Refer madness
Despite the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) deciding to delay by a week (and possibly more) any discussion of decriminalizing recreational use of marijuana, a ruling was expected today, and — as one might expect — the social media outlets for foreigners in Mexico was full of discussions about what the SCJN should do.
A couple points:
- The SCJN is going to make its own decision, and while Mexican courts consider foreign legal analysis and rulings, like any court, their decisions are based on legal principals. The issue before the court is based on a reading of the Mexican Constitution’s prohibition of “discrimination that violates human dignity and has the objective of restricting or diminishing the rights and liberties of person” (Art. 1°). Coming on the heels of another ruling, that allowed for the importation of a marijuana-based medication for medical treatment, it might be understandable that we foreigners (and Mexican commentators, as well), assume the issue resolves around the alleged harmfulness (or lack thereof) of marijuana.
“Grace” with her parents
The earlier ruling, the “Grace Case” (Grace being a child whose seizures could be controlled by a marijuana-based drug not available in Mexico) was decided on a reading of Art. 4° which says “Every person has the right to health protection. The law will describe the basis and means for access to health care services and will establish the concurrence of the Federation and the federal entities in matters of public health.” The court ruled in favor of Grace’s right to protect her heath, not … as a general rule … to use marijuana for medicinal purposes (something already in the law, “necessity” being an affirmative defense in drug prosecutions). It was a very narrow ruling, though understandably seen as indicating the courts’ drift towards legalizing marijuana use in general.
- As I expected, although a few commentators on social media outlets stick to claiming people have a right to do whatever they want (generally with the proviso that they aren’t harming others), most went off on riffs about the alleged benefits of marijuana, or its relative harmlessness compared to other substances. The first might be within the framework of Art 1°, the second it seems somewhat irrelevant, unless the court is considering the fact that other substances people use legally are more harmful, yet the use of which is protected.
Protected, but limited: even if the court were to rule that it was legal to use marijuana recreationally, the Chamber of Deputies would still be free under Art 74, bis XIV, inicio 4 to enact such restrictions as the Health Council sees fit. State codes are pretty much the same, giving health departments wide leeway in setting the terms of what is, and is not, a threat to the public. Drug crimes now are considered “crimes against public health”.
I am dubious that any ruling is going to change the “rules” all that much. Although I expect state laws might change to reflect those of the Federal District (where casual marijuana smokers who aren’t a public nuisance — which is a rather broad category, depending as much as anything on the social status of the smoker — are ignored for the most part, as they are now, even with laws against the use of the substance.
- The bulk of commentary, though, revolved around the “drug war” and the potential economic value of marijuana as an export crop. Although such issues are somewhat peripheral to a narrower consideration of “the rights and liberties of persons”, the implications of any ruling have to be on the minds of the court’s ministers.
The best data I can find (here, and here, for starters) suggests that Mexico’s marijuana consumption is a tiny fraction of that in the United States, the main market for our domestic production. Permitting usage does not automatically permit commercial production. With both the United States and Canada also growing marijuana on a commercial (though mostly illegal) scale, and the legality of exportation not even under consideration, there is concern, as the leftist Jornada recently noted, that the real beneficiaries of any liberalized law are not the users, but the organized crime groups that control production and distribution.
Moreover, although support for decriminalizing marijuana use has gone beyond being a “liberal” cause in the United States, the left here generally reflects mainstream “community values” and for political elites (like SCJN ministers), those values are middle-class ones, which see marijuana as a lower-class “vice” or a somewhat naughty and decadent indulgence — something done behind closed doors, or it is by no means a popular issue here, even on the left. Although U.S. based advocacy groups (and lots of commentators today) speak of the beneficial effects of marijuana use, or its relatively benign effects, there is a fear that consumption levels would rise dramatically if domestic products were dumped on the market. The U.S. histories all date the criminalization of marijuana back to the 1930s and name as their “villains” a few otherwise obscure police officials of the era, while Mexico’s attitudes towards weed go back much further… to the 1880s, according to historian Froylan Enciso (Nuestra historia narcótica, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2015). If anything, opium poppy production was a more respectable business, as Sinaloa historian Luis Astorga has pointed out on more than one occasion.
