Well, well, well… can I call ’em or what?
Yesterday, I wrote
Somehow… this all relates to the OTHER leaking scandal — Carlos Ahumada (who at the time had just added a new daily newspaper to his business empire) ended up in the slammer after it was revealed he’d taped various officials taking bribes that he’d paid them (the reason he was sent to jail, after his stay at a very nice beach house in Cuba owned by ex-president Carlos Salinas) has MORE tapes — which the PRD wants to see, supposedly. Ahumada’s wife claims she was the victim of a “drive-by shooting” (ok, so her windshield did have a bullet in it, but after the Gov. of Oxaxca botched a self-inflicted assassination attempt (hey, somebody actually shot me! SHIT!) last year, I’ve been sceptical of these kinds of stories.
Today’s Mexico City News carries a translation of an El Universal article by Rubelio Fernández headlined
Ahumada suspect in attack on truck:
Capital prosecutors say jailed businessman Carlos Ahumada likely planned the attack against his wife´s truck last week.
City justice officials have obtained recordings of Ahumada´s recent phone conversations. In the tapes, which were acquired by EL UNIVERSAL, Ahumada speaks to unknown sources, saying that nothing at the scene of the crime should be altered before authorities had arrived at the scene of the crime. He does not enquire about the health of his wife or children.
In another recording, he asks an unidentified man about the presidential polls.
“The environment is heating up,” says the unidentified voice, and Ahumada responds, “That´s right.” The voice then says, “And now we mess them up bad on Tuesday, forget about it.” Ahumada replies, “Oh yeah.”
The two also mention that Ahumada´s legal situation may improve if National Action Party candidate (PAN) Felipe Calderón were to win the presidency.
FAMILY TARGETED
Last Tuesday, the armored truck of Ahumada´s wife Cecilia Gurza was shot at by an unidentified assailant or assailants. Gurza was in the truck with the couple´s children and their chauffeur at the time. No one was injured.
In another conversation, Ahumada is heard speaking to capital prosecutors who were inspecting the truck the day before the incident. The examination was for the truck´s involvement in a 2003 accident, unrelated to the shooting incident.
In the conversation, Ahumada urges the city officials to return the truck that same day.
The attack against Gurza came just hours before she was scheduled to release videos that she said would be damaging to the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and the capital government. It also came on the same day as the presidential debates.
Ahumada is accused of money laundering after his company was paid for city contracts it failed to fulfill. He appeared in numerous videos leaked to the press in 2003, in which he was seen handing out cash to PRD politicians.
In a NEW PAN scandal, blandly entitled by the News Calderón faces funding controversy it makes one almost nostalgic for the PRI — which usually at least delivered more than half of what they promised:
For much of President Vicente Fox´s term, Arnulfo Montes Cuén was a prized ally. A spellbinding speaker in a black cowboy hat, he barnstormed rural Mexico, setting up farmers unions friendly to the ruling National Action Party (PAN) and cementing their loyalty with access to government aid programs.
Then the 41-year-old organizer fell out with the party and became a whistle-blower, triggering an investigation into the biggest case of alleged illegal funding to surface in Mexico´s presidential race.
As Montes tells it, Fox´s government had authorized US$5 million for him to buy building materials and distribute them to thousands of poor farmers. But there was a catch: He was to kick back half the money to the campaign of PAN presidential candidate Felipe Calderón.
Montes refused and was booted from the program. He is pressing criminal charges against 12 officials of the government and the party, for allegedly replacing him with someone willing to divert the anti-poverty funds to Calderón´s war chest.
…Montes laid out his version of events in a 152-page affidavit to the special prosecutor´s office and a lengthy interview with the Times. He said the congressman running Calderón´s campaign in Colima state, Jorge Luis Preciado, summoned him to a downtown Mexico City restaurant, handed him two deposit slips and ordered him to divide the kickback between two bank accounts the congressman controlled.
Preciado said he does not recall such a meeting with Montes, and the Fox administration denies placing any conditions on distributing the grant.
When Montes balked at the payoff, he said, the congressman told him: “Don´t worry. Those Indian peasants will never notice.”
In Chapontongo, 60 miles north of Mexico City, the peasants noticed. Some families received only half the promised supplies, while others were dropped from the grant list, administered by a previously unknown civic organization linked to PAN.
