SOMEBODY LISTEN TO ME!
I have a family to support... somebody listen to me!
Cartoonist “Gritón” summarizes objections to the Calderón administration’s fixation on the “drug war” better than anything I could write.
Basically, the narcos are the only secure employment opportunity for many here in Sinaloa, and other rural communities where — aside from farm subsidies for narcos — not much has been done other than to throw more soldiers at the underemployed people, so I can understand exactly where “Gritón” is coming from.
IN urban areas, as has been noted several times, the “drug war” is really a frontier war. Maggie’s Madness, looking at the growing frustration with narcotics trafficking at the California frontier posts, writes from Tijuana:
…it’s the disaffected population who may or may not be involved in narcotics trafficking that are unemployed who have been forced into a life of crime and more tragically, it is the children who are being swept away by the current conditions which Archbishop Rafael Ramon Munoz of Tijuana describes as a “breakdown in social values.”
Victor Clark Alfaro believes that, “…if there were many jobs in this country and everyone was working this phenomenon [the teens fueling the operational basis of criminal groups in the country] would not exist.” But, he adds, under these conditions, labor is cheap and disposable.
And, on that other besieged outpost of civilization Ganchoblog writes:
According to an UNAM study, 64 percent of Juárez residents between 15 and 24 years old neither study nor work. That leaves around 150,000 with nothing to do occupy themselves, which of course offers a fertile market for gang recruitment.
People mean well when they float the simplistic idea that legalizing drug use would somehow end the problem with violence in OUR society, but not being a particularly major drug using country (even in our frontier towns). More soldiers, even better paid ones, has so far meant just more deaths. Maybe throwing school teachers and good paying jobs into the conflict zones isn’t such a radical idea.
A quicky
Let us now praise obscure men.
On 19 February 1913, at 10:34 AM, Pedro Lascuráin Paredes took the Oath of Office beginning his tenure as President of Mexico. By 11 AM, he had named Victoriano Huerta his Secretaria de Gobernacion. By 11:30 at the latest, Lascuráin’s resignation was accepted.
There was a lot of nonsense during the Honduran coup about how it was “constitutional”. Lascuráin’s grand Presidential reign was also “constitutional”, which is a different thing than legit.
U.S. Ambassador Wilson wanted to be able to pretend the whole plot to overthrow Madero was a perfectly normal political transition and not a U.S. engineered coup. So, President Madero and Vice President Pino Suarez were “convinced” to resign at some point on the night of the 18th or the the morning of the 19th (just to make sure the Apostle of Democracy got the hint, Madero’s brother Gustavo was stomped to death after his one good eye was gouged out). Lascuráin, the Foreign Minister was next in line for the Presidency (actually, the Secretaría de Gobernacion was, but he’d taken the hint when Madero and Pino Suarez were locked up and had already resigned, leaving the office vacant) so was sworn in, “constitutionally”, after which he named Victoriano Huerta his Secretaria de Gobernacion and … with no Vice President (which was still an office in those days)… you can guess the rest. All very proper.
The Lascuráin Administration should be acknowledged for its rarity among Mexican governments in avoiding major financial irregularities in its budget. And for its uncanny knack, never seen in governments anywhere at anytime for managing to not get bogged down in bureaucratic infighting or cabinet disputes.
Lascuráin was something of a model ex-President, living rather moderately, neither soliciting funds for a presidential library or Lascuráin Center, nor letting his name and status as an ex-president become attached to dubious enterprises. And, he never demanded a high advance for his presidential memoirs. Instead, sharing the wisdom and insight only a former president can provide, he entered academia, teaching civil and commercial law.
The son also raises an objection
Sinaloan Federal Deputy Manuel Clouthier is in trouble with his party.
Although a PAN representative, Clouthier had the temerity to refer to the President’s “supposed war on drugs in Sinaloa“. Specifically, he complained that, “It’s now three years into the government of Felipe Calderón and in Sinaloa there has not been any decisive action against the drug traffickers, nor has the government done anything serious.”
