Beneath the surface in Oaxaca: Canadian gold mines
A quick “Google search” for Canadian ownership of Mexican gold mines turns up mostly corporate press releases. Even within Canada, the extent of Canadian ownership of Mexican mines — the the environmental and social costs engendered by Canadian firms is seldom mentioned. Canadians own about 40 percent of Mexican mines, and 75% of mining equipment used in Mexico is imported from Canada.
Dawn Pawley, writes in The Dominion (“a monthly paper published by an incipient network of independent journalists in Canada since May 2003. It aims to provide accurate, critical coverage that is accountable to its readers and the subjects it tackles) on one of the most overlooked foreign-controlled industries in Mexico.
Skyrocketing gold prices, favorable mining laws and a recent flood of speculation-linked financing for junior mining companies have opened up the way for Vancouver-based Continuum Resources to buy up the majority of the mining concessions in the state of Oaxaca. The reactivation of the historic “Natividad” site, reportedly Oaxaca’s richest gold and silver mine, has been spearheaded by Continuum, majority owners in a joint venture which started up in 2004 with a Mexican firm. At the Natividad project alone, Continuum holds more than 54,000 hectares of concessions.
It was gold that first brought Cortés to Mexico, and Mexican gold that financed the Spanish Empire. After Independence, Britain and the United States vied for economic control of the new Republic, mostly in a bit to gain control of the gold (and, later, other mineral resources). Although the 1910-20 Revolution returned Mexican resources to Mexican control, under NAFTA, it hasn’t only been the United States that has attempted to control key Mexican resources.
While Canada itself is a major mining country (including gold mining), it has gained more and more control of the Mexican mines — and, with the price of gold still going up — continues to operate mines like Natividad.
As Pawley explains, using the Natividad mine as her focus, these operations are not in the best interests of the locals, in theory, the owners of the minerals.
“While other companies have shied away from exploration due to the violence in Oaxaca, Continuum has been able to acquire highly prospective properties with very large land areas due to a lack of interest there.”
Continuum has made good off of “protest and violence,” doing deals with Oaxaca’s corporatist governments, and joining a host of other mining companies, like Vancouver’s Eurasian Minerals in Haiti and others in Colombia, aiming to make a profit in parts of the Americas where repression and violence are often directed against popular movements.
The Canadians may not be torturing people (and good on them), but they are robbing them and poisoning people throughout the world. Much of the anti-NAFTA protests you see in rural communities are only incidentally directed at local administrations. Those crooks have to get their loot from somewhere. And, in places like Oaxaca, the moneybags are in Vancouver.
They like me! They really like me!
“Forget Lonely Planet and Fodors,” writes Meredith Veto in the Guadalajara Reporter. If you want to know what’s going on in Mexico, she recommends a mixed bag of different websites.
Two of the sites I don’t know at all — one from a surfer dude in Bucerias and the other from Cancún (which Veto says ” is ‘like free therapy … and that’s the sense you get when you scroll through—you might as well be sitting on a bar stool next to her and at least three drinks into the night.”) are interesting in their own right, but no mi onda: after all, I “started the [MexFiles] to fill the “need for an English-language Mexican website that wasn’t a tourism site, or ‘my life in wherever-tlan.’”
One I do read, and is also recommended by Veto, is droppedin.com . Malcolm and Jillian are making a fine art of creative slackering … they’re twenty-something professional ex-pats… presently living in the Yucatan. They take a nicely jaundiced view of the world, which I find refreshing. A little twisted … cae bueno!
What surprised me was that Veto also includes the Mex Files in this company. “The site, as any politically oriented forum might be, is 
somewhat less than objective”. Yeah, well… there’s objective, and there’s the corporate press. I’ll go with “a short rant or rave, but not without foundation and historical perspective” any day.
Meredith Veto obviously has good taste:
The Mex Files is a priceless resource for expats who don’t read Mexican newspapers but want to keep informed—the blog covers current politics, culture, economics, and some U.S.-Mexico related news.
[…] This webpage demands a bookmark—it’s simple way to keep afloat in an unfamiliar political culture.
It also needs to pay for itself.
Half measures?
