From Xico

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.

 

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."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fables of Wealth - NYTimes.com

This New York Times article points out that the wages of unbridled capitalism, or the unbridled, self-justified search for endless wealth, corrupts ALL the participants, not just the participants of a particular country.

When USAers condescendingly (and sometimes viciously condescendingly and destructively condescendingly) accuse Mexico of corruption and then self-righteously put in place policies that hurt ordinary Mexicans (NAFTA, Plan Merida, dumping GM rice, paving the country with Wal-Marts and so on and so on and so on) I sometimes just want to go to Washington or to various corporate headquarters in the US and SCREAM, don't you people EVER look at yourselves, your own activities, your own horribly immoral behavior which pretty much trumps everything in Mexico by virtue of scale if nothing else. I mean for heaven's sake, Mexico didn't make Walmart come down here to corrupt local officials.  As some have pointed out the only difference, really, in the corruption in the US and that in Mexico (and a hell of a lot of other countries) is that a lot of AWFUL behavior is LEGAL in the US and not legal in Mexico (and a lot of othe countries).. And somehow everything is more subrosa in the us, quieter. But LOOK at the list of recent public scandals!. People in the US -- ordinary people -- don't assume their corporations and their governments are corrupt. They are citizens of what they still often believe is "the greatest country on earth." But Mexicans for the most part assume governments and corporations are corrupt and they speak about it loudly and clearly. Corruption is not hidden in boardrooms or backrooms where no one can see it. And yes, it extends to your local policeman. But I can give you a half a dozen personal examples of local police corruption from when I lived in the US. And how about payments to housing inspectors and restaurant inspectors, free meals to cops, a few turkeys on thanksgiving to your constituents, etc. etc. etc. Please, people (I love how Gail Collins always says "people") wake up and smell the rot in your own backyards. And HELP Mexico, don't destroy it!

Culture Shock and Cultural Relativism: Getting Personal

Even after some of us have lived years in Mexico we keep our old prejudices alive and well.   Actually as everyone who thinks for a minute is aware, each of us is our own culture, our own mix of background and genetic material and experiences of all sorts. Our thoughts drift through our minds, sometimes as whisps of cloud and colors, without words. Sometimes as streams of mood: resentment, love, joy.  Sometimes we compose speeches to our bosses or poems or think about friends.  We’re each a distinct part of an enormous human tapestry always in process. So there is no unified Mexican culture, really, or USA culture. There are just threads and ribbons woven together, some of us having more of some of them from one place than others. While jumping from one part of the tapestry across a wide expanse to another, we may be struck by obvious differences, if we move more gradually, we will notice that there are similarities.

Which gets me to cultural relativism. Cultural relativism means not judging other cultures by one’s own. It’s gotten a bad name in recent years, but it really shouldn’t have. In a book called Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind which a friend lent me, the author, Geert Hofstede, points out that some cultures have an easier time with being relative than others: that, for instance, cultures that are characterized by a high level of what he calls uncertainty avoidance have a harder time with cultural differences than cultures more comfortable with uncertainty and change. But the world isn’t moving towards one culture: multiculturalism is here to stay even as we grow closer and more crowded on the planet. To survive in this multicultural world, we have to learn to see past our own biases.

A favorite story of mine (I’m not sure favorite is the right word) that shows in a nutshell the power of cultural bias is the following. It takes place in Alton, Illinois, at the edge of southern Illinois, in those years a bastion of racism. When I was working at the state hospital in Alton, many years ago, a bunch of us happened to be looking out a second story window when a group of employees came walking across the lawn from the parking lot. They were a few minutes late. There were about five whites and one black guy. One of the people I was standing with said, look at that, blacks are all like that, they’re always late. He didn’t even see the whites who were with him. He didn't know that he was prejudiced. A lot of learning about other cultures involves learning about oneself and one’s own personal culture.