Julio Castellanos, the Chamber of Deputies PAN party whip demanded Clouthier either retract his remarks or resign his seat. According to Castellanos, Clouthier has a duty as a PAN representative to NOT object to the party’s support of whatever the President is doing (or not doing) in the “war on drugs.”
Clouthier responds that Castellanos doesn’t know anything about Sinaloa, and besides, he represents a Sinaloan constituency, not a PAN one.
What makes this interesting is that Manuel Clouthier is the son of Manuel Clouthier, Manuel de Jesus Clouthier Rincon, who is to PAN as Franklin Delano Roosevelt is to the U.S. Democratic Party or Ronald Reagan to the Republicans. Or more. The elder Clouthier was not only the first PAN leader to have a significant national following (he received 17 percent of the vote in his run for the Presidency in 1988), but was also largely responsible for repositioning PAN as a legitimate conservative party, building a base beyond its traditional norteño and clerical support. A strategic and long-range thinker, Clouthier Rincon organized an “alternative government” (a strategy later followed by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador following his much more problematic loss of the Presidency) following the 1988 elections, both to develop PAN’s own proposals to political initiatives from the Salinas de Goutari Administraton, but also to act as a leadership incubator for future party leaders, including “Secretary of Agriculture” Vicente Fox. He died in a car accident in 1989, which some to this day claim was no accident.
An iconic figure in his party, he might be analogous to Ronald Reagan or Franklin Delano Roosevelt in U.S. political party history. Reagan and Roosevelt had sons who turned away from their father’s ideology, but it seems somewhat rare in Mexican politics for sons to stray too far from their father’s political inheritance. More likely is that the party drifts from the family’s political heritage. Lazaro Cardenas del Rio’s presidency pre-dated the PRI as an party. His son, Cuauhtémoc, stayed on the left… his break with the PRI was over its drift to the right. Felipe Calderón’s father, Luis Calderón Vega was one of the founders of PAN, but resigned the party in 1981 claiming the party had gone from progressive and democratic to a tool of the rich (Felipe was 19 at the time, so perhaps early childhood experience trumped later paternal involvement).
In 2005 Clouthier Rincon’s daughter, Tatania, then a Federal Deputy from Nuevo Leon, quit the party complaining that the Fox Administration was turning PAN into a bad copy of PRI. But Manuel, hijo, until now has been a loyal PANista, and his “treason” suggests that PAN is both becoming, as his sister said, “a bad copy of PRI” and — like the U.S. Republicans, eating its own, as it becomes ideologically rigid and turning out the very people that reformers like the elder Clouthier and Luis Calderón saw as necessary if they were to create a party capable of governing the country from a conservative platform.
Texas, the Terrorist and la Virgen
In light of yesterday’s airplane suicide attack on an Internal Revenue Service facility in Austin by a guy who doesn’t neatly fit into the category of either right-wing or left-wing extremism, there’s been some attempt to spin what U.S. law (U.S.C. 18 § 2331(5) if you care to look it up) defines as “domestic terrorism into something else. But — whether we call the kamikaze tax protester a “terrorist” or, in my preferred locution, a fuckin’ lunatic — the guy who crashed his plane yesterday is never going to go to trial. But this is not the first time a terrorist (or fuckin’ lunatic) launched a suicide airplane attack to resolve some incoherent grievance either in the United States or in Texas… though Francis B. Alexander may have had to answer for aeronautic atavism to a higher power.
Yesterday’s suicide flier, Joe Stack, left a message blaming, among others, the Roman Catholic Church for whatever it was that set him off. Francis B. Alexander, a 50-year old flight instructor, was a bit more ecumenical — the objects of his inchoate rage included both Roman Catholics and Methodists, as well as Mexicans. On 23 October 1970, Alexander rented a Piper Cherokee 180 and went looking for a target on which to vent his bile. Going for two out of three of his favored obsessions — Catholics and Mexicans — he deliberately launched what U.S.C. 18 § 2331(5) would later define as “domestic terrorism” (“…activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population…) when he deliberately crashed into the Shrine of the Virgen de San Juan del Valle in San Juan, six miles outside McAllen, Texas.