“They left me these 20 bags of cement and promised to deliver the rest of the materials but never came back,” said a dejected Alejandra Beltrán, 47, standing on the weed-covered lot where she hopes to build a home with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. Until then she remains in a one-room hovel a few blocks away, sharing a bed with three teenage children under a leaky roof.
“We´re asking what happened to the money that was budgeted for the materials that never arrived,” said Jesús Ocampo, a farmer who had helped gather applications for the grants in Chapontongo. “They say it went to Felipe Calderón´s campaign. If that´s true, then the PAN is as big a bunch of thieves as the PRI.”
This is very strange… convenient leaks and leakers
After the affair of the inconvenient brother-in-law broke, Calderón DEMANDED AMLO prove his allegations that Hildebrando had benefitted from contracts during Calderón’s tenure as Secretary of Energy. Ohhh… that’s an open invitation, and AMLO supporters complied, showing up with boxes and boxes and boxes of documents. SO…
Suddenly, the Treasury Department (Hacienda) files a complaint against Mexico City’s government for leaking documents. UHHHH….
Alejandro Encinas (the acting Jefe de Gobernacion) could only say… That’s weird!
Back when the PANistas were trying to “prove” corruption in the PRD controlled Mexico City government, I wondered how a PAN politician ended up with tapes of a city administrator gambling in Las Vegas. That mystery was solved: the FBI was gathering casino tapes under the “Patriot Act” and, instead of looking for terrorists, was looking for Mexican politicians. What remained unclear is how exactly those tapes ended up with a particular politician and not with the public prosecutor.
Somehow… this all relates to the OTHER leaking scandal — Carlos Ahumada (who at the time had just added a new daily newspaper to his business empire) ended up in the slammer after it was revealed he’d taped various officials taking bribes that he’d paid them (the reason he was sent to jail, after his stay at a very nice beach house in Cuba owned by ex-president Carlos Salinas) has MORE tapes — which the PRD wants to see, supposedly. Ahumada’s wife claims she was the victim of a “drive-by shooting” (ok, so her windshield did have a bullet in it, but after the Gov. of Oxaxca botched a self-inflicted assassination attempt (hey, somebody actually shot me! SHIT!) last year, I’ve been sceptical of these kinds of stories.
Be careful what you wish for — it’s bound to get complicated. Stay tuned.
There was a touching moment just before the Mexico-Iran game in Nuremburg when the Iranian players presented Oswaldo Sanchez with flowers, who had to fly home for his father’s funeral earlier this week. Which didn’t stop el TRI from whupping the Iranians 3-1 — with, or without voodoo.
The Copa Mundial takes precedence over everything else, of course, but there are those pesky elections coming up …
The New York Times (alas, registration required — so read it in the Denver Post instead) has a nice article on IFE’s role in the election — basically playing referee in a mudslinging contest. Calderón has been stung by the “inconvenient inlaw”, but claiming to the Associated Press — and everybody else — that it doesn’t matter. El Universal’s poll gives Calderón a lead this week (37% to AMLO’s 34%) but it’s within the margin of error, so it’s still anyone’s guess.
And — though they’re supposed to keep quiet — the Church seems to be weighing in on PAN’s side:
The Catholic Church might be using “hot-button” issues to influence voters in favor of Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s National Action Party (PAN)presidential candidate and an abortion-rights opponent, Mexican Catholic community groups said on Thursday, Reuters reports. Guadalupe Cruz — speaking on behalf of six community-based Catholic groups, which include Catholics who oppose the church’s position on birth control and support abortion rights — said that church leaders appear to be supporting candidates who fit an ideological profile, especially surrounding “sexual morality” issues. According to Reuters, the Catholic Church in Mexico this year has held “unprecedented” meetings with presidential candidates, asking them to “speak up” on such issues including abortion. In addition, the church has organized workshops and forums nationwide designed to educate voters on the candidates and their policies. The church says that the workshops aim to help voters understand what the candidates believe about certain issues. However, the community-based groups said they think the workshops might inappropriately interfere in the elections because of the connection the church has with PAN and Mexican President Vincente Fox, a PAN member. Cruz said, “[T]he risk of the Catholic hierarchy influencing votes has been greater in these federal elections than in others due to its closeness to the federal executive.” She added, “Those factors increase the risk of influencing votes in favor of the PAN” (Orlandi, Reuters, 6/8).