These days I realize I was lucky. I was brought up in a bicultural family. I didn’t always think I was lucky: I resented it for a lot of my childhood. I was born in 1943 to a Jewish father and a WASP mother…well actually, her mother was Irish Catholic, but she was brought up as an Episcopalian. My father’s parents were Jews who emigrated from Poland in the early part of the twentieth century, my grandfather to avoid fighting in the tsar’s army. He came first to settle before he brought over my grandmother. He was from a city, she was from a shtetl, a rural village. I don’t know if they knew each other before they were married or if it was an arranged marriage. I used to know, but I’ve forgotten. My grandfather then helped his sister, his father and my grandmother's sisters and brother to come to the US. My great grandfather became a fruit and vegetable vendor with cart and horse in Brooklyn. My grandmother’s brother and one of her sisters became tailors and ended up making luxurious coats. Her other sister married and moved to Missouri and ended up getting divorced, a great shame for my grandparents. They eventually forgave her and accepted her back in their house. My grandparents didn’t know English when they came. When they did learn to speak it, they did so with heavy accents for the rest of their lives. I didn’t notice their accents. At their house, which I stayed at often since my grandparents cared for me on weekends,, the adults spoke Yiddish most of the time. They also knew Polish and Hebrew and my grandfather knew German.

My mother’s father was a northern Baptist with deep roots in New York State. His family went back a couple of hundred years in the US. My mother’s mother´s family were fairly well established Irish who lived I think mostly in the area of New York City. They’d been around probably since the mid nineteenth century. She was fond of making the distinction that they were “lace curtain Irish.” My grandmother actually had a job: she was a proofreader. Ironically, both my grandfathers were printers though my mother’s father came to edit a local paper in western New York State. Also ironically, both family had connections to Brooklyn.

When I was born in 1943. Jews and Wasps weren’t big at mixing with each other. There was a great deal of prejudice against Jews who out of necessity tended to live close to each other and somewhat isolated. Prejudice was everywhere outside Jewish neighborhoods. There were Jewish quotas for admission to universities and graduate schools. Neighborhoods often had charters which kept Jews out. Resorts and hotels were often closed to Jews. So after my dad got out of the Army Air Force in 1945 or 1946 we moved to a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. My mother stood out like a sore thumb. She was slim and beautiful in a very goyish way with coppery hair and a somewhat aloof air. Most of the mothers were plump and wore pinafore aprons and sat out on the sidewalk warm afternoons talking with each other. My mother didn’t. She dressed smartly in tailored skirts and blouses and dresses from the department stores downtown. She read books sitting on the couch with her legs curled under her. Her friends lived elsewhere.

Dislike at best, scorn, prejudice at worst went both ways. My parents had decided they would not bring me up in either religion, but rather would introduce me to both. Thus one of the first books I remember is one called One God and the Way We Worship Him. But I never really learned about either religion.  I remember that the two families never mixed at family get-togethers, though my father could go to my mother’s families’ houses and vice versa. When they were angry at each other, my parents would each tell the other that it was the other’s family that was anti-semitic or anti-Christian. My mother was fond of saying that the general practice of circumcision was a Jewish plot. She said it with a smile. My mother’s brother and sister-in-law moved to a neighborhood where Jews were not permitted at all. My parents and I went just to visit once, and my aunt was asked if my father was Jewish. If he was, it wasn't a good idea to have him come.

I adored my father’s mother. She mattered more to me than my mother perhaps because I actually spent more time with her, because she was much warmer, full of laughter with me, not very critical. Pretty soon I realized that she didn’t really like my mother, nor did her daughters. Whenever it was time for me to leave, she’d say, “Don’t aggravate your mother.” I early took this to mean that my mother was brittle and easily rattled. She was, in fact. On the other hand, my mother would have to sit at dinners with all my father’s family or medical colleagues who were overwhelmingly Jewish and listen to the flaws of goyim: they were cold, unfeeling. They didn’t know how to cook real food, they thought they were better than everyone else, but Jews knew who were really smarter. She had to listen to people declare they’d never let their kids marry non-Jews. She had to listen to my aunt sob that her son wanted to marry a Catholic. My aunt and uncle saw that that never happened. My grandmother would say to me, “You’ll marry a Jew, won’t you?” I would remind her I would have to convert to Judaism. Judaism is inherited through the mother. “Not a problem,” she’d say. "We’ll all be with you.”

As a child I had no sense of being either wasp or Jew. On Jewish holidays, my father’s family would celebrate, the rituals all in Hebrew or Yiddish. My grandfather would translate for my mother and me. The questions asked at Passover: I was coached in English in what I was to say. I always wished someone would tell me what to say in Hebrew, but they never did. My parents did not allow me to stay home from school on Jewish holidays since I wasn’t really Jewish. Most of the kids in my elementary schools were Jewish so I got to hang out with the two or three other kids who weren’t and fool around and wonder why it mattered that I came to school.

