Category: ~ Mexico’s Struggle for Democracy

Enrique, the Highway Bandit

Posted on by sterlingbennett

We had been walking around San Miguel de Allende on Good Friday. Cars had been excluded, and the streets were filled with happy strollers. When we got back to the car, on the north side, near Vía Orgánica—a good organic restaurant and produce market—and got in, the car’s engine did not catch, even though the battery was strong and the Honda CR-V had shown no sign of ailing.

Something had happened that I could not explain.

I got out of the car and headed to a car shop not a hundred feet kitty corner from where the car stood. A man intercepted me.

“Puedo ayudar?” he asked. Can I help?

He was unshaven, wearing a soiled shirt, dirty shorts and worn out running shoes. A simple canvas bag hung over one shoulder. I dismissed him with a curt, probably classist “No, gracias.”

I continued on to the workshop. I explained that my car that had mysteriously decided it couldn’t start. The man in charge pointed behind me. I turned to see the raggedly man that had offered to help me.

“He’s a car electrician.”

I apologized to the man in the dirty shorts, and accepted his help and the mechanic’s implicit recommendation. We also have our own saying about Mexico: when you’re in trouble, especially with cars, help seems to materialize out of thin air.

I remembered the electrician had been sitting on the curb with his back against the corner building, when we returned to the car. Strange things happen in Mexico, so I accepted his position as within the range of normal or different.

I lifted the car’s hood. He took tools out of his satchel. He took the lid off the black casing that held all the Honda’s relay switches. He touched each relay with a current tester and the tester’s light lit up, except for one. He announced that there was a sensor problem. I had no idea what that was, but he seemed to be experienced, plus the shop had said he was a car electrician.

I asked whether he could fix the problem. He said he could, but he would need three hours. I asked whether he could get parts. He said he could. I said it was the first of three days of holiday. Would the parts store be open? He said it would. I accepted that, as well.

He had certain irregularities, limbs a little out of line. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. A neighbor came out of a door ten paces away to offer any advice that might be needed. Sotto voce I asked whether he knew Enrique. “Very reliable,” he said.

After poking at this and that, Enrique mumbled something about a sensor that impulsaba something. That was already too technical for me. Three hours is what he needed. We exchanged cell phone numbers and tested them, getting a reassuring ring out of his. We said our goodbyes. He assured us everything would be fine. We withdrew to Vía Orgánica, went up onto their azotea, their roof, and ordered soup and salad. Then it was the siesta hour and, in the shade of nearby trees, two of us stretched out on wooden benches and slept a wink or two.

Sitting up again, I remarked that we were conducting an experiment in trust. A complete stranger had our car keys and our phone number. We began to compare observations, and the questions that arose from them. Why, for example, had Enrique been sitting on the curb at the corner? I began to remember that he had already been sitting there before we set off on our stroll hours earlier. Why this satchel of tools? Worry began to override trust. I gave my mouth a final wipe for signs of soup and said I was going to go check.

The Mexican owner of Vía Orgánica was sitting at one of the tables downstairs with—I learned later—the store’s accountant. I said I was sorry to bother them but did they know a certain Enrique that appeared where cars mysteriously refused to start. They didn’t know Enrique, but they knew about other incidents. The owner got up and said she would go back to Enrique with me. He was sitting on the curb again, across from the car, enjoying the shadow cast by an east-facing wall. He saw us coming and got up and went to attend to the car again, as if there were still much to do.

The owner of the store asked him what was wrong with the car. She said there had been other incidents. She asked him whether it might be a good idea to call the police. I asked him where the new part was. He said it was coming.

“But why is it taking so long?” my new supporter asked.

He replied that the store was some distance away. Five blocks, she said. She brought up the topic of the police again.

I asked to see the old part. He showed it to me. It was a metal plug with a plastic hat that had broken off. He handed it to me in two pieces. Maybe a rock had done it, he said, because it came from an area under the engine supposedly exposed to the road.

There were three connector holes in it. The piece meant nothing to me, except for the fact that it could be plugged and unplugged into the car’s electrical system.

My supporter went off.

A couple and their two Swedish visitors came out of a door that was nine paces away. The woman in the couple was also Swedish. She and her American husband had lived there forever and swore by Enrique’s dependability. They had never heard anything negative about him. A representative from the car shop—that was now serving mainly as a parking area for the Easter weekend—approached. A short interrogation ensued. Enrique explained the problem. I watched the representative’s face. I could not read it.

The Swedes left, showering me with reassurances.

Enrique walked off and turned a corner, perhaps to meet the person that was bringing the new part.

I stayed and chatted with Jovani, who said he was Enrique’s son. He was a likeable kid of eighteen or twenty. He had turned up about when I began asking doubting questions. I wasn’t sure what his purpose was. My partner and a writer friend from California came to check on me. They had been talking with the owner of Vía Orgánica. They asked a few questions. I caught them up on what appeared to be happening or not happening. They went on a few doors and began talking with an American friend that runs a fine boutique for women’s clothing. I went to join them. For a moment of two I was out of sight of the car. When I emerged from that woman’s courtyard door, I saw movement around the car. I approached. Enrique was already under the car, clanking with a small wrench.

“I want to see the part before you put it in,” I said.

He continued clanking.

I repeated my request. “I have to see the new part first,” I said.

“Okay, just a moment,” he said.

I was looking down through the engine. He was bolting something to the engine. I repeated my request. This time it was more like a demand. I told him I couldn’t confide in him if he wasn’t going to show me the clean part. I may have mentioned the idea of calling the police, if that was the way it was going to be.

