Category: ~ Mexico’s Struggle for Democracy

Buddha and the Police Comandante

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Meeting four is coming up tomorrow. In the meantime, things have become more complex, and getting to yes seems farther off—maybe fifty years. A few nights ago, one of the eighteen-year olds was not fast enough—too drunk or too stoned to run, and a police patrol with dogs caught him, took him to jail and, according to his mother, beat him.

This is what we wanted to avoid. The lad is out of jail again, and his mother is hopping mad. She is sure another mother called the police on her son. D. talked with her and told her when the police came the mother she suspected had been meeting with D. over a period of two hours and couldn’t have called the police.

Shortly thereafter, Hopping Mad—both women live within a hundred feet of us—ran into her enemy and told her that she had a cousin who had a gang and that she would tell him to bring in the gang if things went on the way they were. The threatened woman said she also had a relative in a gang and she would be glad to give them a call. We have a young neighborhood friend who is soft, diffident and overweight. When one of the feuding women told him about the gang she would bring in, our soft friend responded by saying if she did that, she would see a side of him that she had never seen before.

At our last meeting, excitement stirred, and I looked up the callejón to see what everyone was looking at. A herd of police dressed in dark blue was descending upon us, led by a neighbor who had agreed not to invite the police until a later meeting, after we had elected a steering group. One of the underlying principles was to be that we keep the police and army out of the neighborhood, so our boys at risk didn’t get shot or disappeared.

The comandante, short powerful man, reminded me of the murderous Guatemalan colonel D. and I once interviewed on his own base. We more or less asked him why he and his troops were wiping out Guatemalan indigenous peoples. He said he was only restoring Christianity to Indians who had come under the influence of Communism.

This police comandante stood looking down on us—his feet braced if he were on a heaving ship—and as his opening speech barked, “Hay preguntas?” – “Any questions?”

D. and C. got him and his troop to enter the meeting circle. There were seven men in total; each of them looked like a gang member who had come up through the ranks. The comandante turned out to be a mixture of Buddha and Nelson Mandela. He said the trouble started in the family; if a man hit his wife, the children would imitate this behavior. He said they had not come to fight with anyone. Then they described the war wounds – heridas de guerra – they had received in the line of duty, when people threw bricks down at them from rooftops.

His six officers shifted this way and that, their heads always turning, as if a sizeable hostile stone might already be on its way and they needed to see it coming. At one point—I missed the moment entirely—two of policemen walked quickly into one of the four callejones that feed into our meeting place. Someone had begun throwing very small stones at us from a nearby rooftop.

The meeting refocused as much as it could with people holding private conversations, talking over each other and bringing up old feuds. People complained about the lack of security. They described their fear. The comandante said there were only 200 police for the entire city area of about 200,000. I thought he had exaggerated the number of police by at least a factor of two. He said he had grown up in our area, and he promised he would send a patrol twice a day. He said we should choose a centrally placed store where the patrol could sign a clipboard each time. People made skeptical remarks. The two policemen who had investigated the pebble thrower returned.

The comandante said he would give the steering committee a direct number to call, to get the fastest response. The following day, everyone in the neighborhood wanted the direct number—thereby defeating the idea of a special direct line for real emergencies. C., the recipient of the number, an educated archivist, misplaced the slip of paper with the number almost immediately. When people asked me for the number, I simply shrugged my shoulders and said I didn’t know who had it.

At least two of the drug selling families sent representatives. One of them, it was reported later, was secretly taking photos of people in the group, redirecting the camera a little while pretending to photograph a family member. D. and C. intend to address this activity in the next meeting, pointing out that such activity is not conducive to trust building in an open meeting.

In the meantime, there are other issues to raise—like using telephones to call the steering committee first, before calling the police when you think another mother or her boy has offended you at any time in the past, present or may, you’re afraid, in the future. Like waiting for your turn to speak—a skill or training that appears not to be taught in Mexican schools. Like parliamentary or democratic procedure in general. And then, more advanced, conflict resolution skills in general.

For some time, I have thought the way to bend the social despair expressed in the ugliness of graffiti would be to get the graffiti sprayers to paint murals instead. With this goal in mind, D. and I tried to get our two most alienated glue sniffers (and most at risk adolescents) to go to a demonstration of mural painting being held nearby on the occasion of Day of the Dead. We were unsuccessful. K. and M., whom we met on the callejón, were already deeply numbed from drugs they had taken and, fairly politely, brushed us off—barely able to meet our eyes.
Tomorrow is meeting four—perhaps just one more step in a fifty-year project.

Bright Land, Dark Land

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The Mexico I write about focuses “…on a Mexico where cataclysmic events erupt, where war, mob hysteria, sudden dark preoccupations, collapsing structures, and anarchy lie just below generosity, intelligence, humor, and stubborn patience” (from “About My Stories,” http://www.sterlingbennett.com).

Leaving town or city and walking through Mexico’s countryside leads you quickly into what Bonfil Batalla calls México profundo, Deep Mexico. It is like stepping back into the early nineteen hundreds, perhaps further back. The paths are narrow–the width of a horse or cow’s tread. You pass a man on foot, carrying a machete, the symbol of campesino work and manhood—also of poverty. You can tell the timetable of the traveler in front or in back of you by the freshness of the burro droppings. Sometimes a man on horseback overtakes you. There are no fences—at least not until you approach the banks of a stream, where the land is flat and the top soil deeper. Even these fences are mainly to keep livestock out of the milpas—the small-farmer corn plantings. Once in a while, on the hillsides around you, you hear a dog bark or a goat bleat. Then you look for the goatherd, who is there somewhere in shade and has probably spotted you long since and is watching you pass through his life and time.

There is one such a path, and I will not name it exactly. It leads from a mountain village to a busy road perhaps four miles away, dropping down, then flattening out beside the creek. The path is wild, and the dimensions you enter are very old and different from the world of cell phones and communication chatter. No roads cross your path. There are no telephone poles. No national park path signs telling where you’re going, how far it is, the name of your destination. You are on Deep Mexican time, and you are walking in Deep Mexican space. You are safe from muggers, garbage, narcos, and the pressures of high-density living. Your urban soul breathes a sigh of relief. The land is luminescent and ancient. Still, you remain alert. You know you are also passing through a world of matter-of-fact cruelty toward animals and intolerance of women’s independence—and something behind all the luminescence that is dark and that you don’t understand.

There is a village at the lower end of the trail and, just before this village, a hollow surrounded by pirules – pepper trees – and old stone foundations from an earlier time. This is the area where several members of the local symphony orchestra bought land, with the intention of building modest houses some time in the future.