On Christian holidays we were aggressively secular. For Christmas, no crèche, no cross, no wisemen, no church. For Easter, my mother would have family over, but there was no mention of the religious significance of the holiday except that my parents said that Christian anti-Semitism was at its most obvious at Easter since Christians blamed Jews for Christ’s death.

Until I was twelve or thirteen, I really wanted to be one or the other. It didn’t matter which, just so I could be on the inside of one of the walls. I felt conflict over the prejudices of both sides. I did learn early on that these prejudices had something to do with how people defined themselves, and that some people at least seemed to need to define themselves as better than other people and that prejudices against individuals or groups was a very common way to do it. And that they acted on these prejudices and caused hurt.  At least some Christians and Jews hold on to their prejudices very tightly and that it makes it hard to really come together.  But as religious absolutism loses its grip, people get along better. As nationalism loses its grip, they do, too, though that doesn’t mean people have to give up their identity. I think in the US tolerance has grown among younger people by leaps and bounds.

And what does this have to do with Mexico? Now we all need to learn that it is within ourselves that our negative views of cultures take root. Americans are not worse or better than Mexicans. Some of each group is better than some of the other in terms of decency and compassion. Some are worse. There are as many different kinds of Mexicans as there are Mexicans, there are as many different kinds of USAers as there are USAers. Then there are groups that are distinctly USA: southern Baptists, northern Baptists, liberal Catholics, Orthodox Jews. Chinese Americans. Urban people and rural people. Same in Mexico. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to learn what they believe about Mexico and why they so heavily favor military solutions to Mexican narco problems and why they think they have the right to impose their will on Mexico.

Let's Talk about the 99%...

Our Hughes satellite service has, to be blunt, sucked over the past month or so.  We were informed that our allowable download quantity had increased fifty percent, but this is useless if we can’t download anything in less time than it used to take dial-up.  And it is NOT CHEAP.  We pay almost $60.00 a month for this.  Unfortunately, where we live, Hughes is the only option besides dial-up and sometimes it is a bit better.  The reason for this rant is that I have wanted to put up a bunch of blog posts illustrated with photos, but much of the time it is almost always impossible to upload photos.  Hence, some blog posts without photos.

This post is about how some of the 99% live in Mexico – not the poorest of the poor here, but ordinary people.  We can live very comfortable middle class lives US-style.  And I love living here.  But we cannot forget how lucky we are at least in a material sense – and that if we are in the 99% in the US, we have to break down that 99% and realize that for a huge number of people who might not fall in the bottom 1% or 5% or even 50% or 60% or even 80% here (and Mexico is not considered a “poor” country internationally, but rather a “middle-income country) life is materially considerably harder than it is for, probably, everyone above the bottom 20% or so in the US.  And for those in the bottom 50% here, it is harder than it is for virtually everyone in the US.

Where we live, people are not at the bottom of the heap.  They are mostly working poor and some easing into the middle class.  There are some wealthy people, too.  Probably with more money than we have, but not more than a couple. And there are some things about this materially more difficult life that are probably better than for many people in the US who are not poor at all.  In fact for a lot of poor people in our colonia, it may be better in some ways than for many middle class people in the US.  Family ties often remain strong.  Kids often grow up in the embrace not just of parents but of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Old people tend to be looked after.  Life on the street: people hanging out, socializing, buying snacks from vendors, kids kicking battered soccer balls,  community projects like getting ready for La Fiesta de la Virgin de Guadalupe, parades, holy days, even velarias, the public mourning of a death, creates a web of connection which is strong and which gives substance to life and support in times of trial.

But think how much better life here would be if people could make decent wages and work non-sweatshop hours. We learned recently that salaries in one store in a nearby town were the equivalent of less than one dollar an hour for a seventy hour work week (with time off for lunch).  The owners are decent and responsible people who themselves do not live lives of luxury and in fact work very hard at ranching and poultry-raising in addition to their store.  It’s not that all these jobs are physically hard: a lot of the store clerks pass much of dreary lives alone doing little more than waiting for customers.