“Okay, you want to put it in yourself?” he said

“No,” I said. We needed to get home. There seemed to be no one else that was going to get the car going again at the beginning of a three-day holiday.

Again I said I needed to see the part. He started unbolting the same part—the one I wanted to see in its pristine state. It had a metal plug and a cap with wire leads. The metal plug was covered in oil, so that I could not tell whether it was new or not. I told him so. He tossed a small box out from under the car—presumably the box the part had come in. It box was dirty and battered, as if it had kicked around in his satchel for a year or two. The broken part he had given me earlier would not fit in it. I said as much. He said the plastic hat came off. I could not detach the plastic hat.

He asked Jovani to start the car. It sprang to life, as good as new. He crawled out from underneath. He asked Jovani to test the headlights and the turn signals—as if they might have been affected by the defective part. Inside, Enrique clipped the plastic cover back over the wiring behind the steering wheel, as if he had been trying to trace the problem there with his current meter.

He removed an old t-shirt he had been sitting on to protect the driver’s seat while he worked there. Just the way the dealership removes the paper protectors from the front seat of your car when they pass it over to you after servicing.

I asked him how much he wanted. He said one thousand one hundred pesos for the new part, four hundred pesos for his labor. I handed him fifteen hundred pesos, or roughly $120. He said I should call him if I had any problems in the future; that he was there for us if we needed him. I even shook his hand. His hand and arm were deformed by large swollen bumps, possibly from gout. He gripped my hand awkwardly.

He and Jovani left quickly. The owners of Vía Orgánica approached. They asked me how much Enrique had charged me. I told them. I also told them he had refused to show me the new part, the box hadn’t fit the broken part he had originally given me, the box was dirty and there was no receipt. I said I thought he had disconnected something and then simply reconnected it. They said I should come back to the store, they were going to reimburse me for the 1,500 and that we were good customers and that we shouldn’t have pay this kind of penalty for parking and shopping at Vía Orgánica. I said they weren’t responsible. They said, okay, how about we pay half. I said okay. They said they were going to do something about Enrique. They said they had learned that Enrique had been dismissed from the nearby automobile shop four months earlier—for irregularities.

There are three reasons a modern car doesn’t start, I have since found out through the world of Google.

First, if there is no spark. Enrique had had no access to the under-the hood part of the engine, hence to the spark plugs.

Second, no fuel is getting to the engine. The fuel pump has to be functioning. What I saw Enrique moving his wrench around was not a fuel pump.

Third, if the timing has been disabled. Enrique had had access underneath the engine to the Camshaft Position Sensor.

When he showed me the loosened the Camshaft Position Sensor, it was fairly dripping with dark engine oil. If the broken part he had originally given me had come from my engine, then there would have been at least the smell of fresh oil on it and perhaps traces of oil on the ground underneath the engine. There was neither. He had unbolted the real Camshaft Position Sensor probably for the first time when I asked to see the new part.

There had never been a new part, and the old part he handed me, I realized later, could not have come from my car, because it was badly damaged, with broken wire connections. The engine would have stopped running long before we arrived in San Miguel de Allende. Rather, what he had done was simply unplug Camshaft Position Sensor’s electrical connectors, a condition impossible to ascertain without a technical knowledge of cars and a clear view of what happens underneath the engine. It had never occurred to me to crawl under the car and get as soiled as Enrique.

Enrique had diagnosed the problem from the very start. He had said it was a sensor before even getting under the car. He had also correctly diagnosed me as the unwary traveler and technical idiot. Also as a man more privileged than he was. He had chosen the beginning of a three-day holiday when there would be no other recourse for getting the Honda going again, and had profited nicely. What is remarkable is how hard I had tried to believe that he was not lying to us, how hard I had tried to behave in a non-classist way and be respectful of his knowledge—and not as the suspicious type my partner sometimes accuses me of being.

Enrique is part of a long tradition of Mexican banditry and shows the bandit’s sense of entitlement to share some of what those with more money have. He had correctly chosen us as the people with more—people who were going to shop at an organic food market and restaurant where things are not cheap—and he had played me well the whole way. I had gotten away at half price, thanks to the impressive responsibility assumed by the owners of Vía Orgánica. In the end, I still felt grateful to be the victim of a bandit in Mexico, rather than, for example, in the U.S., because it seemed more culturally interesting and comprehensible to me here south of the border.

Well done, Enrique, but beware, my friend. The concerned people at the store are on to you—even if the rest of the street retains their unshakable faith in you.

Chaos in Michoacán—but why?

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A Mexican friend of mine argues that there will be nothing but social chaos if the self-defense groups of the Mexican state of Michoacán are allowed to retain their weapons—now symbolized by the plentiful and much photographed AK-47s. In many regards, he is right. After all, how would the U.S. government react if armed citizen militias began to form and openly patrol towns and neighborhoods they considered insecure?

I asked him why the State was not equally as worried before, when the drug mafias ruled freely in Michoacán, and in many other parts of the country, with their extortions, kidnappings and killings—certainly definitions of social chaos.

He returned to his point. The self-defense groups have to be disarmed.

I replied, “Won’t the cartels just sweep in a kill every single one of them, in revenge and to reestablish their reign of terror, and their control?”

“They are breaking the law, the self-defense groups. There have to be laws to prevent social chaos.”

I replied that Mexico has very good laws, exemplary laws—but that the State has failed to enforce them, failed to protect the citizens of Michoacán.

