
Whether or not I “approve” of Vargas Llosa’s politics is irrelevant (the Swedish Academy never asked me anyhow). He deserves his prize, and to be read for the skillful way he provides insight into the complexities of humans caught up by their own frailties and complexities in political and economic situation beyond their control.
mexfiles.net 