Haitian Relief Accounts
If you are living in Mexico — or visiting and looking to unload your pesos before you leave — walk into any HSBC branch anywhere in the country, and make a deposit in the Haitian Embassy’s “Centro de acopio” — emergency relief warehouse account.
Because so many of us in Mexico do not have credit cards or paypal accounts, direct deposits are the normal procedure for making donations to charities and emergency relief funds.
HSBC Account #4042482604
Cruz Roja Mexicana has two accounts for Haitian relief:
Banorte Cuenta: 0000000065
BANAMEX Suc. 557 Cuenta:65
(easy to remember: 065 is the telephone number for emergencies)
BY TELEPHONE:
Telemex subscribers can call *7777 to make donations (added to your telephone bill) of 100, 200, 300, 400 or 500 pesos. Carlos Slim’s foundation will match your contribution.
TELECEL donations (for those with monthly plans) *8888
That pact with the devil
“They were under the heel of the French, Napoleón the Third or whoever…”
Thus sayeth Pat Robertson, in claiming Haiti made a “pact with the Devil” in 1804, and somehow leading to an earthquake in 2010.
The barking mad Empress Carlota also confused Napoleón III with the Devil, and there might be some divine grace and mercy extended to the unfortunate and bonkers, but Napoleón the Third wasn’t born until 1808. Napoleón Bonaparte was the French leader at the time, but he was a very different person.
I’d suggest Pat ask Jesus for forgiveness, but the addled old fool has been been praying to to Madonna’s boy toy Jesus Luz, Jesús Alou of the Houston Astros or “narco saint” Jesus Malverde all this time.
Oh well, the original Devil’s bargain was at least French:
The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.
For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.
Los Topos to Haiti
While three Mexican military planes are on their way to Haiti with 15 tons of relief supplies, and two naval ships — the Huasteco and the Papaloapan — are steaming towards the disaster-struck nation, a special shout-out should be given to an unexpected good Samaritan, PRI Federal Deputy Francisco Rojas.
Rojas has convinced his fellow PRI Deputies to chip in to pay the airfare for probably the best — and most needed — resource Mexico can offer it’s sister Republic: la Brigada Internacional de Rescate Tlaltelolco-Azteca, the Mole Men of Tlaltelolco.
A spontaneous response to Mexico City’s own tragic earthquake of 19 September 1985, the Brigada’s nucleus were residents of Tlatelolco who — when several apartment buildings collapsed — and the PRI controlled government was either too paralyzed or inept to act — took it upon themselves to rescue their trapped neighbors. While the original crew included some, like sewer workers, who had the special skills useful for the dangerous work of digging though unstable rubble, many relied on a very tough on-the-job training program.
In the years since, the Mole Men — all volunteers who are willing to walk off their jobs and risk their lives for complete strangers anywhere in the world where natural disasters strike — have become one of, if not THE, most respected search and rescue teams in the world. After the Christmas Tsuami of 2004, German airline Lufthansa provided free transport to the Mole Men from Mexico City to Indonesia, where an Australian Air Force plane (and crew) was put at their disposal.
Opiate of the asses
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a Mexican version of the Bolivian approach to their coca export problem — legitimizing the agricultural product through alternative internal markets while tightly controlling the small legitimate export trade, simply buying up excess production and subsidizing small farmers… all to keep the gangsters out of the trade and allow the government to focus on more important issues.
But yesterday’s silly POTMEX post was a response to a more serious and chronic problem faced by Latin America in general, Mexico in particular. A problem for which drugs, or rather, in this case, marijuana are only a symptom of a much more chronic problem affecting Mexico.
A poster on a tourist message board had a naive — but not atypical — query about Mexican travel:
Hi, I am on my way to Mexico (Oaxaca, mostly) and am curious about the curent climate concerning pot. Are there random searches? are they thorough? do they stop buses to search gringos? are the locals offended by it?
Of course, as another poster (whom I thought worth quoting in here) could have pointed out, most of the “locals” are put off by narcotics use, even marijuana use. Though naturally the kind of “locals” who are going to respond to a post on an English language tourist forum are hardly representative (no one posted in Zapotec or Mixtec, let alone Spanish) respondents gave the standard Mexican warning that random searches for pot are a very real possibility, and that the consequences for carrying pot around the country can be rather severe.
While some observers say that marijuana use is widespread in Mexico, and others — like myself — move in social circles where marijuana smoking is considered “naco” at best — no one argues with the contention that marijuana itself is probably not that harmful a substance, and may have some benefits.