The Mexican government has been complaining for years that the violence in the narcotics trade is a direct result of U.S. failure to control the illegal firearms trade. Now that the Bush Administration (and the Calderón Administration) is all excited about the prospect of spending taxpayer’s money with private industries (like Halliburton and Lockheed-Martin) on Plan Merida, the U.S. is throwing in a sop that actually might accomplish something (though I doubt it).
Trailero1 at Mexico Trucker summarizes the proposal:
The United States is giving Mexico access to an electronic database to help trace weapons smuggled from the U.S. into the hands of well-armed Mexican drug gangs, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Wednesday.The database, known as e-Trace, has already been installed at U.S. consulates in the northern cities of Monterrey and Hermosillo and in the western city of Guadalajara. It will be expanded to the remaining six consulates by March, and should be available in Spanish soon.
Elsewhere in the Mexican press, it’s being reported that U.S. Treasury Department Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents will be working on Mexican soil to investigate gun-running cases.
Two problems I see. First of all, with no reciprocity for Mexican agents working in the U.S. on gun-running cases, the initiative is bound to stir up Mexican sensitivities about foreign agents working on their soil, and there doesn’t sound like there will be full cooperation in controlling the gun trade.
Secondly, the U.S. consulates have promised to install all kinds of software systems in the past, and have a spotty — at best — record in following through on deliverables. In this case, I notice that the systems will only be available through the Consulates. In other words, it sounds like some investigator from Fulanotlan will be shit out of luck when there is a murder in his territory: unless there is some method for underfunded local police departments to access the U.S. controlled system (and why are they going to care one way or another about crimes that don’t directly relate to the U.S. — involving U.S. citizens or “kingpins”) I don’t see consular officials spending a lot of time on these investigations.
How complete the FBI database is I don’t know. I’m well aware that in New Mexico and Texas, any U.S. citizen can buy a gun privately from any other citizen. And do — go to a gun show if you don’t believe me. What happens to the firearms after sale isn’t traced… and there’s no way to do so. Nor, am I convinced, it will tell us much.
Bill Bob Gunnut may be a perfectly honest person who is following the regulations, and to whom the question of violence in Mexico is theoretical at best (though, knowing some Billy Bobs, they’ll often tell you that fear of Mexican narcos coming to their neighborhood is a good reason to own your own protective firearms). If a gun Bill Bob sells ends up blowing away a couple of Mexican AFI agents, we may stop that particular gun dealer but that’s like torching one farmer’s marijuana crop — plenty more of both guns and marijuana where they came from.
And, anyway, even if the dealer is identified, and even if there is a pattern of selling to Mexican gangsters — and even if there is proof that the dealer knew he was selling to gangsters, the Mexicans can only turn the matter over to U.S. prosecutors — who might or might not have the time, resources or inclination to pursue the matter. Don’t expect any “gun king-pins” to be extradited to Mexico any time soon (or ever).
And, I’m not sure we really want to know who is actually supporting the gunrunning and money laundering that finances the narcotics trade.
This is cosmetic policing. I’m not sure how seriously to even take this moderate proposal. The best I can tell, it’s just other than a boondoggle for some software house.
Among other reasons
(Courtesy Latina Lista):
Just as poor economic conditions are the driving forces behind these young Mexican immigrants coming into the United States, the same is true for the majority of retirees who feel driven out of their own country.
The increasing cost of health care, an uncertain future for the Social Security system and a cost of living that keeps rising are a few of the factors that compel U.S. retirees to look beyond our borders for where they might spend their golden years.
Syndicated finance expert Scott Burns predicts that thousands more baby boomers will be crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in years to come just to sustain a lifestyle that will be harder to manage once they find themselves on fixed incomes.
Burns estimates, based on a range of data, that a retired couple living off $26,400 a year in Social Security benefits can raise their standard of living, without paying Medicare expenses, to $42,400 by moving to Mexico, where the cost of living can be up to 40% lower than in the USA.
U.S. retirees who can’t afford private Mexican health insurance can qualify for the Mexican Social Security system. Mexico’s health care system charges only $270 annual premiums that include access to hospitals, outpatient clinics, and all medications and care at no additional costs.
