Juarez, I Can Hear You Crying, Part 2

Mexico hates you, EPN

This LA Times Op-Ed doesn't pull any punches about Mexico's upcoming presidential election and the PRI's illustrious candidate for president:

The Mexican version of the old Soviet Politburo is poised to make a comeback, with potentially disastrous consequences for North America. In 2000, the world hailed the end of more than 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as a sign of democratic transition. Today, the PRI's presidential candidate in the July 1 election, Enrique Peña Nieto, threatens to bring back the authoritarian ways of the past.

The PRI has not cleaned up its act or modernized over the last 12 years. To the contrary, it has deepened its networks of corruption and illegality in the territories it still controls. The 10 states where the PRI has never lost power are among the most violent, underdeveloped and corrupt in the country. In these states, democratic transition and accountability are exotic concepts and the local governors rule like despotic feudal lords.

For example, the state of Veracruz is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Recently, four journalists were assassinated in a single week. In January, officials close to the governor were detained in an airport with a suitcase containing nearly $2 million in cash, supposedly for an advertising campaign.

What this isn't, is a surprise. Shocking perhaps. Business as usual, perhaps. But, sadly, no surprise at all. And you don't need to read deeply in Paco Igancio Taibo II or Martin Solares or the Mexican press to be reminded that it's been like this for quite some time. For a very, very long time. It's a tradition. A way of life.

And, of course, the Op Ed actually says it:

Peña Nieto is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He hides behind a telegenic smile and sharp attire, but he represents Mexico's old corrupt political class. Last week, for example, a high-ranking general apparently close to Peña Nieto and his group of politicians from Mexico state was arrested on organized-crime charges.

During his governorship, Peña Nieto allegedly spent tens of millions in public funds to illegally boost his image on national television. But he has few ideas of his own and questionable moral character. He fathered a son in an extramarital affair and has come under fire from the boy's mother for being an irresponsible parent.

When Peña Nieto was asked at a book fair to name three books he had read, he could only mention that he had gone over "parts" of the Bible. The late Carlos Fuentes, who died May 15, said that Peña Nieto's "ignorance" cast serious doubts on his ability to be a good president. No intellectual or independent journalist is willing to publicly endorse Peña Nieto's candidacy.

Well, your Bloguero can relate to all of this. Most Norteamericanos should be able to, also. After all, your Bloguero lives in a country that has "elected" the seeming Village Idiot in 2000 and, as if that weren't enough, again in 2004. So the piquant smell of opaque stooge-ism and favoritism and corruption and hypocrisy and plunder of the system by its supposed curators isn't at all unfamiliar. You could wish such things were only for Banana Republics. What a joke.

Meanwhile, the current Mexican administration, once the supposed antidote to PRI's pervasive corruption, is engaged in its own crazy, deathly War on Drugs that has left more than 50,000 people dead in its wake and has reduced cities like Juarez to places to escape from. Places where the army fights pitched battles with the cartels. Places where innocent people get killed. Or kidnapped. Or maimed. Places where going out at night is extremely dangerous. Where being in public places is a risk. Where speaking out or blogging or posting on FB leads to reprisals. Where riding public transportation may expose the commuter to a hail of random bullets. In sum, Juarez represents the dystopian narco-state at its most virulent and most dangerous.

And then there's this, lest one think that the PRI has the monopoly on corruption and that the War on Drugs has nothing to do with that:

President Felipe Calderon's reliance on the army in Mexico's war on drugs was shaken in the past days with the arrest of three generals and a lieutenant colonel on corruption charges.

With Mexico's presidential election just six weeks away and political campaigns in full swing, supporters allege that at least one of the arrests is politically motivated.

Most shocking was the detention of retired major general Tomas Angeles, a close aid to Defense Minister Guillermo Galvan and a soldier with a sterling reputation.

Angeles was the second highest-ranking officer in the ministry during the first two years of Calderon's administration and had been seen as a likely candidate for defense minister until his retirement in 2008.

Javier Sicilia may have a solution to all of this. But even if he does, it's going to take major upheaval and time to move the inert, corrupt narco-state in a direction away from corruption and toward peace. One thing is sure: EPN and Calderon both have no plan, no idea, nothing relevant to say that will end the killing. They continue to fill their pockets. And they attempt to shoulder their rivals away from the public trough.

All that means, I am sorry to note, that Juarez, City of Tears and Death and Displacement, your weeping is in vain. And your obvious, uncontrollable pain is not going to be swiftly abated.

Calderon's Alternate Reality

Maybe I have finally entered an alternate reality.

As I write this, I am in lovely Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, and it is raining. Hard. After all, it’s October and the Caribe is stirred up. The rain is exquisitely beautiful. The sea is rippling with pockmarks. And the cocos are swaying and dripping. The sky is gray and white cotton. The wind shakes the trees and agitates Bahia Soliman. Everything is wet and the air is filled with mist. It is a day made for napping and reading. And thinking.

