In
2009 Mexican journalist Luis Hernández-Navarro perceived “discontent
breaking out on all sides like the bubbles in a vat of water about to
boil.” Citizen groups battling police in the Estado de Mexico, Morelia
and Oaxaca filed thousands of criminal complaints against Mexican
militaries they identified as “another of the organized criminal bands.”
The wives of miners killed during a massive cave-in at Pasto de
Conchas, Sonora tangled with police who tried to remove their
barricading of the mine entrance and federal authorities pistol whipped
women attempting to block trucks hauling U.S. exported toxic waste to a
to a newly opened dump in the state of Hidalgo.
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Huichapan community,
in the central México's state of Hidalgo, achieved a historic victory,
after 6 months of peaceful protests and legal actions in 2011 that drove
to the closure of the plant of Proambiente company, a subsidiary of
Cementos Mexicanos, CEMEX, by the Secretary of Environment and Natural
Resources. This plant was responsible for receiving and
processing a large part of the 12,000 tons of solid waste generated
daily in Mexico City, to be burned as an alternative fuel in the kilns
of CEMEX plant in Huichapan.
Shipping to cement kilns was a major
"solutions" driven by the Mexico City government (GDF), through an
agreement with CEMEX, for the treatment of Mexican capital's waste,
after the closure of Bordo Poniente landfill (the largest in Latin
America), in December 2011, and has been strongly criticized for its
negative impacts on human health and the environment derived from its
potential emissions of heavy metals, dioxins and furans, and other
contaminants.
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Nearly
3,000 men, women and teenagers converged on state policemen sent to
arrest three local residents in Tochmatzintla, Puebla and locked them in
the local jail. Residents wielding clubs and stones in Santiago Tolman,
Estado de Mexico, counterattacked armed police who’d just rescued two
officers about to be lynched for detaining a primary school student.
Thousands of striking teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca took over
the city of 300,000 and held it for five months before tank- and
teargas-equipped militarized police and soldiers drove them out.
“One
doesn’t know who’s on whose side,” a young university student named
Guillermo Ruiz told me. “The police belong to the gangs, gang members to
the police, guerrillas to both. You never know who you’re talking to.
Even the campesinos fight against each other. Mexico’s become a no man’s
land.”
The drug
corporations absorb hundreds of thousands of adolescents every year.
Contrary to the stance of the Catholic Church hierarchy most of these
ni-nis (ni estudiar ni trabajar—“neither study nor work”) haven’t lost
faith.
“How can one lose
something one never had?” a seventeen-year-old that I interviewed
demanded. “Life is short so you get what you can while you can.”
Before
the last half of the twentieth century most Mexican adolescents grew up
surrounded by relatives and peers who created networks of inclusion and
sharing (so-called “cushions against misery and loneliness.”) But with
urbanization and the consequent breakup of both family structure and
tightly knit homogenous communities more and more Mexicans perceived
that the patrón (father, cacique, governor, president) no longer
deserved unquestioned obedience, widening a crack that had begun to
appear in the deeply ingrained paternalism that had dominated the
country’s political system since the founding of the Republic.
The
majority of young people who perceive hypocrisy between their parents’
and grandparents’ morality and the society in which they find themselves
have no viable new system to insert in the old one’s place. Combined
with increased mobility among the population, including the
rural-to-urban movement of millions of campesinos
and small landholders and the magnet provided by work opportunities in
the United States they’ve became increasingly less willing to accept
lack of opportunity, poverty and oppression that the previous generation
felt that it had to endure.
Mexican
writer Jorge Zepeda-Patterson described a Federal District
fourteen-year-old who like millions of other Mexican adolescents “came
to the conclusion that the only way not to be beaten and assaulted was
to join a gang…” To do so he “…simply had to comply with the conditions
of initiation: rape a woman and kill a rival, which he did.”
La muerte me da risa!