Although both Enciso and Astorga argue that legalization would reduce the violence surrounding the narcotics trade, there is no guarantee that organized crime groups wouldn’t simply shift their business to other, equally or more violent activities: human trafficking (including sex trafficking), murder-for-hire, bank robbery and the always popular protection racket. Already, the “cartels” have been switching from marijuana to meth and heroin smuggling, which is apparently a positive move for their industry, anyway. Whether the court’s ministers have read the two Sinaloa historians, I don’t know, but it appears the argument that legalization will limit organized crime’s activities, weighed against other considerations, is a wash.
- A rather cynical view, and one I tend to feel will have an effect, holds that the United States — conflicted as it always has been about drug use (permitted to the white suburbanites, but considered a public scourge, with Mexican “drug lords” as public enemy #1) — will not “allow” the Mexican court to rule in favor of legalization, mostly to protect itself from having to seriously look at its own usage levels and criminal justice system, especially in a presidential election year.
A “darker” version of the same is the sense that the U.S. banking and arms industries profit too much from criminalizing “drugs” to give up the fight against Mexican marijuana too easily. With the likelihood of “cartel” money still being made from (and in) the United States, were such stories true, I would expect more scare stories in the U.S. media about the effects of this rather limited ruling here in Mexico.
On the other hand, who can say what the delayed ruling is all about, and what’s behind it?
Itskhk Berliner , mexikan dikhter
Sombrero tip to Esther Klein Buddenhagen.
As with so many of our hemisphere’s intellectuals in the first half of the last century, his cultural foundation was laid as a European survivor of that insane blood bath known as the First World War. Born in 1899, Isaac (Itskhk) Berliner served in the German Army in a labor battalion, experiences reflected in the poems published in Yiddish magazines in has native Poland during and just after the War. He emigrated to Mexico in 1922, at a time when Mexico City was rapidly changing, with refugees not just from Europe, but from the rural countryside following the Revolution, pouring into the metropolis. Ironically his work as a street vendor selling rosaries, Virgin of Guadalupe and saints medals
, positioned Berliner — a Polish-born Jew, writing in Yiddish — to capture the essence of what it meant to be a Chilango in those years. Or a human being in a changing world, for that matter. While the Jew has always been seen as an outsider in European culture, the shared experience of losing a traditional culture and forced into a new and bewildering way of life, in a city reinventing itself during the “cultural revolution” that followed the political chaos of the political revolution, was something he shared with his customers and acquaintances: campesinos turned factory workers, displaced Indigenous-language speakers, his fellow displaced Europeans.
His poems, stories, and essays were widely printed in his lifetime… in Yiddish publications in Poland, the United States, Belgium, Argentina and Mexico. Although he lived modestly, he was a figure of high repute within the Mexican intellectual community. His best known work, Shtot un palatsn (1936)was illustrated by his friend and fellow intellectual, Diego Rivera (English translation as “City of Palaces” published in 1996).
Although not much translated into Spanish, he continued to produce poetry and … after 1940… plays until his death in 1955, perhaps not the most widely read of Mexican writers, but a surprisingly and unexpected VERY Mexican one.
Marijuana (translated by Eli Rosenblatt)
The path so muddy
A man, on the earth on the mist
Moving along lazy-stepped
with feet, like heavy pendulums
eyes, alight like candlesticks
small flames aroused, fall upon
womanly flesh and hips,
on girlishly tender faces.What a waste!
He can’t avert his gaze.
Why, if man could master himself
slake in his eyes
these erotic flames.The man smokes marijuana
A narcotic.The dream-effect places him in a harness
The earth is not muddy.
He lays upon divans
that caress his feet, treading:He doesn’t hear the laments,
The begging
The children on grimy corners,
play quartets
Here, thousands of singers singA man collapses from hunger?
They extend their hands and wail?
Their skin dried out?An Emperor
A Youth
Upon thrones
Of red and bloody luminations
NirvanaIt smokes a man, that marijuana.
Narcotic.He’s harnessed to the divan.
upon the earth, which is filthy.
