Throwing the bums out… or new bums?
I used to live a few blocks from PRI headquarters. Because the party was THE party for so many years, my neighborhood was sort of the Mexican “K Street” with several of the party-connected lobbying organizations and union groups headquartered near my house. As neighbors, their “domestic disputes” could get a bit, shall we say, annoying. Like the night one faction of a farmers’ group decided to throw out their leader. Unfortunately for the leader, he was in his second floor office at the time.
Excelsior, the pressmen, reporters and delivery drivers found themselves on different sides in a protracted labor dispute that ended up with one group crossing another groups picket line, and fights breaking out in the newsroom The neutral photographers got some great photos… a friend of mine who was an editor (and — in theory — management) at the paper had the ticklish job of figuring out how to cover the event. He quipped he was glad it was a slow news day anyway, and he figured the brawling employees were just going above and beyond the call of duty to get a good front page story.
In the farmers’ “coup” and in the newspaper strike, the various union factions were tied to various factions within the political parties. Mexico is a labor country, and the wording in the Constitution allows freedom of association “to jointly struggle for rights”. Who is joined to who, and how, is sometimes difficult to tell. One man’s “reformist” is another man’s “sell-out”.
The PEMEX union headquarters was taken over by dissidents last Saturday, in an attempt to oust long-time leader, Carlos Romero Deschamps. As David Shields writes in today’s The (Mexico City) News:
The dissidents, who were protesting against what they called the fraudulent re-election of the union leader, were dislodged two hours later by workers faithful to Romero Deschamps in what appears to have been a bloody battle inside the building. Soon after, the leader held a party for his faithful. Romero Deschamps has led the union for 17 years and has been involved in political scandals such as “Pemexgate,” which sought to illegally finance the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, candidate in the year 2000 presidential elections. He also has a reputation for being immensely rich, corrupt and antidemocratic. Dissident groups have sought his downfall for years and it is not clear what else they can do to achieve their goal.
Romero Deschamps is a scoundrel, but there’s no indication that the “dissidents” are not also scoundrels. Given the tenor of Shields’ piece (and the apparent editorial policy of the News, which is owned by the O’Farrill family, which traditionally maintains close ties to the presidency (and the presidential party), I wonder if the dissident “coup” (or, in this case, “coup attempt”) might have been fomented by PAN to either neutralize the unions’ opposition to PAN plans for PEMEX’s reorganization.
Shields’ piece is on the editorial page, and there is no reason it shouldn’t reflect an opinion. Management or his own. However, with the paragraph following the one I quoted comparing “the rouge oil workers’ union” with SUTERM (which represents CFE — one of the two state-owned power companies) which cooperates with the Calderon administration (it recently accepted adding five years, from 25 to 30, employees need to work before becoming fully elgible for their pension benefits). To Shields (and I think to the News): pro-government unions good. Anti-administration unions bad.
Which is fine in itself. All I’m suggesting is that the dissident coup (or attempted coup) may have had outside help. Certainly, all PEMEX reform packages, whether from the left or the right, will affect the union. What will be worth watching is what other dissident movements spring up in the next few weeks, and what their agendas are.
Memo to Steve Sailer
Now what does Steve Sailer say?
The latest “rationale” for segregation offered by the crazies over at Vdare is that “For whatever reasons, Mexican culture and human accomplishment don’t go together. For example, Hispanics today make up 23.4 percent of all Americans between 15 and 44, yet they only account for four percent of the U.S. Olympic team in Beijing.”
I don’t see what that proves, but among those “Hispanics” are the 21-year old son of illegal immigrants from Mexico, wrestler Henry Cejudo. His parents didn’t find the streets of America paved with gold, but Henry has managed to pick up a nice piece of it somewhere…
Race, la Raza and Spiro T. Agnew
Latinamericanistas who post in English invested a lot of bandwidth this last week in discussing Spanish racism. By total coincidence, also last week
…the United States Census Bureau has just released a projection – based on current birth, death and immigration rates – which predicts that white people of northern European descent will no longer make up a majority of the country’s population by the year 2042.