(“death makes me laugh!”) has become a catch phrase scribbled onto
walls and boasted in cantinas. Better to live high and die young than
slowly starve on dried-up plots of lands that can’t provide sustenance
to burros, much less human beings.
Nevertheless,
despite migration and urbanization, towns and villages throughout
Mexico strive to remain unified. Their inhabitants know each other, work
with each other, intermarry and most share the same ethnic and cultural
backgrounds. From 1810—the beginning of the revolution against
Spain—until after the revolution of 1910 and the decade of bloodshed
that followed many of these communities had little or no contact with
the federal government and were controlled by local caciques who fought
federalization or solidified their control by supporting regional
governors.
The revolutions
of 1910-1926 battered but did not destroy this system. Caciques and
ladino landholders supported one or another of the various revolutionary
forces and emerged having lost territory but not their governing power.
The various indigenous cultures retained their customs, their languages
and to a large extent their systems of communal control. Entire
generations lived and died without coming into contact with either
Spanish or Mexican governing authorities.
The
separation that existed between the elite and the hoi poloi during the
Colonial period continues to exist in twenty-first century Mexico.
Indigena leaders who aligned themselves with the country’s single-party
political system replaced usos y costumbres with Spanish-style
administrative government. Everything that takes place between the
community and the autocratic federal and state governments goes through
party politicians. Periodic local protests and uprisings erupt but are
subdued and the families in power retained their caciquedoms.
In
the year 2000 the monopoly that the single-party political system that
emerged as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario in 1928 and later became
the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) gave way to “the party of
change”: the ultra-conservative and pro-Catholic National Action Party
(PAN). But PAN presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón changed only
the name of the game not the way that it was played. They utilized the
PRI pyramidal structure of regional strong men and caciques to control
local legislatures and retaliate against social or political protests.
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Both, Presidents Vicente Fox (L) and Felipe Calderón are members of the ultra-conservative and pro-Catholic National Action Party (PAN).
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By
aligning itself with the new PAN administration the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church assumed more political power after Vicente Fox’s
election. They achieved a lessening of restrictions against religious
participation in politics and became major players in dictating
anti-abortion legislation.
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Raúl Vera López and
Samuel Ruiz García
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Nevertheless
the “many things to many different people” Church condoned, if not
actually supported, stands taken against human rights abuses. Catholic
bishops Raúl Vera and Samuel Ruiz openly supported the Zapatista
movement in Chiapas, striking miners in Cananea and Pasta de Conchos and
the massive anti-government protest in Oaxaca in 2006. Archbishop
Héctor González of Durango ignited a controversy in April 2009 by
telling his parishioners that the capo
of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquín (“El Chapo”) Guzmán “lives a little
past Guanaceví. Everyone knows this except for the authorities.”
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Ismael Hernández, Governor of Durango defended his state's law enforcement which triggered public derision.
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Durango’s governor Ismael Hernández huffily
defended his state’s law enforcement and insisted that the Archbishop
should go to the federal police with this information. The governor’s
defense triggered public derision. Clearly, if everyone in Mexico except
the authorities knew where El Chapo lived the authorities were lying
about not knowing his whereabouts or they were stupider than everyone
else in the country. (Various people that I talked to asserted that both
were true, the majority conclusion being that the federal government
was lying and was in cahoots with El Chapo or was afraid of him.)
Columnist Denise Dresser of the weekly magazine Proceso
suggested, “The fact that the Archbishop’s parishioners have confided
information concerning the whereabouts of El Chapo reveals something
both preoccupying and important: The people have no confidence in the
government and do not feel protected by the authorities.”
Independent
transmission of news virtually ceased to exist after Vicente Fox’s “by
entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs” government granted duopoly rights to
the country’s two communications giants, Televisa and TV Azteca in 2005.
Local newspapers continued to publish, most of them thanks to
government advertising, but even those that maintained full editorial
and reporting staffs increased dependence upon international wire
services like Reuters and the Associated Press. Carlos Payán, the
founding editor of the daily La Jornada, told a “Mexico’s Situation”
forum in Saltillo, Mexico that the Mexican media had ceased to be
operated by journalists and had passed into the hands of entrepreneurs
who “deform and erode information and any attempts at objectivity.”