PLEASE STAY HOME!
Yes, the Jalisco-Colima coast was badly hit by Hurricane Patricia, and yes, the storms are moving across northern Mexico, and yes, I understand the impulse among foreigners in the tourist communities near the affected zones to help but…
… having been through a natural disaster (the Des Moines flood of 1993) — while I was co-incidentally recovering from a serious illness, on disability and not supposed to be out tossing sandbags (though I was) — I know that no matter how much one might think “just loading up the car and bringing supplies” might be a good idea, it is not.
Residents walk through the debris of homes destroyed by Hurricane Patricia, in Chamela, Mexico, Saturday, Oct. 24, 2015. Record-breaking Patricia pushed rapidly inland over mountainous western Mexico early Saturday, weakening to tropical storm force while dumping torrential rains that authorities warned could cause deadly floods and mudslides. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Are the roads open, and are you going to be tying up traffic needed to ferry in supplies and transport injured people out of the affected zone? Do you know what supplies are actually needed (and is it just guesswork, or have you contacted the local Protección Civil people (for that matter, are you even aware of what Protección Civil does in this country)? Do you speak idiomatic Spanish (or the minority languages spoken in some communities)? How are you planning to feed and cloth yourself during your visit? Are you, as a visitor in an area where basics may be in short supply depriving those in need of their necessities? What is your real motive… your karma or theirs?
Communities throughout Mexico will be setting up supply dumps, with a list of needed items. DO NOT LOAD UP YOUR PRIVATE VEHICLE, but do load up your communal collection.
Give to Cruz Roja Mexicana.
Stay home.
A sweet deal?
With the phase-out of farm subsidies in 2008, Mexican agriculture (with the exception of the unregulated marijuana and poppy trade) was devastated. I’ve long thought that subsidies for agriculture were justifiable on two grounds… both as good domestic policy, and as a national security measure.
Having enough to feed its people is, of course, vital to any country. “No corn, no country” as the opponents of the end of subsidies put it. That the end of corn subsidies at the end of 2008 devastated Mexican corn and bean production is no secret. It seems a genuine national security risk to put the most basic need of the population at the mercy of agricultural policies outside national control.
A more immediate threat, one that impacts both military security and social policy has been the loss of income in rural regions, especially when crops… marijuana and poppies … were unaffected by regulations. While in part it meant that farmers either had to turn to those few reliable cash crops, which have created a security nightmare of their own. What seems worse has been the effect on social policy. The cities cannot absorb the growth due to migration by rural residents, and what rural residents have hung on are no longer independent farmers, but a rural proletariat … peons to corporate farmers (including those producing the above named unregulated marijuana and poppies) largely producing nothing for the domestic market, except for overstock.
Sugar might be, arguably, a luxury crop. Mexico produces a lot of it, and has for centuries. Tthe country has been trying for decades … with on and off nationalization of refineries… to prevent rural displacement and the resulting social displacement, by controlling the sugar market. Given the emphasis on public health, which means lowering the demand for sugar in the domestic market, the only alternative has been exporting more sugar.
NAFTA was supposed to end all agricultural subsidies, throughout the three-nation region, but, obviously, the rich countries also had social policy to consider. And, while agricultural workers were of only minor concern, agricultural producers weren’t. NAFTA was also supposed to reduce consumer prices (or at least allow for competition) in the market.
NAFTA has not produced a “free market” in sugar, which continues to be subsidized … not because of any concern for rural workers, but for the benefit of producers:
… Every year the government grants sugar processors nonrecourse loans linked to the amount of sugar the government says they can produce at a set price per pound: 18.75 cents for raw cane sugar and 24.09 cents for refined beet sugar. If the market price is below the loan price when it’s time to sell, the processors simply forfeit their crop to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in lieu of repaying the loan. They can still make a profit thanks to the price guaranteed by the loan.
To ensure that imported sugar doesn’t drive down U.S. prices, provoking a sugar dump on Uncle Sam, there are also import quotas. Anything above the quotas gets hit with a hefty tariff—16 cents a pound on refined sugar.
