From Xico

US "War on Drugs," Plan Mérida and the Mexican Army

There is an excellent and important post over at Mex Files which you all should read. Why the US continues so dense about drugs, about Mexico and about Latin America is a complete puzzle to me.  All I would add to the article is to mention that the PRI  (which was NOT a ruthless dictatorship -- or not only one -- for seventy years before the 2000 elections) in its previous manifestation was responsible for separating the army from the police and army actions from police actions. The army was  not permitted to be involved against civilians which is one of the reasons Mexico has not been subject to military coups for a very long time.  So Calderón's use of the military vs. narcos is definitely controversial and the US's provision of funding for military hardware via Plan Mérida (hardware which of course is US hardware, I'm pretty sure) rather than for assistance in training, pay increases and equipment for civilian police is a huge mistake.

I agree with RG, author of Mex Files: Obama isn't doing a good job south of the US border. Granted, he has a lot on his plate, but certainly he doesn't have to make things worse.

Mexico Votes

On Sunday, the day of the elections for the federal Chamber of Deputies here in Mexico and for some other offices as well in some states (though not in Veracruz), Jim and I took one of our drives from up into the folds of Cofre de Perote via the small road to Tonalaco.  This is the road that goes past Guillermo's family's rancho. In the little towns we passed through, there were lines of people voting and waiting to vote.  Voting places had been defined by red tape, and they could be anything from the front of a store to a school room to I think maybe even someone's house. We don't know a single Mexican here in our area who isn't skeptical at best, cynical more normally, about politicians, but they have sufficient faith to keep on voting.  This time around, the turnout was considered low at 44.68%.  In the state of Veracruz the turnout was 47.54%.  For very a very good presentation of the data, see this link.

Eight parties were in the elections, and in some states, four of the parties combined into two coalitions of two of the parties each. The dominant parties are the PAN (National Action Party in English), President Felipe Calderón's party, most often compared to Republicans in the US, though it is nothing like the current US Republican Party; the PRI (Institutional Revolution Party más o menos in English), the old dominant party, probably best characterized as center-left and not really like US Democrats, and the PRD (Democratic Revolution Party, más o menos), more left and populist and having lots of organizational problems at the moment.  PAN lost big-time: PRI took over control of the Chamber of Deputies, giving the party control of the entire Mexican Congress which is, as it is in the US, a two-level institution.  The upper house is comprised of senators and is currently and still dominated by the PRI.

Overall, the PRI received 36.68% of the vote, the PAN, 27.98% of the vote and the PRD, 12.20% of the vote.  The Verdes, the Greens, got the next number of votes with 6.50 %.  The Green Party is a very strange party (to me) and I will try to address it in the future.  It was started by one family, considers (-ed?) itself a conservative environmental party, was more aligned with PAN in the past, but this time made up a coalition party with PRI in a number of states. Like all the parties, it has faced corruption charges.

The states vary dramatically in size, so talking about state votes isn't necessarily significant on a national level, but there are some interesting quirks. In nine of the thirty two states (if I counted correctly) the PAN outvoted the PRI, but in 3 of those states, the PRD outvoted the PAN (and thus, the PRI as well).  These states are Chiapas, Mexico DF (Mexico City, counted as a state here), and Michoacán, and therefore won.  I didn't look very closely, but if I'm not mistaken, where the PRI outpolled the PAN, it always took the state.

In our state of Veracruz, the PAN took 33.83% of the vote; the PRI, 45.20%, the PRD 5.37%.  In our district, sexy Silvia Monge, the PAN candidate, lost to the PRI candidate, the pleasant-looking Jose Yuni Zorilla by roughly 27,000 votes to roughly 70,000 votes.  PAN won in only three districts, and only in one of them by a significant margin: 48,600-44,000 votes. (roughly).

It is interesting that the PRI so dominated here. The governor, Fidel Herrera Beltrán, is PRI, but he is not generally liked.  Practically anyone you talk to says he is involved with narcos (perhaps, but only perhaps, one of the reasons the state has a low crime rate: the Port of Veracruz is, after all, a huge port and ports traditionally have a role in the drug trade.) It is said that he claimed to win the lottery a couple of times, which seems a good way to funnel drug money.  These are rumors.  But he is not popular, for sure: he has sponsored not bridges to nowhere as has a famous US governor (as far as I know) but he has sponsored roads to nowhere.  Local public works projects have flashy signs hanging over them crediting the PRI -- and also often advertising the incredibly high prices for the projects.  I'm never sure whether people are supposed to be amazed that the government spent so much on their behalf or what.