My friend built a shelter right away, an essentially one-room house made of hewn stone and heavy mesquite beams. The purchase occurred according to real-estate law and was entered into the escrituras–the public record. But as he built, on a shoe string, men would appear—up to thirty of them at a time—and sit on the old walls and stare at him.

I am not sure how many times this happened. They were from the village at the other end of the four-mile trail. They were ejidatarios—communal owners of a section of land – ejido – given to landless farmer by the Lázaro Cárdenes government in 1934—in this case the piece of magical land that extended from the village four miles away, at the upper end of the trail, right up to my friend’s modest dwelling. The staring men came in their pickup trucks and cars over modern roads. In their minds, the ejido extended up to and over my friend’s small lot as well.

My friend continued to build—stone by stone. The musicians went to court, with a lawyer, to clear up once and for all the question of who owned what. The judge—even the governor of the state—agreed that the ejido did not include their property, and there were old maps to prove it.

There had been other developments to reassure my friend and the rest of the musicians. In 1991, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari managed to have his minions rewrite Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, breaking the ejidatarios’ communal hold on their lands. NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement—which the U.S. Congress passed largely without reading it), the World Bank and the U.S. Government required assurances that Mexican ejidatarios would not be able to invoke old claims and pull the rug out from under corporate privatizing. With this stroke of the pen, the ideals of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and peasant and indigenous land rights took a step backward, and ejidatarios became vulnerable to internal and external manipulation.

Time passed, and my friend began to sleep in his dwelling. He kept his musical instruments, books, and bicycles there. We gave him a bed so he could sleep up off the floor. He had metal doors he could lock. He lived at the edge of a modest settlement between him and the highway. His neighbors kept their eyes out for him and looked after his stone cabin.

Another man owned a large section of land close by; at least, he said he owned it, but may not have. He sold off many small parcels; the new lot owners put up shacks—maybe twenty of them—to stake their claim upon the land. The ejidatarios in the distant village did not like the new shacks. One Thursday, they came in their cars and trucks again. Five police trucks arrived with them, plus a large backhoe. The ejidatarios had documents; they showed them to the police. The police stood by while the backhoe smashed the shacks on the nearby parcel of land. The ejidatarios’ families were also present. They cooked food and ate and drank. They were camped near my friend’s modest dwelling. When the police left, the picnickers broke open the metal doors and, exchanging blows, fought over my friend’s possession—three trumpets, bikes, clothes, his serving camp stove, dishes, everything. Including the small metal bed we had given him, including the piece of 3/8 plywood I had shaped for the top of the little bed.

The big backhoe—I am quite sure I saw it working alongside the busy highway the next day—backed into position between the old foundation walls and pepper trees—pirules. It was a magnificent machine with a hydraulic front end loader and a hydraulic backhoe behind. Mexican workers on an adobe project next door—men who most likely do not read—entered my friend’s house and saved his books and music, but then felt threatened and left. Then the backhoe operator reached out with the backhoe arm and pulled my friend’s house apart—leaving a rubble of loose stone, two twisted metal doors and two mesquite beams too heavy for the looters to carry away.

A little later, my friend received a call on his cell phone. He was on his way home. One of the other musicians warned him not to go out to his house, they had bulldozed it, his life might be in danger. In Mexico, you listen to warnings like that. My friend drove out anyway, parked some distance away, put on a black shirt and crept through the dark, close enough in the darkness to see that his home and everything he owned had been destroyed.

The Barrio Organizes

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Yesterday at 6 PM, we had our first barrio (neighborhood) meeting to discuss how we could keep our glue-sniffing (now mota-gulping) local teenagers from slipping over into the hands of narco subgroups. Mota is marihuana. Its new availability already means the kids are branching out, bringing in the pesos. Making wider connections. The more surface agenda for the meeting was neighborhood security in general. That included keeping the Army out—because the Army is a force unto itself and is credited with ham-handed tactics which include shooting people or, in some cases, it is said, disappearing them—all under the umbrella of pursuing the struggle against the cartels.

D and C had prepared intensively. They produced printouts: announcements, contact numbers and the names of agencies for help with alcohol and drug addiction, for how to communicate with your teenager, even an announcement of a meeting taking place in an adjoining barrio in a few days, so that those interested could attend—also, so that people could see that our off efforts to take matters into our own hands was not unique.

On the half–sheet of plywood I carried out, D and C taped the following agenda–on red poster paper:

Ventajas (advantages, things were like about our barrio).
Expectativas (our dreams, hopes, wishes for the barrio).
Problemas y Recursos (existing problems and already existing resources for dealing with them).
Acuerdos (agreements we reach for action)
Fecha de la próxima reunión (date of the next meeting)

D made popcorn. There was a bottle of hot salsa, the way some people like their popcorn. We carried everything out. It was a little after 6 PM. I had no idea what might happen. Two women approached from above, coming down the steps on the callejón, the alley. I had images of whacked out teenage thugs breaking up the meeting. To be honest, I even had a brief image of gunfire. There have been deadly narco attacks on drug rehabilitation clinics up nearer the border. I wasn’t sure we knew what we were dealing with by organizing against, for the most part, unchecked small-scale crime and addiction to inhalants and alcohol. I wasn’t sure whether D and C were misjudging the situation. I wasn’t sure to what extent there would be resistance. Or threats. I knew enough about culture to know I didn’t understand what I was happening around me.

Two more people should up. On of them Manuelito, D’s reading student, the boy no one washes. He has read almost every one of the thirty or so books D has accumulated. The last one was a book on how to play chess. I told him I would play with him sometime in the future. In the meantime, I pump up the younger boys’ ragged soccer balls. That is my work with the next generation as they prepare to run the drug gauntlet only a few years from now.

Manuelito stayed for the whole meeting. He was the only child who was actually participating. D had brought crayons and extra paper for children to draw or write their dreams (expectativas). He lay down on the sidewalk right away and began to draw.

In the end, there were something like thirty-five people. Under the category Existing Positive Things about the Barrio, people mentioned the beauty of the city, the presence of so many concerned neighbors, and the many children who played quite peacefully in our midst.

For Dreams, people wanted more religious holidays, the graffiti painted away, the nuisance vacant lot sealed off, more places for children to play, more police vigilance, more security in general, waste paper baskets for the waste created by snacks and soft drinks people consumed—in general, an end to the ugliness created by people who didn’t care.

The Problems, of course, had to do with the drug consumption, sniffing inhalants, the resulting violent and disrespectful behavior and the growing lack of security for everyone after sunset. Two of the mothers of problem kids were present. I took them small paper plates of popcorn. I notice one of them put hers aside. I had not consciously realized it before, but she had long since lost the teeth to eat it with. They had come, I suppose, to monitor our actions, to be on the lookout for any infringement on their sons’ right to sell mota–marijuana, or inhalants.

