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The Paris Talks

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Paris

Spring 2015

How many groups in exile have met in this city (or New York or Mexico City) to discuss the salvation of their countries of origin, or to simply write what they risked their life for by saying it at home? During different periods of history, they came from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile; from the Congo and Egypt; from Turkey, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Irak; from Palestine; from Germany, Cuba and The United States; from Vietnam, China, Russia and the Soviet Union. There is a long history of “Paris talks.”

I attend a daily two-hour conversation group for foreign students wanting to improve their French. All of us come in off the street, paying a small fee. I meet bright, kind, likeable young people, roughly 25 to 35 years old from some of these countries, and from many others. Some of them hate their governments for the oppression they exercise over their people. Some of these students will not being returning home, if they can help it, at the risk of living in exile.

Last night I attended a meeting at a private venue. There were perhaps twenty people, out of all of Paris, in the room. They were Mexicans. They had come to listen to a panel of Mexican scholars and writers discuss the political situation in Mexico. Mexico is where I live and, to a great extent, the subject of my novels and essays. I listened intently. What I heard was not new to me. What was new was being witness to a kind of exile group meeting to discuss what can be done to save their country from full-blown dictatorship.

They talked about what should resonate with almost everyone these days: living in a country where there is a long history of voter fraud, intense, unrelenting and reality-distorting propaganda, with essentially no outlet for massive grass roots discontent. Where the powerful in the country, elected or not, are disconnected from the base and answerable only to themselves and their allies and cronies. A great question looms, and that is whether, with the June 7, 2015 elections coming up, one should vote or annul one’s vote, rather than support a corrupt system. Because the voice of the people is blocked, the three speakers argued that that Mexico is essentially a dictatorship. What I thought they left out was the context: a country where there is no rule of law, where judges and prosecutors have no protection because all the police forces are corrupt; where journalists and labor leaders are murdered in great numbers (the most journalists of any country in the world); where a parallel narco government exists or merges with the regular government; where in two states at least (Michoacán and Jalisco) Army generals rule like war lords, committing more extrajudicial executions than the narcos; where auto-defense groups formed to protect their communities become the targets of Government, the narcos, the Army and other militarized groups.

During the meeting, the pendulum swung between despair, cynicism and hope. One speaker urge support for MORENA, a relatively new grassroots political group that grew out of the National Convergence and became the National Regeneration Movement (el Movimiento Regeneración Nacional), made up of many citizen initiative groups. MORENA is putting up civilian candidates: academics, writers, athletes and social activists in the up-coming congressional elections. Up to this point, in their brief history, they have won only about 2% of the national vote. But things may be changing if enough of the disenfranchised electorate can hear about them and act.

Of course, even if they could win in larger numbers, the citizen candidates would still have to contend with the reality of existing power: the separated, uninterested, entrenched, perpetually ruling political leaders (the PRI and the other parties) who have become the great masters of fraud; two television monopolies that are handmaidens to them; the Army (Marines, Navy); the corrupt police at all levels; the narco rule on the local and national level; and the legal vacuum which can offer them no protection to those who want and lobby for the rule of law.

One more Paris talk on how to save one’s home country from tyranny. Was it one of the seeds of a citizens’ non-violent revolution? We will have to wait and see.

The Racist Chocolates of Paris

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I write in one of the cafés, the Delmas, at the Place de la Contrescarpe on Rue Mouffetard, Paris. On the west side of the square, there is a sign high up on the side of a building. I am not the first to find the sign objectionable. It reads Au Nègre Joyeux, “(The place of) the Joyous Negro.”

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That’s only part of it. A large, old painting on wood hangs below it, showing a muscular young black man with a wild looking grimace meant to show his joy. Or perhaps below that, his essential diabolical nature. With a little research, we learn he is supposed to be Zamor, christened Louis-Benoit 1762–1820, from Bengali, who was taken from Chittagong, Bangladesh by slave traders when he was eleven years old. Louis XV of France bought him and gave him as a gift to his principal mistress Jeanne Bécu (Countess du Barry). She took a liking to him and oversaw his upbringing and education—as her personal servant. She died in 1794, the year that slavery was abolished in France, although Napoleon reinstated it in 1802 until it was abolished again in 1818. Napoleon died three years later. As a way to measure the present against the past, every day I walk past an enormous plantain tree in the Jardin des Plantes. It was planted in 1785 and is still doing very nicely. George Edward Dupré was born in Rouen, France in 1798, and he is still my great-great grandfather.