The curious case of the inconvenient in-law
The elections are — no suprise — getting nastier. AMLO’s folks are claiming Calderón’s brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala Gómez del Campo obtained no-bid contracts from Pemex (Hildebando SA de CV provides data services), suggesting influence peddling and the use of family connections.
How much effect this will have is questionable. There are people who assume you’re supposed to use your influence to get your relatives jobs. And those contracts may have been perfectly legitimate — there aren’t that many Mexican data service companies, and Hildebrando SA de CV (and Meta Data, controlled by Diego Zavala ) are two of the few large companies that do this kind of work. STILL… Diego Zavala was denying any contracts existed, and was threatening a civil suit against AMLO for “moral damage” (basically, slander) until someone dug them up in the public record.
OOPS! The left is having a field day (or course). Diego Zavala — with a touch of the “deer in the headlights look” was the front page photo in today’s Jornada. El Financiero (of course) is ignoring the story. Instead, they have an softball interview with Calderón in which he poo-poos the allegations, and quotes his internal polls, showing him ahead by 7 percentage points.
However, a poll cited by Jaime Martínez Veloz in a Jornada opinion piece has AMLO over Calderón 34% to 28%. Martínez is mostly attacking Calerón’s market-strategy campaigning style and claiming the polls he cites are a truer picture of the electorate.
I don’t think anyone really knows anything — like I said, who’s up and who’s down is still guesswork.
And, with dirty tricks now in play, expect more revelations to surface. AMLO’s car accident today might be worth something. No one was hurt (his driver hit a bus pulling out of a parking lot, and AMLO — being a consumate politico — climbed on the bus for some impromptu campaigning), but it’s an excuse to bring up Nico the driver again (When AMLO ran Mexico City, PAN raised a stink about Nico’s salary as a department head, but as a bodyguard, driver and appointments secretary rolled into one — his salary wasn’t all that outrageous). At least he’s not a relative.
The unknown Mexican icon…
If you don’t recognize this covergirl from Paris Magazine’s July 1933 issue, you might remember her as “Vera” in the 1931 Greta Garbo – Clark Gable tearjerker, “Susan Lennox”…
Still no clue?
And what does she have to do with Mexico?
According to Puerto Morelos author Jeanine Lee Kitchel, this Hollywood supporting actress of the 20s and 30s (and sometime French covergirl) played an important role in Mexican-American relations.
A regular at Carlos Herrera’s “Rancho de Gloria” cantina in Rosarita, she liked her tequilla, but hated it straight up. One day in 1935, especially for her, Carlos mixed three shots of white tequilla, two shots of triple sec, a shot of lime juice, mixed it in a blender, added ice, and poured it into a champagne glass, it’s rim dipped in lemon juice and twirled it in a bowl of salt. And the rest, as they say, was history.
Marjorie King (1911 -1998) … or, as Carlos called her — in the Mexican style — Margarita.
THE Debate — basically a tie…
There’s not much point in my writing a long piece on last night’s debate. My screw-up — I didn’t see it. The highlights of Calderón v. AMLO are available through El Universal’s website. There were five candidates, but neither Patricia Mercado nor Roberto Campo really count. Though, I have to admit, Mercado came off well, pumping not for the Presidency, but for enough votes to gain a few plurinomial Assembly seats to bring up (and horsetrade) votes on iniatives to reduce domestic violence, increase transparency and push for free trade agreements within the Americas. Campo — Esther Elba Gordilla’s good soldier — was irrelevant. La Maestra and her minions may garner some votes, but I don’t think the debate would affect their support (or lack of support) one way or the other.
Madrazo, and his PRI-Green Alliance is still behind — no surpise there. He managed to get in more digs at Vincente Fox than anyone else — which probably won’t help Felipe Calderón any, but may not much help PRI either. Who knows, maybe those votes will go to Patricia Mercado’s
AMLO and Calderón are the only ones who really count. According to Kelly Arthur Garrett, “The general consensus of panelists gathered on public television was that Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) waged a cautious, defensive battle that ended in a virtual tie. The two candidates were tied for the lead in most polls released just before the debate.”
To my thinking, this makes AMLO the “winner” — he and Calderón traded snipes (Calderón claims Mexico City is out of control, to which AMLO responds by sweetly asking why he’s so popular with the voters there; AMLO raises questions about Calderón’s relations who’ve made money off bank restructuring ), but by NOT getting angry or uptight, he did a good job of neutralizing Calderón’s claims that AMLO is a loonie leftist. And Calderón — from what I can tell — was well organized but came across as too wonky and cold to really appeal to the voters.