More people came–many I had never really seen before. They complained about trash being dumped in other nearby vacant lots. About mugger types ambling past their homes, keeping them from going out at night. What to do about the problems? Go to the Presidencia and get them to seal off the vacant lots. D and C emphasized that no one wanted to blame the juveniles or have them go to jail; that they should finish get an education and find jobs and do well earning a living. That it made no sense to call the police when you saw a drugged out kid who was being disrespectful, even threatening. That the concerned citizens should call the mothers instead.

In the end, we agreed to go to the Presidencia. We agreed to bring in experts on community education. We agreed to get the vacant lot owner to pay attention to the lot and seal it off so the kids couldn’t sell drugs there or get zonked on paint thinner, thereby destroying their brains at the same time.

The woman who had earlier told D and C she had been instructed not to reveal the name and information of the lot owner—the aunt or mother of one of the most problematic adolescents—volunteered to find out who owned the lot. C said she would write a solicitud (formal letter of request for information regarding the ownership of the lot. I had been to the Presidencia three times asking for help with the abandoned lot. With complete disinterest, the authorities told me I had to write a formal solicitud. That would be a written request for the information I had just asked for. Since I can’t write the tortured Byzantine language of Mexican bureaucracy, C wrote the letter. I’m not even sure I could write such a letter in English. I do not expect the aunt or mother of the problem kid to follow through. I do not expect the city to enjoin anyone to do anything about the lot. I am not even really sure the lot rightfully belongs to anyone, since the lot “owner” was squatting on it in the first place and has reportedly since died. (There is a legal path to ownership by which you build a fence around the land you’re claiming, post your name, and hang on to it for ten years.) In the meantime, the man’s widow may or may not have been “hanging onto the lot” in a way acceptable to the disinterested city bureaucracy. Hence, a property in limbo.

At one point, a couple of the local pre-hooligan lads crossed through the meeting, averting their gaze with studied non-interest—while everyone’s eyes followed them through. Younger children came and bought candy at the tiny store fifteen steps from out door. Some sat on the steps with the relatives. An hour and a half had passed. The participants agreed to meet again in two weeks. Some stayed behind to chat. The whole thing had come off as a kind of morality play with everyone playing a role. C and D were the organizers, G was the note taker at the paper on the sheet of plywood. The drug dealers’ mothers and aunts played the role of concerned good citizens looking out for their children’s rights. Most everyone else was an indignant citizen who, without any help from the city government, was trying to figure out how to gain control over the gone-to-hell neighborhood. I had played the role of popcorn server and alien gringo, with little noticeable social credit, in spite of all my afternoons of re-inflating the younger boys’ cheap, beat-up, half-dead, soccer balls. Manuelito, the boy no one washes—on the paper laid out for children to write their expectativas, their dreams—had written “No drogas,” no drugs! then a picture of a bottle of beer that said “Corona” and finally “…hay que vivir guntos (he meant juntos),” we have to live together (in peace). Mother Teresa allegedly wrote: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Mother Teresa and Manuelito.

A much larger crowed showed up at the community meeting the in the nearby Plaza Mexiamora. A city official attended but–we were told–looked away and chatted with someone else whenever a citizen addressed him during the meeting. At one point, three of the local trouble–makers strutted through. The crowd, angry and hostile, surrounded them. One of the punks, it is said, began to cry. Two policemen who stood nearby did not engage with either the citizens or the punks—who are also citizens but just don’t know it; and with luck will someday become leaders in their barrio.

Army in the Alley

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Dianne comes into the bedroom. “There are soldiers in the callejón, the alley,” she says. “At least people wearing helmets.” I go up on the azotéa, the roof, so I can look down on the alley, which runs right by our front door and along the upper edge of the house. I see police with helmets—and dogs. Mexicans are afraid of dogs. This is a new weapon for the police. The police have new uniforms, look well-equipped. I look down the alley, toward the Old City center. All of it is old city. I see more police. They are acting like soldiers, taking cover in doorways. I look farther down. There are other figures. They are harder to discern. For some reason, Army olive green at night makes them blend in with the things around them. These men have Army helmets on and the rest of the battle dress. They hold assault rifles in ready-to-fire stances. I mean, they point them at a few passers-by, one of them holding his hands in the air. The soldiers have the most powerful flashlights I have every seen. They spot me on the roof top and illuminate me. I wave, to show I’m friendly. The lights stay on me, then move away. From my position, I can see the “enemy” climbing over a wall—the gang banger, paint thinner-sniffing seventeen-year old’s climbing over a wall bordering a dead end alley where the Army has trapped them. Three of them jump down and run uphill through the overgrown empty lot I’m looking down on. The Army has no idea the lads have slipped the noose. The flashlights land on me again. I point in the direction the “enemy” is escaping. I think better of it. I can be seen as collaborating. The police run back up past our house in pursuit. Then the Army. They search the vacant lot. They come up empty handed. We go to bed. At three a.m. I hear the gang bangers in front of the front door again. They are whistling signals to gather in their compañeros. They are winding up for another go at scaring the neighborhood. I call 066, get an almost immediate response. The woman at the other end is professional and clear. She wants to know how many gang bangers. I exaggerate a little: six or eight, I say. “A patrol will be right there.” I lie in bed listening. The glue-sniffing whistlers seem to have left. Later, I think I hear the quick tread of soft-soled boots on the steps of the callejón.

The Resistance of Chiles

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I bring you good news. Essential, deep Mexico is alive and well—I will get to that in a moment—even though the country has once again certified a new president who did not win on a level or even honest playing field.

The opposition, the Movimiento Progresivo (the Progressive Movement), calls it an imposition. Enrique Peña Nieto is now new President of México. But this is the Mexico known by some as méxico imaginario. That is a reference to Bonfil’s book México Profundo, where he contrasts the two Mexicos: the first, méxico profundo (Deep Mexico); the second, méxico imaginario (Imaginary Mexico).

What is the difference between these two Mexicos?

In Imaginary Mexico, modern freeways connect major cities, with their Costcos and Radio Shacks. But beside the highways–beyond the shopping centers, the advanced health centers, the international banks, the tourist hotels and the beaches–across the mountains, covering the entire country there is a parallel world (méxico profundo) of human, horse and burro paths, still used, which connect villages, milpas (corn patches), memory, hunger, love, loss, and war.

This is the deep indigenous landscape of the Mexican psyche from which comes the vocabulary of poetry, song, food, folk medicine, and art. It is a landscape as essential to Mexicans as the forests of New England were to the Transcendentalists. It is a landscape that is in danger of becoming extinct because of modern institutions both legal and illegal.

Big media, government, business monopolies, the Church, and the government institutions that serve these (in this case, the Federal Election Institute and the Federal Electoral Court) point away from deep landscape, while using its customs and images for their own narratives.