I drew diagrams, I brought in my thin knowledge of Hobbes and Locke, I asked whom the laws were for and where laws came from. I said there was another category, in addition to la ley, the law. There was also el derecho, a person’s rights.

My friend said you had to have laws and they had to be followed in order to have a stable society. I said, in the case where the State does not enforce the laws, then rights had to supersede laws—as in the case of the right to self-defense, not to mention the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

My friend said the laws were there to prevent social violence and, again, chaos.

I argued that chaos already reigned, the moment the State failed in its responsibility to enforce the laws, especially those conceived for the protection of the citizens.

My friend had calmed down. He asked how I would solve the problem. I said I had no solution. The problem, I said, had to do with cultura, the culture of considering the law as something that applies to the other fellow, but not to oneself. Culture, I said, could only change through education. And that that was my position.

In the meantime, if Mexico is to prosper, so investment comes and there are jobs and education, the government must decide who is the enemy in Michoacán: the drug cartels or the self-defense groups? And apply the law equally. And if it can’t do that, then it needs to examine itself and see why it is not enforcing existing law equally.

Some things seem to have changed. It is likely the federal government wants to change the topic away from admission of past failed policies. And so, they say, the mafias are not the real problem; the self-defense groups are.  At the same time, to its credit, the government has begun to make arrests of some mayors and some politicians who in fact appear to have been aiding the criminal cartels. It is too early to tell whether this is show or not.

They have also arrested a few self-defense leaders and some of their self-defense foot soldiers, accusing them of murder and putting them in jail. There are complaints that some of the latter have been mistreated and abused by federal police: for example (Proceso): “…evidence of injury around the neck, air pipes,  and the inner ear…” of a leader of the self-defense forces in Yurécuaro. Defense lawyers claim the men are being framed, as a way of removing self-defense leadership.

It is also not entirely clear to what extent government is thinking about and making distinctions between the three elements in the triad: the law, individual rights and the underlying culture of impunity. What is needed, of course, is years of education on the merits of social responsibility.

In the midst of all this, ninety percent of the self-defense groups say they have no intention of disarming or being disarmed. At a recent meeting of CAM, the General Council for Self-Defense of Michoacán, self-defense leaders have given the federal government the same deadline the government had given them. Federal Commission Alfredo Castillo had given them May 10 to respond to disarmament demands. CAM has now given him May 10 to respond to their counter-proposals: 1) Legalization of the self-defense groups; 2) Release of self-defense forces imprisoned by the government; and 3) Putting an end to the entire Knights Templar structure in Michoacán.

Is Abortion Legal in Mexico?

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Abortion and the Mexican Constitution
Reforma: Diego Valadés
Translated by Brittany Doss
April 1, 2014

Summarized and expanded:

Here’s what’s confusing.

According to Diego Valadés article, you can get a legal abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in Mexico City (approved by the city’s legislature in 2007).

But the same procedure has been criminalized in 17 other states in Mexico—even though the Supreme Court of Justice (at the federal level) has declared its constitutionality.

The trouble—plus the confusion—may be that the court did not establish a jurisprudence, i.e. binding written law.

This left a legal vacuum that local legislatures rushed to fill with all kinds of restrictions, in defiance of the Supreme Court ruling and led by the federal Attorney General’s Office and the federal National Human Rights Commission—both located in Mexico City.

Hence, there is plenty of room for confusion and the fog of ambiguity that weakens the rule of law in Mexico.

In 2011, the name of the first chapter of the Constitution was changed to “Of Human Rights and Their Guarantees.”

Article 1 of that chapter speaks of the inviolability of the human rights laws, which should be interpreted following the Constitution—for the protection of the people by applying the principles of interdependence, indivisibility and progressivity—alas, in my opinion, words to vague to count as law.

The same document talks about 3 concepts that shall apply throughout the country: pro persona, universality and progressivity.

That is, with legal protections first and foremost for persons exercising a right (as opposed to protection of the legal whims of bureaucrats and politicians); everyone shall be granted these human rights; the protections are open to evolution toward progressivity, i.e. to greater—not fewer—protections.

But, in reality, there is no universality if women outside of Mexico City do not enjoy the constitutional protections granted to women inside the city.

Here is the rub: “According to the 2011 reform of penal law, it’s unconstitutional to prosecute an action as a crime in one part of Mexico when it is protected as a right in another.”

Supposedly, women outside of Mexico City can seek redress through amparos—appeals or injunctions—when accused of criminal abortion.

Women accused of aggravated murder (abortion, stillbirth and misscarriage) in reality find little legal recourse once the indictment begins.

In my city of Guanajuato, and in the entire state of Guanajuata, women are regularly accused of murder by vengeful neighbors, (ex)husbands, in-laws and busybodies in cases of miscarriage or stillbirth. A local Women’s Rights Group, Las Libres, fought for and got the release of six women accused of murder in this state, in instances of stillbirth and miscarriage. Some of them had already served years in prison and faced the prospect of many more.

The Other Side: M’s Future in the Context of Private Wealth

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I hope Reforma’s lawyers and Professor Dresser pardon my use of this important column, but I feel it gives the context in which the Ni-Ni’s are drowning, going under.