Not that the arguments for legalizing narcotics possession has anything to do with whether or not a person might be searched in Oaxaca in the next few weeks. One person, after speaking of the benefits of marijuana, added:
Having said that [marijuana is less harmfull than alchohol], the problem right now is hemp is illegal, and it does involve major criminal activity, period, end of debate. You CAN get really messed up if the cops find you with it in Mexico.
The bottom line among Mexican “locals” seems to be that the marijuana traders are NOT NICE PEOPLE. And, a person very well could end up in legal trouble if they are caught carrying marijuana.
The person who asked the original question seemed to think they could meet that mythical nice little old farmer who grows a couple of plants… supposedly to sell nice wannabe hippy tourists, apparently. The farmer is either selling to the cartels, or if he’s not, he’s likely to be murdered. As are those “nice mellow dealers” some people mentioned. Of course, they’re dealing with gangsters, or people working for gangsters or — by engaging in commerce with foreign buyers — likely to make them the target of gangsters. Or worse. Noting that here in Sinaloa, farmworkers have been kidnapped and press-ganged into harvesting marijuana (and often killed afterwords), frankly I think U.S. marijuana buyers are aiding and abetting slavery and murder.
That is the real state of the Mexican marijuana industry. What’s more than a little scary is that one respondent (and his remarks were echoed by others) said “I’m not going to stop doing what makes me feel good and be a better person, so all of your ranting and waving is futile on me.”
Perhaps marijuana smoking make the poster feel good… but a “better person”? In that the person says his personal needs (assuming marijuana is a need, and not a “want”) justify his contempt for the social norms and laws in Mexico, there’s not much difference between him and mining company that pays assassins to take care of pesky locals who object to their search for personal fulfillment, or the homeowner who absolutely “needs” some tropical wood stolen out of Mexican forests by gangsters for his kitchen cabinets. Or for that matter, the guys who come here to have sex with minors.
It is not “ranting and waving” to point out that a particular action is objectionable, and — whether one agrees or not — the “locals” have the right to their resources, and a right to decide how they wish them to be used. That Mexicans would prefer not to have a marijuana business may be an unwise move, but it’s theirs to make, the same as it’s up to Mexicans to decide they don’t want protect their forests or control the environmental damage caused by gold mining. It is no different than the United States insisting Mexico buy Montsanto genetically altered corn seed, because there’s Montsanto “needs” to sell it.
The outsider may “need” marijuana or gold or tropical woods or a market for seeds, and perhaps may have a justification of why they “need” them. But they are pleading “greater necessity” to buy or sell or use resources aren’t theirs in the first place, and the pleas of “greater necessity” come down to simply this:
We want it, we’ll steal it, or kill you to get it, or hire someone to kill to get it, and ignore any of your social norms that interfere with us… because… we want it, so it’s ours.
The real problem isn’t with some joker smoking marijuana in Oaxaca, or naively believing his actions aren’t seen as harmful by Mexicans. It’s his sense of entitlement and the pervasiveness of that sense of entitlement (even among so-called “liberals”) accepted unthinkingly by the citizens of the rich countries that is the root of too many of our problems here.
There is nothing wrong with having things or wanting things, even marijuana. It’s not the opiates that should concern Mexico or most of the planet … it’s the rich and clueless of the world’s addiction to a sense of entitlement to stuff that isn’t theirs in the first place.
Ah well, the road to recovery isn’t easy, but the first step is. Admit there is a problem.
For those in la Capital (and suburbs)… and elsewhere
There apparently has been complete devastation in Haiti of the communications system and infrastructure. The region is not as prone to e earthquakes as Mexico (the last major Haitian quake was in 1940) and very few structures are built to withstand quakes of this magnitude. Among the collapsed buildings are the MUNISTAH — United Nations “Stabilization Mission” (occupation force) — headquarters.
The Haitian Embassy — Presa Don Martín No. 53, colonia Irrigación, delegación Miguel Hidalgo — is open 24 hours a day to receive bottled water and canned goods.
As soon as I get a number for direct bank deposits, I’ll post that.
For those outside Mexico, a list of international (mostly U.S. based) relief agencies are here.
Pipe dreams
With voracious demand for a Mexican commodity just north of the border (which had some domestic supply, but not nearly enough to meet the insatiable demand for it, even with sizable imports also coming from Canada and South America), the ambitious, greedy and amoral suppliers turned to thugs, cutthroats and mercenaries in Mexico to control their territories and supply the United States.