The state does not invest in its human capital. The “elected” leaders pass laws that allow the wealthy to offshore their capital gains and practice tax avoidance. Trade agreements like NAFTA allow lucrative grain dumping on the Mexican market. Corn farmers give up and move to urban poverty. Rural and urban youth turn to glue sniffing or to the drug cartels, or cross the border at great risk, because here there are few jobs and severely limited openings in publicly financed education.

When election time comes, huge amounts of laundered money finance the ruling elite–to keep the chusma aturdida (the unruly mob) at bay. The poor and uninformed sell their votes for food or household items and follow the misinformation disseminated by the two big television monopolies.
These two Mexicos–deep culture and modernizing culture–and the tensions that build between them form the background tectonic rumble behind everything that happens in Mexico.

But Deep Mexico carries on, as if invulnerable to the machinations of dictatorship, autocracy, and monopoly. How do I know this? Because I walked to the Mercado Hidalgo today to buy chiles. I stood before piles of chiles –fragrant pequín, de árbol, guajillo, habanero, mulato, ancho, cascabel, pasilla, tepín, puya, chipotle, mulato, and manzana (fresh cascabel). All these weren’t there, but they looked like the ones I saw. A handsome stout woman with only one front tooth explained the names of the ones she had (I did not retain the names, some were not familiar) and what they were used for, how hot, how to prepare them, their flavors, and the ones she preferred for the blond easy-to-cook Peruviano bean and the black slow-cooking black bean, for this rich mole and that. I was looking for chile de árbol but ended up buying five different kinds. She made little packages of the different types, then put those in a large plastic bag. I paid her 38 pesos ($2.50). I put the chiles in my small LLBean backpack, beside my three packs of Radio Shack AAA batteries. And then I walked back to the center and climbed the 203 steps to my house.

The Mexican War Chronicles

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Friends question my use of the word “war” to describe what is happening in Mexico. It’s okay to use the word as in “the war on drugs.” That would be “war” as metaphor. But then you would have to ask, the Black Hawk helicopters which the US have given Mexico–some twenty-five in all–with their rockets and gatling guns and machine guns, are they metaphorical or are they real?” And if they are real and, at the same time, the tools of war, and they are deployed against the narco paramilitaries, aren’t we talking about real war?

~ Friday, August 25, 2012, coordinated for about 2:30 PM, there were twenty five (in another place in the same paper, same day: twenty-two) different highway blockades, which included burning cars, buses, and trucks in the Mexican states of Jalisco and Colima.

Unnamed sources said Federal Police had captured a narco-leader in Tonaya, during which episode seven alleged gunmen and three policemen were wounded (same edition, same day: the version was that the seven narco-gunmen were killed). The Government had employed five Black Hawk helicopters and a transport helicopter to move in what I suppose were swat team members and or troops. The troops are usually Mexican Marines, since they–it is said–are the least corrupt of the armed forces.

The blow back (in the style Monterey, Mexico has experienced for some time) came quickly in the metropolitan areas of Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta and, later, in the state of Colima (which lies roughly between Guadalajara and the Pacific Coast).

Blockaders sealed off the entrances to Guadalajara and a major road in the state of Colima, according to León/Guanajuato’s newspaper “AM,” “in order to inhibit the movement of federal police and military.” There were seven blockades in Guadalajara and fifteen more in the “interior” of the state of Jalisco.

When I hear that something is “in retaliation” for something, I have to think there is some kind of war in progress. Certainly, the blockades–pulling people out of their cars and igniting the cars–are terrorist in name: the point is to un-nerve the population. But it is also to answer the power of the central government with its Black Hawk helicopters. In other words, a military act evokes a military response, and the form of the response is guerrilla warfare.

As to how it affects me, a resident of Mexico, now I have to think extra hard about whether I want to make the seven and a half hour drive from Guanajuato through Guadalajara and down over the mountain road through Compostela to Sayulita (where I surf), knowing I can be stopped at any point and lose my car and everything in it, or worse.

So in that regard–unnerving the citizenry–narco-terrorism/guerrilla response is very effective, whereas the Government’s military action seems clumsy and counter-productive because it just makes things worse.

But the Mexican 99% are under attack by more than one kind of terrorism, one can argue.

NAFTA permits subsidized U.S. corporations to dump corn (much of it GMO, as in killer seeds which can not be saved and used by campesinos to replant) on the Mexican market. This drives campesinos off their land–they cannot compete–and into the cities where there is no work for them, and no meaning, or into the arms of the narcos.

Some thirty percent of youth have neither jobs nor educational opportunities. These are called “nimis.” Ni trabajo, ni educación. Neither work, nor education. They too can fall into the arms of the narcos, or end up sniffing glue and commit street crime in the cities, until they either die or fall in with more sophisticated criminals–and then die, or end up in prison.

Going north is hardly an option when the youth have to face robbery and murder, riding the roofs of freight trains north–often for weeks–and where the chance of entering the U.S. is small; where they are treated like criminals if they get through. If they get through, they are treated like second class citizens and are vulnerable to all kinds of extortion and blackmail.

The prices are of eggs, beans, avocados, tortillas, chicken, and milk have shot up and are quickly becoming out of range for the vast pool of the poor.

Capital flees off-shore; there is massive tax evasion. The 1% are not over-burdened by feelings of social responsibility, as in doing anything about all of the above.

The political leaders in the U.S. aren’t going to legalize drugs or nudge their Mexican counterparts toward meaningful social and political action.

So Mexicans–the 99% (60% of those are poor)–are in a pickle. To put it mildly.

~ Saturday, August 26, 2012 ~ Civil War?

A little research (YouTube “Mexico’s Black Hawk helicopters”) shows that Mexico already has about 25 UH-60L and UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters. A Memorandum of Understanding exists between Sikorsky Aircraft and Aeroservicios Especializados (ASESA) to “jointly explore assembly and service opportunities in support of Black Hawk helicopters.” Black Hawks were operational and present during the confrontation between narco fighters and government forces (including Federal Police) in Apatzingán last week, west of the Morelia–Lázaro Cárdenas route, in the state of Michoacán. Armed men set up various roadblocks. They stopped a bus and a trailer truck and firebombed them. Another reliable source said it was twelve vehicles in all. The most recent source talks about three different events (some put the figure much, much higher), all of the shootouts being with the Familia Michoacana, a group which, in my opinion, is half narco and half political, as in challenging the government for power. In one account, when the Army arrived gunmen fired on them from areas above the highway. (Read “Jorge and the Santa Muerte” at http://www.sterlingbennett.com to get a feel for the social pathology at play.) Other sources say it is unknown who the shooters were. The narcos have morphed into what I would call para-military; besides enforcing the drug routes, they hold territory and regional power. Of course they fade away when the government applies military power, but when the government leaves and the real situational power returns to control the area. In my opinion, the Black Hawk helicopters are evidence that the “drug war” is becoming a real war. Since all sides seem to be from the same country, it may not be unreasonable to refer to the events as events in a civil war.