Mexico: A Plutocratic Country – Denise Dresser
Reforma: Denise Dresser
Translated by Janine Rhyans

Each time that Forbes publishes the list of Mexican multi-millionaires, the country should start thinking. Each time a rich person appears on the list who has made his fortune pillaging Mexico, we should ask questions:

How has this person accumulated so much wealth?
Is it because of their extraordinary business talent, or because of the political connections they were able to build?
Is it because of the innovation they have inspired, or is it because of the rentismo [milking businesses as cash cows, to provide guaranteed income with little investment] that they have made the most of?
Has this person created his or her fortune due to the good products and services offered to the consumer, or did this person rise to the top by exploiting the consumer?

The Economist magazine asks these same questions to understand why there are so many emerging markets with powerful plutocrats and entrepreneurs who are always looking for the best slice of the pie, and not how to grow the pie.

The principal reason is because of the widespread phenomenon of rentismo. A way to charge more for something that should cost less. A form of abuse, exploitation, and fraudulence that occurs in markets that are imperfect, poorly regulated, monopolized, with little or no competition. In Mexico, rentismo occurs through collusion among businesses to maintain elevated prices. It occurs through the lobbying of laws that protect the entrepreneur and not the consumer. It occurs each time Telmex, Telcel, Elektra, Televisa, Compartamos, or whichever bank, or whichever service provider charges us above the price they should. It occurs when the Mexican government gives concessions, awards licenses, and privatizes public goods without imposing rules for their use. It occurs when the government is at the service of those they should regulate.

This creates crony capitalism; a capitalism of accomplices. The type of capitalism that The Economist describes on an index of 23 countries in which rentismo – permitted and supported by the government – is a structural problem. It lists the sectors most susceptible to rentismo, such as casinos, coal, banking, the infrastructure and gas pipelines, petroleum, gas, chemicals and other forms of energy, bridges, airports, real estate and construction, mining, and telecommunications. Industries vulnerable to monopolies, concessions, and government involvement. Sectors prone to corruption, according to Transparency International. These are areas managed by magnates in Mexico.

These are economic environments in which multi-millionaires have grown in a phenomenal way. In the developing world, their wealth has doubled relative to the size of the economy and amounts to 4 percent of GDP compared with 2 percent in 2000. Emerging markets, like Mexico, contribute 42 percent of global production, but 65 percent of wealth via crony capitalism.

Mexico is in seventh place on that index that reflects the corruption, cronyism, favoritism, regulatory protection and poorly executed privatizations. Mexico is behind Hong Kong, Russia, Malaysia, Ukraine, Singapore, and The Philippines. According to the index, Russia is on the list because of how the oligarchs appropriate natural resources. Mexico is on the list because of Carlos Slim and other like him, who are allowed to be the country’s plutocrats.

The index is an imperfect guide, but it illustrates the concentration of wealth in opaque sectors compared with what happens in competitive sectors. The index reveals much that needs to be done and what Mexico – little by little – is already doing with the law of Economic Competency, with the declaration of predominate businesses that the Federal Telecommunications Institute has made, together with efforts to limit the practice of rentismo, and with reforms to the judicial system. What is clearer is that global investors are becoming pickier, more demanding and less willing to invest in countries with opaque markets and bad governance.

This is a rubric where crony capitalism – built on a dysfunctional legal system – continues to limit the country’s potential. According to the World Justice Project, Mexico is number 79 out of 99 countries regarding functioning of the rule of law. Because the corruption continues. Because judicial reforms have not been completely adequate, and their impact needs to be measured. Because the judges are still for sale, and sentences can still be bought. Because the plutocracy prospers in a country that continues to exalt its existence.

M. Avoids His Future—Some More.

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Recently, we found out that M. has not been going to school. D. intervened, went to his school and learned that the twelve-year old would have to repeat the whole year if he did not return that week. D. explained it to his mother. She said she would take him every day. I fear that resolution may not have continued. He is smart, but that is not enough. There are other things at work: a father that does not love him or visit him, a mother that is sickly and underemployed, as well as uneducated. M. also lives between the two families that have the Usual Suspects as sons. The latter fill up the vacuum in M’s life with their anti-social attitude, their bravado, their certainty that they are heroes against everyone with their magic potions for getting high and, to M. probably, carefree and happy: paint thinner, Magic Marker, weed laced with got knows what.

M. doesn’t just have to maneuver through the Usual Suspects in our neighborhood. He has to reach his school, which is located in Cerro de Cuarto, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city of Guanajuato.

La Jornada’s Fernando Camacho Servín (Translated by: Rhiannon Nicolson) has written recently about the perils of reaching one’s school in Mexico.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) warns “that Mexico now ranks No.1 worldwide with the highest number of cases of bullying in middle schools, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”

“The NHRC, led by Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, stated that bullying has reached a point where students in elementary and middle schools are now forming gangs to attack their classmates physically, with many of the victims going so far as to commit suicide.”

“The NHRC also referred to statistics from the National System for Comprehensive Family Development [Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, or DIF in Spanish]:

40% of students in Sixth Grade say they have been victims of theft;
25% have been insulted or threatened;
16% have been physically hit; and
44% have been the victim of a violent incident of another nature.

In addition:

17% of children aged six allege that they are being insulted and hit at school;
Two of every ten children between the ages of 10 and 12 say they have been picked on and humiliated;
11 per cent of Elementary School students admit to having robbed or threatened by a classmate; while
Just over 7% of Middle School students admit to having similarly been robbed or threatened by a classmate.

Types of violence found in the classroom range from physical, psychological or emotional attacks, and go as far as sexual abuse and cyber-bullying, all of which, if occurring repeatedly, can lead to the social exclusion of victims.”

The next step is to find out whether M. is being bullied outside of his neighborhood, as well as in it.

