Colorful writing
I admit, I speak Spanish with an atrocious accent, but have a colorful vocabulary which I cheerfully attribute to perverse reading habits.
I love notas rojas — “red notes”, the police reports in the local newspapers. While full of the purple prose typical of the yellow journalism, they are an art form. Not just because the correspondent is usually paid by the word are notas rojas sometimes literature worthy of Cervantes, giving an epic grandeur to the mundane world of human frailty and stupidity, but because the best of the writers understands the joy in reading is the element of surprise.
While sometimes the author — to stretch out the word count — has to resort to low tricks like referring to a police car as a “blue and white 2008 Dodge Neon, with plate number… “, the nota rota writer strives for variation in his or her craft. The banality of criminal activity sometimes reduces even the most creative of nota roja writers to clichés (there are a plethora of ways to say “corpse” — the center of attention but least interesting character in any murder story — all of which have been use to death), but the best are true artists. They still manage to surprise us, enlighten us and delight us with their mastery of the language.
How much really, can one say about a drug bust. The anonymous writer of a three-paragrapher in yesterday’s El Debate de Sinaloa, didn’t have a real promising plot to work with — the headline (Militares atrapan a 3 tipos, les aseguran armas y droga en Guasave — “Soldiers nab thee guys in Guasave said to have arms and drugs”) about wraps the story up. Soldiers, acting on a tip, raided a house and caught two guys in one house and a third guy who made a run for it. End of story. But, out of such unpromising material as “militares” the author crafts a wonderfully poetic image.
“Elementos del Ejército” (elements of the army), a dull and bureaucratic cliché in the first paragraph gives way to “Los castrenses” (those who live in barracks), a good metaphor, in that it suggests the ordinariness of soldiers ; and then, unexpectedly, as the soldiers close in on the one who almost got away as “un grupo de verdeolivo” (a group of olive-green) — the soldiers as a mass of color — like a flock of birds… or birds of prey? … an image that would appeal to poets in any number of languages, something Arthur Rimbaud might have written, or Amy Lowell or the young (not yet totally bonkers) Ezra Pound, or Salvador Novo.
We’re from the government, and we’re here to help
“Security is the key now in order for us to be able to put our feet on the ground,” said Vincenzo Pugliese, a U.N. spokesman. He said a lack of security had limited peacekeepers’ access “to the operational theater” — the city beyond the U.N. compound’s walls.
Meanwhile, outside the “operational theater” there are operating theaters busy at work… as opposed to standing by off-shore. From CNN Report, 17-January-2010:
I wonder if the insistence on “security” before assistance has anything to do with this:
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
In other words, when Latin America needs assistance, there is a solution… one I think I may have seen somewhere else. Oh, right… in the movies.
Latin America (left); IMF (right); U.S. peacekeepers (background)
Tourists — love ’em or leave ’em
The photo on the left, from Lloyds, is of the port damage in Port-au-Prince as it was on 15-January. On the right is the PRIVATE port, where Carnival Cruise Line docked Friday. My living — like that of a couple hundred Haitians working for Carnival Cruise — depends on tourism for the most part, but some days its very hard not to have fantasies of DE-porting them all.
Touché!
I love that voodoo that you do to meeeee….
Pat Robertson Voodoo doll… 100 percent of proceeds to the American Red Cross
… and yes, I know that Voodoo dolls are part of Louisiana, not Haitian voodoo… it’s the (ecumenical) thought that counts.
(Sombrero tip Kiss My Big Blue Butt)
Fresh disasters in the making
MEXICO:
As Patrick Corcoran notes this morning,:
According to a study from the National Institute of Adult Education, 700,000 Mexican youths have dropped out of school as a result of the crisis. The dropouts are concentrated in southern states like Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas, and Michoacán.
He might have, but probably didn’t need to tie that small item to a previous item, to the effect that Alonso Lujambio Irazábal, the Education Secretary had fired two education officials, presumably at Esther Elba Gordilla’s insistence. Esther Elba has been a de facto part of the PAN administration since the Fox Administration and her party, PANAL, played a crucial role as a spoiler in the 2006 election. Even if one assumes (which I have my reservations about) that Felipe Calderón was elected in 2006, the margin of victory wouldn’t have been possible without PANAL’s overt efforts to siphon votes from the “Benefit of all” coalition (PRD-PT-Convengencia) and the PRI-Green ticket. It’s probably not accidental that public education is being neglected in states where PAN (and PANAL) do poorly, and where Esther Elba’s leadership of the teachers’ union is most challenged.