On Friday the 24th of August, an event occurred on a road southwest of Mexico City, at Tres Marías, near Xalatlaco, which may indicate an escalation in U.S. military involvement in Mexico. A Mexican Marine officer and two U.S. officials were driving in a heavily armored black SUV with U.S. diplomatic plates. They were ambushed and then pursued by some eighteen Mexican Federal Police–some of whom (some say all) were dressed in civilian clothes. The pursued officials telephoned for help. Their car came to a halt, riddled and disabled. The eighteen shooters approached the car firing as they came–execution-style, I would think. Six uniformed federal police arrived, one of them shouted out a code (clave), and stopped the original shooters but not before the latter had riddled the car and wounded the two U.S. officials.

The officials, it has been revealed since, were CIA agents on their way to a government (Navy) firing range to teach weapons handling and marksmanship. The CIA you will know, if you’ve been watching their widespread hunt/kill special forces operations in Afghanistan, are also now military, and these two “officials” may be part of the militarization of the ongoing struggle in Mexico. As Richard Grabman points out in The Mex Files (Google), “The two most recent U.S. Ambassadors here — Carlos Pascual and Anthony Wayne — were widely touted for having Afghanistan experience.” So now we have weapons flowing down from the North through unregulated guns sales to straw men, as well as weapons systems (Black Hawks and CIA trainers) also sent south under the Plan Mérida to combat those who receive the smuggled weapons.

I read recently that U.S. weapons sales had risen something like 27% over the year before. Good for U.S. weapons sales, bad for Mexico.

One wonders whether the pursuing Federal Police, some five cars in all, on instructions from a cartel (or the Mexican Government?) were targeting the CIA agents. Twelve of the attackers were arrested and are being held in Mexico City–although there were eighteen. Their lawyers are saying the defendants thought they were dealing with a stolen car (with diplomatic plates) that they thought might be involved in a kidnapping incident which had just occurred in the area (Milenio reports). They also say the US CIA driver had no permission to be in the U.S., only a visa from or to Afghanistan (a doubtful claim, in my snap judgment); that the attacked car has been “disappeared;” and that the two CIA have left the country without giving required evidence.

Here’s how I see it now (until the sequel continues): the police may have thought they were pursuing a stolen car, or they were corrupt and had orders to kill the agents; a couple CIA characters (one was in his 49, one 50) got exposed, even though this kind of training has been going on for years–but maybe not by CIA; this embarrasses everyone because historically Mexico (and all of Latin America) is sensitive about US interference; the U.S. is concerned about instability south of their border; Plan Mérida goes ahead with more Black Hawks (and their support), more CIA or other maybe private agents; there is continuing interest in drones (they say Calderón has already given permission for unarmed drone flights); continuing pressure by US weapons manufacturers to sell weapons, hence Black Hawks and other sophisticated, expensive equipment–a Devil’s gift–which the US tax payers pay for.

Ode to Joy, Ode to Sorrow

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Something really wonderful happened in Mexico today (Saturday, August 11, 2012). I heard choruses of shouts coming from across the plaza. Café owners typically place television sets outside so guests can watch important soccer matches. Non-guests, passers-by, assemble on the sidewalk under the branches of the Indian Laurels to look on, some on benches, some standing. Mexico was winning 2 – 0 against Brazil for the Olympic gold medal–something nearly beyond belief because, in the minds of many Mexicans, their country is condemned to lifelong disappointment.

I went over to my favorite café in the Plaza Baratillo. They were showing the game inside. I was welcomed to sit with strangers. There was just enough time to see the final scene of the drama. Mexico was exhausted, Brazil–the soccer giants of South America–was angry.

Mexico had been outplaying them, but now the Brazilians were going to put an end to the farce. They seemed unstoppable–one of them was called Hulk. They scored easily in the three-minute overtime. They attacked again and missed a header that should have gone in.

I could feel the gloom gathering in me. Were we going to see it all slip away? Was Mexico to be fate’s stepchild once again? But the Brazilians had rallied too late. The referee blew the final whistle, and Mexico had won the Olympic gold in soccer. Everyone in the café cheered, including me–and the announcer held a manic fifteen-minute soliloquy on the unbelievable glory of it all.

All of Mexico must have been cheering that something so wonderful had happened and that it had happened at a time when Mexicans needed it most. The team’s trainer Luis Fernando Tena, interviewed on the field minutes afterward, said, “This comes around once in a lifetime, it’s for Mexico, for its people, to relieve them a little of the troubles we have and to give them, at least for a while, rest and relief.”

Yet I know from young people here that not everyone could feel the relief. They were still too stunned by the July 1st presidential election, which they considered fraudulent, on a scale Americans may not be able to grasp.

And the rest of it–the barrels full of body parts, the SUVs full of corpses with signs of torture, the continuing and unresolved attacks against women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and other places–the attacks against journalists.

Mexico has the largest number of assassinated journalist of any country in the world. Activists like Lydia Cacho (http://www.lydiacacho.net/english/), whose 2004 book “Los Demonios del Edén” exposed pedophiles and sex traffickers, has recently had to flee the country because of continuing death threats against her.

The threats are said to have started after the publication of seven pages excerpted from Olga Wornat’s recent book “Felipe el Oscuro” (Felipe the Dark One)–a reference to Felipe Calderón, current president of Mexico–published in Mexico’s Playboy Magazine. The publisher of the magazine Garbiel Bauducco, along with Lydia Cacho, also received death threats. The two women have had to leave the country. In her book, Wornat describes the government of Calderón as “six years marked by death, poverty and social disintegration.”

Then there is also the suspected July 1st election fraud and manipulation by the PRI old boys’ club that rules Mexico–huge amounts of off-shore money (an estimated 417 billion dollars, a portion of it more than likely narco-generated) laundered through upstanding Mexican and U.S. banks for massive vote buying–moneys hidden from taxes that could be used to stimulate an economy where there is so much hunger, unemployment, lack of affordable education. The same club enlisted the two TV monopolies as its private electoral campaign propaganda branch. The electoral commission and judicial electoral court enable the charade and are institutionally incapable of guiding a truly fair election.

In too many other areas, the country is losing. For example, the day before Mexico won the gold, there were coordinated fire bombings at gas stations in or around something like eight cities my state of Guanajuato (Guanajuato capital, San Miguel de Allende, Salamanca, Salvatierra, Yuriria, Moroleón, Uriangato, Celaya).