I’m not completely sure the timing of the report — just as it looks as if the United States will elect a “non-white” President — was coincidental. The Census Bureau report assumes “if present trends continue” that the largest growth in “non-whites” will be among “Hispanics.” “Hispanics”, though, “may be of any race.” At various times, the Census Bureau has counted various Latin Americas as other “races”, and for many years, Mexicans (and Mexican-Americans) were “white”. 
Also co-incidentally, though I probably should be working on other things, I’m antsy to get the advance copies of my book, Gods, Gauchupines and Gringos (which looks at Mexico as a multi-racial, multi-cultural society) and have been screwing off. Somehow — and I’m not sure the circumstances — I ran across reference to myself in a neo-nazi website which is convinced I’m Jewish.
I’m not, but what’s interesting is the nazis were linking to a discussion I was in about the difference between the meaning of “race” in different cultures. Weird, huh? Nazi-logic says that because I’m a “white guy” who doesn’t think the definitions of “race” are carved in stone, I can’t be “really white”… ergo, by … Jewish. The Nazis are — in goes without saying — fucking idiots, and they’re too stupid to realize it, but they make a point… access to power requires assimilation and toleration by the elites, more than skin color. The Nazis are never going to be part of the elite, however it is defined — just by being in the same census data category as the elites. Normally, people of color — and even white outsiders — are only let into the “club” one at a time. Even when a large number of individuals are in the club, there are still reservations about the group collectively. The club doesn’t resort to crude phrases like “towel head” around an Egyptian doctor, but the doctor is expected to be on his best behavior, and live by the club rules.
I stuck around the Nazi site long enough to look at their ridiculous discussion of “white Mexicans” (something I’ve heard before), and the assumption that because “white” is the default top dog in the United States, it is in Mexico. Both somewhat false assertions. All of which leads to Spiro T. Agnew.
She’s got legs…
Photo: EFE
Several dozen mini-skirted women picked the Metropolitan Cathedral today (17 August), after being escorted out of mid-morning Mass. The mini-faldistas were protesting recent Church recommendations that to prevent violence against women, young women should not dress in a “sexually provocative manner.”
One of the demonstrators read a statement calling for support of the “Laic State” [the state’s neutrality in matters of faith and morals], freedom of expression, the rights of women to conrol their own bodies and “to live free of violence, discrimination and harassment.”
The statement went on to note that in the State of Mexico murders of women double in the last year and, according to a recent survey, fifty percent of all women have been the victim of some physical, psychological, sexual, or of another type of aggression.
The abuse runs the gamut from “from imposing how one should dress to decisions on when to use, or not use, a condom,” it added.
“Women have the right to dress as they want, but men don’t have a right to violence”, Jessica Reyes, spokesperson for the “Coalition of Youths for Sexual CitizenshipEarlier reports had the Rector banning mini-skirts from the campus” (la Coalición de Jóvenes por la Ciudadanía Sexual) told EFE.
Reyes described the Church recommendations as “absurd” because “a woman could hide herself in a sack up to her neck, and still be attacked.”
A somewhat related issue has arisen here in Sinaloa, where the State Autonomous University runs a junior high and high school. The Rector was blamed for requirements that forbid the junior high girls to hitch up their uniform skirts . As in all Mexican schools, these sorts of regulations are set by the school’s Parents’ Association. While they are not a government body, they have political pull, and are sometimes — like local school boards in the United States — are obscure enough bodies that sometimes cranks (like hard-core anti-Evolutionists in the U.S.) can easily take control of the group and influence their decisions. Many of the Parents’ groups take their cues from the Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia, A.C. which has close ties to PAN and to the Catholic Church.
Maybe, the Parents’ Association can just put together some standard miniskirt regulations.
Unintended consequences
According to Antonio Payan, a political science professor at the University of Texas in El Paso, 3000 mostly middle-class families have moved from Juarez to El Paso over the last year. Payan is indirectly quoted by AFP (or the editors at AFP assumed) the reason was “Mounting drug-related violence and 800 murders so far this year…” Most of those moving across the border, Payan notes, are either dual-nationals themselves, or the parents of United States citizens.
If Professor Payan is saying that the drug violence is causing middle-class emigration, then it is another indication that the Calderon Administration’s “Mano duro” is creating as many (if not more) problems than it was meant to resolve. The last paragraph in the AFP story reads:
Federal authorities have deployed more than 36,000 soldiers across the country, including 2,500 in Ciudad Juarez, in an effort to combat drug trafficking and related violence, but some 2,000 people have been killed so far this year.