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The lettering and the painting below it continue to advertise a chocolate factory that was established in 1748 and is now long since gone. As I mentioned above, not everyone is happy with the lingering artifacts. Someone has tried to protect the painting with a plexiglass shield, and subsequent stone throwers have already managed to smash it in two places. A window next door has taken a direct hit and no one seems in a hurry to fix it.

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The anger likely has to do with both the wording and the painting. Zamor is shown with all the usual racist features: his grimacing mouth—to show he’s something of an idiot or crazed or both—and his eyes are of the same bright white to emphasize a darkie blackness that may date the painting to the period of the American blackface minstrel shows of the early 19th Century. He wears a large, hanging napkin around his neck, as if he were about to eat, and appears to be holding a phallic-looking carafe high in his left hand. Madam du Barry, seated, seems to be holding a silver tray that holds chocolates or small cakes. Is the idea that she is offering him things? Things in addition to sweets? It’s hard to tell through the reflected images from the Place de la Contrescarpe just opposite, but I think that was the intent.

The painting is not a particularly good one. There is a far better one from the same date as the plantain tree, 1785, by Jaques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine, currently at The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida. It shows a thoughtful man, elegantly dressed and someone whom Louis XV made the governor of Madam du Barry’s chateau and the secretary of her private affairs. The person who contracted the sign and painting seems to have had his own agenda and may have asked that the painting be sexually suggestive in all the usual racist ways, portraying the young black man as phallus-slave without full or maybe any personhood having his way with a white woman of standing, and she with him in a reverse, exciting, racial and social slumming—all ideas appealing to the racist mind.

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Were these ideas associated with eating chocolate? Or perhaps other things made of chocolate. There is in fact an old French delectable still called the Nègre en Chemise which is a dab of rich chocolate cake with a thick whipped cream companion covering. Descriptions of it usually include remarks by the cooks explaining how the name is not politically correct but that they’re going to keep using it anyway.

Madam du Barry may have been something of a courtesan, but she was highly thought of by some. She was a name people knew. Perhaps for that reason the person who contracted the painting wanted to associate his chocolates with her, just the way others at one time wanted to associate their products with Victor Hugo. Who knows how much of her bawdier reputation was apocryphal. When Louis XV was dying, he is said to have asked her to come to him one last time with her breasts bared. That sounds like a snippet of history written by a man. At the same time, Madam du Barry admired Voltaire’s work and near the end of his life sent him a note saying it enclosed two kisses. He supposedly wrote back in verse:

Quoi, deux baisers sur la fin de la vie !
Quel passeport vous daignez m’envoyer !
Deux, c’est trop d’un, adorable Égérie,
Je serai mort de plaisir au premier.

What? Two kisses for the end of my life!

Such a passport you deign to send me!

Two (kisses) is one too many, adorable Égérie [a muse for a person of letters, out of Roman mythology],

I would die of pleasure from the first one alone.

Zamor and du Barry are far more humanly complex and interesting than what one sees in the painting. If you raise a child, Zamor, there is likely to be affection involved but probably not trans-generational sex, although one writer claims that she liked to kiss and fondle him. But at what age? Zamor probably cared for her, but historians suggest he was later also disapproving, even angry at her for many of her excesses, perhaps for a patronizing attitude. All this makes rich ground for a novelist to add to the already present fictions. Here are three: Gérard Saint-Loup’s Le Nègre de la du Barry, Paris 1997; Eve Ruggieri’s Le Rêve de Zamor, Paris 2003; Joan Haslip’s Madam du Barry: The Wages of Beauty.

Zamor read Rousseau and learned there—as if he didn’t know already—about liberty. It is said he tried to persuade the Duchess to reign in her extravagances. As the Revolution raged, she took trips to England to recover jewels stolen from her. Zamor and others advised against the trips. He cautioned her not to support or shelter nobility on the run from the purges. At the same time, he was an active member of the revolutionaries, passing information to them. When du Barry discovered this, she fired him, or kicked him out, the verb depending on what his standing was: slave, freeman, servant, friend, ward or mixture of all these things. One can speculate that Zamor’s thoughts were complicated. Since history is seen and written through the eyes of the local, dominant race and culture, we have to assume he was not simply a traitor, giving her up to save his own skin—although that is a possibility. If only he had left a journal.