The last pre-debate polls had Calderón and AMLO tied at 36% each (AMLO inching back up, Calderón falling from 39%). Madrazo had briefly been almost tied, but at 24%, it looks as if he pre-debate support was mostly dissatisfied PAN supporters — or undecideds.
There’s some new anti-Calderón commercials coming out this week, and a weird story about the wife of Carlos Ahumada (the jailed businessman who videotaped himself bribing Mexico City officials and PRD operatives) being attacked by gunmen because she threatened to release new tapes — but I’ve become sceptical of “convenient” attacks by phantom gunmen ever since the Governor of Oaxaca staged a phony attack on himself (that backfired, when he actually got winged — served him right!).
AND… of course, the World Cup trumps presidential politics. My friend José Luis Borgues calls futbol “el opio del pueblo mexicano”, but any polls taken during the World Cup are going to be automatically suspect. Who in their right mind is going to answer the phone, or talk to a pollster (or take a poll) when there’s a game on TV?
Julie Watson, writing for the AP uses the upcoming release of “Nacho Libre” as the hook for a rather elegant and informative little essay on the sport… or art… or evidence of pre-Colombian culture in the Americas… or entertainment… or…??? of Lucha Libre.
Professional wrestling, known as Lucha Libre, was largely the inspiration for the World Wrestling Federation, now known as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
But unlike in other countries, wrestling’s impact reaches far beyond the ring in Mexico, where Lucha Libre is influenced by the country’s mystical Aztec and Mayan roots.
“We are part of the national patrimony,” said Blue Panther, still wearing his turquoise mask as he fastened his seat belt and drove away in his compact Sentra after a fight.
Lucha Libre is not an exclusive, corporate-dominated world of cable-TV celebrities. In Mexico, the gritty arenas appear in working-class neighborhoods across the country. And while there are many superstars, fights often feature entry-level contestants, including middle-aged, overweight men who slip on their own masks and become larger than life.
I disagree with Ms. Watson. There are out-of-shape, over the hill wannabes in any sport. One legitimate criticism of the film is that a big part of Jack Black ‘s comic appeal is his unathletic body. Luchedores may have a higher body mass index than, say, bicycle racers or NCAA wrestlers, but then so do NFL guards and other practicioners of sports requiring bulk. They are big guys, but they’re not a bunch of fatties. And they continue to perform (or compete) well into middle age. The greatest of all Luchadores, El Santo, who was born in 1917, was still working into the early 1980s. The “real” luchador who inspired Black’s character, was already a well-respected professional in another field when he took up his Lucha Libre career — which he continued for another 23 years.
What fascinates people about Lucha Libre is not so much that the great stars go on forever and ever, nor that it’s just a weird pop culture entertainment, but that :
“There are so many ties to mythology, to people in the news, to politicians, to stars, to science-fiction characters,” said Lourdes Grobet, a photographer who has documented lucha libre for 26 years and who advised producers on “Nacho Libre.”
“In Lucha Libre, I found the true Mexico,” she added. “I discovered a marvelous world.”
Fray Tormenta,
That “marvelous world” is in no way a simplified world. Luchadores like El Ecologista bring environmentalism to the ring. Two that I’ve previously written about struggle for the human worth of gays and transvestites (with good humor and panache). Superbario “made his name leading marches demanding better public housing for the poor” (Watson writes).
One Mexican writer, commenting on “Nacho Libre” said “I think its a dumb mockery of a very bizarre sport” and he may be right. I’m not a big Jack Black fan, and the trailers and ads for the film suggest most of the humor is just the usual Mexican and clerical stereotypes you find in comedies (bull gores man in butt, nuns see naked man, etc.). Black’s role is based on the very real, and impressive story of Sergio Gutierrez Benitez, a Teotihuacan priest.
There’s nothing bizarre about a priest/pro-wrestler. Father Gutierrez — “Fray Tormenta” when masked — took up Lucha Libre to raise funds for an orphanage — the kind of story that would have made a good Bing Crosby musical in the 1940s (assuming Bing had the right build to play a Luchadore).
