From Xico

Yet again, NAFTA and the Mexican Diet

NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement or El Tratado de Libre Comercio de  America del Norte in Spanish) has been deadly for many ordinary Mexicans who depend[ed] on their farms for their livelihoods.  I have been a small voice among many talking about this over the years.  Today in La Jornada there is an article on NAFTA's effects on traditional food and on the growth of the junk food market here in Mexico.  I often wish I could beg the owners of the tiendas in our colonia to stop selling soda and chips and all the other crap that has so affected the health of my neighbors, but then they'd be done out of much of the small income they get as would the delivery men and line workers at places like Coca Cola.  I do know that at least on special occasions, one of the shop owners sells home-made syrup for jamaica, the delicious local agua made from a local flower.

The translation of the article below is mine and is kind of loose to make it flow (I hope).

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The North American Free Trade Treaty (with the US and Canada) has distorted Mexican eating habits. The use of transgenics and the importation of "junk food" [chatarra in Spanish] in local cooking and eating represents a danger to the national cuisine which is included in the list of the Non-material Cultural Patrimony of Humanity of Unesco noted Gloria López Morales, ex-official of the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO).

Interviewed at the Mesoamerican Food Summit, she said that "the changes in food are a secondary effect [of NAFTA] on the availability of affordable local ingredients.  The real danger for the Mexican kitchen is that they are losing these ingredients.  There are a series of such products which, without adecuate farm policies, can be lost. This is going to mean we will have to give up a traditional balanced diet: varieties of corn and beans, many kinds of quelites [I think this is amaranth and related plants]. and wild and culivated greens and herbs.

Also the former director of the regional office for culure of Unesco for Latin American and the Carbbean, López Morales warned of the "enormous fragility" of the products of the milpa. [The milpa is the indigenous/traditional and effective small-scale method of farming corn, beans and squash together.  The link is in Spanish but you can use google translate if you need help.]

"Everything has been distorted by the foodstuffs of the free market, and we import junk food, transgenic maize, all that is deterimental to the cultivation of our own products." Studies have been called for from biological and anthropological perspectives so that policies in defense of local products can be developed.

Sooner or later, she affirmed, governments are going to have to develop adequate policies for the preservation of our food system, "first, because we've already lost self-sufficiency and sovereignty and second, because we have already won the championship in obesity and diabetes. [These "championships"] also hit us hard in something that matters a great deal: our pocketbooks.

We are learning that we have to spend too much of our public budget to treat illnesses caused by malnutrition."

During the current transition [from the presidency of Calderón to that of Peña Nieto] the promoter of Mexican gastronomy suggested that citizen actions should be undertaken to attract the attention of the new government to the country's food problems.

At the gathering which took place in Mexico Ciy from the 25th to the 28th of July Guadalupe Latapi, promoter of organic products through her business Aires del Campo, emphasized that in Mexico the consumption of organic food has increased twenty percent (in the US it grew this past year by 9 percent) since more and more people are worried about health, flavor, the environment, the well-being of animals and the sustainability of the agricultural economy.

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Me speaking again: the government takes a much more active approach in advertising issues of health and nutrition here than the US government does.

 

 

 

 

 

La Jornada de México Comments on the Colorado Massacre

Below is the main editorial in today's La Jornada.  My translation.

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The mass murder occurred in the first minutes of yesterdy morning in a movie theater in Colorado where an armed man killed at least 12 people and wounded at least 50.  It provoked cries of condemnation and solidarity in both US society and among its politicians including the president, Barack Obama, who declared five days of national mourning as a "symbol of respect for the victims of this act of violence without sense" and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, and reawakened the perennial debate over the necessity of regulating the gun business in the nation.

This massacre is the bloodiest since the events in April 2007 at Virginia Tech when 33 people died as a consequence of two armed attacks by a student.  Disgracefully, acts such as those on the university campus and in the movie auditorium are not isolated. Thirteen years after it occurred, the memory of that sadly famous massacre at Columbine High School, also in Colorado, where 15 students were killed, is still fresh.