Things did not end well for the duchess. The illegitimate daughter of a priest and a seamstress, she came from poverty—as did Zamor—and rose to wealth and importance. Her husband, the duke, was captured by a French Revolutionary guard and dropped off at Versailles, where he and his troop were murdered by a mob and their bodies torn to pieces. When du Barry returned to France, after the execution of Louis XVI, January 21, 1793, she was arrested as an agent for the English, a theme we see in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, thrown in prison, and tried before the Tribunal Révolutionaire. Zamor is said to have denounced her twice. But it may be too easy to see her as victim and him as villain. We need the journal. Denounced a second time, she went to the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde and was beheaded there on December 8, 1793.

Petitions to highest levels have asked to have the painting removed from the building at Place de la Contrescarpe, on Rue Mouffetard, one of the most frequented pedestrian streets in Paris. The petitions have been unsuccessful. The position of the person who is supposed to decide these matters apparently doesn’t exist. Or, as I’ve read, the person and position do exist, and still the matter doesn’t move forward. Some report the artifacts are not included in the registry of historic paintings and monuments. Others say they are.

The painting is not that good. It is racist and probably lewd, as well. It should hang in a museum to show various stages in the history of French racism. The lettering and the painting are part of larger lingering issues having to do with French anti-Semitism and racist feelings about immigrants. The lives of Zamor and du Barry were far more than what we can see in the painting. Ironically, one could argue that the sign and painting should stay right where they are because they open up an important discussion. All that is missing is an enormous plaque that could give all the background information. But that might not go over so well with the square’s merchants, who want the strollers to enter their stores and cafés and not just stand in front of the painting, gawking, readying the plaque which isn’t there, and feeling troubled.

Learning French With Authority

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A few years ago, in Montpellier, southern France, on a modern tram, a man stood like a wrestler at the head of the car, with his legs apart and with an expression on his face that said that he was some kind of system-wide inspector of the most feared kind and that he was about to find the one passenger in the car who had not bought a ticket. The Inspector looked at his watch every five seconds or so, as if it was also his job to be sure that time itself was functioning properly. When he was not checking the time or giving us intimidating looks, he repositioned himself in his wrestling stance, as if the tram floor were wet sand that had sucked him down a little. He also looked out the windows at the passing city, as if to check that everything there was also in order. It took a few moments to understand that a self-appointed state of authority had crept up on him when he wasn’t looking and, like an enchanted cloud, had taken possession of him.

A few days ago, in a bus shelter in Paris, near the Jardin des Plantes, we puzzled over illustrated routes. A man sat on the metal bench smoking and watching us. I asked him a bus question in French. I didn’t understand his answer. Perhaps he hadn’t understood my question. I thanked him anyway and turned back to the map. A man about fifty or sixty, in flood pants—trousers cut strangely high—wearing modern, waterproof sandals, a windbreaker, everything khaki color, as if he were a German retiree, began scolding the man I had not been able to understand.

“You cannot smoke here.”

The man who was sitting was unresponsive and continued to bring the cigarette up to his mouth.

“You cannot smoke here.” The scolder pointed to a spot on the sidewalk outside the shelter. “Step out there.”

The smoker mumbled something.

“Where are you from?” the scolder asked.

“Romania.”

“You cannot smoke in here. I am police.”

I do not know what makes me do these things. I had not been in France a week, but I said to the scolder, “You are police?” And then I held up my hand, cupped, in a gesture that said, “Where is your identification?”

The Authority turned his full attention on me. He came very close and warned me that police did not have to show their identification. He said it was against the law to interfere with the police. The situation had sped up beyond the speed of my language readiness, I suppose even in English. Relying on all the French police movies I’d seen, I held up my cupped hand again to show I still wanted to see his identification. Plus, the man, as I have said, was strangely dressed and a little too authoritative. Plus, the French smoke everywhere and no one thinks twice about it. Plus, I thought I might have seen something like this once before.

He demanded to know what country I was from. I said Mexico. He asked me whether I spoke French, German, or English. I continued in French. “You are police?” I held up my hand again.

“Your French isn’t very good,” he said. “Probably your English isn’t either.”

At that moment, the Nr. 89 appeared, I said as much, of course in English, to my partner and gave the Romanian a parting conspiratorial look. He held his cigarette suspended in front of his mouth and seemed mildly amused. I got on the bus with my friend, pressed my Navigo card against the green, jellyfish-shaped electronic button, got my electronic ding, and immediately forgot the man who claimed he was police.

The Writer Censors Himself

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Café Dose, rue Mouffetard, Paris

May 2015

Censorship comes in different forms. You’ve indulged in free political speech for most of your life—but then grown more and more concerned about security agencies like NSA taking notes on what you say. Perhaps for later use. And so you arrive at the point where you ask yourself, “Should I come right out and say this?”