The resulting chaos and violence this engendered in Mexico undermined the credibility of the state and its leaders, led to rampant bribery and raised national security concerns, especially with continued threats of intervention — militarily and politically — from the United States. Despite the best military, legal and political efforts, the situation was only resolved when — managing to build a concensus among political leaders, community organizers, ordinary citizens and even the Catholic Church — Lazaro Cardenas simply nationalized the oil industry in 1938.
Of course, PEMEX has not resolved every problem created by the oil industry, but it did bring relative calm and stability to Mexico. It neutralized the threat from powerful non-state actors like Edward Dohenny, William Buckley and Lord Cowdry, as well as ending the career of their private enforcer, Manuel Pelaéz (the Zeta of his day). While there was — and is — exploitation and downright criminality in the oil industry still, and, PEMEX may be — as it is with some (ah heck… er, good deal… ahh, lots of … no — extremely good) reason considered a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy, it also has had the effect of bringing revenues into Mexico that otherwise would have been invested outside the country. Nationalization, if nothing else, brought stability and relative prosperity to Mexico, and eliminated the rationale for much of the overt and covert intervention of the United States into Mexico (and completely eliminated British intervention).
In my wilder, “I could never say such a thing, but you might think…” moments, I’ve thought maybe Mexico should just set up POTMEX and bring the latest Mexican commodity with the United States can’t get enough of, which it is willing to turn to criminals and thugs to supply and which leaves the country vulnerable to subversion financed by private interests north of the border, or calls for that government to intervene in Mexico’s internal affairs. And just think of the funding that would be freed up if Mexico didn’t have to spend so much on military forces, CSI types, and morgues. And, when it comes to national security, there’d be a huge benefit… the United States, described by someone worried about the effects of drugs on the U.S. now as “half a nation of zombies” would be too busy dealing with their own zombie attacks, or too stoned anyway, to be much of a threat this side of the river.
Yea, there are a few challenges. Paying off all the arbitration claims from nationalization took twenty-five years, and — while World War II set the process back about several years (the Dutch, being occupied and the British being broke, couldn’t really be expected to press their claims between 1936 and 1946) but, for the most part, it was relatively clear who owned what. Identifying the owners of narcotics industry properties might be challenging, although requiring the owners to identify themselves if they wanted compensation might be worth something in itself.
But Lazaro Cardenas managed to build support from right, left, center and the Catholic hierarchy when he nationalized the oilfields… support unlikely to be achieved for any nationalization of the narcotics trade. And, oh yeaaaah… there’s that little detail of the whole industry’s legality.
And the gringos probably would invade to protect their business interests… though they’d have to hire “illegal aliens” to do the job Ameicans were too stoned to do!
HAITI — what more can it take?
From TeleSur is some of the first reportage on the 7.0+ earthquake that seems to have destroyed most of what public service infrastructure that exists in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.
With the virtual destruction of its entire ecosystem shortly after independence (by the armies of Napoleón Bonaparte, whose sense of Liberté, égalité, fraternité did not extend to the ex-slaves who wanted to liberate themselves from their French overlords ) the country has been short of everything except need ever since. Under quasi-occupation by foreign troops (as it has been on and off ever since a joint British-German-United States occupation force first landed in January 1914), consistently misruled by foreign-backed kleptomanics and plain ordinary maniacs like U.S. backed Papa Doc (and the only democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristides run out by a U.S. backed military coup) AND having undergone the collapse of the nation’s only reliable food source (swine flu killed off the naturalized pigs in the 1980s), today’s earthquake promises to be one of the worst calamities to befall the Republic yet.
Cash donations to the Red Cross, OsFam, Catholic Relief/Caritas or other reputable relief organizations go further than trying to figure out what supplies are needed where at this point. Some immediate relief efforts — especially from Cuba, which has an excellent record in disaster preparedness and relief — have been hampered by fears that the quake will be followed by a tsunami in the Caribbean. The United States, Venezuela and Dominican Republic have, however, dispatched some relief teams already. Colombia, Panama, Canada, Mexico and Honduras have already signed on to provide additional assistance, as well as France and the World Development Bank.
Homeland Security: snow job
I guess Homeland Security recognizes that immigrants are just doing the work natives won’t do… and so, have to do it, even when they shouldn’t be doing it, because, as we know, they’re “illegal” and all. Or something like that.
Boston Globe, via Benders’ Immigration Bulletin:
PROVIDENCE – Federal agents detained dozens of Guatemalan immigrants en route to shovel snow at Gillette Stadium last week, and then drove many of them back to the stadium to work, the immigrants said yesterday, giving their fullest account yet of the operation.