We also have to remember the violent events at the end of 2007 when a 19-year-old youth armed with an assault weapon, killed eight people in a shopping center in Nebraska, and we have to add the chain of bloody events of 2009: the murder of 11 individuals in a series of shootouts in Alabama; the taking of hostages in an immigration center in Binghampton, NY which culminated in the murder of 14 people in April, and the massive killing perpetrated by the psychologist of Pakistani origin, Nidal Malik Hasan, at Fort Hood in Texas, where 13 died including 12 soldiers and a police officer and 31 were gravely wounded.  In January, 2011 a shootout in Tucson, Arizona left six people dead and 13 wounded, among whom was the Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  We can add to the list with a series of lesser shootouts in various cities in the countr to our north, in which generally people were left dead or wounded.

These hair-raising episodes have as an inarguable component, aside from the mentally disordered individuals who brought them to fruition: the excessive proliferation of firearms among the population of the United States, a proliferation which is protected by the Second Amendment of the constitution which grants all citizens the unrestricted right to purchase them. It is estimated that in the United States there exist almost 300 million firearms in the possession of individuals, that is to say, almost one per inhabitant, and that more than eighty persons on average die daily from aggression committed with this type of weapon.  The possession, legal or not, of firearms is fed by the determined support of reactionary and chauvinist sectors of this country like the National Rifle Association (NRA), the ultraconservative organization tightly tied to the Republican Party which has dedicated itseñf to block all government efforts to regulate the arms market.  What happened in that Colorado movie theatre coincides with the argument going on now in the US over the approval of a treaty among the countries who are members of the United Nations to better regulate the international trade in conventional arms. This discussion has been marked by the NRA as an effort by Obama to limit the Second Amendment.

Events such as yesterday's demonstrate, in conclusion, the devastating effects of the anachronistic [lack of] regulation of arms and the destruction which prevails in the United States and which represents on a national scale the law of the jungle which the governments of Washington have sought to impose on the world.  The lack of ability or will on the part of the Obama administration to regulate and contain the sale of arms not only casts a pall periodically over the society of the US, but also affects other nations such as ours.  It reminds us of the massive quantity of contraband arms that traveled from the US to Mexico in Operation Fast and Furious: more evidence that the present US government has been defeated by the devastating inertia which prevails in politics, in the economy, and in the culture of this country which claims to be a champion of civilized behavior to the rest of the world, and which finds itself brought to a halt, instead, in a situation of backwardness marked by a systematic propensity to violence and barbarism.

 

Mexico Election Protests y Dalai Llama es Numero 132

A friend forwarded this.  

MEXFILES for Election and Post-Election Commentary

Terse, to the point, witty commentary on the ongoing drama (but not violent!) of the Mexican presidential elections can be found pretty much daily at mexfiles.net by Richard Grabman. Follow him!

US-Mexican Drug War Policies Changing?

Update: My friend Babs has undertaken the challenging job of proofreading this post.  I obviously need help in this department.  I hope her efforts make it easier for you to read!

You wouldn't know it by reading the NY Times, but under the chairmanship of John Kerry, the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee has criticized the US role in the drug war with Mexico in an articulate and useful manner. David Brooks (not the NY Times David Brooks) reports on this in an article headlined on the front page of yesterday's La Jornada. Below I translate most of it.

There does seem to be some significant shifting of positions.  This link sends you to a more US-oriented critique of US drug policy from David Simon, creator of the classic HBO series, The Wire.

I don't think there's any hope of overcoming the horrendous divide between Democrats and Republicans for the next US presidential election.  I am no fan of Obama's, but if only because there's more of a chance for a LITTLE bit of reason to guide policy under Obama, I guess at this  point I think it is important to vote for him.

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The deployment of armed forces to combat narcotraffic in Mexico has been "ineffective" and has even managed to worsen the violence concluded a report of the US Senate distributed today.  It proposes a change of strategy, including sending more US personnel and money to prepare and facilitate police and judicial reforms necessary to reduce violence in our neighboring country.