M. is a ten-year old at risk. He is, in my mind, a symbol of where young Mexicans without education stand. In great peril. To cope with this peril on all levels, M. has learned to be a superb liar. He can invent endless complicated tales in order to get human attention and money. It is very hard to determine where his center is, or what it is made of. To survive with a good life he needs to be medivac’ed out and into an intense program of Outward Bound, therapy, family and firm love.

And it is unlikely he will get that, not to mention the Usual Suspects in our neighborhood.

Mexico’s Wasted Resources: Education

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A recent study partially explains much of the tension in our neighborhood, not to mention in Mexico in general—the vast number of young Mexicans that never have an opportunity to contribute to the economic development and general well-being in this country. It is easy to see how many drift into early pregnancy, underemployment, into the arms of the narco cartels or into all of those categories, one generation following the next.

Writing for the Mexican national newspaper La Jornada, March 22, 2014, Laura Poy Solano lists some of the reasons. The figures are from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which compares education in some 233 countries.

~ Six out of 10 young people over age 19 in Mexico have dropped out of school completely.

~ Only 12 percent of the population aged 20 to 29 continues in school.

~ This is less than half the average of the OECD’s member countries.

~ Ni-Ni’s (neither nor in Spanish) are the population group that neither works nor studies in Mexico.

~ They make up 24.7 percent of 15 to 29 year olds.

~ That is the third highest rate of the 233 OECD countries.

~ That figure increases with age: in the age group 25 to 29 the percentage of Ni-Ni’s rises to 29.5 percent.

~ In the group 15 to 19 years, four in ten do not attend school.

~ The statistics for women are even worse. Girls aged 15-29 live an average of 5.7 years as Ni-Ni’s. 1.7 years for males in the group.

~ In 2011, the percentage of female NiNis was three times higher than that of males: 37.8 women and 11 percent males. The rate worsens over time:

15 to 19 years: more than 25 percent;

20 to 24 years: 42 percent;

25 to 29 years: nearly 50 percent.

What a waste of economic potential, not to mention just plain human development—for which I would hold the Mexican political leadership responsible—on all levels. To me, they seem much more interested in chasing individual power and the peso in general than addressing a broader vision of what a vibrant, prospering nation needs—first and foremost, investment in the education and guidance of all of the nation’s youth.

Competing Truths in Michoacán = Mexico

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La Jornada’s Luis Hernández Navarro summarizes the competing truths in Michoacán with following information, which may be true and may not be true.

Summarized and expanded:

1) The leaders of the self-defense groups in Michoacán must all be criminals, if the federal government says three or four of them are.

2) The leaders are being defamed and criminalized by the federal government; hence, the self-defense movement is discredited.

3) This is a classic undermining of grass roots authority when the leaders say things that make the government look corrupt, indolent and incompetent. The government is in fact those things.

4) The same defaming has not been applied to the narco-leaders and those who collude with them within state and federal government.

5) The effect of “criminalizing” the self-defense group leaders weakens their unity. Or has the opposite effect. Remember Pancho Villa.

6) Confusion follows, as well as doubt and distrust.

7) Without their weapons, the famous AK-47s, the self-defense groups will be cut down by the narcocartel killers—along with the self-defense groups’ families.

8) The self-defense groups have really had enough of the killings and rapes and will not give up their weapons and will choose new leaders whether those new leaders have records of previous weapons and marijuana possession—as long as the leaders lead.

9) The government’s tactic removes the critics who have pointed out over and over the government’s corruption, indolence and incompetence.

10) By “criminalizing” the groups, the latter may decide that the government is an equal opportunity enemy; and then there will be something like civil war.

11) All of which could be avoid if the government cleaned up its act—which it may be incapable of: i.e. enforcing the law, cleaning house, strengthening the Rule of Law at all levels. Police, judiciary, government bureaucracy.

12) The federal government is afraid of the Pancho Villa effect: the existence of the people’s heroes. As they should be. History shows that reformers awaken the wrath of the established order.

13) Since the government is not protecting the people (the men, women and children of thousands of villages and towns), the people will do it—no matter what is put in their way.

14) All of which spells the approach of a tragic storm.

15) One recent group, forced to hand over their weapons, wrote on the forms they signed, “We are prepared to die.”

How to Stop Mexican Politicians from Stealing Public Funds

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The León/Guanajuato newspaper A.M.
Feb 28, 2014: Summarized from an article by Denise Dresser, on the case #YoContribuyente.

It is hard to find someone in Mexico who does not believe that politicians pilfer from the public coffers. A certain percentage of income tax monies is to flow to the federal coffers. Often, when the mayors and governors have mismanaged (the useful excuse) or pilfered, they ask for a condonación or waiver, reprieve or cancellation of what is owed the federal government, as if these well-intentioned politicians had suffered an inexplicable Act of Missing Funds and needed federal mercy.

As I understand it, in such cases, the unpaid tax monies are forgiven by Congress with a certain frequency, especially when the delinquent governors and mayors are friends and cronies of the ruling majority. That is, the missing tax monies are socialized, i.e. assumed and paid for by rest of the nation’s tax payers.

Astute political observer and journalist Professor Denise Dresser and friends are submitting a writ of amparo— a legal procedure to protect human rights—to the Mexican Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of this practice: politicians pleading victimhood, then asking for financial bailouts—essentially a thinly disguised method of graft.

Articles 103 and 107 of the Mexican Constitution insure citizens the right to ask for a judicial review of governmental action in an effort to protect individuals against State abuse—an idea allegedly coming from De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

March 6, 2014

La Jornada.