I wonder if it is it should read “2,000 people have been killed BECAUSE Federal authorities deployed…” I’m not saying that the narcos shouldn’t be driven out, or put out of business, or even that the military can’t play some role in achieving those goals. However, look at the countries that use a military/law enforcement approach to narcotics. I’m not talking about narcotics consumer countries… although they also have less violence related to narcotics use and trade… but to narcotics PRODUCERS.
In Colombia, coca production is up. While exports to the United States are down, there are indications that the cartels are simply finding new markets. In Afganistan, opium production is up fifty percent. Is this in spite of, or because of, the heavy military presence in those countries which have disrupted normal commerce?
Bolivia has taken a different approach, supporting the coca growers and attempting to control exporters. According to the United States Department of State, Bolivian coca production is not being exported in any substantial quantity, and what exports there are are not controlled by Bolivians, but by Colombians.
Afghanistan obviously has “issues” beyond opium production, and Bolivia is a poor, “third-world” country. In Colombia, some progress was made in moving cocaine exporters out of the country (though some argue they just moved into the government), and the relative passivity of the capital requires continued violence in the countryside, and a militarized state. In Colombia, there was at least a credible internal military threat to keep the Army busy, though it appears that with that excuse evaporating, the government has to find other rationales to keep the Army occupied.
So, Colombia has become a police/military state with MORE, not less, narcotics exports. Mexico — which is a much more stable country, with a less serious production problem. Maybe that’s due to the police crackdown, and maybe just to the high cost of gasoline. Interesting that this story came out just as rising transportation costs did start to sink in as an economic problem for the United States. Marijuana can be grown in the consumer countries, and the Mexican cartels are already finding it cheaper to lower transportation costs by moving to to the consumer.
And, in Colombia, the “drug war” and militarization also resulted in emigration and worsening social conditions.
Recent emigration has been driven by both economic and political factors. Between 1996 and mid-2003, the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), which is in charge of migration controls, registered 1.6 million Colombians who left the country and did not return; nearly half of them migrated between 1999 and 2001. These peak years correspond to a period of deep internal crisis.
In terms of the economy, the country’s level of gross domestic product growth (GDP) plummeted from 5.8 percent in 1995 to -4.05 percent in 1999. Meanwhile, unemployment doubled, reaching 18 percent in urban centers, where three-quarters of the population live.
Although those Juarez residents moving to El Paso are not the same as Colombians leaving for Miami, it is still worrisome. The middle-class — people who invest in the future, who have an education and who make sure their kids are educated — are not the people you want to drive out of the country. While Mexico is a middle-class country, their position is insecure. Having the ability to move, if they don’t see a decent future for their families, they will do so. Even if it’s only to El Paso.
I don’t have a “prescription” for fixing Mexico, and wouldn’t be so presumptious as to propose one. I do know that militarization hasn’t worked, and the Calderon Administration’s “mano duro” has only increased the violence.
The recent arrest of several police officers in connection with Fernando Marti’s murder does not necessarily mean that police reforms are not working. It means police corruption is being exposed (albeit, too late) and is no longer tolerated. Police reforms, and judicial reforms are tedious and slow, but seem to offer a partial solution. Cutting down on the “gasoline of crime” — guns and money — would be another. Better customs inspection still another (in the “Ye Gon” case, no one seemed to notice the huge quantities of chemicals being imported… or was paid to look the other way, which is more likely). Customs, by the way, was “privatized” under the Fox Administration and perhaps the contracts need to be scrutinized. Better jobs in rural areas would still be another. While some people would just opt out of working for the narcos if there were other jobs available, just making rural communities wealthier would have a secondary effect.
With wealth comes access to information. Very few people want to be seen as disreputable and — much as I hate to admit it — people generally try to conform to the values that are “respectable”. Respectable people don’t get involved in narcotics exports (of course, they do… but their neighbors are always shocked when it’s in the paper, or their family is shamed, or they say “I always knew there was something wrong about those people”).
No one thing will probably end the narcotics exports (if ending them is the goal), but already suffering serious consequences as a result of economic policies that force the poorest and least educated to emigrate, Mexico does not need to lose the better-educated, informed citizens who are likely to be driven out by the violence unleased by a military solution.