The report, prepared by the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate was ordered by its chairman, Democratic Senator John Kerry, with the objective of offering a context for the development of bilateral strategies with the new Mexican president.

The diagnosis offered in the report confirms that "an extensive dependence of the military to confine illegality and directly confront the narcotrafic cartels appears to have been, in great measure, ineffective and, in some cases, has exacerbated the violence suffered by civilians." It indicates that in spite of the significant increases in the effort of President Felipe Calderón, "his anticrime strategy centered on combatting the capos has been amply criticized for putting Mexicans' daily necessities for security at a lower level."

Although it praised the efforts of President Calderón as well as the high level of bilateral cooperation which has been developed in recent years because of the Merida Initiative, the report maintains that the strategy has left "doubts" among the population about whether it can triumph owing to the "inability of the government to suppress the hyperviolence that is going on in certain parts of Mexico.  Put simply, the majority of Mexicans lack confidence in the main tools the federal and state authorities use to comb at crime, with the police and the judicial system, given its history of widespread corruption and ineffectiveness."  Furthermore, [the report] points out " the worrisome increase of allegations of serious violations of human rights against civilians by military personnel."

Senator Kerry declared, when releasing the report, that "the presidential transition in Mexico offers a new window for discussing Police Reforms in Mexico, It recommends that the US government increase its support for judicial and police reform at federal and state levels, with funds from the Merida Initiative for some 250 million dollars annually for four years.  Thee funds include supporting US training of Mexican agents.

It appears that this recommendation implies a redoubling of efforts.  The investigators of the Senate say that both governments already support the creation of an academy of public security for training state police of the whole country, and that such an academy has already opened its doors in May, 2012 in Puebla.  The investigators add that the Mexican government increased from three to eight the states considered priorities for receiving US assistance in the "professionalization of police" in the context of the Merida Initiative.  At this time, they report that with this effort, the United States is putting "expert consultants" in the police academies of Chihuahua, Nuevo Le{on, Sonora and Tamaulipas as well as helping to create specialized teams of state police in at least 21 states.

The authors of the report suggest that the US government increase efforts to implement mechanisms of accountability within the federal and state police in order to prevent corruption and abuse of human rights.

Reiterating that the deployment of the military to combat organized crime has had "limited success and, in some cases, has led to the violation of human rights," the report indicates that US efforts to increase police capacities will help to reduce the role of the armed forces in re-establishing internal security.

It recommends that the US government continue strengthening the investigative skills of the office of Attorney General, as they are also improving these skills at a state level.  Under this rubric, the report said that the Agency for International Development (USAID) is already present in seven Mexican states in the implementation of judicial reforms including investigative abilities and that expanding this effort to thirteen other states is being considered.

At the same time, the US Department of Justice is doing something similar at the federal level in Mexico, including giving courses on new investigative procedures and training personnel in the Attorney General of the Republic´s office.

Although the report does not dwell on the point, it recognizes that it has "to do more" to deal with problems in its own country which contribute to the violence in Mexico, such as reducing the demand for illicit drugs, lessening the flow of weapons into the countr to the south, and combatting money laundering in US financial institutions.

 

The New York Times Sort of Covers Mexico Today

Andres Manuel López Obrador, the so-called defeated candidate for president here in Mexico and his followers are mounting significant challenges to the election.  Among the most prominent is that Monex, a member of the Banamex Financial Group, was involved in buying gift cards at the supermarket chain, Soriana, in order to buy votes for the PRI. This front page news in La Jornada got a tiny mention in today's NY Times in what the Times itself calls a "Brief" entitled Mexico: Runner Up Mounts a Challenge.  This is literally a mere paragraph in the section World Briefing| The Americas.

Oliver Stone Corrected (by others) and a bit about Elections Here

I put up a mild post with some translations of Oliver Stone's statements in connection with his new movie, "Savages", which appeared in La Jornada and BBC Mundo.  But for some more explosive commentary on Stone, see InSight Crime, one of my favorite sites for violent news, which will send you to some further links.  I avoid writing specifically about this stuff.  The idea of doing so scares me, and I don't know anything more than I read in well-thumbed sources in any event.