Wall Street Journal (The Sugar Scandal, 29 July 2015)
So, to prevent Mexico’s lower priced, subsidized sugar from entering the U.S. market (and driving down the subsidized price paid by US consumers), Mexico will have to limit sugar exports to the US through 2019. Meaning… that while Mexico is also trying to cut domestic consumption, in the name of “free trade” it is being frozen out of it’s “free trade” markets.
Does that even make sense?
Also see:
¡Ya Chole!
A British guy on U.S. television gets the mood of Mexico right:
One toke over the line?
La Jornada’s “Dinero” columnist, Enrique Galván Ochoa, makes an interesting observation. While focused on the irony of Minister (Supreme Court Justice) Arturo Zavala being hailed as a “progressive” for pushing (if that’s the right word to use here) for decriminalizing marijuana, despite having ruled against Carmen Aristigui on an important free speech case seen as much more vital to progress and freedom, Galván notes that:
The Dutch government decriminalized marijuana consumption (originally five grams per person, then 30 grams) in 1976. Amsterdam became a global icon for its famous “coffee chops”, where tourists can buy it like a cappuccino. After nearly 40 years experience, the cost-benefit analisis is still under discussion. One of the worst consequences had been the development of a mutant cannabis strain that, according to experts, causes severe health damage.
That said, the Netherlands is among the ten least least corrupt countries in the world, in eight place, according to the Transparency International index 2014. That is, decriminalization occurred in a country under the rule of law. Now they want to decriminalize marijuana in Mexico, a country that ranks among the most corrupt, at 103rd place on that index.
[…]
…The minister’s project favors the reign of El Chapo. Perhaps Zaldívar wants to go down in history as a progressive jurist, but is in fact only an unwitting collaborator (let him determine to what degree) in the business interests of El Chapo and his fellow mafiosi.
It may be a tad harsh to accuse Minister Zalívar of collaborating (wittingly or otherwise) with gangsters, but then to just assume that the “magic of the marketplace” is going to erase exploitation and end violence is the hopelessly naive sort of thinking that makes me wonder if its proponents aren’t stoned when they say that. As I’ve noted before, the marijuana industry is not particularly different than any other tropical or sub-tropical commodities export business, its model based on exploitation and abusing rural communities. But, the Dinero columnist isn’t talking about exports, but about internal markets.
The internal market for marijuana … while only a fraction of that of our northern neighbor… may indeed be larger than I believe it to be, I don’t see how viable a market it really is. Not that I really care if people DO smoke marijuana (as long as they aren’t going to use heavy machinery, or attempt to engage in logical discourse), but the likely outcome being either corporate control of farmland better used for basic crops (and less water-dependent ones in dry regions where it is now being grown) and a lack of a good regulatory system for quality and purity … not to mention control over where and how it is sold, is likely to be disastrous in a country where even long established, “legitimate” exploitative commodity industries (think mining) have proven not just a danger to our environment and public health and safety, but to our economy as well.
Today’s must read
There is a narrative coherence to Trump’s stories that mere reality cannot match. His stories match how we feel—we who feel like we are fighting a race-war with Mexico (a decidedly white Anglo-American kind of “we” which feels quite insecure about it). When my late grandmother told me about the time she visited Texas, she described hearing people speaking Spanish and feeling like they were talking about her. She didn’t like it. For the insecure “we,” militarizing the border makes sense: more walls, more checkpoints, more men with guns, and more cages for human beings. For the insecure “we,” security theater can be a comforting reality show to watch.
[…]
… As Carmen Boullosa’s newly translated novel, Texas: The Great Theft, suggests, fascism has happened here, and—to be blunt—reality is a much more vicious and stupid place than the saner version of it that we “non-crazies” imagine we inhabit. History tends to tell us that our leaders were intelligent and serious and that—at worst—they had “flaws”; history is a slow, gradual and predictable progression of things we’ve already seen before. In this way, history re-assures us that a “President Trump” will inevitably remain the punchline to a very tired joke.
Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: We Have Always Been At War With Mexico, Aaron Bady, Pacific-Standard (1 October 2015)
How dry they’ll be?