You also need to remember that the Calderón Administration has used the “drug war” as an rationale for keeping military expendures high, despite “la crisis”. This is directly opposite what was done in the Great Depression, when Interim President Emilio Portes Gil slashed military expenditures while protecting education and rural development projects.
CHILE:
Speaking of spoilers, as Hemispheric Brief writes this morning:
Right-wing businessman Sebastian Pinera was elected the next president of Chile Sunday, breaking two decades of rule by the center-left Concertación coalition.
There’s no real surprise here. Eduardo Frei, the Concertacíon candidate was, well… kinda boring… and Michele Bachelet was a hard act to follow. Dr. Bachelet remains popular, and Pinera had to go out of his way to promise not to undo the twenty year run of social democratic programs, the poor showing by Concertacíon in the first round (Chile’s system includes a run-off between the two top vote getters if no candidate receives fifty percent plus one of the total votes) was largely due to an insurgent campaign by the more exciting Marco Enriquez Ominari.
In addition, as in Mexico’s 2006 Presidential election, organized abstention campaigns hurt the left more than the right. In Mexico, it was the Zapatistas, in Chile it’s younger voters turned off by electoral politics in general, and the Chilean voter registration system in particular. In that country, once one votes in any election, voting is mandatory the rest of your life. Bachelet, at the last minute, has tried to change the system to give automatic registration to voters when they turn 18, but would make voting optional. Too late.
Naturally, the Wall Street Journal sees this as a resurgence for the right in Latin America. Pinera has gone out of his way to assure voters that the social democratic safety net would be untouched (although he has been making noises about some denationalization of the copper industry, much as Calderón did about PEMEX) and — in a country where divorce has only been legal since 2004 — successfully avoided appealing to the social conservatives, even spotlighting gay couples in his campaign advertising. And, Pinera had to promise to distance himself from supporters of the discredited (and blood-thirsty) Pinochet regime (his brother was a Pinochet-era cabinet member), but expect some resurgence of nastiness.
HONDURAS:
After all the smoke and noise from the right that the coup that wasn’t a coup was all about preserving the Constitutional order in that country (yeah, right) and the restoration of law, any pretense of searching for justice was dropped last week, when Roberto Micheletti and fifty of his henchmen were made “Senators for Life” under some hitherto unknown constitional provision. As Senators, of course, these guys have immunity for prosecution… but they don’t need it, since they’ve also decided not to offer “amnesty” for themselves. The other side…no.
“The kind of people who give Mexico a good name”
One commentator on the original posting (on el Universal’s on-line site) wrote: “These are the kind of people who give Mexico a good name, those who study, work hard, strive, are in solidarity with the neighbor, not criminals, pop stars or monopolists whose names appear among the three richest people in the world.”
And the pooch deserves a paw too…and an extra taco. Good doggie!
The gentleman who was dug out, by the way, is Professor Patrick Alhston, buried under twelve meters of rubble when the seven story Saint Gerard’s University office building pancaked.
The Italian volunteers who are burying the dead deserve more than a glancing mention, but I know nothing about them.
Notice the Mexican military people are unarmed. As they and the Italians are working in “solidarity with their neighbors”, across town it’s not solidarity but soldiery Haitians are seeing:
(Sombrero tips to Burro Hall and Abiding in Bolivia)
Hog wild Sunday readings
Capitalist pigs
Jane Smiley (who knows something about pigs… having written a novel with a swine research project run amok at the center of it… and who is raising a hog named “Rush Limbaugh”) on one overlooked ingredient in the Haitian disaster:
The US has been fiddling with Haiti off and on since the French went away, but the sin that really struck me in my researches took place during the Reagan Administration (as did so many in all areas). American hog farmers became nervous about the appearance of African Swine Fever in Haiti, in the 400,000 strong population of indigenous black swine, animals that the peasantry depended upon for survival (article here). American authorities and Haitian authorities then set about exterminating ALL of these hogs. Don’t you love that? Then they sent the peasants a few experimental white hogs from Iowa that were used to luxury conditions, just to see if they might be able to live there. The Haitian hogs were classic hogs who did classic hog business–scavenging, getting fat, making use of what they could find. The new American hogs needed to live in American hog idleness in a world without the facilities they were used to.