Anyway, in general, in recent years, the IFE, the Federal Electoral Institution, has been a model of efficiency and pretty much of honesty in running elections. Mexicans in fact went to Iraq with Mexican voting machines to assist in setting up voting procedures.  Again, as naturally skeptical Mexicans may tell you, IFE is great in theory but sometimes rough around the edges in practice.  

Here is a copy of a ballot from the State of Coahuila:

Next to each party's icon, the party's name is printed on top, the candidate's name underneath.  Since only one office was being voted on, there is only one name for each party.  As I understand it, when more offices are being voted on, for instance, governor, senator and local dog catcher, then there are additional sections for each office.  But the party icon is always to the left of each candidates' names, because it is the party icon of each candidate that you put a big "X" in to indicate your vote. This enables people who can't read well or at all to at least identify the party they want to vote for.  When Jim and I first saw election ads, we saw something like this:

In the lower right corner of Dr. Jorge Quiroz Díaz's banner you see a big X through the Convergencia icon.  We thought this meant DON'T vote for this party.  We were wrong. It meant DO vote for him: that's what the X means.  Dr. Quiroz Díaz was a candidate in our area for a smallish party called Convergencia.  The man on the left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was the PRD candidate for President in 2004.  He lost narrowly and perhaps unfairly to Calderón.  Since then, the Left has been struggling and AMLO and others have loose alliances with some smaller groups and they endorse each others' candidates.

Below is a ballot from previous election.  The voter wanted to indicate very strongly that he wrote in a candidate.

Here is a Mexican voter ID card.  The voter ID cards are in fact national identity cards required kind of the way drivers' licenses are in the US. Everyone is supposed to have one.  It's a good way to build up the number of eligible voters. (I took this image from the IFE site where it the circle was drawn to show where to find your voting section.)

And finally, a last glimpse of Silvia Monge.  I inserted this by mistake, but a new glitch in Typepad is preventing me from deleting it!

Alas, Poor Sexy Candidate

Trivial really petty election coverage:

Silvia Monge as candidate in the running (courtesy her poster):

Sylvia Monge as defeated candidate (stolen from La Voz de la Región)

Still sexy, but not so happy.

Elections and Floods

Mex Files has a good exposition of the upcoming elections in Mexico here.  For those of you who speak Spanish, and even those who don't but can make sense of maps and cognates, this link to El Diario provides you with a lot of very good information about them, including who is voting for what, elections not held the 5th of July, etc. We are very aware of elections since cars with loudspeakers have been tooling around neighborhoods with great frequency.  However, as you can read in Mexico, electioneering right up to the voting centers as happens in the US is prohibited and in fact by law pretty much stops 72 hours before the event.  If I remember correctly, liquor is not sold in the US on Election Day.  Here in Xalapa, it was illegal to sell liquor forty eight hours previous to the election, but that has been reduced to 24 hours.

On the flooding in our area.

From today's El Diario , a snapshot of the Xalapa-Banderilla highway where much of the flooding has occured.

It seems that as in the United States, the paving over of large swatches of land with parking lots and large box buildings and highway contributes to the problem.   The La Martinica- Banderilla area is very hilly and prone to landslides and rushes of water to begin with, and the development along it has just increased problems. A basket of efforts has been proposed by elected and civil service officials, both short and long term.

Water, Water Everywhere

Last night a good friend, just returned to the area, came over so we could all go to Xico for supper, which we did, at El Campanario.  ¡Qué aventuras tuvieramos! Dark clouds had been tumbling through the skies all afternoon, but though it had rained a bit, it had not been sufficient to dampen our enthusiasm.  (We brushed aside our knowledge of recent rains in the Xalapa area.) But as we drove on the main road towards Xico, we got the distinct impression it had rained more in that direction than in our own area: rushing water overfilled the drainage ditches exploding against the small pedestrian bridges which crossed them. Water tumbled down the road.  Thunder cracked.  But still, the rain seemed to have slowed.  We pulled up across the street from the restaurant to see someone shut the light off inside it.  And the rain start up again.  S. ran, umbrella-less across the street to stand on its veranda. Jim, disconcerted by the fact that our umbrella didn't seem to want to open and anxious to get me and it and himself out of the rain, managed to lock the keys in the car.  And of course the lights going off signaled that the restaurant had closed.  What fools would be going out to eat this night?

Maybe we could eat across the street?  The manager, a small, plump, friendly woman smiled at our obvious disappointment.  Okay, you can eat here.  