Meanwhile, via Plan Merida the United States is sending arms and vehicles produced by US manufacturers so police and the army can make shows of being tough driving through the streets with their automatic weapons at the ready.  What kind of sense does this all make?  What sense does it make to pour millions (billions?) into fortifying the border with more military hardware when cattle are dying in the worst drought on record in the state of Chihuahua?  What kind of sense does it make that a poorly-paid policeman carries a weapon that might cost more than his annual salary? That in the US there is so little effort made to understand that truly vast inequality cannot be controlled successfully by walls and fences and weapons of mass destruction, and that the vast inequality across borders matters as much as it does within them?

I don’t think most people expect that everyone should have exactly the same amount as everyone else: just that people should be able to feed their families, see to their kids’ education and health and have decent jobs that give them time to have meaning in their lives.

 

 



Let's Talk about the 99%...

Our Hughes satellite service has, to be blunt, sucked over the past month or so.  We were informed that our allowable download quantity had increased fifty percent, but this is useless if we can’t download anything in less time than it used to take dial-up.  And it is NOT CHEAP.  We pay almost $60.00 a month for this.  Unfortunately, where we live, Hughes is the only option besides dial-up and sometimes it is a bit better.  The reason for this rant is that I have wanted to put up a bunch of blog posts illustrated with photos, but much of the time it is almost always impossible to upload photos.  Hence, some blog posts without photos.

This post is about how some of the 99% live in Mexico – not the poorest of the poor here, but ordinary people.  We can live very comfortable middle class lives US-style.  And I love living here.  But we cannot forget how lucky we are at least in a material sense – and that if we are in the 99% in the US, we have to break down that 99% and realize that for a huge number of people who might not fall in the bottom 1% or 5% or even 50% or 60% or even 80% here (and Mexico is not considered a “poor” country internationally, but rather a “middle-income country) life is materially considerably harder than it is for, probably, everyone above the bottom 20% or so in the US.  And for those in the bottom 50% here, it is harder than it is for virtually everyone in the US.

Where we live, people are not at the bottom of the heap.  They are mostly working poor and some easing into the middle class.  There are some wealthy people, too.  Probably with more money than we have, but not more than a couple. And there are some things about this materially more difficult life that are probably better than for many people in the US who are not poor at all.  In fact for a lot of poor people in our colonia, it may be better in some ways than for many middle class people in the US.  Family ties often remain strong.  Kids often grow up in the embrace not just of parents but of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Old people tend to be looked after.  Life on the street: people hanging out, socializing, buying snacks from vendors, kids kicking battered soccer balls,  community projects like getting ready for La Fiesta de la Virgin de Guadalupe, parades, holy days, even velarias, the public mourning of a death, creates a web of connection which is strong and which gives substance to life and support in times of trial.

But think how much better life here would be if people could make decent wages and work non-sweatshop hours. We learned recently that salaries in one store in a nearby town were the equivalent of less than one dollar an hour for a seventy hour work week (with time off for lunch).  The owners are decent and responsible people who themselves do not live lives of luxury and in fact work very hard at ranching and poultry-raising in addition to their store.  It’s not that all these jobs are physically hard: a lot of the store clerks pass much of dreary lives alone doing little more than waiting for customers.

Meanwhile, via Plan Merida the United States is sending arms and vehicles produced by US manufacturers so police and the army can make shows of being tough driving through the streets with their automatic weapons at the ready.  What kind of sense does this all make?  What sense does it make to pour millions (billions?) into fortifying the border with more military hardware when cattle are dying in the worst drought on record in the state of Chihuahua?  What kind of sense does it make that a poorly-paid policeman carries a weapon that might cost more than his annual salary? That in the US there is so little effort made to understand that truly vast inequality cannot be controlled successfully by walls and fences and weapons of mass destruction, and that the vast inequality across borders matters as much as it does within them?

I don’t think most people expect that everyone should have exactly the same amount as everyone else: just that people should be able to feed their families, see to their kids’ education and health and have decent jobs that give them time to have meaning in their lives.

 

 



Terrorism and Narco Wars--Afghanistan and Mexico: A Mexican's Perspective

Below is an article by Mexican financier Jorge Suárez-Vélez, who writes frequently for Letras Libres, Letras Libres, which I’ve mentioned before, is considered one of the best journals addressing cultural matters in Latin America.  It not only has articles on literature, art, and so forth, but current  and historical events which of course have a significant impact on culture.  The director of the journal is Emrique Krause who wrote the wonderful Mexico: A Biography of Power among many other things.  His op-ed pieces appear in the New York Times.