An agency called the ASF (Auditoria Superior de la Federación—the federal audit), after examining the state of Queretero’s books for 2012, has found that huge amounts of federal funds earmarked for education at all levels were used instead for bonuses (Christmas and otherwise) for some 16,463 education officials (trabajadores comisionados), of which 209 appeared not to exist at all. There are 18,955 teachers in the state that were supposed to be paid or supported by the monies diverted. A total of 37.2% of federal educational funds were never applied to education. In addition, roughly 39 million federal pesos were never applied to police and police training for which they had been allotted.

Determining What is True

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Things change faster than you expect they will, especially when you don’t expect them to change at all. On top of that, in the digital age, truth is hard to come by. Perhaps it was different a hundred years ago. News traveled slower, and when it arrived, there weren’t that many versions of it. You read one newspaper or listened to one news program. You almost never thought, “Maybe he’s lying.” That is, you didn’t think that way unless you were a member of a minority group and persecuted because of your skin color, religion or political affiliation.

The disturbances in Venezuela are a good example. Each side (the U.S. State Department is always one extra side, attached to the interests of its choice like a pilot fish) manufactures its version of what is happening. You yourself say, “Well, I know my history and I know something about the hidden actors in my own country; therefore, I choose to believe this and this and this, but not that. There are photos of police beating demonstrators from the opposition party in that country in South America. Photos make an instant impression, and we tend to equate them with the truth. But then other players show that the photos are not truthful, because they are from a different time and country with no bearing on the actual situation in Venezuela. And so, what are we to believe, except what we already believe because of our political predisposition?

Then there is the Mexican state of Michoacán where self-defense groups have risen up to defend their families and themselves against criminals, narco and otherwise—since the government, local and federal, either is unable to or uninterested in granting them their basic human rights and protection under the law.

One of the leaders is Juan José Farías “El Abuelo,” The Grandfather. There are whispers, reliable or not, that he used to be with organized crime. The spokesperson for the self-defense groups, José Manuel Mireles, says El Abuelo is a member in good standing of the new citizen defense forces. I once watched an interview with this Dr. Mireles and judged him to be credible.

On the other hand, “El Abuelo,” captured on the front page of La Jornada, wears aviator glasses, tinted, if I remember correctly; a full beard, carefully groomed; a baseball cap with something like oak leaf braids that suggests he might be the commander of an aircraft carrier; and an AK47 military-style assault rifle that hangs around his neck and one shoulder, across his chest like an honor guard sash; the weapon is fitted with an oversized cuerno de chivo, horn of the goat, a curved ammunition magazine called a banana clip, that holds about fifty rounds—one size larger than normal. This combination of accoutrements, for some reason, makes me wary and in my mind suggests a man who feels weak and therefore wears things that make him look important and powerful. The clincher is the big black Hummer that carries him around and that reminds me of the in-between culture one sees when the police merge with the narcos. I am thinking of the gold chains and black t-shirts a couple of questionable Federal Police were wearing when they stopped me and my love on a remote stretch of highway between Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez, leading north to the U.S. It turned out they did not want our heads, or car, or anything else. But I cite the incident as a case where the manner of dress tells us something about whom we’re dealing with.

I have found that dress tells a lot in my small Mexican city. I learned this first from being mugged at knife point a few steps from our garden gate (the account is called “The Knives of Mexico”) and from having a couple of young wannabe thugs as neighbors. The wannabes dress in a manner that gives them away—as if they were just more costumed characters in this country’s social melodrama. White baseball shirts not tucked in, white baseball caps, oversized sneakers—and a swagger.

When I look at the opposition demonstrators in Venezuela, young people, I see middle class kids that feel entitled to throw Molotov cocktails at soldiers and police to express their dissatisfaction with the elected government. That is what I see—the little things that may or may not help in determining what is true.

“El Abuelo’s” dress may mean he sees himself as American-like, also part patriarch, plus part aircraft carrier commander, part Rambo and, because of the Hummer, possibly part narco—a bizarre set of factors that may describe what we need to know about what’s happening in Michoacán and which is a situation as surreal and obvious as any comic book drama. Except with deadly real world consequences, depending on which way “El Abuelo” leads us.

Re-entering Mexico and Measurements of Madness

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I got myself to yoga at eight o’clock in the morning and limped through a series of sun salutations, having torn something in my right shoulder doing too many chaturanga-swoop-into-cobras on my own roof. Ten days in Belize eating black bean soup and thick, grilled “mackerel” had not cured my shoulder. Now I sat in my favorite plaza Baratillo eating a gordita, a thick opened tortilla with eggs and rajas—strips of roasted jalapeño chile—inside, and feeling more connected with my breathing and body than usual. Probably more because of the rajas than the yoga.

I noticed, not too far away, The Artist, a madman I’d bought a rather good scribble from—of a local church—several years ago. He had only one shoe on, unlaced and without socks, and favored his left leg, stepping gingerly. Both pant legs were rolled up. A worn jacket, deerskin color, hung over his right shoulder, and that hand held a cup of coffee someone had given him. The left leg, and especially the foot, was dark and swollen—I supposed from a life of drinking Coke and other sugary poisons, now rotting from diabetes. He had come down a lot. In the past, he managed to be completely dressed and spent most of his time mute and wild-eyed, giving us all what some might call the Evil Eye, which was probably really nothing more than a mild paranoia mixed with a dash of anger.