Guess what happened to the Haitian peasantry and to their land?
Bureaucratic pork
Gustavo Reveles Acosta in the El Paso Times (sombrero tip Laura Martinez)
Chicharrones, the salty pork rind snack that is a staple of the fad protein-rich Atkins diet, are facing stricter import restrictions along the U.S.-Mexico border starting this week.
Today U.S. Customs and Border Protection will start enforcing new rules that make it harder for companies and people to bring chicharrones made in most Mexican states into the United States.
Local immigration officials say they don’t expect many problems because Chihuahua is one of the nine states not facing a pork-rind ban.
The other states without restrictions on chicharrones are Baja California, Baja California Sur, Campeche, Nayarit, Quintana Roo, Sinaloa, Sonora and Yucatan.
Chicharrones made in any other state must come with a health certificate that verifies the rinds were cooked in oil for at least 80 minutes at a temperature of 237 degrees; or that the snacks were dry-cooked for at least 210 minutes at a temperature of 500 degrees and then cooked in hot oil for an additional 150 minutes at a temperature of at least 302 degrees.
The penalty for not declaring prohibited items can be up to $1,000 for personal importations and up to $250,000 for commercial importation.
Protecting the news
We know that journalism is a dangerous profession in Mexico, what with newsmen and women kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered by narcotics traffickers (often overlooking the thugs hired to protect the interests of developers, mining operations and political organizations as well). José Luis Romero, a police reporter for a Los Mochis radio station was only the latest. He won’t be the last, but perhaps there is some hope that finally the federal government will give more protection to the fourth estate.
A bill, introduced by Senators Mario López Valdez, Fernando Jorge Castro and Carlos Lozano de la Torre, seeks to provide more protection for journalists from these kinds of dangers… and — less discussed — ameliorate the very real, everyday risks faced by those humble scribes, photographers, editors and even the weather-girl, every day. Gangsters are the least of it… riots, building collapses, hurricanes and truck accidents (a Mexican photographer was incinerated last year when a gas truck exploded). What we tend to forget is that journalism is a dangerous profession everywhere, not just in Mexico.
The Senate Bill is something of a grab-bag of journalistic protections. It includes things like a “shield law” protecting the rights of journalists to confidential information, but more importantly, would make intimidating a journalist a federal offense. This probably will not protect a journalist from gangsters bent on intimidation or worse, but will make it easier to prosecute persons who do so. The people who killed the two Triqui-language radio journalists in Oaxaca two years ago were known, but nothing ever came of the prosecution because the state authorities refused to act. It might make it harder for local authorities to harrass jouralists, and — one hopes — avoid incidents like that in May 2008, when Federal Preventative Police threatened the staff at Cuilican’s El Debate. One reporter was pulled into a police car, a gun pointed at his head and told “you don’t know who you’re fucking with; we’re not cops from here. Go complain with whomever you want.”
At least now, he will be a “cop from here.” But there is more, and that provision may be the most important of all. The bill will classify journalism as an inherently dangerous occupation — like truck driving or mining or constuction. As such, IMSS, the Mexican Social Security system, will be obliged to write occupational safety regulations, and develop a protocol for dealing with on-the-job injuries as well as administering a disability insurance fund for the injured newshound and/or his/her survivors and dependents.
This, of course, means that the employers social security taxes will see a rise. I haven’t seen the bill (and I’m not sure I’d understand it in all it’s full legalese) and am not sure how this will affect free-lancers (who — not being employees don’t have employer-paid IMSS coverage) but am pretty sure it doesn’t cover disability payments for keyboard-finger fatigue syndrome incurred by foreign commentators, even those of us with work permits.
Los ricos también lloran
Marc Lacey and Simon Romero, in yesterday’s New York Times, on the society news from Haiti:
Earthquakes do not respect social customs. They do not coddle the rich. They know nothing about the invisible lines that in Haiti keep the poor masses packed together in crowded slums and the well-to-do high up in the breezy hills of places like Pétionville.