Mexfiles offers a post from Ganchoblog.  All these folks point out that Oliver Stone's figures don't add up.  En mi opinion, los gringos who live in Gringolandia get all their (mis)information from north of the border.

Regarding the elections in Mexico. MexFiles offers some good and amusing commentary in English on the Mexican elections for those of you up north who want to know more about what was/is going on. The Americas Program offers more comprehensive coverage, also in English. Yesterday we went to our dentist whose office is on a quiet street in a pretty middle class residential suburbanish area.  The community bulletin board outside was filled with notices of peaceful activities for citizens to partake in to help AMLO in his fight against the Powers that Be.

Oliver Stone, Savages/Los Salvajes and Some of His Opinions

Oliver Stone's new movie, Savages, has received good, interesting reviews from such diverse sources as The NY Times, The New Yorker and Roger Ebert, among others. However, there is a general shadow of criticism hanging over many of them about the lack of what might be called a moral core. It is possible, though I haven't seen it, that the reviewers don't quite "get it."  This doesn't seem typical of Stone, who has loved to provoke discussion over important issues starting with (if I remember right) JFK's assassination. But maybe he is using Savages as a catalyst for expressing his views rather than presenting them overtly in the movie itself. .

In two articles, one in BBC Mundo, the BBC service in Spanish, and one in La Jornada, Stone gives some opinions.   He is no expert on Mexico, but nonetheless has some interesting if not necessarily original things to say.  Bits of both pieces below. I did the translating.

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Oliver Stone: The War against the Narco is a Disaster" in BBC Mundo by Valeria Perasso

Oliver Stone has experience bringing violence to the big screen: he has done it with Natural Born Killers and with Platoon. 

Now the US director has chosen to tell about a different kind of violence, that of narcotrafico and the Mexican cartels.  Thus was born Savages, the film that has reached the heights of media interest in the US and not only for its technique and cinemetography:  it provided the point of departure for Stone, always talkative and polemical, to raise his voice in favor of the legalization of drugs [is anyone surprised?]

"The war against drugs knows no limits.  It is a form of slavery to make so many young people end up in jail because of drug trafficking, it is an international problem and it isn't going to end, at least until they change the rules.  To decriminalize drugs would be the first step," suggests the director to BBC Mundo in Los Angeles.

An open marijuana user since his service in Vietnam at the end of th 1960s, Stone says he has tried grass from all over.  "The best that I have smoked in 40 years is produced today in California."

The southern part of this state in the US is the setting for a story "which is fiction for now," according to the film maker, about a Mexican cartel seeking to expand its business.  And to succeed, it needs the support of a trio of young hippies, beach lovers and marijuana sellers....

The collision between the two business models for the distribution of illegal substances is the excuse Stone chose to reflect on a truth which he considers undeniable: the narco, and this war is a phenomenon with two different faces, one for each side of the border.

"It's curious that there has been no explosion of violence on this side, except for isolated incidents.  There have been deaths and violence, yes.  But it is not a wave in proportion to the activity.  It is in the interest of the Mexican cartels that they keep it this way, because bad publicity inside the US would bring grave consequences," opined the director.

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"Felipe Calderón is like [George W.] Bush in 2001: He Detonated his Own War"

by Juan José Olivares in La Jornada, 10 July 2012

Why did you compare President Felipe Calderón with George W. Bush, La Jornada asked Oliver Stone, winner of three Oscars and a leading light of world cinema.

The producer/director, who as much in his fictional feature films as in his documentaries rubs salt in sociopolitical wounds, answers: "I'm not a psychologist, nor do I know President Felipe Calderón personally.  Neither do I follow politics in Mexico in detail, but anyone can see that unleashing this war against the drug cartels was crazy, a disaster.

"Calderon was enamored of Bush's idea in 2001, when Bush decided to  make war against Iraq, and so, Calderóm started his own.  This violence was unnecessary...."