I’ve yet to hear a single politico from any party address this in the United States. I imagine those who think “citizen = consumer” (the Libertarians and Republicans who whine when their taxes go up, but whine even louder when they can’t get the government services THEY want) might see this as somehow good… but then, most of them are the kind of morons who make common cause with David Duke and the Nazis — you know, Ron Paul’s deluded supporters.
There’s nothing inherently evil about immigration to (or from) Mexico — or anywhere else for that matter. The generational shift is going to create some interesting problems. Especially with us geezers locked into our own way of thinking… though the Mexicans don’t get bent out of shape by gringos raising the U.S. flag or demanding Mexicans speak English (or complaining the food isn’t what they’re used to), we need to remember we are living in a foreign country. And, for no other reason than it’s good manners, should at least learn Mexican history….
Uh.. I just happen to know a book coming out on that subject.
See you South of the Border in a few weeks.
We’re screwed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has ordered a small border city in Texas to temporarily turn over its land to the federal government so it can begin to build a border fence.U.S. District Judge Alia Moses Ludlum ordered the city of Eagle Pass, on the border about 100 miles southwest of San Antonio, to “surrender” 233 acres of city-owned land. The Justice Department sued the city for access to the land.
The Homeland Security Department is trying to build 370 miles of border fence by the end of the year. A law signed by President Bush and supported by both of Texas’ U.S. senators mandated a total of 700 miles of fence along the border. The government had warned the city, which opposes the fence, it would sue under eminent domain laws to secure access to the property, declaring it is “taking” the property for 180 days.
The feeling inWashington — and around the country — is that people living on the border don’t deserve the same rights as the rest of the country. Just because some dickhead from Michigan gets the heebie-jeebies when he meets some guy from Michaocán, poor people in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona are going to have to… oh… emigrate. And most of us habla español. But aren’t looking forward to peonage in some Nebraska packing plant.
This is an outrage, but as long as it gives warm fuzzies to people who live far away from this area, the theft will continue. Just a reminder that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton voted for the construction of the Great Wall of America™.
Yankee ingenuity?
Rebecca Lopez, at Dallas TV station WFAA-TV8 reports a new twist on an old idea.
DALLAS — Law enforcement agencies across the country have been warned to be alert for vehicles that have been made to look like commercial or law enforcement vehicles, but in actuality are “clones” being used for illegal activities.
A 28-page report obtained by News 8 revealed that cloned vehicles are being used to smuggle drugs, guns and illegal immigrants.
Authorities said in one example, authorities discovered that a truck that appeared to be a Federal Express vehicle was actually a fake hauling 1,300 pounds of marijuana inside U-Haul boxes.
…In another case, a vehicle posing as a border patrol van was found to be holding 31 illegal immigrants inside. Authorities said the people were stacked on top of one another.
A tree grows in Polanco…and a bush in Culiacán
Alfredo, aka “Citius64″ has his own favorite, but according to The Guardian, the “Cafebrería” (Cafe/Librería) El Pendulo in Polanco is one of the top ten bookshops in the world.
Their English-language selection is rather small, but perhaps they’ll have room for a Mexican history in English book … and perhaps someone will buy the author a coffee (and the book, natch)
Photo by Lourdes Place
In an up-scale neighborhood of Culiacán, the botanical displays seem to reflect Sinaloa’s proud agrarian traditions. This meter high beauty (photographed by Alfredo Tolosa of El Universal) graces one of the city’s boulevards…
Zapatistas… what have they done lately?
Immanuel Wallerstein, the anti-globalist academic historian and sociologist, presumably is pro-Zapatista, though even he is hard pressed to find any anything they’ve ever accomplished.Wallerstein (and his publisher) would prefer one not use excerpts from “Mexico: What have the Zapatistas Accomplished“) but print the essay in full (“Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. … Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed.”). I assume Wallerstein’s entire essay series is meant to advance a thesis of some sort about globalization in general, but my concern is solely with the Zapatistas. At the risk of annoying the Yale scholar, I’m only using him as a “straw man”. I am going to rely on the time-honored right to except a small bit for discussion purposes … and my “creative commons” license.
…Armed insurrection as a tactic was suspended after about three months. It has never been resumed. … the truce agreement reached with the Mexican government – the so-called San Andrés accords providing for the recognition of autonomy for the indigenous communities – was never implemented by the government.