Mexico’s REAL Oympics victory
.. of a sort. Surburban Guerilla quotes a McClatchy Washington Bureau story on the long-term economic effects of the Beijing Olympics:
Earlier this summer as the Olympic Games approached, the Chinese government sent businesses around this capital city an unmistakable message: China would do everything possible, including shutting down whole industries, to ensure the games’ success.
…With China dominating global production of many goods, U.S. consumers will likely see higher prices if not outright shortages for products such as … auto parts, semiconductors, Vitamin C, steel and domestic Chinese supplies of cement and aluminum.
Cool! Mexico’s auto parts, semiconductor, vitamin C (what do you think jalepeños are?) and steel industry might have to pick up the slack. And, Cemex is one of the few Mexican companies with an Asian presence.
To get rich is glorious
Deng Xiaoping
Olympic Gold and Silver for Mexico!
Just not these Olympics…
At the VII International Geography Olympiad, held last week in Cathage Tunisia, Francisco Javier Quezada Figueroa, de Guerrero earned a gold medal, and Emanuel Johansen Campos, of Morelos, took the silver.
The 16 to 19 year old competitors are scored 40 percent on a written examination, 40 percent on field work (ability to read maps, data analysis, etc.), and 20 percent on a multi-media presentation. And… to make it harder, he tests and presentations have to be in ENGLISH. Team Mexico may have had something of an advantage in the field work competition, since they had to demonstrate an understanding of agricultural water usage in arid climates. 70 countries participated.
How green was our border…
The Border Governor’s Conference (The 10 border states – Arizona, Baja California, California, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, New Mexico, Sonora, Tamaulipas, and Texas – together exercise an economy that ranks third in the world for size), and hosted by California Governor and former “illegal alien” Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeks to Terminate some common problems facing the two countries, as they meet to discuss ways of “Building Green Economies“.
Mexico’s top environmental official Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, who heads the Secretariat of the Environment and Natural Resources, proposed the creation of state climate change plans to deal with the environmental impacts of global warming in a coordinated way.
He said the environmental agreement that Mexico signed recently with the state of California could be applied all along the border strip.
It would include greenhouse gas emissions inventories at the local, state and regional levels, and, said the Mexican
secretary, the states south of the border could adopt California’s low-carbon air quality standard.
In addition, he suggested the establishment of 15 crossborder pollution control districts and also proposed building desalination plants in coastal areas to ensure drinking water supplies for the arid region.
Perhaps they’ll get rid of their official SUVs and find alternative transportation solutions. (Photo of “los Gobernators” from Telecinco.com.es)
Sunday readings: 17 August 2008
Our Their Woman In Havana
Diana Barahona, writing in Spanish in La Republica and in English in Machetera on Cuban double-agent Aleida Godínez:
…Godínez went on to become an independent journalist, and independent librarian, founder of the Cuban Christian Democratic Party, a leader of two independent labor organizations, the right hand of Martha Beatriz Roque, a trusted spy of a CIA officer and a close friend of Frank Calzón, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba. All of the titles and organizations were fictitious, and all followed the orders of the US Interests Section.
In her capacity as celebrity dissident Godínez was a guest on Radio Martí, filing 102 reports about supposed human rights violations between 1992 and 1993. She met with diplomats and delegations from several countries, and recieved copious amounts of money, gifts and free meals. She was tasked with spying for the United States, and carried the required information, gathered by her Cuban handlers, to her American handlers at the USIS.
A fatal obsession… with foreigners
P.M. Corn (Mexico Trucker On-Line) complains that obsessive worry about Mexican truckers operating in the United States is misplaced. The dangers lurk elsewhere
The violations discovered in the bus belonging to Angel Tours that crashed in Sherman Texas Friday morning points to the stupidty and ignorance of a small percentage of people obsessed with ending the Cross Border Pilot Program, which has operated safely for the past 11 months, while ignoring American common carriers who flaunt and ignore the laws and rules thinking it does not apply to them…
Vow of poverty?
Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was sworn in Friday, promising to “work, work, work.” Lugo, a former Divine Word missionary priest, and later Bishop, was released from his religious obligations by the Pope at his own request. According to the Financial Times (U.K.) he
…sees himself as a moderate.