San Juan owed its existence as a community to settlement in the late 1910s and 20s by the Mexican diaspora created by the Revolution and the subsequent Cristero Wars, the latter leading to emigration to Texas of Catholic traditionalists from Jalisco. The original mission church in San Juan, served by Oblates of Mary Immaculate (originally 
a French missionary order, now based in San Antonio, that has traditionally provided priests in rural Texas and the American southwest) sought to preserve the traditional religious practices of their Jalisco parishioners. The mission priest installed a statue of the popular Jalicience icon — la Virgen de los Lagos (who was also known as la Virgen de San Juan, making her presence in the small community a point of local pride) in the 1940s. The small town church became the center of worship for those who venerated this particular manifestation of the Vigin, and — it being a hardship on the faithful in the United States to make pilgrimages to the original shrine — in 1949 the San Juan Texas shine was built. As a pilgrimage site attracting thousands of the faithful, the Texas shine outgrew its original site a new facility was built in 1954. Attracting tens of thousands of annual pilgrims by the mid 1960s, the shrine became the repository for a large collection of sacred art and grew to include a housing for pilgrims, a cafeteria, retreat house, a grade school, nursing home, a radio studio, a convent and rectory.
Credit the intercession of la Virgen, or the steel-beam construction, or a combination thereof, but Alexander’s plane was tangled in the roof beam when it hit. The 130 persons in the church all made it out alive, as well as the over 200 children and nuns in the grade school fifty yards away were uninjured. the image of the Virgen was also unharmed. Francis B. Alexander — the first known person to use a civilian aircraft as a terrorist weapon — was the only fatality.
The shrine itself, and the artwork were destroyed. The image was moved to the cafeteria and the faithful continued to show up while a new facility, begun in 1974 was dedicated in 1980. The new Basilica (a special ecclesiastical designation conferred on the Shrine by Pope John-Paul II in 1999), according to the Handbook of Texas On-line:
… seats more than 1,800; the surrounding grounds are landscaped with the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The image of the Virgin is placed high in the sanctuary where it remains the center of the people’s devotion. Pilgrims average from 10,000 to 20,000 weekly. They come from every state in the Union and from many foreign countries and find Masses, in both Spanish and English, in progress from early morning to late at night.
1970 was not the ancient past, but this incident never seemed to sink into the public consciousness. Partially, it’s because the concept of “terrorism” wasn’t considered in those days, partially because there were no major casualties, partially because the Alexander’s motives were never clear to anyone (perhaps even himself) but mostly because what happened in rural Texas to Mexican-Americans was dismissed as relatively unimportant, and the victims relatively unimportant people, and subsequently erased from our collective memories. That, or la Virgen is all forgiving.
(Photos: Plane Crash, Corpus Cristi Caller-Times; Virgen, Santo Nino ng Makati; Basilica, Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan – National Shrine)
18 Febrero 1913
Today is the anniversary of the “Embassy Pact” — when U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson met with Victorianao Huerta, to hammer out the details for a “regime change” that allowed the U.S. to claim the violent coup (and subsequent murder of President Madero and Vice President Pino Suarez) was a “constitutional process”.
Victoriano Huerta (with those shades, the very model of the modern Latin American dictator)…
… who was in charge of defending the governemt and the president, holded up in the National Palace. The rebels captured la Ciudadela — the Mexico City military headquarters — and bombarded the National Palace, mostly hitting civilians in betweens the two. Huerta was crude — a sadist and an alcoholic — but he was no fool. While civilian bodies were piling up in the streets, Huerta, Felix Díaz and Ambassador Wilson struck a bargain. They even signed a contract: Huerta would switch sides and become interim president…
(Gods, Gachupines and Gringos, © 2008)
Results were not quite as expected. The reason, given by Wilson at the time was that he wanted to prevent “more bloodshed” (and, also prevent a higher mineral extraction tax from going into effect, as well as labor reforms that would have forced landowners like William Randolf Hearst to spend more on workers). The result was another ten years of warfare in Mexico, massive immigration by Mexican farmworkers to the United States, the eventual expropriation of the oil industry and strict labor laws, as well as restrictions on the ownership of property by foreigners in Mexico.