Yesterday, dozens of the immigrants poured into the Guatemalan consulate, a two-story red brick building near Federal Hill, wearing thick sweatshirts, baseball caps, and worried faces, since they are here illegally and now facing possible deportation. But they and their advocates said they are workers, not criminals, who had left poor villages in the hope of finding better lives for themselves and their families.
In interviews at the consulate, where they sought legal assistance, the workers, most of whom live in Rhode Island, said they had cleared snow at Gillette last Tuesday, and were heading back to work early Wednesday in four vans when federal agents pulled them over.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 58 people during the operation as part of a search for fugitives, including criminals, who had been ordered deported. Seven people, including people with criminal records such as domestic assault, are being held in Bristol County jail.
The immigrants said the rest were taken to a nearby police station, fingerprinted, photographed and released, pending an interview with immigration officials to determine their legal status, before they were driven to the stadium.
“They brought us back to work themselves,’’ said Vicente Avila, 43, who said he lives on $200 a month so he can send as much as $800 a month to his family, including five children, in Guatemala. “They told us if you want to go to work, you can go to work.’’
Matthew Chandler, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that carried out the operation, declined to confirm that federal agents drove the immigrants to Gillette or to describe the agency’s policy on transporting immigrants after such operations.
Some people never should have children…
… Exhibit A, the parents of PRI Deputy Emiliano Aguilar Esquivel.
Sombrero tip to Alfredo at Citius64.
On the plus side, there was news today that one possible hold up in the Federal District’s new marriage law failed to materialize. PAN was unable to gather the necessary signatures in the Federal District Legislative Assembly to bring a complaint about the constitutionality of the law before the Supreme Court. There were complaints also about the Catholic hierarchy’s attempts to insert themselves into the political discussion. Wisely, or perhaps just using smart politics, the PRD let it be known that they offered to meet with Cardinal Rivera to discuss the upcoming legal change, but the Cardinal is unwilling to compromise. Making him the bad guy.
I get the sense that PRI, which is the majority party nationally, but only the third party in the Federal District (after PRD and PAN), is gambling that passage of the Federal District marriage law will give them a social issue they can milk in 2012, winning over social conservatives and rural voters. It may backfire, given that younger voters nationally are supportive of same-gender marriage, and PAN run the risk of turning off their traditional anti-clerical supporters, who see the backlash against same-gender marriage as a PAN and Catholic Church initiative.
And, intelligent voters, turned off by fools like Aguilar Esquivel.
In dutch…
Ever since Grupo Modelo’s takeover by Anheiser-Busch, FEMSA beer sales have been plummeting.. Coupled with the humongous debt from FEMSA’s Coca-Cola purchases, the company was leaking money, and the Dutch boys were there to stick their finger in the financial dike. Reuters has the fullest coverage in English. Highlights:
AMSTERDAM/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Heineken NV will buy the beer business of Mexico’s FEMSA in a $5.7 billion deal that boosts the Dutch brewer’s emerging-markets presence and cements an alliance with one of Latin America’s biggest drinks firms.
[Heinekin] shares rose 3 percent… FEMSA shares (FMSAUBD.MX) slid 13.61 percent on disappointment over the deal price after brewer SABMiller (SAB.L) pulled out of the auction. SAB was not interested in FEMSA’s Brazil operations, sources told Reuters.
FEMSA, which started as a brewer and ice maker in 1890, is the world’s second-biggest Coca-Cola bottler, and sells the soft drink in nine Latin American countries. …
FEMSA’s beer unit, [is] home to Dos Equis, Tecate and Sol…
The company operates OXXO, one of the fastest-growing convenience store chains in the region. It has 7,000 units in Mexico and recently expanded into Colombia.
Heineken would secure an operation with 43 percent of the Mexican beer market and a 9 percent share in Brazil. The United States is the most profitable beer market, Heineken said. Brazil is second and Mexico is fourth.
…
FEMSA will remain listed on the Mexican stock exchange and end 2010 with no debt… The company’s free-cash flow generation will also help bring Coca-Cola FEMSA’s debt close to zero, he added.
The (drug) war at the end of the world
UPDATE: This was written before this morning’s announcement that “El Teo” — Teodoro García Simental — the presumed Sinaloa cartel leader in Baja California, had been arrested. El Teo formerly was with the Arellano Félix cartel, which controlled the Baja narcotics industry, but in 2008 either went free-lance or opted to become a franchisee of the Chapo Guzmán organization (depending on how you look at it).