I guess having a multi-party legislature means something other than just political groups.
The Chamber of Deputies today agreed to form a committee to look into maybe, sort of, possibly, amending their ethics code (who knew they had one?) and consider the question of whether to stop serving liquor in the Chamber cafeteria. And, maybe, even on the floor of the Chamber.
In its discussion of the matter, La Jornada brought up two of the more notable drinking bouts on the chamber floor.
On October 25, 2011, work on a constitutional reform was suspended amid allegations of that deputies were voting while hammered.
Re-enactment of the Chamber of Deputies at work.
On that night the PRD deputy Enoé Uranga and Workers Party Deputy Porfirio Munoz Ledo both complained of “the ethyl atmosphere that pervades the chamber. PAN Deputy Oscar Saul Castillo added that the drinks were flowing in the PRI seats. That session was derailed when PRI Deputy Julian Nazar said of Munoz, “if you did a blood test on Porfirio, you’ll find 90 percent alcohol and 10 percent junk food”. He also accused PRD Deputy Avelino Méndez Rangel, of being intoxicated. Minutes later Méndez appeared before the press, to announce “I’m here, and I’m not drunk. Not out of respect for the deputies or you… but because my wife disapproves.
And on September 13, 2007, when the Chamber of Deputies approved a bill allowing for a monthly increase in gasoline and diesel prices, PAN, led by Hector Larios Cordova and Juan Jose Rodriguez Prats, broke out the drinks while the house was still in session. And, after adjourning, moving on to the Chamber’s cafeteria until the wee hours of the morning, while running up an 18,000 peso bar tab.
In light of the bad publicity, PAN installed a private “VIP” bar in Deputy Larios’ office for their … uh… Party.
The refugees at Mexico’s door
Although President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico said when he announced the so-called Southern Border Plan that it was to “protect the human rights of migrants as they pass through Mexico,” the opposite has happened. By the Mexican government’s own accounting, 72,000 migrants have been rescued from kidnappers in recent years. They are often tortured and held for ransom. The survivors tell of being enslaved working in marijuana fields or forced into prostitution. Many are killed — sometimes they have organs harvested — in what’s become an invisible, silent slaughter. The government push has been interpreted as open season on migrants who have become prey to an exploding number of criminals and the police who rob, rape, beat and kill them.
[…]
As Mexico has blocked refugees from moving forward, it places enormous obstacles in the way of being able to apply for asylum in Mexico. Those who are detained by migrant officials and are allowed to apply remain locked up during a process that can take months or a year, sometimes in jails where rats roam by day and worms infest the food migrants get. Of those who are able to hold out for a decision, only about 20 percent win — less than half of the roughly 50 percent asylum approval rate of the United States. Mexico granted asylum to 18 children last year.
“You can lock people inside a burning house, you can close the front door, but they will find a way out,” says Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “The U.S. doesn’t want to recognize this as a refugee situation. They want Mexico to be the buffer, to stop arrivals before they get to our border.”
OTHER surrounding Latin American countries outside the so-called three conflicted Northern Triangle countries — El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — have seen an almost 1,200 percent spike in asylum claims between 2008 and 2014, according to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees study.
Sonia Nazaro, “The Refugees At Our Door” (New York Times, 10 October 2015)
Photo: Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
Los Mascogos
If there is a “typical” Mexican, perhaps a Mascogo fits the bill… after all, what’s more Mexican than being of African-indigenous-mestizo-gringo-refugee heritage?
Descended from the “black Seminoles” … a tribe descended from slaves who had fled the English colonies into Spanish Florida and intermarried, the “Black Seminoles” — while ostensibly “Indians” had maintained numerous African customs and folkways. With Florida’s annexation by the United States, and the loss of their homelands in the Seminole Wars (1816-1842), the Black Seminoles were deported to Oklahoma.