Expats who want to whine about having to pay their maids a decent income, or complain about the restrictions on land ownership can spend the day cursing the U.S. State Department and Henry Lane Wilson.
Beat the press, part infinity
Mexico’s special prosecutor for crimes against journalists has been replaced; out goes Octavio Alberto Orellana, in comes Gustavo Salas. The Inter-American Press Society is happy, as it viewed Orellana as inactive. That complaint echos a view I heard when I was working on this article. I believe that despite ample opportunities (60 murdered journalists in Mexico since 2000 according to the CNDH; a fraction of that number but still quite a few according to the Committee to Protect Journalists), Orellana never prosecuted a case.
Here’s a place for Gustavo Salas to start. It shouldn’t be too hard to identify the perps:
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Four reporters were assaulted by police on Wednesday while covering protests outside an event attended by Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
“They took our telephones, the equipment, cameras, and they enclosed us in a small space to prevent us from getting out, we received blows from billy clubs,” journalist Oscar Amaya said.
The attack on Amaya and colleagues Daniel Dominguez, Miguel Lozano and Carlos Moreno enraged the protesters, who briefly scuffled with the cops…
(EFE, via Latin American Herald Tribune)
Courtship and (same-sex)marriage
Among the small cadre of English-language Mexican news commentators, most of us stick to the executive branch. Patrick Corcoran and David Agren aside, very few pay any attention to what the legislature is up to, and no one, outside myself, it seems to the judiciary. The same holds true — a lot about the executive, some on the legislature and next to nothing on the judiciary — outside of criminal cases — for Mexican writers. Anyone wanting to pick up the ball and run with it isn’t facing much competition. Living out in provincia, not a lawyer and not a Mexican lawyer, I’m not exactly difficult to surpass for those who think there’s some kind of competitive ranking in the MexInfo biz.
That said, while maybe judicial deliberation just don’t have the drama of executive action or legislative manoevering, and the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN: Supreme Corte de Justicia de la Nacíon) has usually been dismissed as an paper tiger in the Mexican political sphere. Part of that is just the nature of Supreme Courts, being designed to resolve controversies, not to raise them. However, its decisions can have a long-reaching, dramatic impact on the nation and its culture that are at least as important as some specific action by some president (likely to be reversed by the next president) or some legislative initiative (which will be compromised into something very different).
The Federal District’s same-gender marriage law goes into effect on 5 March. It isn’t, in some ways, so much a profound cultural shift as a recognition that the assumptions of a rural, traditionalist Mexico is no longer the “real Mexico”, if it ever was. But, the marriage bill is controversial. Five state governors, all from PAN, as well as the Federal Attorney General, have brought before the SCJN a complaint that same-gender marriage is unconsitutional, based on the probably mistaken assumption that Article 30, Section B-II of the Constitution assumes a “family” means one with two parents, both of different genders.
The way Mexican law works, the aggrieved parties (the Attorney General on behalf of the executive branch and the five states) are claiming the Federal District law infringes on THEIR constitutional rights and is seeking an injunction from the court to stop the harm. The court is obliged to consider the controversy… or, rather, whether there is even a basis for a claim.
In an ordinary criminal or civil case, an investigative magistrate receives a complaint, weights the evidence and — if there is evidence of a crime or a tort — presents his or her findings to the judge, who then rules on the law or issues an amparo (injunction) while reviewing the evidence. In a constitutional case, the SJCN acts as its own investigative magistrate. Or rather, appoints one of their own as the investigator.