And we did: just the three of us in a corner, most of the restaurant still dark.  And wonderful food, which is why we wanted to eat there and not across the street. S. and I had my favorite, a dish called No Que No.*  After dinner we talked and drank beer.   The lights flickered on and off several times.  The thunder boomed, lightening cracked directly overhead.  At some point it became clear we had to face leaving.  

The manager called a taxi.  The driver had come away from home to take us, and his wife and a child sat in the front seat.**  One of us is a bit plump, one a bit less plump, one a rather tall man, and we joked about squeezing in the back seat.  He laughed: once he had, he said, 23 children in his car!  On the roof? In the trunk? On the hood?  No! Inside the car!  I think he was kidding a bit.  Anyway, it was a merry ride home through the storm.

The rain let up as we drove down our street to the house, but still water flowed. It appeared that much of the dirt from the park a half a block uphill had poured down to our street. 

We rummaged for Jim's keys as the lights flickered on and off in the house. S. said maybe we should turn the fridge off since uneven current was bad for it. Hmm, I said, and the lights went out and stayed out. Does this happen to us often, asked S. It did for a while a month or so ago, but not recently.  But we felt our normal irritation about interrupted service in our poor, neglected colonia.  And then Scott drove us back to Xico to retrieve our car. Colonia Ursulo Galvan was not alone in the dark. The lights were out everywhere, including in Xico  I have no idea how much of the area lost luz.  

We made it home and lit candles and flashlights, said goodby to S. and settled in. The waterfall was roaring; I could just make it out: it looked like a faint, giant white cloud settled against the darkness.

The lights came on at some ungodly hour.  We woke up to them shining in our faces (it's hard to remember which switches were on, which off in the dark).  This morning, the sky was a lovely blue with innocent-looking puffs and streaks of white cloud drifting around.  The waterfall is still huge and turbulent, but there appear to be no ill effects in our community. 

However, flooding continued in Banderilla, and there was flooding in Xalapa's Centro. And the forecast predicts more rain starting today as onda tropical 8, tropical system 8 heads towards the state.

In Banderilla, citizens continue to say that the floods are due to poor maintenance as much as poor engineering to start with.  Below you see a picture I stole from yesterday's Diario de Xalapa showing the demonstration blocking Highway 140 and a picture of a man up to his neck in water.  He is reclining, by the way, not standing.  Reminds me just a teeny bit of that old picture of Mao's head floating on water which was supposed to convince us he was in good health.

According to El Diario, in some places, the standing water reached 70 centimeters in depth.

.

*I have been told what "no que no" means (vaguely) and I can't remember (exactly).  There are songs and restaurants called No Que No and it appears in lyrics and tons of other places. I think it has the sense of "don't say no," or maybe "say it isn't so," but I could be wrong. It is one of the phrases that reminds me I am a foreigner.

**The taxi driver who took us to Caxa, the Xalapa bus terminal, for our van to the airport in Veracruz, brought along his mother.  It was after all three in the morning.

More flooding and now protests in the Xalapa, Veracruz area

(information from El Diario de Xalapa, June 29 and 30):

The night of June 28-29, too much rain again fell in the area north and west of Xalapa. Banderilla, adjoining Xalapa on the west and north suffered severe damage to businesses and a number of families lost their possessions.  Part of the federal highway (140) west of Banderilla and higher in altitude "turned into a lake" according to Enrique Noé Romero in El Diario de Xalapa, "closing traffic for more than two hours.  A garage for storage of tourist buses had water running through it as if from a torrential river.  Much other damage was also reported.

The lack of planning in the construction of a bridge on the route is reported to be the cause of the constant flooding in this rainy season, the worst since the bridge was opened ten years ago.  At this point, businesses and residents are frightened in the face of already large losses.

As a consequence of this seemingly ceaseless and very severe flooding problem caused by the particularly severe rains, El Diario reported today that the people most affected, those in La Martinica a community in Banderilla, took up a familiar form of protest: yesterday they blocked the main highway in the direction of Mexico City for an hour and a half demanding that government construct proper drainage in this region. They said they'd been promised help before, but nothing had happened.  

According to government officials, solutions are complicated and very and will take a long time. Paving projects in the municipality of Banderilla have added to the problem because water pours down these newly-paved places and into La Marinica and existing storm drains can't contain it.  Some progress has been made: the National Water Commission (Conagua) has authorized "extraordinary resources."

The citizens of the area have a powerful tool: the threat of blocking the main Veracruz-Mexico artery in both directions.  While this is illegal (if you remember, it came up in our colonia when people were agitating about our water delivery -- nothing has changed here, by the way) public sympathy for the sufferers tends to mean that it is not politically wise to arrest them instead of addressing the problems.