There is a Mexican version and a Spanish version of the print magazine.  The Mexican one is the parent of the Spanish one.  Its birth goes back to 1998 and it was designed to replace a journal directed by Octovio Paz.  The online version includes blogs and podcasts.

The article will provide you with one Mexican’s perspective on the war in Afghanistan and may open some eyes.  It is my translation.

 

Drug trafficking and terrorism

The recent execution of Osama Bin Laden obligates us to think about modern strategy for fighting unconventional wars: wars against terrorism and drug trafficking.  These wars mean confronting a sophisticated enemy, well-armed, who is not subject to any rules or laws, is essentially immoral, and is capable of blending in with his environment.  After ten years of military presence in Afghanistan, thousands of lives sacrificed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, it is  time to question whether the original objectives of the invasion were achieved and if the means used were adequate.  At the same time, we can ask ourselves if the fight against drug trafficking  has been making use of suitable resources for achieving its proposed objectives.

The original incursion into Afghanistan was intended to punish Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, its leader.  Every strategy involved retaliation against the regime of the Taliban which had concealed and permitted the presence of the terrorist group in this country, even though the Taliban never tried to do anything hostile to western objectives, and its medieval repression sought exclusively to define the form of daily life of the local population.

Unlike the Iraq of Hussein, a country highly centralized, Afghanistan has always been a country which is a sum of tribes in isolated valleys, with a very poor population which has defended itself against incursions by powerful colonialists from Alexander the Great and the Mongols in antiquity to the English, Soviets, and Americans in recent decades.

It is important to note that one of the main sources of conflict between the local population and the Taliban comes from the Taliban´s efforts to prohibit the planting of poppies, one of the major sources of income for the population.  For decades, the principal export of the tiny Afghan economy – which produces a gross national product of barely 1.6 billion dollars or 553 dollars a year per capita…has been poppies, the basis for the production of opium and derivatives like morphine and heroin.  The traffic in drugs derived from Afghan production has been controlled principally by the powerful Russian and Eastern European mafias which transport the drugs to markets in Asia and Europe via Russia and Iran. 

It is striking to see that the US desire to gain “the hearts and minds” of the population has led the crop of poppies to “blossom” in the zones dominated by US troops.  The permissive practice, perhaps reminiscent of the opium wars of 1839 has had the hardly desirable effect of making too accessible heroin for American troops, and many of them have returned home with severe problems of addiction equal to those which Soviet troops suffered in the 1980s.

The US will have little to show as a result of a decade of invasion in Afghanistan.  Although the Taliban has been politically marginalized, it is highly likely they will return to power the instant that military intervention ends.  There are more and more voices in US diplomacy who have resigned themselves to simply negotiating with the Taliban and to assuming whatever wish they previously expressed to empower women and establish a solid base for education and democracy were  only “opium dreams.”

And Al Qaeda? Its militants are in Pakistan.  According to its own General Petraeus, the general in charge of US armed forces in Afghanistan and future chief of the CIA there are perhaps 100 combatants of that organization in Afghanistan.  As George Will the columnist says (“Times Change”, Pittsburgh Tribune, May 3, 2011) if we assume that there are 140,000 American soldiers there, and that it costs around a million dollars a year to move  and maintain just one soldier, the cost of American troops equals one billion five hundred million dollars for each Al Qaeda combatant in Afghanistan (I am sure that for a small fraction of this amount, they would be disposed to put down their arms, shave, put on a suit and even convert to a religion of our choosing.)

And Bin Laden?  Bin Laden was just assassinated by elite forces of the US Army which made an incursion into Pakistan territory.  Without doubt, it took six years of being the guest of the fragile and questionable guest of that country to reinforce the idea that the most valuable element of modern war is intelligence.  The marines which attacked Osama´s hideout came from a unit which has a “few” hundred soldiers based in Dam Neck, Virginia who aare part of DEVGRU (Grupo naval para el desarrollo de enfrentamientos bélicos especiales = Navy group for the development of special war confrontations), a species of fraternity which is the elite of the elite and which calls itself “silent professionals.”  Simply put, they executed successfully a mission which was based on four years of what was basically police work and police intelligence.  One of the few defenses which is left to those who continue to believe in the necessity of mobilizing large battalions is that obtaining this information requires such a physical presence.