The Ministers of the court, who serve 15 year terms, are — while like in the United States selected as much for their ideology and presumed political biases — unlike in the United States, the Ministers are also chosen as representatives of a legal specialty: that is, there will be specialists in various fields of law — criminal law, civil law, family law, labor law, etc. The Ministers are divided into two “salas”, one looking at criminal and civil law, the other into administrative and labor law, presided over by the Minister-President, elected by the ministers, and analogous in the U.S. Supreme Court to the Chief Justice.
Here’s where a bit of politicking comes in. Criminal and Civil Sala Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero is considered one of the more “liberal” (in the U.S. sense of the word) members of the court, and there was some pressure on Minister-President Guillermo Ortiz from the Federal District to assign the investigative work to her. Sánchez has a background in both sociology and the law, which — according to some, would bias her towards the Mexico City administration’s contention that social change can come through legislation.
To counter this, the Governors and the Attorney General insisted the same-sex marriage bill was an administrative law matter. Ortiz agreed with the Governors, and assigned the investigation to Minister Sergio Valls Hernández.
If you were trying to read the tea leaves in a U.S. court case, you’d start plowing through the judge’s record, looking at previous rulings. Minister Valls’ judicial history is in Social Security Administrative law, but he has some record in this kind of case… one that doesn’t look promising for the governors.
In 2008, Valls investigated a complaint brought by “La jarocha”, a transsexual male to female. The Civil Court (which registers births) in the Federal District refused to issue a new birth certificate to “La jarocha” showing her female name and her gender as female. The court would only make an annotation on her existing birth certificate. But Valls recommended to his colleages that — on Constitutional protections of sexual identity — “La Jarocha” be issued a new birth certifcate and her original certificate (showing her original name and gender) be surpressed. This effectively ended a controversy — important to a few people, not just trannies, but academic to most Mexicans (as is the same gender marriage bill).
The basic principle — that civil rights, even for small minorities — trumps administrative regulations — has a wider impact. Prison and judicial reforms, policing and voting are all largely controlled by administrative regulations too. The court matters more than we realize.
NAFTA: some are more equal than others
Beginning on March 1, Canadian and U.S. citizens who enter Mexico via air must show a valid passport or passport card, Mexican officials said Tuesday.
…
Mexicans wishing to enter the United States — even just to make a connecting flight — must apply for a visa by making a premium-rate phone call to schedule an interview and paying 131 dollars, regardless if the visa is approved. Even if it is issued, a visa does not guarantee entrance to the country, according to the U.S. Embassy website.
Real Mexico is not a telenovela, but could be
Via Correspondales Indígenas (a news service pulling together various reports on the indigenous communities within Mexico and a recent addition to my regular bloglines feed) comes this nota roja written by Yajaira Vásquez for Voz de Oaxaca.
Certainly, this article sounds like the plot of a bad telenovela, but official impunity, the arrogance of the “political class” and the abuse of the indigenous people (as well as women and rural people in general) are a part of “the real Mexico” one would prefer to gloss over, or ignore, and perhaps the “bad telenovela” plot is the only way to make the less palatable parts of the “real Mexico” (and the real human race) bearable.
My translation attempts to preserve some of the nota roja flavor, but I took liberties in adding details where the original could make assumptions local readers would understand, or where the author added more details (like police report numbers) to pad out the word count.
PRI State Legislative Deputy Floriberto Vasquez Vasquez was charged with sexually abusing a young Mixe girl, as well as depriving her of her biberty, confining her in a house in the Rancho Aguayo sub-development of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlan for several months.
According to the ministerial indictment, Vasquez was abetted by his sister, Rosalia, a teacher at an San Miguel Quetzaltepec Mixes elementary school, who lured the young woman to Xoxocotlan, under the pretext of a short visit.
A preliminary investigation indicates that the young woman met Vasquez on 8 May 2009 in San Miguel Quetzaltepec Mixes, who invited her to dance.
In her deposition, the victim recounted that Vasquez was drunk, but insisted she was his girl-friend and marry him, telling her he’d seen her from afar, and fallen in love. The plaintiff complained that the Deputy continued to visit to her community, where he brought her flowers and continued to speak of his plans for conquest. She spurned his attentions, she said, because he was twice her age.