A theological historian once pointed out to me, SOP for the Catholic Church until the late 16th century, was to accept local beliefs and practices as long as they didn’t conflict with offical Catholic ones — or could be used in a Catholic context. The Irish shamrock, the German Christmas tree we accept as just “European” . Why not the Aztec and Mayan mask? In the twenty-first century, we still think of that blend of Germans, Celtic, Slavic, Roman and Jewish traditions as simply “Western” Mexico — with its non-European roots — has customs and traditions that owe nothing to Europe, but are are perfectly good Catholic practice.
The Mexican Church, from the beginning, recognized the power of indigenous art and culture. And, Catholic Europe and Pre-Columbian Mexico both knew of Warrior Priests.
The masked hero — in a symbolic fight against evil — is simply Mexican. What made Fray Tormento unique — and something far deeper than the inspiration for a light-weight comedy is the moral dimension of his art — behind the mask (and the Church has always accepted symbol and ritual as a means of forming religious virtue) the priest was doing what a priest should do — acts of Charity, done anonomously.
Father Gutierrez’ personal story is an amazing one. Born in Tepito (Mexico City’s breeding ground for great wrestlers, boxers and gangsters), he was a teenage drug addict, who in recovery joined an order of teaching priests. He was trained in Rome and, upon return to Mexico, became a professor of Philosophy. Informally helping out homeless kids in Veracruz led to his decision to leave his teaching post (and his order) to become a simple diocesan priest managing a home for abandoned children:
Soon after his last professional appearance in 2005, An article in El Universal (translated here) retold the story of the amazing Fray Tormenta’s unlikely mission:
“Money was always running out. No child was ever turned away, even when I had no idea where the next meal ould come from.””I became a professional wrestler because I had a cause. If it weren’t for my children, there would have been no reason to fight,” he explains.
Like most poor boys who dream of becoming wrestling champions, Father Sergio thought he would earn millions if he became a prizefighter. He endured dislocated arms, a broken nose, three cracked ribs and several mangled fingers, but never made a fortune, in spite of a career that took him to Japan 14 times and to the US 70 times.
…
It was easy to conceal his true identity. Mexico, he says, is a country of masks. “Whether out of fear or self-protection, we rarely present our true face to the world. Mexicans are secretive by nature. Our formality is a shield against scrutiny. We use masks all the time.”
Even after his accidental “outing” (a fellow Luchador attending a Sunday Mass said by Padre Guiterrez recognized Fray Tormenta, he continued his unusual preaching/charity at Arena Mexico until diabetes forced him to retire in 2005 at the age of 53. At his emotional farewell benefit performance, he said: “Life is but a brief masquerade. It teaches us to laugh with tears in our eyes, and to conceal our sorrow with laughter.”
The “Green Wall” — eco-friendly border security…
Given his track record for misunderstanding and bad information, anything coming from Mark Stevenson should be taken with a grain of salt… but this looks promising
Mexico creates nature reserve to discourage illegal crossings
MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press
MEXICO CITY – Mexico is creating an environmental reserve about 30 feet wide and 600 miles long on the Texas border, a “green wall” to protect the Rio Grande from the roads and staging areas that smugglers use to ferry drugs and migrants across the frontier.
Much of this border zone is remote and inhospitable – generally too rough to hike through unless you’re a black bear or a pronghorn sheep, species that have flourished in the area’s deserts and mountains.
And that’s the way Mexico wants to keep it.
While the proposed Rio Bravo del Norte Natural Monument is only about 30 feet wide, it will connect two large protected areas south of the river. When a third nature reserve, known as Ocampo, is created this year, the protected areas in Mexico will form a “wall” of millions of acres of wilderness, matching Texas’ Big Bend parks foot-by-foot along the border.
“This stretch of border is the safest one we have. It’s safe because it has wilderness on both sides,” said Carlos Manterrola, who heads the environmental group Unidos Para la Conservacion.
Big Bend National Park has had some problems with migrant and drug trafficking, but superintendent John King says extending protected areas on either side of the border will likely keep the problem from getting worse.
“When you have a roadless area, you make it more difficult for these activities to happen,” King said.
The strip protects a much longer stretch of riverbank, from just downstream of the Texas border town of Presidio to the outskirts of Laredo, Texas, raising the possibility of still larger reserves that will serve as biological corridors, encouraging four-footed traffic but making it exceedingly difficult for humans to pass.