He will need to be a skilled negotiator, holding together a gaggle of coalition parties, and brokering deals in Congress, where he lacks a majority and outgoing President Nicanor Duarte Frutos is expected to remain an influential force.
He has also vowed to introduce land reform and charge Brazil more for electricity produced from their jointly owned Itaipú hydro-electric dam. Paraguay sells its excess to Brazil at well below market prices.
Mr Lugo also says he will not draw his presidential salary – nearly 16m guaranies ($4,000, €2,750, £2,150) a month – saying: “This money belongs to the poorest.”
Tyler Bridges of McClatchy News‘ Caracas Bureau, attended the inauguration. He has a fine eye for detail.
Lugo’s speech lasted 45 minutes. Afterward, the presidents walked two blocks to the Cathedral. Chavez attracted the biggest yells from the people lining the crowd barrier. He also drew the most attention from the press.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner shook hands the entire way to the Cathedral. I noticed she had a bracelet around her left ankle. I’d never before seen a president with one of those!
I was too far away to see but Peru’s vice president, Luis Giampietri, confirmed to me that Lugo was wearing his trademark Fransican sandals “Without socks!” Giampietri told me.
And, only a toothbrush… with visuals
IT BAFFLES THE MIND to meet some of the mindsets in our country about migrants and the lives they lead, and the pains they go to to find work that will sustain them. The way some xenophobic individuals speak, you’d imagine Mexicans (because it’s always Mexicans to these people) stroking long luxurious mustachios and plotting which part of the USA they will reconquer, just exactly what excellent careers they will steal away from us, and how much of their fat moneyroll they will squander on coyotes. It’s always Mexicans to the haters because for them to acknowledge out loud in one rational conversation that people are coming from Mexico, from Cuba, from Guatemala, from Central America and South America would point to a huge economic crisis and imbalance that any rational person would have to connect back to U.S.
After presenting a BBC News audio slide show on migrants catching freight trains in Lecheria, an industrial park on the far north side of Mexico’s Federal District, the Unapologetic Mexican concludes, “”These politicians are devils in human form. And they are our ‘leaders.”
Oh baby, those immigrants are HOT
What make believers out of those suffering from willful ignorance? Why, a chance to be even stupider than normal, what else. I suppose the good news is that right-wingers are finally coming around to accepting what scientists have been warning about for years. Tom Tancredo, who we we last heard of when he remodeled his “Big(Carbon)foot-print house in Colorado, piped up that even he has “no doubt that global warming exists.”
Tancredo was referring to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies which somehow took the undisputed fact that people in the United States use more natural resources than people in other countries, and that immigrants to the United States pretty much live like everybody else in the U.S. to conclude that immigration caused global warming.
Latin American and European schools normally include logic in the curriculum, but not U.S. schools. I went to high school in New York State, but fortunately, our local college offered some limited courses to local high school students — including logic. Even if people in the United States can’t recognize an ad hoc propter ergo hoc fallacy when they see one, I’d hope they’re smart enough to know when they’re being fed bullshit.
Pack to school special
(Photo: El Noroeste)
It’s that time of year again. School starts next week, and there are stories in the media this time of year about charities providing school supplies and backpacks to poor kids. Education is free and compulsory (and, in a change that is radical, school attendance next year will be mandatory through High School), but… kids normally have to bring their own supplies. With a national curriculum that even private schools have to follow, every fifth grader in the country needs a protractor and nearly every Junior in High School a tee-square.
Parents’ committees — which are a powerful lobbying group in Mexico — set the rules for each individual school. Most require uniforms, and nearly all require the kids to have a backpack. Following the one and only school shooting Mexico ever had (and it was more or less accidental. A kid brought his grand-dad’s pistol to school to show his buddies, dropped it, and winged another kid. Grand-dad went to the pokie for a couple of days apparently for not smacking his grandson up the side of the head for snooping around) there was a fashion for schools to require see-through plastic backpacks, and many schools still require every kid to open their packs for inspection every morning.
The proposed national defense budget for 2008 is 3.2 billion dollars. Federal spending on education is normally about a quarter of the Federal budget, about 46 billion US dollars in 2004 (I got lazy and used Wikipedia). But, that doesn’t include backpacks.
mexfiles.net 