Juan Caballo
While supposedly under the protection of the United States government, and supposedly classified as “Indians” and not “Negroes”, authorities tended to look the other way when Black Seminoles were kidnapped and sold off as slaves. John Horse … known to the Mascogos as Juan Caballo… a war leader captured near the end of the last Seminole War… led his people across the border into Mexico in 1849. Still recovering from the United States invasion of 1846-48, the Mexican government was unable to provide adequate security in the north, and granted the “Black Seminoles”… now know as Mascogos (a possible hispanization of “Muscogee”… the Seminole language) land in Muzquiz, Coahuila, in return for serving as a frontier military outpost, and their warriors’ services as scouts and irregular soldiers in the Mexican Army.
The arrival of Kickapoos (originally from northern Indiana, although… like the Seminoles… exiled to Oklahoma) who also fled to Mexico in 1864 (and were granted land by Emperor Maxmilano) brought to the attention of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs… and the U.S. Army (then focusing on its renewed “Indian Wars”) that “free Indians” in Mexico (where indigenous people were considered citizens, and not wards of the state, when they were not enemy combatants) might give aid and comfort to their brethren north of the border, and there was the slightly embarrassing fact that the U.S. Army was having trouble finding those “free Indians” in their own country that they were bend on rounding up or eliminating.
Arguing that slavery had ended, the U.S. Army began recruiting Moscogos to work as scouts in return for promises of land in either Florida (their homeland) or Texas. While most Moscogos returned to the United States, the promises were never kept, and with the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890s, they were simply left to their own devises. Many simply assimilated into the Mexican-American or African-American communities north of the border, while others… at least having land in Coahuila, returned.
The customs and folkways of the Mascogo reflect both their indigenous and African-American experiences. Although their Kickapoo neighbors are also migrants, with the Mexican Constitution recognizing the rights of indigenous communities based on having a linguistic history going back in the Americas before 1524. Kickapoo folkways are at least constitutionally protected, and Kickapoos receive some government support for cultural affairs. The Moscogo, as a culture, date back only to the 18th century, and their language is “more or less English”. Preserving their culture is up to themselves… something made all the more difficult by drought and the general collapse of the rural economy, forcing more and more Moscogos to move to the cities or to the United States, and likely to lead to the extinction of what is, arguably, an archetypal Mexican culture.
The plot sickens
With Enrique Peña Nieto preaching about human rights and the dangers of populism before the United Nations, increasing dissatisfaction with the economy (not to mention the state of democracy), growing evidence of state involvement in atrocities, and the Secretary of National Defense all but saying that the military is above the law… what’s the best response? Blame George Soros!
Jenero in Proceso (my translation and footnotes)
MEXICO CITY (apro) .- Certainly the current resident of Los Pinos and his top advisers are familar with Rafael Bernal’s novel, The Mongolian Conspiracy 1. Set in the heart of Mexico City’s Chinatown, the novel features a series of intrigues as fascinating as they are unrealistic as private eye/hitman/hired muscle Filiberto Garcia, unravels a conspiracy against world peace, with the unlikely assistance of both the FBI and the KGB.
Now, with our federal government facing a credibility crisis there is a better plot than anything invented by Bernal is unfolding. This new plot aims to overthrow Mexican institutions, undermine the military and national prestige, by using the victims of the Tlatlaya, Iguala, and Ayotzinapa massacres — and an accumulating cast — in a power play led by US billionaire George Soros and international “dark forces” based in the United States.
I know it’s crazy, but the new “Mongolian plot” against Peña Nieto isn’t being masterminded by populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who gained international stature thanks to the United Nations speech (decrying populism as the greatest danger in the world) by the favorite son of Atlacomulco.
The populism of the two-time presidential candidate, former head of government in the Capital, and leader of the new Morena party it seems is not the the real “danger” to Mexico, but he is part of a plot put together by eccentric billionaire George Soros, who probably also gave an order to the Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, to send to out dozens of young students to be slaughered… all the better to create problems for poor Peña Nieto … and steal our oil.
According to the versions of the story that began with the synchronized swimming club covering Los Pinos2 and publishes the columns and blogs consumed by the political class, the Tlatlaya killing and forced disappearance of 43 normal school students in Iguala are a cat’s paw in a conspiracy to weaken the Mexican government through non-governmental organizations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the PRODH Center and the great financier George Soros umbrella, through its “destabilizing arm”: Open Society Foundation.