In most cases, the attacks were accompanied by robberies of the attendants and the customers who were having their tanks filled. The term firebombing was used loosely it seems. In many case, it consisted of using the pump to dose the stolen car the attackers had arrived in, or the customers’ cars, and then igniting them. The attack in Guanajuato occurred in the tunnel between La Plaza Los Ángelos and El Jardin de la Union, and three cars were set on fire. Drivers and passengers remained untouched.

Coordinated attacks like this spate of car fire bombings usually carry a political message. But unless the armed groups say, no one really knows what the message is. A few weeks ago, a group attacked four PepsiCo-Sabritas Company installations and burned forty trucks. The company makes and delivers various kinds of delicious deep fried chip-like things that are bad for you. One could make the argument the arsonists were taking on a monopoly to extort protection money. But no one seems to really know–or want to say. One rather implausible rumor circulating is that the Government was using Sabritas deliverymen as spies against the drug cartels.

As for the gas station attacks, the local press says it was revenge because of the shoot-out between the Army and narcos in Apatzingán, in the state south of us (Michoacán) the day before Mexico won the Olympic gold. Armed men set up various roadblocks. They stopped a bus and a trailer truck and firebombed them. Another reliable source said it was twelve vehicles in all. The most recent source talks about three different events, all of them shootouts with the Familia Michoacana, group which, in my opinion, is half narco and half political, as in challenging the government for power. In one account, when the Army arrived, gunmen fired on them from areas above the highway. (Read “Jorge and the Santa Muerte” at http://www.sterlingbennett.com to get a feel for the social pathology at play.) Other sources say it is unknown ho the shooters were.

Apatzingán is in the area called the tierra caliente, the hot country, where there has always been trouble as long as anyone can remember. As in Chiapas, the Army has permanent bases just to keep the lid on things having to do with political rebellion, narcos, and lawlessness in general.

If you look at a map, there appears to be some sense to the attacks against the gasoline stations. If you draw a line through the cities you have, roughly, an oblong running north and south that intersects the major highway between Mexico City and Guadalajara. That route continues all the way to the border at Nogales (Tucson). Another important highway runs north and south between the Pacific port Lázaro Cárdenas, through Morelia, and on north through Zacatecas to Ciudad Juárez (El Paso). A third route runs north and south from the major industrial city Querétero through San Luis Potosí (recently under attack by armed groups) through Monterey to the border at Nuevo Laredo (Laredo, San Antonio). Those would be three important routes for transporting narcotics–or goods and services. An armed enclave centered in that oblong could cut Mexico in half, if it comes to that. Apatzingán lies just to the west of Nueva Italia on the Lázaro Cárdenas (Pacific Coast)–Laredo, Texas route. For an overview of the wild goings on there, Google “Apatzingán tiroteos” (“tiroteos,” as in shoot-outs).

As for the fire bombings, I suspect there may be another agenda, as well. Perhaps it is to announce that the State of Guanajuato is no longer violence free—which also makes limited sense since it was mainly just the capital (Guanajuato) and San Miguel de Allende that were relatively free of violence. Local lore has it that the calm in those two cities was because the sons and daughters of the narcos attend the state University of Guanajuato, while their wealthy parents live in Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende. Perhaps a dissident group in one of the cartels is announcing that the sanctuary is no longer a sanctuary.

The chaos in Mexico seems widespread and, on its face, incomprehensible. But the end of May, 2012 the Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos (The Permanent Peoples’ Court), held a meeting titled “Libre Comercio, violencia, impunidad (Free Trade, Violence, and Impunity,” in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso, Texas. At the meeting, participants examined what they called the systematic use of social, economic, and political chaos to further the interests of the few.

Something like: while the chickens fight, the foxes steal the eggs. They cited the use of the public instruments (the power and authority of the Mexican Government–judicial, economic, political) to benefit narrow private interests (the old boys’ club), to the devastating detriment of the Common Good that the government should be protecting. Myself, I’m not so sure it’s an intentional old boys’ modus operandi. I would say it is more the consequence of not being able or wanting to work together with the rest of society.

An example would be the peasant struggle in Cherán, Michoacán, where the people enjoy none of the legal protections of the Mexican Government. They are Purépecha Indians who are organizing (with AK47s) against organized crime-supported loggers (with AK47s) before the passivity and corruption of government and police. The struggle has already found its way into song. A friend supplied me with source. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbhwt4m8E1E

Another cause of the social and economic chaos would be the un-remediated enforcement of taxation. During the Calderón administration there was a 48% increase of in tax avoidance-refusal. The in-country tax avoidance as of June 2012 was almost 800 billion pesos (roughly 62 billion dollars)–an incredible sum that could be used for training a competent and reliable police, as well as improving education.

On the same day Mexico won the gold in soccer, there was a substantial hike in the price of gasoline and diesel. The incidents of stealing gas from Pemex’s pipelines are increasingly alarming. As I write this, there is one more fire burning: a refinery in the state of Tamaulipas, in the northeastern part of the country. The reported cause of fire is “lightening”–more than likely a government statement to cover up the real reason. To me it seems unlikely that such installations are not fully equipped with lightening rods. Maybe you have heard of lightening striking and igniting refineries. I haven’t.

As I write, a caravan of Mexican victims of violence, intellectuals, activists, and artists has crossed the border into the U.S. with a message for U.S. citizens and government: Stop the so-called drug war, because it is killing us. Stop the flow of your weapons into our country, because they’re killing us. Stop treating our border-crossing citizens as criminals; they are coming because they are victims of NAFTA and the economic policies of the 1%, in your country and in Mexico. Their leader is Javier Sicilia, whose son, along with six other youths, was gunned down by organized crime March 28, 2011 in Temico, in the state of Morelos.

They crossed the border at roughly the same time Mexico won the Olympic gold in soccer against Brazil. The caravan is asking the U.S. to work together with Mexico to stop the violence. The Mexican soccer team demonstrated what could happen when people worked together in a framework of respected rules under the eyes of a reliable authority–the referee. Local newspapers are beginning to say it. The youths’ cooperation–they beat Brazil because of it–puts us to shame. And they are right. All the players in Mexican society tend to have only their own interests in mind. The modus vivendi is “He did it, not me.”

Midfielder Jorge Enríquez exclaimed, “Today Mexico can look an rival in the eyes and tell the world that we are here, that we made it work and that we have players with a lot of quality to take on all with talent.”

They were the metaphor for what Mexico could be like.

Here in Guanajuato, on the day of the victory, I saw three boys in the back of a pickup truck, leaning over the cab, holding Mexican flags. They were he age of the muggers that plague most cities in Mexico, but these youths were beaming their pride at being Mexican. And as a friend of mine would say in California, “There you have it.” If the Mexican society and government were organized the same way as the Mexican soccer team, it might be a society that could reject corruption and violence–and embrace working together.