According to the complaint, the public servant, seeing unable to convince the girl to agree to marry him, or at least have a romantic relationship, decided to enlist the assistance of his sister Rosalia, a primary school teacher in the town, to assist him in winning over the plaintiff.
As part of the plot, the teacher would visit the humble home of the victim daily, insisting that her sibling was a person of good will, who would provide her with a better life and had no plans to take anything away from the plaintiff or her family, who are people of modest resources.
Finally, the plaintiff said, on the 31st of July, at about ten in the evening, the mentor again visited the young woman’s home and, deluding her into thinking she was being hired to work in the city for a few days, agreed to visit the teacher and her brother.
The next morning, the deputy’s sister and the young girl left on a bus for Oaxaca city, but about one in the afternoon, left their bus at a suburban terminal. Later, they arrived at the house on calle Amador Pérez Torres in the Rancho Aguayo sub-division of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán.
Upon arrival, the young woman found the Deputy was already in the house. He said, “Here you’ll be locked up and if you try to escape, I will kill your family and you, so do not try to resist “and then left the building.
Later, Vasquez Floriberto returned home again, drunk this time. He insulted the female and began to paw her lustfully. The youth tried to resist, however, was struck by the man, who tore her clothing and sexually assaulted her.
Weeks passed and each time the PRI deputy went to to see the young woman, it was to beat, humiliate and abuse her. The victim did not say anything, because she was threatened by this guy.
Moreover, the witness said Vasquez repeated several times that in the next elections he would be the future congressman, then no one could stop him, and he could kill anybody.
However, on 30 January, near 10 pm, Professor Rosalia went to the house where the kidnapped girl was held and told her they would be moving to Cuilapam in Guerrero State; but at that time, the wife of a local deputy, Aurora Lula, who saw the girl’s bruises, told her to run for it, and went to warn her husband.
The girl fled the house and was assisted by a who said it was not the first time that young Deputy Vasquez had held women in the house, but out of fear of reprisals, had preferred not to make a report. However, the courageous girl denounced the PRI deputy, as well as Professor Rosalia, on charges of sexual, physical, moral, psychological and other forms of abuse, as well as deprivation of liberty.
Food policy
Basic food prices in Mexico are practically out of control, the Federal Consumer Protection Agency said Sunday.
In just three years, the cost of primary foods has risen 66.7 percent, indicating a large gap between salary and consumer prices. In 2006, it cost 812.92 pesos to buy 42 items, or 16 days worth of minimum wage, but in 2009, those items cost 1,358 pesos, or 23.6 days of minimum wage.
(Erika Velasco, The [Mexico City] News)
While we have yet to see a food crisis in Mexico, and other than some sporadic “tortilla riots” a few years ago, there hasn’t been much mention of this growing problem, either. The Calderón Administration, a couple of priority issues earlier promised to do something about holding down food prices, through “voluntary agreements” with producers. Yeah, like that worked.
Farm livin’ is the life for me…
Former President Vicente Fox and his brother; Calderón Administration Secretary of Agriculture Francisco Javier Mayorga Castañeda; Sinaloan exporter and commodities broker Chapo Guzmán (as well as his mom and his brother); as well as various member of Chapo Enterprises largest local competitor, the Beltrán Leyva clan; Durango Governor Ismael Hernández Derás; Sinaloa’s Secretary of Agriculture Jorge Kondo; and miscellenous senators and union leaders must be having a tough time. They’re among the campesinos receiving subsidies from “Procampo”, a state program administered by the Secretariat of Agriculture since 1995 to help ameliorate the hardships and insecurity of rural life.
Think there might be a scandal brewing over this?
Wow!
I’m told that the logic of the Amazon ranking system algorithm has defeated the best mathematical minds in the world, leading at least one doctoral candidate to conclude it included a few random numbers generated by random calculations of other random numbers.
And, it changes by the hour, but even so… I’m not complaining.
Of course, I get a bigger cut if you order the paper version (which is only a few dollars more) direct from the publisher.
mexfiles.net 