Maybe that’s the point: to make you think twice or thrice before you let your fellow citizens know what you think about, say, censorship in all its forms. After all, as throughout history, first they eavesdrop, then they make lists, then they come for your neighbor—and then for you.

Here in this country below the border, you withdraw a one-act play from the Internet, first the Spanish translation, then the original English, because it may or may not be dangerous to suggest, even indirectly through art, that the country’s government may be complicit in high crimes against its own people. In the process, you get the idea of what it was like to write in France during the German Occupation, in the Soviet Union then and now. And, presently, in Saudi Arabia, China and much of Africa.

How did you arrive at this point? You took a screen writing workshop at this year’s San Miguel Writers Conference. Up to that point, you had applied yourself to writing short stories and novels. You had never written a play before. Thinking you might be asked to write something right then and there, you chose a subject that was on everyone’s mind, the disappearance of forty-three students in the south of your country of residence, all of them from one school, all of them surely murdered—this in the context of some 92,000 other people who are also missing here.You didn’t have to write a five-minute play, but you decided to proceed with your idea. You wrote a one-act play. And then you had your translator translate it into Spanish.

Hoping to continue skirting the line of what was safe, you mentioned your play on Facebook. You wrote, “Thanks to the gifted translation by the Guanajuato writer and poet X, you can now read ‘The Colonel and the Pig’ in Spanish, a short one act play possibly in the epic style of Bertolt Brecht, where the latter sought to distance his audience from the anecdotal quality of reality. That is not my phrasing, but I can’t think of a better way of putting it—in the matter of forced disappearances in a country south of wherever you find yourself in the world.”

And then you gave your blog address, so people could read the play.

You mentioned the posting to a few young Mexican friends. One such friend told a friend of hers. The latter, a young woman with a BA Theater, read the Spanish version, said she liked it very much but added it would be difficult to stage because it was so politically loaded.

At that point, you begin to come out of your self-congratulatory haze and realize that a watching censor would likely come to the same conclusion. Your best friend warns that the government, Army and Federal Police would not understand myth, metaphor, irony, epic theater or Bertolt Brecht. And that the government—on many levels—was becoming increasingly intolerant of critics. Plus, your are not a citizen, and they could deport you for breaking one of the rules on being a resident: You may not demonstrate politically against the government.

And so you decided to take the little play down, both the Spanish and the English. You give a few people electronic copies, but tell them not to distribute them further. You also write a friend who has been living in the country for more than sixty years and whose opinion and judgment you trust. You mentioned the great risks taken by articulate and brave women like Lydia Cacho, Denise Dresser, Carmen Aristegui and Raquel Padilla Ramos, who do not hesitate to take on the government. You mention you do not feel good about yourself, giving in to the fear of censorship and retaliation.

You friend replies, “Being a non-citizen of Mexico can also be a great cloak to wrap around yourself. The most comprehensive stories of graft and corruption, the best investigative inquiries into massacres and suspicious suicides like Linda Diebel’s book Betrayed: the Assassination of Digna Ochoa are written by non-citizens. Given the choice of an article in Proceso or an in-depth article about the same incident in The New Yorker, I will almost always prefer the dispassionate but fact-checked writing of the American journalist. But what you wrote, in my opinion, is not investigative journalism. You wrote a lovely lyrical almost poetical play that is more art than rant or cant. Aristegui, Dresser, Cacho are IMMINENTLY public figures with huge followings, hence the threat as well as the political clout that they bring to their battle. I think the performance of your play (in Spanish) or even just reading of it at some cafe or little theater at least in Michoacán would have been thoroughly appreciated for what it is. My getting involved in the disgusting political machinations of the mayoral campaign here in town is seriously dangerous…I still take notes and jot down the farcical (albeit with deadly serious implications) nature of this campaign.  You should not self-censor. Keep writing in your (excuse me) Brechtian fashion, and collect your writings. Posting or publishing is not that important right now. Capturing your impressions of the political climate is what is important. ”

You write this as you sit in a third country (France), which prides itself on unrestricted expression that, if exercised without some situational restraints, can have disastrous consequences. And then there is Texas, where free expression is used as provocation—again with disastrous results.

There is a danger line in the country where you live,  except that you don’t know exactly where it is. There are other questions. Were you overestimating the importance of your words, or were you underestimating their possible impact? On the one hand, a writer wants the widest possible audience—but not so wide that the government’s enforcers react. The Internet offers the illusion that you comment from neutral ground and that you are therefore safe, but we all know that that is not true.