And so it was with the devastating temblor that tore through Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, last week, toppling houses large and small, and trapping and traumatizing residents no matter where they stood on Haiti’s complicated social scale.
The quake’s casualties, yet to be fully reckoned, are likely to fall heaviest on the poor, who make up the majority of the population…
Uhhh… the poor, malnourished and those unlike
Harold Marzouka, a businessman, [who] chartered an 18-seat executive jet to fly members of his extended family to Miami. Standing around their luggage, they complained of nightmares and worried about aftershocks, the same worries voiced by the people wandering aimlessly through the streets with their few possessions bundled in their arms.
Mazouka is not heartless, just — like anyone else — likely to look after his and his family’s needs first:
One of his warehouses is full of food and he said he fully expected it to be looted as the situation in Haiti grew more dire in the days ahead.
“I understand it and I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m expecting it.”
I don’t mean to minimize Mr. Masouka’s losses, nor am I going to get into a “beat the press” mode. Beat Simon Romero, maybe, but most of us who write about Latin America do that already.
Simon Romero is often a twit, and has a lackey’s sensibilities in his sympathies for the rich and sometimes twisted (like his notorious adulation of Bolivian slave-owners and now fugitives, Ronald Larsen and his Mr. Bolivia contestant son, Dustin). Going to Haiti right now — as a journalist or an aid worker or a soldier — is dangerous, and Marc and Simon deserve credit for doing their job under extraordinary conditions.
It’s human nature that we’re more interested in the rich and powerful than the poor and powerless. It’s always been this way, I guess: one of the best selling biographies of all times quoted the not-rich, but noteworthy subject as saying, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
Unless you’re rich or have a really good biographer, I guess your story is going to be forgotten.
Ahí es un detalle
The Google “Nexus One” telephone, touted in Latin America, as elsewhere as a telephone that “changes everything” has a slight sales and marketing problem here.
The big break-though being in voice recognition, it won’t change everything but could be a significant change in the way telephoning is done now. However, there might be sales resistance to this next generation of “smart phones”, seeing the phone can’t recognize Spanish…or Portuguese… or Quechua, Guaraní, Nahuatl, Otomí…
Hey, googlers… Spanish isn’t that hard… if you have a good teacher:
Egg, bacon, sausage and spam
I hadn’t really noticed, but last week I passed the 100,000 spams caught by Askimet since I first migrated Mex Files from it’s original home on Blogspot to WordPress.
Of the ones I actually saw and had to manually delete, on-line viagra pushers led the pack, with cialus coming in a poor second, followed by various naked ladies performing various contortions (mostly with humans, although variations ranged through naked ladies with various animals, vegetables and minerals… but no protozoans or slime-molds that I recall).
The only reason I noticed the number of destroyed spams was that I got an invitation to write for “travelexpertguide.org” and happened to notice they’d also left a “comment” (which Askimet wisely marked as probable spam) on a post that had absolutely nothing to do with travel… actually it was the post on Patricia Hayes, the Texas matadora.
Let’s see… nothing to do with travel. Any expert worthy of the name would have realized they need to guide their comment to something quasi-travel related, but… NOOOOOO. And they expect me to write for them? Yeah, right.
And now for something completely different:
Patricia Hayes Franklin, D.E.P.
A short note. Patricia Hayes, the “Grace Kelly of the Bullring”, (previous posts here and here) passed away yesterday at the age of 78. Born 3 January 1932, she had suffered a massive stroke that left her unable to speak or swallow and inevitably, to breathe,on her 78th birthday.
Her niece, Adele, sent me the following message late last night:
My cousins were with her when her breathing became difficult, so she knew she had loved ones with her: she was coherent and smiled before the difficulties. Unfortunately, I was detained a day too long getting to my family. Pat barely made her 78th birthday (1/3/32)…she was a bit essentric, a fabulous but unknown artist (pastels, oils, acrylics, charcoal/ink) and spiritual but not an evangelist [… ] Pat leaves no children behind, but she so loved her ballet in the bull ring.
An amazing woman, with a rich and varied life beyond her exploits here in Mexico, she will be sorely missed by her surviving nieces, nephews and siblings. And those of us who honor those expats who have the wisdom and grace to embrace their life in Mexico, bumps, bruises, bulls, blood and all. Condolences to all.
mexfiles.net 