So wrote Ricardo Aleman, a columnist for El Universal , who need not provide any supporting documentation, because is sentences are divine revelation, much as were those of Moses when he was given ten tablets of the law several hundreds of years ago:
Today it is possible to prove that behind Tlatlaya are the same NGOs pushing the case of the 43 de Iguala. And if you doubt this, just take a look at the progress report [on Tlatlaya] issued on 2 July 2015 by Centro ProDH, the private property of Emilio Alvarez Icaza: nothing serious, but misleading and vulgarly deceptive in repeating the story that troops had been ordered to exterminate the members of organized crime syndicates under cover of night3
Cento ProDH Center — which is holding hostage the parents of the 43 Iguala students, controlling information on the case of the normal school, and ‘shepherding’ the so-called experts of the Commission — receives hefty dividends from foreign organizations interested in destabilizing democratic governments, like the Open Society Foundations, funded by a tycoon interested in Mexican oil, George Soros.
Centro PRODH is the operational arm of Emilio Alvarez Icaza, whom Soros imposed on the CIDH (Interamerican Human Rights Commission). And Centro PRODH is the organization that co-opted, financed and instructed the three women who survived the clash between soldiers and drug traffickers in Tlatlaya which incidentally were not murdered, but suddenly accused the military of having executed members a band of organized criminals to which they belonged.
By the logic of this tale-spinner, surely journalist Carmen Aristegui, who is pursuing a lawsuit against MVS and the Mexican State before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights is part of George Soros’ plot. Proceso magzine, which interviewed Emilio Alvarez Icaza, the thousands who have marched demanding justice in the case Ayotzinapa, the Associated Press and Esquire Magazine which revealed details of the Tlatlaya killing of and even those who have met with members of the Commission then are on the payroll of George Soros.
Moreover, Joaquín El Chapo Guzman escaped from Altiplano prison on orders from Soros and Emilio Alvarez Icaza and in the height of delirium, the five persons executed in Narvarte of Mexico City were probably killed by gunmen of the Commission to “taint” the trajectory of Enrique Peña Neito, the great friend of the pundits paid by Javier Duarte from the Veracruz state treasury4.
Delusions of this sort would be exceptional if it were not for the intense media campaign by the Secretariat of National Defense, and its chief Salvador Cienfuegos, to deny any responsibility “for commission or omission” in these cases and pointedly to warn that the Mexican armed forces need not be accountable to any group of experts or to any international body.
Cienfuegos’ “inteview” on Televisa’s Channel 2, more than the visceral reaction from officials, columnists and even official human rights defenders to the report of the Commission on the situation of serious violations of individual rights in Mexico, suggest that a sensibility worse than anything found in The Mongolian Conspiracy has begun to permeate the federal government: like with Gustavo Diaz Ordaz who felt misunderstood, and was perfectly content to fall into the trap of his own paranoia.
1 El Complot Mongol (1986), described by Francisco Goldman as “The best fucking novel ever written about Mexico City ,” is available in an English translation by Katherine Silver published by Grove Press (2003).
2 A rather round-out way of saying the “usual suspects” in the chattering class, equivalent in the U.S. to descriptions of the television “pundits” and columnists as the “villagers”… those who echo each other, pushing a political meme.
4 The original did not use the President’s name, but for clarity, I added it to the sentence. Recent revelations have shown the state of Veracruz (Duarte is the state governor, and an ally of Peña Nieto) has been paying journalists for coverage and opinions favorable to his, and to the federal, administrations.
CIA: we have a little list…
According to the CIA Word Fact Book, the most important “political pressure groups” in Mexico are the business chambers. Of the 16 listed groups (alphabetically, by the English language equivalent of their names) less than half are workers or citizens groups, and of those only three (APPO… the Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly), CNTE, the dissident teachers’ union, and the Roman Catholic Church are not state or party organs.
The rest are less “pressure groups” than the factions who decide who does, and doesn’t hold office and are not outside the system, but are the system.
Anyway, here’s the list:
mexfiles.net 