   

Dreaming up projects vs. carrying through on them and water problems

Projects for around the house we've dreamed up:

1.  Building a studio

2.  Enlarging our bodega

3.  Fencing some garden areas

4.  Growing some veggies and herbs and roses

5.  Installing non-polluting toilets

6.  Building a compost heap

7.  Harvesting rainwater

8.  Getting chickens

Projects we've actually carried through on:

     3.  Fencing some garden areas

4.  Growing some veggies herbs androses

6.  Building a composting heap

Jim and I tend towards dithering, not because we're lazy but because we overworry about how to go about things.  That's why numbers 1, 2, 7 and 8 haven't materialized. We made a fair amount of effort on number 5 but found unless we wanted outhouses and to deal with the stuff ourselves, we'd essentially have to tear out the current plumbing system and the walls and floors in which it is embedded and tear up the front lawn which we'd have done if doing the plumbing part had been feasible.  Essentially, we wanted to have a series of non-chemical treatment tanks for the sewage, a reasonable approach which leaves you with water that can then be drained into the soil.  But it is really reasonable mostly when you are just starting to build, not afterwards. 

Nos 1 and 2. Building a studio and enlarging our bodega: the house isn't packed enough yet and we haven't been crowded in our projects enough to follow through.

No. 8.  I swear this will come to pass this July.

No. 7.  I worked in bureaucracies enough to learn that if you just didn't get certain paperwork done, the time would come when it was no longer necessary to do it. I'm wondering if water capture might just be like this.  Today, this post appeared in the NY Times's Green Inc. blog.  So I'm thinking, capturing rainwater may not be the totally wonderful and essential idea I thought it was.  We don't need to capture water during the rainy season for sure.  Maybe in the dry season I'll have second thoughts, but maybe that's the worst time to do it.  In any event, while I grumble at our externally-imposed unintentional water conservation system which provides us with some water in the house every other day, it turns out it is enough water (so far) for domestic purposes.  In the dry season it keeps us from watering our lawn (one of the supremely wasteful water uses in the US) and it ensures we don't leave taps running, keep leaks fixed, take reasonable showers, etc.  The water comes from springs whose source lies in Cofre de Perote.  That Cofre's water tables are endangered is due to the large issues of deforestation and industrial use.  We pollute the spring water in its passage from the spring to the rivers, but we don't diminish it.  We'd pollute the water if we used captured water as well.

Pollution of water in our area is probably not as grave as it might seem.  Here we do not have heavy metals in the water and we don't have large quantities of chemicals from industry and medicine as they do in the US (and, for that matter in Xalapa and elsewhere in Mexico where industry abounds). Human wastes are nasty but not as serious since they are organic.  But we do need to investigate the effects of the materials we use for cleaning, for various processing systems, for agriculture.  

Nick Kristoff has picked up on one aspect of the world's water problems. As with global warming, many water problems are caused pretty much by too many people making and using too much stuff in wasteful and other harmful ways.    

    

A bit more on Continental Airlines and IAH: Herding Cattle

Here is what my husband wrote to the site consumer affairs.com about our missed connection in Houston:

June 25, 2009, the departure of our flight from Boston was delayed 1 1/2 hours. The Continental Airlines agent who issued our boarding passes made it clear that if we missed our connection in Houston, which was likely, Continental would pay for our Hotel and meals in Houston. We did miss our connection. Customer Service for Continental Airlines in Houston said that "Air Traffic Control" was the reason and that therefore they would not pay hotel or meals. When I protested that we had been told the opposite by the Continental employee in Boston, they said they could not confirm that and then got rude and said that "customers with attitude" were the least likely to be helped.

You'll notice a lot of other complaints on the same page. 

In my experience, the most unpleasant place I've been in my air travels is Houston which of course is Continental's hub. The most unpleasant people have been airline personnel and the folks running the security check.  When you arrive in Houston from someplace foreign, you have to go through security all over again, and a meaner bunch of security personnel you haven't met.  Not all of course, probably not most.  But there is always at least one designated slave driver yelling, "keep it moving, keep it moving, you're holding up the line," and so forth.  This time in Houston, a new wrinkle: we couldn't put our shoes in one of the trays so a woman was yelling, put your shoes on the belt, take them outta the trays, outa the trays."  When one man paused to put his shoes on on the other side of the belt she screeched, "don't slow the line, don't slow the line, use the tables, did you hear? I said use the tables..."

I suspect that things would be no slower if people tried a little courtesy, a little respect.