For this reason, Stone said, the results of the recent presidential elections in Mexico are a repudiation by the Mexican people of their current president....[The] highly political director ...is in Mexico to promote his recent work, Savages, the story of a hypothetical war, very bloody, between the producers of marijuana in California and a Mexican cartel who tries to take over their business....

For Stone, one way of stopping this war is "to decriminalize the use of drugs.  It's what intelligent people think; this is the first step.  In whatever form, the legalization of marijana would be the beginning.  But one has to realize that politics will interfere, because there are economic interests.  But the first thing to do is to say that the drug is not a demon, that it is not to blame; you can use it in a medical context or for pleasure, but in the end the financial aspect is the most important for all involved. This haas been a terrible thing: an economy of this type, which we would call an underground economy," said Stone, who returns to the theme of drugs for the first time since Midnight Express and Scarface, for which he wrote the scripts....

"We know that some governments have deals with the drug cartels, but not only them...we are speaking of corruption, which is here, right around the corner.  Many people are involved in the business.  But we can take that first step with depenalization.  As a society, we are prepared, because many of us have smoked since high school, no matter where we come from.  For many it is normal to smoke cannabis; a great many people do it.

"I recommend that the government legalize it, charge taxes and in this manner help its economy...," insisted the creator of Natural Born Killers, Nixon and Born on the 4th of July, among other films.

However, Stone accepts that there are hidden forces who don't want the legalization of marijuana because it isn't convenient for them.  There are politicans, police, corrupt labor leaders and prison directors without ethics...who only want to make money."

One of the actors in the movie who was present at the interview, the Mexican Demián Bichir, [believes] that the real problem is rooted in "corruption and impunity....as much in the United States as in Mexico, and it appears that there is no escape.  The curious thing is that those who are most affected are always the poorest people, those whom  you see in the prisons."

For the actor Sandra Echeverria, "The problem of the war among cartels is the corruption in both countries."

....Echeverria argues that Oliver Stone knows "What theme to use and in what moment.  He doesn't seek only to make movies that entertain, but he also seeks to create conscienc. Savages is a work which deals with strong ideas, but in the end, it makes you smile, because of the use of black humor.  It is a satire, a cliche of what happens every day."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Surprising David Brooks

Not THAT David Brooks, this David Brooks:

THIS David Brooks has been the U.S. correspondent for Mexico's national and well-read left-wing newspaper, La Jornada, since 1992 as well as a researcher, writer and collaborator in a variety of ventures addressing Mexican-US relations.  I like David Brooks's columns addressing US-Mexico issues, because, unlike many writers, he does not try to convince that Mexico is not "so violent" or that Mexico is really more like the US than USAers think, etc.  It would be quite wonderful if the NY Times saw fit to print some of THIS David Brooks's columns as a left-wing counterpoint to their own David Brooks's writing.

Below I translate his recent piece "Salvation," from his regular column, American Curios. This column does not directly address US-Mexican relations but rather excoriates US leadership's habit of engendering fear in its people for its own ends.  While I hope later to deal with Mexican-American issues, I thinkit is valuable for USAers to understand that others can be very critical of the US -- that it is not always envied and revered.

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According to its leadership, the threats against this country [The US] never cease.  The European economic crisis, the electrical storms in the east, the fires in the west, drugs, migrants, crimes, and of course "the extremists" throughout the world, but it also appears that the same country which supposedly is defending itself, is also a potential threat.

How to explain that this country with the most people in jail of any country in the world and where the govenrment has systematically eroded civil rights-- to privacy, to free expression, and to peaceful free assembly among others-- under the justification of maintaining the sacred "democratic" order which one finds, they say, under threat of suspicious forces, all in some manner included in an increasingly broad definition of terrorism.

This [reasoning] has been utilized in investigating and attacking  Wikileaks and the soldier Bradley Manning among uncountable -- still many not identified-- citizens around the world who were detained in clandestine jails.  It has also been used to hold hostage governments not subordinate to Washington, among them Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.  But more astonishing is that these strategies have been used increasingly in the United States against citizens: against groups opposed to the wars of George Bush, and now Barack Obama, against journalists who have dared to publish leaks about the management of these wars, about migrants and the Muslim community in this country [and not just in Wikileaks], and most recently against participants in the movement Occupy.  Again, all is justified in defense of "democracy" in this country.