And so you arrive at the final question—perhaps a false one—and that has to do with which group you belong to: the brave risk-takers? Or to the self-censoring, the silenced, to those who have knuckled under? We have some guidelines that help here. There are a great many dead risk-takers in this country and, no doubt, a few living expelled ones, too, like the Italian women who got involved in Chiapas during the Zapatista uprising. Clearly, you also have to control the writer’s ego, which might otherwise be over-estimating its importance and foolishly willing to risk disaster for a piece of writing, badly timed and, in the long run, quixotic. And so, in the end, you turn to the meta-story, the one presented here, which you hope will bore the censors speechless, while giving the writer some relief.

John Updike’s Advice to a Young Writer

Posted on by sterlingbennett

It is instructive, I think, to read what various writers think are important steps to take in becoming a writer. Often it is affirming of what you already know but you just need to hear from someone else who’s been there before you.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/john-updikes-advice-to-young-writers-reserve-an-hour-a-day.html

E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94, Paris Review

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In the belief it’s best to refer to one’s favorite writers for advice, I give you E. L. Doctorow and The Art of Fiction. This man has written scenes and moments I have never been able to forget, or wanted to.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2718/the-art-of-fiction-no-94-e-l-doctorow

Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Paris
17 February 1903

My dear sir,

Your letter reached me just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the deep and loving trust it revealed. I can do no more. I cannot comment on the style of your verses; critical intent is too far removed from my nature. There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words. They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Even more inexpressible are works of art; mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure.

Having said these things at the outset, I now dare tell you only this: that your verses do not as yet have an individual style. Yet they possess a quiet and hidden inclination to reveal something personal. I felt that very thing most notably in the last poem, “My Soul.” There, something of your inner self wants to rise to expression. And in the beautiful poem “To Leopardi” something akin to greatness and bordering on uniqueness is sprouting out toward fulfillment. However, the poems cannot yet stand on their own merit, are not yet independent, not even the last one to Leopardi, not yet. In your kind letter accompanying them, you do not fail to admit to and to analyze some shortcomings, which I could sense while reading your verses, but could not directly put into words.

You ask whether your poems are good. You send them to publishers; you compare them with other poems; you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts. Well now, since you have given me permission to advise you, I suggest that you give all that up. You are looking outward and, above all else, that you must not do now. No one can advise and help you, no one.

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Do not write love poems, at least at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal, something unique, when there are so many good and sometimes even brilliant renditions in great numbers. Beware of general themes. Cling to those that your every- day life offers you. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. In order to express yourself, use things in your surroundings, the scenes of your dreams, and the subjects of your memory.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant. Even if you were in a prison whose walls would shut out from your senses the sounds of the outer world, would you not then still have your childhood, this precious wealth, this treasure house of memories? Direct your attention to that. Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past. You will gain assuredness. Your aloneness will expand and will become your home, greeting you like the quiet dawn. Outer tumult will pass it by from afar.

If, as a result of this turning inward, of this sinking into your own world, poetry should emerge, you will not think to ask someone whether it is good poetry. And you will not try to interest publishers of magazines in these works. For you will hear in them your own voice; you will see in them a piece of your life, a natural possession of yours. A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

Therefore, my dear friend, I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question, whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analyzing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without. For the creative artist must be a world of his own and must find everything within himself and in nature, to which he has betrothed himself.

It is possible that, even after your descent into your inner self and into your secret place of solitude, you might find that you must give up becoming a poet. As I have said, to feel that one could live without writing is enough indication that, in fact, one should not. Even then this process of turning inward, upon which I beg you to embark, will not have been in vain. Your life will no doubt from then on find its own paths. That they will be good ones and rich and expansive—that I wish for you more than I can say.

What else shall I tell you? It seems to me everything has been said, with just the right emphasis. I wanted only to advise you to progress quietly and seriously in your evolvement. You could greatly interfere with that process if you look outward and expect to obtain answers from the outside—answers which only your innermost feeling in your quietest hour can perhaps give you.

I was very happy to find in your writing the name of Professor Horaˇcek. I harbor the highest regard for this kindest of scholars and owe him lasting gratitude. Would you please pass my sentiments on to him. It is very kind of him to think of me still, and I appreciate it.

I am returning the verses with which you entrusted me. I thank you again for your unconditional and sincere trust. I am overwhelmed with it, and therefore have tried, to the best of my ability, to make myself a little more worthy than I, as a stranger to you, really am.