In other border areas where U.S. reserves aren’t fully matched in Mexico – such as Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument – primitive roads and ramshackle hamlets have sprung up on the Mexican side to provide supplies and staging areas to illegal border crossers. They have then overrun U.S. wilderness areas.
As the U.S. puts up more fencing near cities and popular crossing zones, migrants will likely be looking for new routes in remote areas.
That happened with the Mexican hamlet of Las Chepas, which became a hub for undocumented border crossers. The problem got so bad that Mexican authorities – at the urging of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson – bulldozed 31 buildings to discourage them from being used as a smuggling haven.
Now, Mexico is working on yet another “mirror” border reserve, to be announced this summer in an area known as the Janos grasslands, roughly west of Las Chepas and across from the Alamo Hueco Mountains and Big Hatchet Mountains Wilderness areas in New Mexico’s boot heel region.
Law enforcement is a problem at many Mexican parks, but if well policed, the 1.2 million acres of the proposed Janos wilderness area could not only protect one of the largest prairie dog populations in North America, but also present a natural barrier to smugglers moving deeper into the wild as border security tightens.
Mexican ranchers and environmentalists applauded the Rio Bravo del Norte proposal, which was published Monday, starting a 30-day comment period. Along with the Ocampo wilderness, it will protect several pine- and oak-clad mountains often described as “sky islands,” temperate mountaintop enclaves divided by seas of heat-seared desert or grassland.
“This would close the circle,” said Jesus Armando Verduzco, a 73-year-old ranch owner from Ocampo. “Perhaps later, we could do a bit of hunting, eco-tourism, preserve it for humanity.”
Some environmentalists say this policy of establishing nature preserves along the border could be a more effective alternative to the walls and “smart” fences being pondered in Congress.
“The whole idea that people are coming up through wilderness and roadless areas, and that’s simply not the case,” said David Hodges, policy director of the Sky Island Alliance. “People have a tendency to stay near roads, because they don’t get lost and that’s where they get picked up. … It would be disastrous to put roads through these areas.”
“Deadwood” and the Juarez Feminicidas
The AP Spanish edition noted the passing of Abdel Latif Sharif last Thursday. Sharif has been in prison since 1996 for one murder, and was suspected of anywhere between 10 and 30 of the “Juarez Feminicides” .
In 1996, when he received 30 years for murdering a 17 year old girl, there was relief that the Juarez “lady-killer” had been caught. At the time, it was almost believable that the Egyptian immigant was a serial killer — make that THE serial killer — responsible for the crimes. Another 100 or so murders later, (350 women in all, over the last 14 years according to some estimates) despite federal investigations assisted by FBI agents, the Surete and Interpol advisors, and Argentinian and European forensics experts — and a series of special prosecutors, there still is no particular suspect, and no one theory. Just lines of speculation. The only thing for certain is that Abdel Latif Sharif might have been responsible for SOME murders (when he was arrested, he was accused of 30 of them — never proven, and many believed he was too perfect a “perp” — a foreigner with some peculiar sexual “perversions” to begin with). And he confessed — for whatever that’s worth given the bad habit the Chihuahua State Police had then (and all too often still do) of gathering questionable confessions.
Sharif’s death is not suspicious — he had a serious heart condition, high blood pressure and severe depression (according to one report, his lawyer said he died of sadness, having been abandoned by his family back in Egypt). Still, anything about the Juarez Feminicides is suspect.
Or, is it much simpler than we think…?
Tonight, I was watching a DVD of the American TV series, “Deadwood”. It’s a strange western, violent and poetic at the same time. What made me think of Abdel Latif Sharif was how casually murder and violence was in a boom town like Deadwood South Dakota in the 1880s. Or in present day Juarez.
Officially, Juarez has a population of 1.3 million, but no one seems to know for sure. It’s not a city… it’s a giant Deadwood, where a job — any job — is the gold that lures the ambitious and the desperate. And, again like the wild west, it’s a magnet for the crazed, the misfit and the psychotic. In the TV mining camp, even “respectable” women are on their own, and openly abused, though Victorian chivalry provides some protection. The murder victims in Juarez — mostly young, single working class girls and women — live in a post-Victorian era, and, though many came from more traditional parts of Mexico, are on their own in a rough open town.