In 2001, the Zapatistas led a peaceful march across Mexico to the capital, …The march was spectacular but the Mexican Congress failed to act. In 2005, the Zapatistas launched “the other campaign,” an effort to mobilize an alliance of Zapatistas with groups in other [sic] provinces with more or less similar objectives – again spectacular but it did not change the actual politics of the Mexican government.
In 2006, the Zapatistas pointedly refused to endorse the left-of-center candidate for the presidency, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was running in a tight election against the proclaimed winner, the very conservative Felipe Calderón.
Throwing the 2006 election to Calderón is arguably the only concrete political act by the Zapatistas that has succeeded. And I don’t think it was unintentional. In my forth-coming book (Gods, Gachupines and Gringos), I argue in passing that the Zapatistas are simply traditionalists — and by definition — conservatives. If not reactionaries.
The PRI has certainly ossified over the years, but it was always a “progressive” party, seeking to bring modernity even to agrarian regions. It had its successes. When the PRI became the “party of neo-liberalism”, backing globalization (don’t forget, Carlos Salinas was the father of NAFTA, not George Bush or Ronald Reagan) and largely giving up on Mexican agriculture, the PRD became the “real” party of the left. But. it too is “modernist” — Lopez Obradór’s “Benefit of All” campaign was suggesting more investments in education and business opportunity in places like Chiapas — certainly as much a threat to “traditional values” as Vicente Fox’s failed “Plan Puebla Panama” (which would have brought in roads and electricity, but not much else).
Wallerstein is mistaken in saying the “San Andres Accords” were never implemented. Not completely, true: “usos y costumbres” were given legal recognition by the Mexican Constitution — mostly at the urging of PAN.
“The Other Campaign” did change Mexican politics. By organizing an abstention campaign, the Zapatistas managed very neatly to weaken the PRI, keep the PRD-led coalition out of Los Pinos and retain the traditionalists in PAN to power. AND… by not openly supporting PAN, they maintain their left-wing “mystique”.
Mexican politics has always involved contradictions and compromises, even within the same party. Wallerstein is writing about global issues, and global effects. But, in Mexico itself, and within Mexican politics, the Zapatistas are affecting “the actual politics of the Mexican government”.
Just say “no!”
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department as early as next week will go to court to force 102 property owners along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, including 71 in Texas, to allow surveyors to determine if the border fence should be built on their lands.
The 102 landowners — including 20 in California and 11 in Arizona — either rebuffed or ignored a 30-day deadline given by the Department of Homeland Security to provide access to their lands for the fence, which has been particularly hotly contested in the Rio Grande Valley.
The majority of Texas landowners identified by the Border Patrol and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the site surveys agreed to comply with the government’s request, albeit many of them reluctantly.
Of the 408 Texas property owners affected, 337 agreed to comply.
The list of property owners refusing to grant access to their land includes local city and county governments, utilities, businesses, the Nature Conservancy and individuals.
…Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is under pressure to complete 370 miles of fencing, including about 130 miles in Texas, by October. But he’s faced significant opposition, particularly in Texas, from individuals and local elected officials who are fighting the fence on grounds it will disrupt life along the border while doing little to deter illegal immigrants.
Though lawsuits are being readied to defend the property owners’ rights, Chertoff has two major weapons in his arsenal: the government’s ability to seize land through eminent domain, and the powers he was granted by Congress to waive environmental and other laws to build border fences.
The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, which may represent some of the landowners in court, argues that the federal government is trampling on indigenous, water and property rights.
“We plan to see the Department of Homeland Security in court,” said the center’s executive director, Peter Schey.
And a happy new year to you too — WTF???
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PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island – The father of the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008 was arrested and is now facing deportation after he disclosed in interviews with local reporters that he was undocumented, Univision reports. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mynor Montufar in his apartment Friday after a newspaper and a local television station interviewed him and his wife, Carmen Marrero. David De la Roca, an undocumented immigrant who shared an apartment with the couple, was found dead, the victim of an apparent suicide, hours after Montufar was arrested.
Going through Google to see what is in the news about Mexico (something I try to do a couple of times a week), there isn’t much making the English-speaking news outside of some reports on inflation (its not going up as fast as expected) and the tiresome old “drug violence” stories. The only new thing there was that the latest bunch of gangsters included U.S. “residents” (probably citizens, but the story wasn’t clear on it).