There is such a thing as too much rain

In Boston, it rained every day except on the day we arrived and for a few hours when the sun seemingly miraculously broke through just in time for my daughter and her novio to exchange their vows on a small, flower-strewn dock on a pretty lake in front of the houses of her father and grandfather.  In Houston, of course, it had not rained at all for weeks. Here back in the Xalapa area, it rained way too much, as we discovered yesterday upon talking to friends and neighbors.  There were horrific storms that frightened even people who have lived with storms their whole lives.  The quantity of rain that fell sounds biblical.

According to Miguel Zalazar, writing in El Diario de Xalapa today, "the rain left more than 60 colonies in Xalapa emergency zones.  The Director of Civil Protection for the city, Silverio Avila Contreras, said also that the rain had been more intense than anything in recent years.  He said [and this sounds a little odd to me] that the amount of water that fell in four hours was equal to that which had fallen in two years."  

The greatest damage was in Xalapa and to its north, west and east.  We live to the south, so our area seems to have escaped the worst. And since Jim and I weren't here for the storms, we have awakened only to beautiful skies with lazy, drifting clouds crossing them.  Everything is green and fresh.  

Climate folks say that we are likely to have more rain in bigger storms separated by less rain and stretches of warm weather instead of the daily rains of tradition.  

....

I am going to be shifting over to Jim's satellite for my internet coverage.  Mr. Slim's Infinitum DSL service has deteriorated to the extent that I cannot upload pictures. When we do make the change, more pictures on the blog.

Houston Layover

Work and my daughter's wedding in Massachusetts put a longer stop to this than I thought they would. This post was started in the lobby of the Holiday Inn at the Houston Airport. We missed the connection for our flight to Veracruz because the flight into Boston from Houston using the plane we were to take was an hour and a half late. As the incoming-Houston-to-Boston flight, it had turned back to Houston mid-flight because someone on board had suffered some kind of medical emergency.  That seems to me the mark of some continuing humanity in the rushed and impersonal world that the USA seems to be, for the most part, in its public spaces.  The ripples of the delay washed over many people, but we are better for it.

Unfortunately Continental Airlines' treatment of the passengers delayed by this wasn't good.  We had been told in Boston that if we missed our flight to Veracruz, Continental would take care of our hotel and two meals.  But when got off the plane in Houston, we were met by an attendant who rammed a piece of paper in our hands with a telephone number where we could find motels where we could get a discount, not an airline paid-for room. He then literally shoved us on our way.  It took someone else to point out where customer service was located.  We were kind of annoyed: if we'd known that would happen, we'd have spent our unexpected waiting time in Boston.  So my husband protested rather sternly when we arrived at the customer service desk He can look quite stern.  I've always thought he doesn't know just how stern. The passenger assistance women responded belligerently refusing to even check whether we were telling the truth.  First she said, snarlingly, it was weather, then she said it was air traffic control, neither of which Continental is liable for. When another passenger in the same boat, a tall, amiable graduate physics student repeated exactly what we said, the agent, everyone's idea of a nasty, burnt-out school teacher passing out of middle age, finally agreed to review the situation. At first she denied him, too.  But then magically, the information on her screen changed. We were right!  But the agent, glaring at my husband with jaw thrust out and  wagging a finger, told him lack of courtesy would get him nowhere. She refused us meal vouchers. 

In any event, the delay wasn't so bad after all.  We spent much of the time at the Holiday Inn at the airport.  It's a pretty nice one, decorated with a variety of geometric designs, often whimsically used.  We sat for several hours in the lounge as did other people apparently waiting for flights. Clumps swirled through: teenagers bursting with energy and then quieting themselves, self-important men with their cellphones and blackberries at their ears or held out in front of them, a somewhat martial group of women, their chests leading the way, an African and a middle-easterner captured by the soccer game on the tv. I sprawled with my Kindle on a sofa looking out onto dense tropical greenery through louvered windows, their slats cocked at different angles to mute the sun's heat and brilliance.  

Houston had been baking and dry for the previous three weeks, the temperature dancing around on both sides of the 100 degree mark.  At one point, I caught site of glitter on the other side of the windows and realized it was raining: celebration in the lounge.

Which brings me to note that I sat in the lounge in my bulky sweater, brought for Boston weather.  It couldn't have been above 72 degrees inside while it broiled outside.  When we went to the airport, it was the same.  One would think daily experience in Houston might have an impact on people's awareness of global warming, of energy use, etc. etc.  If these public spaces, giant ones in the case of IAH, are so oblivious, what point is there in individuals making their own small efforts?