One of the best examples of how extreme this internal supervigilance has become has recently been reported by a journalist in Wire:  The National Security Agency (NSA) -- the most powerful federal office of expionage-- refuses to inform two powerful federal senators how many citizens' communications it has spied on because, the agency explained in a letter in response to the legislators' request, to provide the senators with the information would violate the privacy of the citizens."  That is to say, those in the government who actively ride roughshod over the privacy of citizens by intervening in a secret manner in their communications, can't inform the Congress about these activities, since that would violate their privacy!  David Sirota [a progressive US journalist among other things] explains in Truthdig that the senators only sought an approximate numer of people who had had their communications inspected by the agency, not their names, since it has been reported that the NSA has developed a massive program of intervention of the communications of millions of citizens since 2001.                                           

This explanation, that being vigilant of and defending the rights of the United States is violating the same guarantees is, for Sirota, almost more extraodinary than the famous phrase from the Vietnam War when a young journalist, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, asked a US official about the great possibility of civilian casualties in attacking a Vietnamese village, was told that "it is necessary to destroy the village to save it."

After at least a billion dollars spent and hundreds of thousands dead--including thousands of USAers- in these wars and operations in defense of the US since 9/11 (the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could come to between 3 and 5 billion dollars, according to some calluculations) the notable result is that a USAer runs a risk of 0.0001 percent of being a victim of "terrorism" according to the magazine The Atlantic -- that is to say that of the 13,288 dead because of terrorist attacks in the past year, 17 were US citizens.  Of the 978 kidnapped in incidents related to terrorism in the past three years, only three were US citizens. In fact, where it is possible to identify the religious affiliation of those brought down by acts of terrorsim, Muslims suffer betwen 82 and 97 percent of the deaths related to terrorism.  All this is according to official data of the US government, Micah Zenko, specialist in these matters, reports in the magazine.

In fact, Zenko and his colleagues, in a report for the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), report that since 9/11 a total of 238 have died in terrorist efforts, that is to say, an average of 2.9 per year.  They point out that to put this in context, the average USAer has the same chance of being crushed by his television set or furniture as to die at the hands of a terrorist. They add that since 9/11 in this country almost 150,000 murders and 300,000 suicides have been recorded.  In fact, they affirm that this country lives in a world with more security and fewer violent conflicts than at an other time in human history. This, they argue, reveals the "inflation of threat" which prevails in Washington and a "chronic exaggeration of threats to the national security of the United States" in official discourse.

It is nothing new that the heights of political leadership inflate threats to succeed in getting what they want.  Noam Chomsky has documented this repeatedly, reminding us that what leadership most fears is citizens and that to promote measures against the popular will they always resort to generating fear. They have used this to justify wars and interventions for decades, first with the use of the "Communist" threat and then in recent years with the threat of "terrorism."  In 1947 a senator who presided over the Committee on Foreign Relations advised then-President Harry Truman that to succeed in his wish to finance anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey he should "Exaggerate the fears of the countries."

Now, it appears, the leadership (as much political as economic) is disposed to employ the same logic proposed  by the official in Vietnam, but now applied here: to "save" this country from threats at times it will be necessary to destroy it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poynter Biography

David Brooks has been La Jornada’s U.S. correspondent since 1992. He is the author of several scholarly works, including a book with noted sociologist of Mexico, Jonathan Fox. In 1988, Brooks founded the Mexico-U.S. Diologos Program, which has promoted an ongoing bilateral interchange among national social sectors from both countries on economic integration. He has contributed to various media, academic and NGO journals in both countries, and has worked on various U.S.-Mexico projects as a researcher and consultant. Before his long tenure at La Jornada, Brooks worked at the Instituto de Estudios de Estados Unidos at CIDE, one of Mexico's leading research institutes, and as a senior researcher and founding member of the Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios Estrategicos (CLEE), also in Mexico City.