With my sincerest interest and devotion,

Yours,

Ray Bradbury’s Advice to Young (and Old) Writers

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I highly recommend this good advice by Ray Bradbury for all those who want to be writers, or are writers. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the filmed interview. Delightful viewing and good tips for the digital age. http://culturacolectiva.com/12-consejos-de-ray-bradbury-para-quienes-quieren-ser-escritores/

Extremely Dangerous: Being a Journalist or Reporter in Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett
Translated by Jane Brundage for Mexico Voices. From the newspaper Reforma, original Spanish by Denise Dresser

Stories of the country of the absurd. Stories of the country of contradiction. Mexico today, where freedom of speech and the press live under the pretense of laws that say they defend them. Where for journalists the most common words are fear, silence, death, censorship or a new euphemism: dismissal for “breach of trust”. A reality described in Article 19’s Annual Report about the violence committed against journalists in Mexico. The title says it all: “State of Censure.” A state of defenselessness for human rights defenders, bloggers, tweeters, social and student leaders who live in permanent fear. Because raising a voice to report, disagree, criticize, carries a high risk.The title is not accidental. It invites readers to play with words. State as government that censures, or the state as climate that leads communicators to fall into line, self-censor, mimic the official line. The state of fear that the reprimand can arrive at any moment. And the fear grows daily since 326 attacks were documented against the media in 2014, only four fewer than the previous year.

During the first two years of Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, ten journalists have been killed. During the government of Felipe Calderón, a journalist was assaulted every 48.1 hours; in the Peña Nieto administration to date an aggression occurs every 26.7 hours. In the Federal District. In Quintana Roo. In Veracruz. In Guerrero. The states where it is most dangerous to tell power what it does not want to hear.
The Internet—sanctuary for many media—has also become common place for attacks, threats, harassment. A place where contents are falsified, portals are attacked and journalists are defamed. A site where, anonymously, we are called “whores” and it is written to us:

“respect @epn, or we will hang you by the ass with a meat hook, bitch”; or we are tweeted

“respect our president @epn we are going to kill you, fucking bitch. The PRI arrives even if it hurts.”

In the last two years, assaults on women communicators and documentarians increased 20 percent. They takes a particular form. They attack the dignity, draw ghoulish attention to privacy, use gender as an excuse to trample.

The fence is deliberately closing. In this administration, the average of attacks on freedom of expression rose 80 percent. In this government, 48 percent of attacks on journalists have been committed by a public official. The State itself muzzles. What should protect freedom of expression becomes the main perpetrator of attacks against it.
Because despite laws, mechanisms and “special” prosecutors, the complete impunity of those who attack the press persists. Because Mexican democracy is dying alongside free journalism. Because Angélica Rivera will not sell her White House and Luis Videgaray [Treasury Secretary] will not explain the conditions under which he bought his own house. Because the PRI wants to win Mexico City with networks woven by Cuauhtémoc Gutiérrez de la Torre [former PRI head in Mexico City accused of running a prostitution ring from party offices]. Because the governor of Quintana Roo prefers to shoot the messenger than pay attention to her message.
Here was the case of Edwin Canché, tortured for photographing the crash involving the mayor’s nephew. Or Gregorio Jiménez, murdered by an armed commando. Or the Northwest Sinaloa newspaper, which has been the object of 47 incidents of theft, looting, physical assaults, threats and aggressions. Or Karla Silva, beaten by three men, in order that “she fucking stop her articles.” Or Pedro Canché, imprisoned for documenting an eviction. Or the weekly Lights of the Century, cloned 61 times, in which the covers were falsified in order to make reference to the supposed achievements of Governor Roberto Borge.Or that of Carmen Aristegui, supposedly fired for the “use of a trademark”, when the real story includes editorial guidelines—equivalent to censorship—that the company intended to force her to sign, and the role of a friendly mediator, José Woldenberg, which should have worked, whom MVS chose to ignore.
Faced with these cases, society must fight for the freedom that is being lost, murdered journalist after journalist censured. To fight for the freedom to know, declare, argue, investigate Casas Blancas [White Houses] and political leaders with black histories. To defend freedom, as Yoani Sánchez says, is the possibility of standing on a streetcorner and shouting:

“Here there is no freedom.”

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*Denise Dresser is a Mexican political analyst, writer, and university professor. After completing undergraduate work at The College of Mexico, she earned her Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University. She is currently a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), where she teaches such courses as Comparative Politics, Political Economy and Contemporary Mexican Politics. She has taught at Georgetown University and the University of California. Twitter: @DeniseDresserG