Minutes before I saw The Artist, my neighbor passed close by me for the second time, again without seeing me. When he’s function, he weeds alleys for people, or carries trash to a dumpster. I also don’t know his name. Often he sits on the callejón—alley—steps below our garden gate, maybe fifty steps below, paralyzed by depression. Now he stepped along smartly with a manic bounce. His brother may have been the miner that was beaten to death in front of our house. Word circulated that we had lured the victim into our garden and bashed him. It is not true.

On day two, in my favorite square Baratillo, I saw Kaliman (I refer you to my story “Kaliman and the Madness of Writers”), leaning against a wall, drinking in the morning sun. He wore his hair in a new style, that is to say, except for on the back of his head, his grungy dreadlocks were gone—an alteration I hope was voluntarily. In line with Kaliman, I saw the The Artist again. He is not doing well. I asked the waiter at the little restaurant El Chahuistle whether he knew his name. He did not. I asked a woman at the taco stand across the alley if she knew him. She didn’t. So I walked up to a better source, The Artist himself, greeted him and asked him his name. He leaned in at me, reeking of old alcohol and neglect, mentally adrift—insane seems like too judgmental a term, dehumanizes and shows no degrees of disorientation. At the same time, he came too close, so that I found myself blocking him qigong-style, with the heel of my palm against his chest.

He said he was from Aquascalientes and some other things—that made no sense.

I asked his name again, since I thought he might not have heard me the first time.

“Qué the importa?” he said— what’s it to you?

He was quite right there, I was invading his privacy.

“You’re suffering,” I said.

I did not understand his reply. He looks away and up, as if he were talking to others hovering just a little higher than us.

“You’re an artist,” I told him at one point, to show I knew about his interest in drawing.

“So are you,” he said.

I’m not quite sure he said that—because it is too bizarre—but I think he did, and it threw me for a moment. I wondered how could he know I painted—I don’t just write—and whether his madness had equipped him with a seer’s powers like Sophocles’ Tiresias in Oedipus Rex?

His eyes, in fact, were discolored, and I didn’t know to what extent he could see. It seemed his eyes were clear when he looked at me but clouded when he looked away, as hovering beings. He came in too close again. I put up my hand. I offered him two ten peso pieces, enough for two gorditas from the señoras who slap them into shape, roast them on the big comal, then fill and sell them just part way up one of the side alleys.

He said he wasn’t hungry. I decided to break off the conversation. I didn’t know to what extent his wild look signaled an incipient violence in reaction to my interference. I said I had to go and turned away, even though he was still talking to me and coming toward me. I went into the nearby café where I write. I asked the young barista whether she knew his name. She didn’t. I told her he had refused money. She said other people tried to give him money. That was news to me. I went back to the Chahuistle café and my writing partner, who was scribbling away himself, in prose. I considered the authenticity of my inquiry. I would never have asked him his name if I hadn’t been writing about him. On the other hand, because I was writing about him, I had realized I should know who he was—a person with a name. Later, I asked the flower lady—who has been sitting among her flowers forever—whether she knew his name.

“We’ve all always just called him El Chino,” she said, The Chinese Man, because of his curly hair.

No one knows why Mexicans say “Chino” for curly hair and wrinkled glass. It has nothing to do with China.

I am not sure why I write about these people, except that we all seem to appear mornings in the same small plaza, as if called by a common voice. There was me; then Kaliman, whom one should call The Writer, because of his illegible scribbles; Mateo of the missing front teeth (who has disappeared and is very likely dead); Josefina, who still sits in confusion and begs from the devoted who climb the steps of the cathedral called La Compañia; and finally Roberto, hunch-backed, the most dirt-encrusted of us all, his pants in rags, drinking Coke or smoking, who sometimes stands with one hand to his ear and sings softly to all of us like a shy Irish schoolgirl; and The Artist, “Chino,” (who a friend has since informed me is called Raúl).

Earlier, we had not been back from Belize a whole day when we packed up again and drove to San Miguel de Allende, an hour and twenty minutes to the east, to the ninth annual San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference, where we heard a wonderful talk by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a poet and writer that lives in El Paso, Texas. As a boy and adolescent there, he gradually realized he was neither an American nor a Mexican, but something in between. He spoke with passion about Ciudad Juárz, which he can look over at from his university office and which represents everything that is horrible about Mexico (absence of the rule of law and violence) and at the same time everything that is wonderful. In the last ten years or so, depending on who you talk to, there have been between 350 and 700 killings of young women. Because of indolence, corruption and lack of training, 95% of these crimes remain unresolved, with complex and dangerous criminal connections to both sides of the border. At the same time, there is the on-going normal, wonderful part: the weddings, the parties for quinceañeras—the coming out parties for fifteen-year old girls; family gatherings; children playing in the streets, watched over by the community; music and dancing; people eating together, love-making and laughter—all the activities that bind people together and endure in the face of ubiquitous disruptions—one of which has been NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which—among other things—has led to the loss of 700,000 jobs in the U.S. so that we Americans can buy goods cheaply and with them, the Good Life; and the corporations, Fatter Profits. Under NAFTA, the corporations were allowed to set up assembly plants, maquiladoras, across the border in Mexico, where cheap labor—often largely young women with education and skillful hands—was available, or soon would be, as women migrated to to Juárez, giving up the protections of the “village” and working for very low wages.