Federal
incursions into the mountainous areas of southern Mexico demolished the
facilities of community radio stations, many of which broadcast in indigena
languages. Officials cited technical or licensing violations but the
broadcasters and their audiences assured human rights advocates that the
punitive actions, which including the assassinations of two young
Oaxaca broadcasters, were launched because the stations were providing
news and commentary that contradicted government propaganda.
By
2006 the PAN administration, the television giants and the hierarchy of
the Catholic Church had effectively joined forces to restrict citizen
participation in political and social decision-making, paving the way
for neo-liberal entrepreneurs to accumulate immense wealth and the
Church to actively promote legislation that corresponded with its
ideology. Protest demonstrations were described as “Communist-inspired”
or “leftist-led” and the members branded as “dissidents” and
“revolutionaries.”
“[This]
dissidence is attacked and in the atmosphere of false religiosity the
existence of true dialogue is not just a ‘rupture of institutional
order’ but a heresy,” Carlos Monsiváis insisted in Tiempo de Saber.
“It
is as though a hundred million people are crouched in the shadows
watching a fictional television show called ‘our government,’” retired
business owner Luis de la Vega told me as we chatted on the patio of his
hillside home.
“Like a
lucha libre (pro wrestling) performance, bright lights and grunts and
waving to the crowd, it’s all fake, everybody knows it’s fake. Our
leaders have beautiful wives, they have mansions and big cars and herds
of bodyguards and they tell us how good things are and we have less and
less. But we’re just audience, hypnotized…”
Clearing
his throat and forcing himself upright, he insisted, “Nietzsche said
religion is the opiate of the people. No, the media is.”
The
worst months of the economic crisis (October 2008-May 2009) thrust
nearly 750,000 Mexican workers out of their jobs as inflation increased
and federal and local governments reduced services. Mayors and municipal
presidents throughout the country abandoned construction projects and
laid off employees, including police and firemen. The drastic reduction
in money being sent by emigrants working in the United States further
impoverished already struggling marginal communities.
“The
fatal bullet,” a retired aluminum plant foreman described the 2008-2009
crisis. “It killed what already was a quivering corpse.”
Governing
authorities enclosed in their “PAN-landia” make-believe, a country of
happy people enthralled with bicentennial celebrations and the national
soccer team, shunted aside all protest as germinated by “a tiny
minority.”
“In
Oaxaca it’s a crime to write! It’s a crime to protest! It’s a crime to
think!” newspaper correspondent Pedro Matias told members of a Rights
Action human rights delegation of which I was a member.
Protesting
farmers in San Luis Potosí battered their state governor with eggs
because he failed to acknowledge their complaints about inflation and
unemployment. The wives of miners buried by a cave-in at Pasta de
Conchos blocked access to the site of the tragedy shouting, “The
government wants to forget what happened! Pretend we don’t exist!” The
parents of nearly a hundred victims of a fire that destroyed a
privatized government infant care facility in Chihuahua pounded on
bureaucrats’ doors demanding, “Why are you ignoring us?” Oaxacans
opposed to cyanide contamination of their water and farmland by Canadian
mining firms blockade roadways despite deaths and arrests.
“We
have no place to turn, no one to turn to,” I hear over and over
throughout Mexico. As the governments of Mexico and the United States
continue to promote the “War on Drugs” the drug corporations have become
better armed that the militaries of many Third World countries.
Auto-sufficient farming has disappeared as men desert their crops out of
fear or to take work constructing roads for drug smugglers and illegal
lumbering operations. Competing marijuana and opium poppy growers and
exporters commandeer huge swaths of territory in areas where they have
become the only government that exists.