Who’s Who in Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Here in Mexico, you can pretty much tell who’s who just by looking at them. There are those who would scoff at such a claim. But I will tell you why I take this position and how it helps me survive.

There is still less cultural homogenization here than in the North, I would say; and the economic and class distinctions are clearer. For example, I can pretty much tell by looking who is an abañil (mason), who is a working ayudante (mason’s helper), an active estudiante (student), a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper’s helper, a citizen performing a tramite (a bureaucratic chore), or a tourist. In short, I believe I can make a pretty good calculation as to who someone is by evidence of the activity they are performing, whether they are carrying a tool, a backpack or some other object; and this narrows things down considerably–to the people who require more scrutiny. Alas, this works in reverse as well, when people look at me.

There is the anomaly, as well. For example, when the Pope visited recently, several tall athletic-looking Clark Kents–too neatly dressed, but not like businessmen or officials, and light skinned (which does not disqualify them as Mexicans)–strolled around in the main plaza, as if they were simply a few more tourists, with clean triangularly shaped backpacks just the right for a Koch submachine gun. They were the type that senses when you’re looking at them with a little too much curiosity, even at a distance–in which case their eyes meet yours.

I supopse they were either the Swiss Guards (Vatican) here to protect the Pope, or the Mexican Secret Service (the Estado Mayor Presidencial) here to protect President of Mexico, who was going to be in town to meet with the Pope and, like him, would be driving through the narrow streets that lend themselves so well to ambush.

There are other people who stand out because they do not look like locals. I am talking about burly rough looking men who do too much watching, who don’t seem to know where to stand, and who study people as they go by–including me–and whom no one ever greets. They also notice if your eyes are on them. They are rare, but in this age of organized crime (drug cartels and their killers) and disorganized crime (extortionists and muggers) one pays attention and one asks oneself: What are these fellows doing here in my peaceful little plaza where I buy fresh fruit juice and gorditas (thick tortillas filled with delicious things) and where I slip into my favorite student café–where everyone knows me–to write.

I weave through the callejones (alleys) of my little colonial city. I climb the 203 stairs to my house. I descend again to the old city center five minutes below. I take different routes, different callejones and stairs, depending what I decide is probably the most secure route for that day. It is a sad but very real thing and probably the way the majority live in this world of increasing scarcity. All the while I watch for young men around fifteen or sixteen (the range is more like from twelve to thirty) who may recognize me as prey, as target of opportunity.

A short while ago, we drove the hour and twenty minutes to San Miguel de Allende to pick up mail and do some shopping. After washing down one and one half brownies at Via Orgánica with a cappuccino descafeinado, I walked over to the Artesanias lane running along the creek east from calle Hildago. I bought a couple of simple colored glass bead bracelets, one for my granddaughter, and one for her mother. Then I bought black bead rings for my two daughters-in-law for an upcoming family reunion in Wisconsin.

When I had concluded this last transaction, I noticed three young men, fifteen to sixteen, walking toward me, coming from the direction I had come, moving with the familiar gangbanger strut, throwing one shoulder forward, then the other. They did not meet my gaze as they passed, though I was studying them.

I went to another booth to peruse more bead rings. Turning my head and looking right, I could see that the three boys had stopped and sat down on either side of the alley, just where the shops ended. Their attention was on me in a poorly disguised manner. They fit the mugger category even more obviously than the young man who assaulted my love and me close to our garden gate some months back.

I smelled trouble. I asked the shop lady whether the boys were known to be dangerous. She gave me a hostile, disinterested look. She did not bother to lean her head out to see whom I was talking about. Why, I don’t know. There could be several explanations, none of them too encouraging–for example, all three of them were her sons.

I placed my hand on my pepper spray. I picked out the young man sitting on the ground on the left. I had already identified him as leader. He was looking up at me as I approached. I held my pepper spray in my right hand, the palm pointing backwards, the front of my hand hiding the weapon. I switched the safety position to the spray position.

I have tried to think how to describe the look on his face–a mixture of defiance, disdain and rage. Young sniffers of glue, paint thinner and Magic Marker™ are not subtle. He more than gave himself away. His glowering intensified as I approached. He made no move to get up. I glowered back at him and held his gaze. Why I continued between their Scylla and Charybdis, I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps because there is little clear thinking going on while being male and running on a mixture of adrenalin, testosterone, and fear. I had no plan.

When you’re stalked, there really is no direction that seems safer than another. I continued into the empty part of the alley. It extended about eighty feet and then became stairs. I had no idea what was at the top of the stairs nor whether there would be people and safety at the top. There was only one shop in that otherwise remote section of the alley. I made for the shop. I could see in my peripheral vision they were not right behind me. Nothing in the shop interested me, and I came back out. They had started my way. I think they had expected me to continue toward the stairs. I walked back toward them instead. I still had the pepper spray in the spray (fire) position, so all I would have to do was point and depress the lever.

I think they had timed their move to catch me on the stairs, which was the very same maneuver the mugger used some time ago when we were assaulted at knife point (the incident is described in “The Knives of Mexico” at http://www.sterlingbennett.com) close to our own garden gate. On stairs, I think they know, it is harder for the prey to defend or run.

They passed about eight feet away–all three looking straight ahead as if I had somehow disappeared. I swung my head to see if they were turning around. I decided they were not going to reach me before I got back to the shops. I kept on, looking back obliquely. I did not see them.

When you are being hunted, you consider all possible variations of the original danger, and I wondered whether they were running through a side passage so they could appear in front of me at some point along my retreat. I reached the end of the alley and climbed a short flight of stairs and was now beside a busy intersection. I turned frequently to see if they were following. They were not. Perhaps they had decided to seek an easier mark. A friend asked, did I not feel some measure of guilt that the boys had given up on me and gone to look for some other more unwary prey.

It is not pleasant being stalked. It is my second time while living in Mexico. The first stalkers were two low level thugs in Guadalajara–the dominant one with a scar across one eye–who followed us into a Starbucks. Our joint undiscussed reaction had been to walk right up to Scarface, put our noses about a foot from his and stare him in his bad eye with an unspoken, angry and defiant look of “We’re on to you.”

In that moment, my love had said, “There’s a bus outside” and in classic Guy Noir style we shot through Starbuck’s entrance door and ran down the steps and up to the bus—at least thirty years old, if not fifty—which was waiting at a red light. We banged on the dilapidated door, the driver opened it, and the blessed rattletrap hurled us ten blocks down into the center of the city and close to our hotel. To safety.