For writer Sáenz (sa-enz), Juárez is a metaphor. It is the border through which mountains of automatic weapons and cheap corn flow south, undermining still further the rule of law and displacing Mexican small farmers; while the cartels’ drugs flow north to sate Americans’ appetite for narcotic escape. Sáenz says we are all Juárez City, all of us co-responsible for what happens there—all of us suspended between Mexico and the U.S., between consumerism and exploitation, all of us participating in a dark and dysfunctional system, concocted by the an obsessive, hoarding corporate elite, their lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians they buy—on both sides of the border.

Mexico is now the third largest importer of food. That is to say, for greater profits for the few, it has given away its ability to feed itself. During the last twenty years of NAFTA, 4.9 million farm workers lost their jobs and migrated into the cities, where they do not do well. The youngest and strongest of them, at terrible risk, try to cross into the U.S. in hope of a better life. Powerful agricultural transnationals have filled the vacuum. Only ten percent of the remaining farmers are successful. Still, it is hard to crush small farmer culture which the 1% is so proud of, and that is because there is no bottom to Mexican rural poverty. In the twenty years of NAFTA, in order to increase production of the broccoli we eat in the north, the transnationals sprayed Mexico with 949,000 tons of pesticides (La Jornada, Feb. 20, 2014). Nevertheless, Presidents Peña Nieta, Barack Obama and Prime Minister Harper, meeting presently in Toluca, Mexico, sang NAFTA’s praises— Peña Nieto, in a familiar, empty political-speak about a system that does not work for the vast majority of Mexicans. One could argue these men—in their own magnificent madness—are themselves talking to hovering beings that only they can see: the ghosts of wealthy investors that remain invisible to the rest of us. In Mexico’s case, La Jornada published an editorial translated by Lindsey de Haan, saying that “According to  data from the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNVB), 42% of the value of the Mexican economy is concentrated among less than 200,000 investors and that .18 percent of the population possesses almost half the national wealth. From an inverse point of view, 99.82% of Mexicans are excluded from this portion of the economy.”

——-

I live in my own Juárez City, a barrio in Guanajuato that suffers a learned incapacity, assumed after centuries of the neglect and disinterest of today’s rulers of Mexico, our internal colonialists. As an example of this assumed incapacity, city workers worked on the sewage line in front of our house. When they were through, they filled sacks with the broken stone and concrete they had extracted (new concrete covers the repair) and then—instead of carrying the rubble away—they threw the filled sacks into the vacant lot in front us, the one still registered to a dead man (See my story “The Tenuous Connection”). All of which played into the hands of M, my young neighbor and one of the Usual Suspects. One of the nation’s discarded youth.

Last night, he arrived at the alley crossroads in front of our house drunk and perhaps drugged. By his behavior, I would have said paint thinner, but it could also have been something in the weed he was smoking—in any case, some chemical that destroys judgement and calls up rage. Roaring and whooping, he staggered around, behaving supremely antisocial. He began by kicking in the steel door in the wall that surrounds the lot; and that’s when he found the rubble—throwing material—left there by the city workers. I went up on our roof where I could observe him and his co-delinquent Q, who was strangely non-involved, other than acting as a lookout. M brought out rocks, large ones, and threw them first at the lot’s walls—his anger seeking targets. Then he threw them up the alley steps at nothing, then at R’s little store located ten paces kitty-corner from us, then at the camera on her wall, then at our house wall, then at our camera. Then at me.

I had called down to him.

“Hey! Qué passa?” Something like, What’s up with this?

He looked up at me. And threw. I ducked out of the opening. The rock smashed somewhere outside it. Then I went downstairs and called 066, the equivalent of 911.

I’m not sure they ever came—the police. There are too many angry and abandoned youth to cover all of them. Q and M left the scene. M’s aunt was up at R’s little store in a flash to smooth things out, covering for her nephew. I hate the phrase “damage control.”

“He threw a rock at me,” I called down to her.

“I’m taking care of it,” she said, the concerned aunt, turning away too quickly, too busy to talk to me. She had to deal with R and her daughter who were explaining they weren’t happy about M’s behavior. From past experience, I can be fairly confident that M’s aunt was pointing out that the two cameras—the one on R’s store and the one on ours—had provoked the behavior. And that we, my love and I, after community discussions, had mounted the cameras. Which is true.

I feel I should add M to the Local Hall of Disfunctionality, along with my mad friends in my favorite square in the whole world, Baratillo. As well as all the “leaders” of Mexico. They are all my Juárez, and we are all of us suspended between NAFTA (all NAFTAS) and the Mexico we could have if we all weren’t just as mad as Kaliman, Chino the Artist, Roberto the Shy Singer, Josefina the Beggar and Mateo Who is Probably Dead. M was abandoned by his father, just the way Mexico has been abandoned by the people who have been elected, legitimately or not, to lead it.

I can not add J to the list. He is Q’s (the recent lookout’s) next younger brother. A few nights ago, he appeared at the door along with my love’s only book borrower, the other younger M Who Avoids his Future. J has shunned me gang-style for a year or two, refusing to talk to me and looking away. But this time he was friendly, clear-eyed, cordial, hanging out with Book Borrower M in front of our door. He talked about his favorite courses in school, in response to my love’s questions. This is a kid that, along with his brothers, had also shunned school for years.

After we said goodnight to them and closed the door, I turned to my love and asked, “Do you think the DIF has gotten to him?” DIF is the acronym for Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, Integrated Development of the Family, an agency that intervenes under a variety of circumstances to help “incapacitated” youth that are “at risk.” If that is in fact who reached J, that is a very good thing. One could only hope they might reach the rest of us who have given up on Mexico. Or are sometimes tempted to.