For the exploited, those “desde abajo”
(“from down under,” a term used by both the Zapatistas and Oaxaca’s
Popular Assembly to describe Mexicans disconnected from the ruling
elite), the gap between their lives and their needs and the operations
by which government-supported entrepreneurs and the monied class control
the flow of labor, goods and wealth has widened into an impassible
chasm. Other than being able to vote (although not to select the
candidates for whom they can cast ballots) those desde abajo and the
organizations that represent them—NGOs, labor unions, human rights and
environmental groups and university researchers and writers—lack input
into the decisions being made by the ruling coteries of Mexico and the
United States and by entrepreneurial associations like the Security and
Prosperity Partnership (SSP) and the North American Competitive Council
(NACC).
Heavily armed
security forces restrict access to SSP summit meetings, much as they do
to other international collaborations of heads of state like the World
Trade Organization. Most of the details of the so-called “Plan Mexico”
(renamed the “Plan Mèrida”), which provides armaments and training to
Mexican security forces, emerged from SSP meetings before the plan was
presented to the Congresses of the two countries for modifications and
approval.
That federal
police and the military were the primary anti-protest forces used to
repress the citizen uprisings at Atenco and in Oaxaca, to contain
possible expansion by the Zapatistas, to forcible evict union workers
during the takeovers of the Luz y Fuerza del Centro and to crush strikes
in Cananea and Pasto de Conchos has intensified the frustrations of
those whose protests haven’t been answered. They share—and fear—what a
Witness for Peace bulletin warned:
…if the “Plan Mexico” proposal is any
indication, the SSP is going well beyond the economic realm. Taking into
account the wealth disparity, extreme poverty, and levels of migration
exacerbated by policies such as NAFTA, many wonder if the next key
ingredient to any trade agreement would be security measures to both
quell the inevitable social discontent and protect private investment. “One
of the objectives of the administrators of neo-liberal systems like
those in the United States and Mexico is to erase all memory of social
struggles,” |
La
Jornada correspondent David Brooks quoted Noam Chomsky following a
presentation by the latter in New York City on June 14, 2009. According
to Chomsky neo-liberal economic philosophy masquerading as “democracy”
spreads the costs of generating income among the masses but funnels the
profits into the hands of a wealthy minority. PRI administrations from
1982-2000 made efforts to cloak the process that Chomsky described but
the PAN “by, for and of entrepreneurs” governments blatantly rewarded a
select few and impoverished millions, increasing emigration and opening
channels for drug corporation capos to flourish.
The
legislative support given the administration by the supposedly
“opposition” PRI enabled PAN operatives to defer tax payments by major
corporations, including trans-nationals, and remove subsidies from
gasoline and electricity. PAN pushed privatization of health services,
social security and government daycare centers and systematically raised
taxes, placing even greater financial burdens on the struggling middle-
and working class.
Chomsky
revised the nineteenth century elitist pronouncement “an intelligent
minority has to govern an ignorant and meddlesome majority” by
substituting “an elite technocracy” for “intelligent minority” but he
insisted that the same motives—enrichment of the few at the expense of
the many—guides the neo-liberal oligarchs just as they did the
nineteenth century financial barons. Control of this “ignorant and
meddlesome majority” in Mexico necessitates repression of mass
movements, including those originating with labor unions, curbing
education and supplanting indigenous culture with a media dominated
“reality show” that exalts consumerism and only peripherally discusses
poverty, un- and under-employment and social issues.
This
substitution of participatory government for a state-controlled
telenovela also keys Mexico’s international relationships, even with
countries and agencies that see through the sham. One of the most
critical of these agencies, Amnesty International, repeatedly admonished
President Calderón’s government for failing to acknowledge and respond
to human rights violations. AI’s secretary general, Irene Khan, called
Mexico’s attitude towards human rights “schizophrenic,” a label that
syndicated journalist Ricardo Rocha insists she applied “with good
reason.