Perhaps it’s not a serial killer, “thrill kill cults,” rampant sexism, anti-union death squads, crazed police officers …. or any combination of these. Maybe it’s just the situation. Maybe the murder rate is “normal” for an abnormal last-chance hard-luck boom town where the real population is significantly more than the officially recognized 1.3 million, and where transients of all kinds — and of all kinds of psychosocial kinks — change the dynamic from day to day. MAYBE… violence and casual murder is the “norm” in any lawless community in transition — whether the community is a gold rush mining camp (like in Deadwood), or a giant NAFTA spawned work camp, like Juarez, both brutal places where the brutality against the individual is only matched by the brutality by which outsiders (the State and the San Francisco mining interests in “Deadwood”; “maquilladora” plants and foreign corporate interests in Juarez) bring “civilization to a place.
Fred Reed on Mexico today
I think that the Mexico of today is confused with the Mexico of fifty years ago. For example, a clear gradient exists in health between the old and the young. Men of fifty or more often look as if they had spent their lives carrying anvils across the desert with nothing to eat. They are arthritic. They walk painfully. They are just plain wore out, as we say in Alabama. They make for picturesque postcards, but bear little resemblance to today’s Mexicans.
The young appear as lithe and healthy as those of their age anywhere, and show no signs of wearing out beyond the normal effects of age. I don’t know the average quality or quantity of dental care, but they seem to have their teeth, which appear healthy. (I say “seem to” and “appear” because I don’t carry dental picks and a mirror, but when all visible teeth are white and where they ought to be, things can’t be but so bad.)
My eccentric opinion of “Sub-Comandante Marcos”
… is that he’s only useful to the Mexican right and to PAN. Apparently, I’m not alone in thinking this (Rodolfo Soriano Nuñez writes about this in his political science blog, “Mexico Desde Fuera“).
I don’t pretend to Professor Soriano’s learning, nor am I a rigorous student of this matter. My arguments are simple:
- Indigenism, by definition is reactionary. These are people fighting to preserve “traditional values” — which may be of real value, but are not necessarily so. Traditionalists don’t like change — everyone likes to gloss over the fact that Maximiliano’s biggest supporters were traditional indigenous groups (who felt threatened by the social and economic values
of an unknown, untried modern state), as were the Cristeros (which was cynically exploited by the right and William F. Buckley Sr — the Texas oil man who was always looking for a way to force the U.S. to intervene in the 1920s). Everyone forgets that Emiliano Zapata’s family had backed Maximilanio during the French Intervention. - ELZN is quite right in seeing “globalization” as a threat, and their critique is quite cogent — and probably correct. However, beyond vague and romantic notions of a return to the land and self-sustaining communes, they don’t offer much to a modern urban country like Mexico. They are no threat to the “powers that be” — nor, do I think, do they intend to be.
- I’ve noticed that ELZN actions are never directed against PAN. The original uprising was against the PRI… and the Atenco actions seemed more designed to discredit AMLO and PRD than they were designed to accomplish anything substantial.
There’s nothing particularly mysterious, about “Marcos”. I think what happens is that European and North American admirers want to romanticize Rafael Sebastián Guillén as Zorro. Sure, he wears a mask. Some say he’s leading a rebellion against cruel oppressors.A few — like the writer of the Wikipedia article on him can’t quite bring themselves to accept that he’s not a man of mystery, nor — am I sure — is anything more than the PR spokesman for the ELZN. How much power he has in the organization — and whether that organization is not being manipulated by the right has never been clear to me.
If “Marcos” is in the tradition of any Mexican “masked hero” it’s more in the tradition of Rudy Guzman — el Santo (about whom the Wikipedia has a very good article indeed!). Like Guzman, Guillín accepts his image (we’re told Rudy Guzman never even went to the market without donning his mask — and was certainly never photographed without it — he was buried wearing it). In Mexico, it’s understood. The masses need a hero, a champion against evil forces from the outside. While in the 19th century, it was the otherwise very silly and plainly insane Maximilio who filled that role, in the media-saavy 21st century, it’s a hero who can appeal to pop culture (Marcos himself once compared himself to another Mexican pop icon — Speedy Gonzales). El Santo fought space aliens, vampire women and Zacatecan werewolves. Marcos fights … what I’m not sure. And to whos ultimate benefit I’m even more unsure.
Just Say No… an update from the war on drugs
The body of presumed narco Armando González Avilés, kidnapped last Wednesday in Acapulco, was found yesterday, with a note pinned to his body, reading “SAY NO TO VIOLENCE.”
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