The US will bask for a little while having succeeded in putting a bullet in the head of the nefarious Bin Laden.  The mission was a success and President Obama harvested the honey of a victory which was not free of significant risks.  However, now comes the necessity of deciding of what to do with the troops in Afghanistan whose withdrawal is already programmed.  It is a fact that that country will be left, in the majority of cases, the same as it was before the multi-million dollar invasion which has cost so many lives.  The Taliban will surely return and Al Qaeda will continue as it was, since Bin Laden hardly had real logistical importance inside the organization.  It is hard to maintain leadership without having some real or virtual presence.  His importance was merely symbolic.

The rights of Afghan women will continue to be non-existent (only one in eight women knows how to read), and religious fundamentalism will become entrenched.  The traffic in drugs will continue alive and kicking and the wallets of organized crime will continue swelling from the primary material the very poor Afghan farmers provide.  And what will have had to happen for a different outcome?  A real social bae would have had to have been established where people receive education, where infrastructure is invested in and where a network of social support exists, and there i access to health care and conditions contributing to lives with dignity. In ten years, something could have succeeded.  Conservative estimates indicate that the war in Afghanistan has cost more than 400 billion dollars to the US, about twenty five times what that economy produces each year.  Perhaps it could have done something very different with those resources, something which would permit the sowing of seeds so that that society would eventually develop and end up with an endogenous form with the extremes which afflict it[sic] . Considering the weight which the military industrial complex has in the US, it is perhaps naïve to even suggest it.

And what does this have to do with drug trafficking in countries like Mexico?  Everything.  It is even more naïve if I think that one day it will be the army which eradicates drug trafficking.  The fight against this cancer begins with education, the development of a state of law, the fight against corruption, the development of infrastructure and conditions which together offer the possibility that young people may have access to worthwhile employment without having to sell their souls to the devil (that is to the narcos).  Equally, Mexico has to count on the sophistication of US intelligience in order to deal strategic blows to organized crime, and to do this they have to increase cooperation with that country, launching effective public relations campaigns which make clear that Mexico is not the problem but the victim of US consumption.

The solution to such complex problems can’t be given in a short time, and can hardly be resolved with bullets.  Intelligence, in the broadest sense of the word, has to start showing strength. 

 

 

even more on Fast and Furious

here at Mex Files.  It's good to see that R. Grabman, el dueño  of Mex Files seems to be back to posting longish stuff.  He's also put up a new post on Calderón, et. al. which will remind the more informed and inform the ignorant that there's lots more to Mexico than drug wars and that Mexico isn't some shrivelled sibling of the US's.

FAST AND FURIOUS Update and Global Warming in One Fell Swoop Sort of

I made fun of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' gun trafficking investigation known as "Fast and Furious" in April.  Here is a follow-up article from today's NY Times.  The investigation, as it was reported in the sources I used, still seems foolish in conception and execution, but the Times articles puts some new  perspective on the situation.  It seems that Charles Grassley, the leading Senate investigator whom I knew was a Republican, is very pro-National Rifle Association, as is his House counterpart.   They seem to have been interested in showing it up as incompetent, which it certainly seemed to be.  However, the bigger debate is really over the existence of the Agency itself which is caught in the "gun wars" of the US, another one of the truly nutty issues with which the right is dividing the  country. 

Not dividing the country but demonstrative of at least some Americans' blindness to reality is this story on Texas's reaction to nine months of drought. After nine rainless months, a major concern appears to be keeping football fields watered.  According to an April post on the Green blog in the NY Times, 

"Texas weather experts attribute this drought to the Niña effect.  Some observers are wondering whether it is also related to global warming, though that's a delicate question in Texas, the only state refusing to carry out greenhouse gas regulations recently introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency.  Gov. Rick Perry, who just issued a proclamation urging prayers for rain this weekend [they failed], has said that the climate is always changing but that it is not clear that humans are affecting it."

Having lived in San Antonio for eight years, I have to add that not everyone in Texas is nuts. Not by a long shot.  It's just that the nuts tend to be drawn to politics and business.