The split exacerbated violence amongst the cartels. El Teo is the guy responsible for the soup-maker — the flunky whose job was dissolving dead gangsters in vats of acid… about 300 altogether.
Bringing down El Teo may mean the administration is finally willing to go after Chapo’s people, or they may be doing Chapo a favor, weeding out potential rivals. And, this could lead to further shakeups in the industry, which has an unfortunate way of settling internal disputes, to the consternation of us all.
Patrick Corcoran’s “Ganchoblog” picked up on an op-ed piece by the Mario Vargas Llosa, which appeared Monday in the Madrid daily, El País. Varga Llosa basically supports the Calderón Adminstration’s militarized “war on (U.S. exported) drugs” in principal, but thinks it’s unwinnable. The Peruvian novelist and rightist politician makes the same argument for legalization that everybody else has made. Patrick said it was raising eyebrows here in Mexico, but I saw nothing particularly eyebrow raising in any of what Vargas Llosa wrote… and, while better circulated than most foreign newspapers, I’m not sure the Spanish conservative daily is all that widely read by anyone other than elderly Spaniards and those with bets on European futbol scores.
The only remarkable thing I though was that a Latin American conservative intellectual (almost a contradiction in terms, but there are a few) is making the same observation that every other intellectual came to long ago, but for slightly different reasons. The upshot being — the “war on drugs” is a losing proposition.
I’m not sure how Patrick jumped from Vargas Llosa’s article to his reading of the situation in Colombia:
After all, Colombia is better than it was in Escobar’s heyday, in large part because the gangs operating there are smaller and less powerful, which in turn is in large part due to the government’s having developed the capacity to take down the biggest fish. Similarly, there is no American equivalent to Chapo Guzmán, basically because criminals in the US are arrested long before they gain such notoriety.
Is it? U.N statistics for Mexico now show a murder rate of about 0.10 to 0.11 per thousand. Colombian statistics aren’t listed. The latest available statistics for Colombia are for 2002. By 2002, well into the first phase of “Plan Colombia , the murder rate was three times that (0.63 per thousand) of Mexico’s (which was slightly higher, not lower, in 2002: 0.13 per thousand). After that date, the Colombians stopped publishing statistics, and no wonder. Where most Mexican murders, aside from “normal” ones like domestic disputes, and the under-investigated killings of environmentalists (including environmental reporters) and labor activists, have been “narcotics related” deaths.
In Colombia, the relative number of “narcotics related” killings has gone down, based on anecdotal evidence, but that of environmentalists, labor leaders, ordinary ornery peasants, social and religious workers and the occasional “false positive” (poor boys dressed up as “guerrillas” and murdered to meet military quotas for killing “terrorists”) goes on as usual. In short, nobody is safe in Colombia. Most of us — barring bad luck or deranged family members — who aren’t somehow DIRECTLY involved in the narcotics industry are.
I hope I’m not misreading Patrick when I say there’s a sense that Mexico is expected to “do more” militarily to avoid the risk of becoming a “narco-state”. I’m not sure what a “narco-state” is exactly, or why it’s such a bad thing that a representative of a major agricultural industry reach the Presidency (Evo Morales has done a bang up job in Bolivia).
As Patrick says, Chapo Guzmán, who many have always suspected is the only beneficiary of the Calderón Administrations actions against every narcotics “cartel” except Chapo’s, is not a Pablo Escobar. Guzmán, unlike Escobar, has no political ambitions. But, in 2002 (after Escobar’s death), his relation and former associate, Álvaro Uribe, became president, with the full support of the United States (which had known of his narcotics cartel connections since 1991, according to Joseph Contreras of Newsweek Magazine).
The reason I worry that Mexico could become a “narco-state is that it could end up like Colombia: overrun with U.S. paid mercenaries, numerous DEA and other U.S. government anti-narcotics agents working in the country, and U.S. military personnel not managing to stem the flow of narcotics, but apparently furthering U.S. (not Colombian) military interests in the region.
Otherwise, I don’t worry. Chapo Guzmán for President? I don’t think so, but wouldn’t discount someone’s competence just because they’ve been associated with the guy in some way. At least they know something about rural issues, which might be a better use of limited funding (along with environmental protection and — above all — improved education) than wasting it on what Vargas Llosa and I, two foreign observers, both consider an unwinnable, unnecessary “war” without purpose.
mexfiles.net 