“We fight for human rights in the
exterior, signing whatever treaty is put in front of us, while we stomp
on those same principles inside out frontiers.” |
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Fernando Gómez-Mont defended military personnel after the slaying of 2 children and assassinations of 2 university students in June 2010 |
Government Secretary Fernando Gómez-Mont defended
military personnel after the slaying of two children in June 2010 and
the assassinations of two university students in Monterrey by charging
human rights investigators with bias. Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz
blatantly rejected AI’s documentation of assassinations, disappearances
and beatings in 2006 by joking that “they read like they written by the
APPO” (the initials of the Peoples’ Popular Assembly of Oaxaca).
Summarizing
AI’s documentation, Rocha insisted, “If those in power evidence a lack
of respect for human rights it creates a pernicious and corrosive
impunity that corrupts the entire governmental apparatus.”
Journalist and environmental activist Gustavo Esteva
asserts that corrupt or incompetent governments can ruin a country’s
economic well-being when its institutions “produce the opposite of what
they try to do…
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Gustavo Esteva, journalist,
labor leader and activist
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Instead
of protecting the citizenry the state security apparatus [in Mexico]
has dedicated itself to spying and repressing it in order to protect the
government and its institutions.”
After
federal troops and federal police swept members of the People’s Popular
Assembly, passers-by and shoppers into prison without allowing them to
consult lawyers or relatives in Oaxaca in 2006 I questioned a state
government attorney, “What if most of them are innocent?”
“All the better,” he responded, “it will make the rest of the people more afraid.”
PAN’s
government by, of and for entrepreneurs turned former federal functions
over to private individuals and corporations (including
trans-nationals), increasing their political power as well as their
wealth. As the result these entrepreneurs and corporations—including the
major drug exporting organizations—control many aspects of the
government instead of the government controlling them.
“We
don’t know who’s calling the shots,” one participant in a “What
Happened to Democracy?” forum in Mexico City complained. “Is the
government taking orders from Televisa? The capos? The United States?”
Many of those attending concluded that whoever was giving the orders
cared only for their own wealth and were willing to see the country
deteriorate.
“For the
Spanish crown of the sixteenth century,” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
insists, “like the neoliberalism of the beginning of the twenty-first
century, the only culture is the one they dominate. Indigenous lands
were nothing but an abundant source of labor for the Spanish powers, as
they are now for savage capitalism.”
Despite
countless so-called reforms, constitutional guarantees and supposed
concessions on the part of the federal government the majority of
Mexico’s indigena population “remain unheard and unattended,” journalist
Juan Pablo Montes-Jiménez quoted labor leader Raúl Hilario Sánchez
during the latter’s appearance in Oaxaca’s poverty-wracked Mixteca in
2009.
“The conditions of
poverty and margination of the pueblos are the road for an upcoming
social revolution and the government of Mexico alone is responsible,”
Sánchez insisted.
The
victims of military aggressions, including destruction of property,
theft and rape, flail desperately at whoever will listen because the
federal administration denies that the offenses occurred. Courts refuse
to examine testimony from community members protesting the arrests and
assassinations of those who tried to stop illegal clear cutting of their
forests. “We want to be heard!” human rights advocates whose documented
reports of violations are shelved, journalists who coworkers have been
beaten or killed, indigena communities whose homes are raided and burned
by government-equipped paramilitaries, churchmen who see drug dealers
openly recruit adherents in their communities, writers who report the
private enrichment of high-ranking government officials and have
defamations charges filed against them and thousands of others
throughout Mexico shout, write and demonstrate to no avail.
Meanwhile
the government of the United States sends millions of dollars worth of
military hardware to Mexico, drives migrants who want to work into the
hands of the drug exporting organizations it is trying to contain,
whitewashes the massive exportation of arms and military-type weapons
and ignores the dangers that the country with which it shares a
2,000-mile border faces as it becomes explosively desperate in its
desires for change.
Robert
Joe Stout’s books include Why Immigrants Come to America and The Blood
of the Serpent: Mexican Lives. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared
in The American Scholar, South Dakota Review, Conscience and America,
among other magazines and journals. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico
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