Where I am is paradise. No doubt about it. And it is far, far away from the shooting war between the Mexican government and the drug cartels. That is happening in other areas: the border states, the west coast, the capital. Where I am is far from that immense national tragedy. Regardless, it remains a topic of enormous concern. And Javier Sicilia remains a personal hero.

So it was with great interest that this morning the New York Times reported on its Front Page an interview with Mexican President Felipe Calderon about the unsuccessful drug war he has run for five years and has left 40,000 people dead. Calderon, whose term is up next year, apparently seeks to justify and perpetuate his shooting war on the cartels:

He insists that the country will eventually become more secure, although about 40,000 people have been killed since he declared his war against organized crime. He began waging it shortly after taking office in 2006 as violence climbed, and he has continued pressing his offensive against drug organizations as they have splintered and descended into bloody infighting over territory and criminal rackets.

But in a wide-ranging interview, he could not say that his approach had made Mexico safer….

The inability to control the violence, with fresh horrors nearly every week, has rattled even some admirers in the United States Congress, who have begun to question publicly whether Mr. Calderón’s strategy — supported by the $1.4 billion in anticrime aid the United States is providing through the multiyear Merida Initiative — is making progress….

Still, coming close to self-criticism for someone who has typically blamed the United States or Mexican lawmakers for what goes wrong, Mr. Calderón said he would have shored up state and local police forces that were now overwhelmed as well as hobbled by inexperience, lack of training, incompetence and corruption.

And so it is in the fifteenth paragraph of the article that the “c” word first appears. Corruption. And even there it is the fourth reason given why police forces are “overwhelmed” and “hobbled.” Does that strike anyone except me as exceedingly odd? Am I in some alternate reality?

Maybe this omission makes sense if you are in the United States and don’t know anything about life south of the Rio Grande. Maybe it makes sense if you know no Mexican history. Maybe it makes sense if you think that everywhere in the world is exactly the same: Burger King, Wal-mart, Coca Cola, malls, neighborhood policing. Maybe it makes sense if you think that the state is always above reproach. Maybe it makes sense if you haven’t read anything about Mexico.

I’m not suggesting reading non-fiction to get the feel of this, although Eduardo Galeano’s non-fiction discussions of Latin America are extremely important. The real truth (is there any other kind?), I think, is in the fiction. And for the sake of brevity, I offer for your consideration two wonderful works that I think should inform discussions of the drug war in Mexico. Evidently, neither informed the Times’s credulous discussions with Sr. Calderon.

First is Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s “No Happy Ending” (“No habra final feliz”), a 1981 detective novel. Hector Belascoaran Shayne, an independent detective in Mexico City, confronts a series of murders. There will be no spoiler here. What you have to watch for is how the suppression of demonstrations by the central government in 1971 figures in the tale. And the role of the police. Enough said. It’s a remarkable book, a critique of Mexico by someone who loves it, masquerading as a detective story.

Next is Martin Solares’s 2006 novel “The Black Minutes” (“Los minutos negros”). Someone is murdered, and the question, of course, is why. And by whom. Is this really a police procedural? Probably not, though it sure looks like one in the beginning. There will be no spoiler here. Yet again, the issue is how someone escapes the consequences of a series of serious, brutal crimes for decades and what the role of the police, of the state might be in all of that. No mas. This is a literary masterpiece dressed up as a detective story. If you don’t read anything else this year, please read this wonderful book.

Both books are remarkable works of art. And they could actually change the way people in the US perceive the war on drugs without ever mentioning it. Both are available in English. And both do not directly discuss any of the particulars of 2011. They don’t have to. They provide the tablecloth on which to spread out the present war as if it were a picnic.

And then there’s also this: la mordida (literally, “the bite”), a bribe, is a fact of life here. An ugly one, but one nonetheless. It’s not really unusual for a police officer to stop a car for speeding or running a red light and to say that the matter can be settled right there at the roadside, without a trip to court, for $US50 of $US100. No receipt will be given. And everyone knows that if you only appear to have 200 pesos (slightly less than $US20) that will probably work as well. This is a small thing. It’s no big deal. It’s customary. From the motorist’s point of view it’s better than going to Municipal Court or sending in a check. But it raises important questions.

If a speeding ticket is the common cold of crime, and it produces bribery and pervasive official misconduct, what, one wonders, does the trafficking of tons and tons and tons of cocaine produce? Does it produce so little corruption that the idea can be overlooked until the fifteenth paragraph of a story about the war on drugs? You have to be kidding to do that. Really.

In whose interest would such an oversight be? You don’t have to speculate deeply about this. You just have to acknowledge the multitude of possibilities this odd placement might indicate and what that says about the reality in which I find myself.