No one seems to be reporting that even the United States Senate is FINALLY paying attention to the biggest cause of drug-export related violence in Mexico… U.S. guns and money. And that story wasn’t in the U.S. press, but in the Mexican papers.
Instead, all the U.S. papers (and political blogs) were fixated on the 9 Democratic Party Convention votes won by Hillary Clinton for an election not scheduled for another 11 months. And the meaning of those nine delegate votes. And, predictions on the future of the world based on those nine delegates. And…endless blathering about the meaning of the meaning of the people who talked about the meaning of the meaning of the votes in the 41st largest state of the Union. Or the ballyhoo over the candidates for a couple of delegates to the other corporate capitalist’s party’s nominating convention.
It’s really not worth my time… not only is the Presidential election a long way off, but if I bother to vote, I’ll have to vote in Texas, where our “electorial college” system will mean my vote will go to the state-wide winning candidate — which in Texas will be the Republican candidate, even if they have to steal the vote: Texas law makes it next to impossible to list candidates from any party other than the two that have controlled the United States since the 1860s, and, while I might vote for one of the Democrats, (none of the Republicans are even sane that I can see) it would be a meaningless gesture on my part.
Besides, Mexican politics, with its very real ideological, economic and philosophical differences between the parties, is much more interesting.
The big news (naturally, unreported by the media in Mexico’s largest trading partner — except for the startling news that Mexicans are organizing opposition to OUR push to make them open up their oil reserves to our investors) is the on-going disussions between the parties of the left to form a long-term common front. The “Wide Progressive Front” (Frente Amplio Progresista) — the PRD, PT and Convergencia bloc in Congress, against expectations, selected Porfirio Muñoz Ledo as their leader.
WHO?
Muñoz Ledo has been around a long time. He’s been president of both the PRI and the PRD as well as a presidential candidate for the now-defunct PARM. And — PAN President Vicente Fox appointed him Ambassador to the European Union. He resigned that post to work for the Lopéz Obradór presidential campaign. Having switched parties a few times is no disgrace in Mexican politics — and, given that PRD was, in large part, the left-er wing of PRI joined with PARM, there’s nothing at all odd about Muñoz Ledo’s political resume.
What makes this interesting are two things. The Mexican left has always been weakened by their tendency to split hairs on ideological issues — PT has always claimed to be Maoist (well, more Ché-ists with ballots instead of bullets) and Convergencia seems to be more a left-leaning party of the rural middle-class (I admit I’m not up on the nuances of Convergencia’s ideological roots), while the PRD has several “currents” — all vaguely on the left, but ranging from social democrats to Communists. All the factions — and parties — with the FAP, however, have roots in socialism.
Having worked with several different parties, and having come out of the concensus-style politics of the PRI, I see Muñoz Ledo as a potentially effective leader — especially if, as there is movement to do — the FAP becomes a single party.
The second interesting point has to do with Muñoz Ledo’s background in the PRI. He was a cabinet officer under two of the “neo-liberal” presidents: Lopez Portillo and Carlos Salinas. With PAN and PRI often uniting to maintain the status quo (on the left, the two are known as “PRIAN”, much as in the U.S. people speak of the “Republocrats”), the PRI has been trying to re-invent itself to maintain relevence. While it is still Mexico’s largest political party, it seems hopelessly adrift, caught between a growing united left (PRI is technically a socialist party) and the “neo-liberal” PAN. At times, it seems to be a “liberal” party (as in their support for gay marriage in Cohuila), at times a loyal opposition to PAN (as in their support for expanded foreign capital in PEMEX) and at times, just the guys who SHOULD be in control (as in the on-going mess in Oaxaca). If FAP is able to form a party structure that can compete nationally with more than just a Lopez Obrador at the head of the ticket, the more left-leaning (or ambitious) PRI politicos are likely to change their membership… as did Muñoz Ledo (and, for that matter, Lopez Obrador and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas).
Even people who know something about Mexico assume the country has two parties — PAN and PRI. Nope: it may someday be a two-party state (though I don’t foresee it — multiple parties are probably here to stay) but the two parties are likely to have real differences, and offer Mexican voters real choices.
mexfiles.net 