I imagine the percentage of muggers in my small city is very small. It is not as if I am the only potential target. Most of those mugged are Mexicans, and most of these, students. But this is the world I live in. Poor, disaffected youth self-medicate themselves—because of dysfunctional families and the lack of opportunities. The glue, paint thinner, and Magic Marker™ make them aggressive and crazy. Under the right circumstances, I will be an occasional victim—unless I can tell who’s who and take the appropriate evasive action. It is nothing personal. As my beloved older brother would say, “It is what it is.”

An Open Letter to the Disappointed Youth of Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

To the disappointed youth of Mexico, I would say this: Do not be too discouraged. The election of Miguel Ángel Mancera in Mexico City indicates the possibility of advance toward democratic principles—even though much of the rest of the country–like a bird confused by the TV monopolies’ hissed reassurances–appears to have hopped straight into the snake’s mouth.

And who is this snake? That is a good question. I think of the Stalinists–secret police (NKVD and GPU) and other kinds of trained forces–that poured into Spain in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. They did not really come to support a socialist democratic revolution (POUM). Under the pretense of fighting fascism (Franco), they came to execute the leaders of the POUM and to stifle efforts toward land reform and workers’ rights.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is certainly institutional, and it is supported by an ideology–but one that is more counter-revolutionary than revolutionary. In that way, they are like much of the Church. In the face of illiteracy and ignorance, they look the other way.

Instead, the job of the PRI is to support a top-down patronage culture, where the spoils (the public coffers) are shared among them as deserved booty. The concept of the public good attracts minimal attention. They feel no obligation to institute an excellent public education, public libraries, a strong and protected judiciary, the rule of law, nor a commitment to job creation, with a living wage. (These sound like some of the deficiencies of another country I know north of the border.)

The PRI, at the top, is part of a vast club with interlocking arrangements, the main agreement among members being that they will harvest the riches of the country, non-members will not. This club admits a variety of cousins: drug cartels, the conservative wing of the Church, predatory banking and various all-powerful monopolies. One could argue that the cartels’ structure and goals have become increasingly indistinguishable from those of government.

As my friend says, there is a little PRI person inside each of us. By which he means, I think, in one way or another we all join the patronage club and take our payoffs. We will all go along, we say. That’s the way it is, we say. Maybe the leaders–in spite of their graft, impunity and corruption—will take care of things after all. Please keep the peace, be reasonable, work it out, keep bandits off the freeways, give us a little democracy, things will improve, it’s alright as long as the violence doesn’t touch us.

Going along with the PRI (and the other parties as variations of the PRI) means, as another friend says, recognizing our learned helplessness in the face of the social and political disfunction that surrounds us: the schools, the infrastructure, the police, the lack of the rule of law, the failure to create jobs–and the fear. We live with the fear that is everywhere, on the surface, below the surface. You know the images. I don’t need to describe them.

We accept the feudal arrangement. Why else would we accept living in a city where the local newspapers do not have a letters section similar to that of La Jornada or The New York Times? There is also a little PRI in the newspaper editors. It does not occur to them that there should be a public forum, a place where citizens can comment on the social and political functioning of the city–without censorship; and most importantly, without the reaction of their indifference.

A public letter section is a daily section in the newspaper where citizens can bring attention to those who are failing in their social responsibility. Where they can ask: Why are there no city campaigns that explain the deeply anti-social nature of graffiti? Why does so little learning go on in the public schools and even the university? Why are there children in the streets selling chicles (cliclets)? Why do oversized buses still grind and roar through the narrow streets? Why do the streets belong to the petty gangsters and muggers after dark? Why is there no work? Why are there so few European-style city playgrounds for children? Where did the money go that should be available for a trained and adequate police force? Who controls the open space surrounding the city, and how did they come to control it?

It is true you can go to the Presidencia (the city government) on certain days to ask these questions, but that is not a truly public forum–if you can be ignored or treated with indifference. Such a response is not possible with an open, public letter. The public reads it; it cannot be ignored, a kind of political shaming occurs: “Some one is not meeting their social responsibility. Why is that? What did you think elected office was for?” The public nature of the letter gives the citizen a moral, social, and political leverage that is otherwise not available.

A public letter breaks through the wall of impunity and indifference. The citizen is not just helplessly accepting the top-down social disfunctionality. All of which makes the public letter profoundly democratic—and profoundly dangerous. Letter writing is a form of journalist commentary, and journalism is dangerous in this country, as we all know.

That is why I think the public letter, as metaphor and as actual event, in some cases should be employed anonymously, or as a group: Yo soy 132, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and OWS (Occupy Wall Street) are examples. The guerrilla commentator does not expose himself or herself to confrontation with club-wielding goons. For safety, and if there is no other recourse, perhaps a guerrilla commentator should slap public letters on the oversized buses as they pass, that say: “Why aren’t you addressing the city graffiti?” Using non-permanent paper graffiti to expose the city fathers’ indifference to graffiti.

Ironically, the narcos use public letter (mantas, banners and signs of the most hideous kind, attached to corpses) to get their messages across. How else will they explain their carnage, if there are no public forums? Perhaps it means they are open to talking to us non-violent citizens. They too should be addressed in public letters and asked: What are you doing to make the streets cleaner and safer? What are you doing to have Mexico surpass Finland in public education? Or are you, like the PRI (and the other parties) and the monopolists simply interested in profit and domination of the public space, the zóccalo, the plaza–and indifferent to your own social responsibility?

Change starts with the little PRI inside all of us and with the question: What is our own social responsibility? How can we make the streets cleaner and safer in our neighborhood? How can we help the youth put down the paint thinner sniffing and pick up a book? How can we make our leaders stop sniffing indifference and pick up social responsibility?

And, of course, the public letter, once initiated as a social activity, must be protected in some cases by anonymity, if that’s what it takes in order to protect the letter writer from the threat of violence, actual violence and retaliation in the form of debilitating libel law suits (made easy by lingering Napoleonic Law) by the powerful and wealthy who do not like to see their impunity embarrassed.

As a recent New Yorker article by William Finnegan points out in the June 25, 2012 edition, the systems hides behinds layers of pantallas (veils, screens). To lift the veils and expose the system and change it, the citizen letter writer has to get busy. One way to start is with “AM” at: repensamiento@periodico.am. They said they were interested in what you think of their new format. I think I would ask why there is no section called “Letters to the Editor.”

The Narco Plague

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Here in Guanajuato, Mexico, we learned you could ask for more police patrols, if you went to a certain office, or maybe to a certain police station over on Alhondiga. We went to the police station. We were told to go to the police outpost in our district. We went there, to Cerro de Cuarto, an area that has a bad reputation after dark, or even during the day. Gangs attack police stations or patrol trucks with rocks, then scatter when the black-clad swat fellows arrive–if that team is available.

We found the outpost. The ground floor was sealed off. We climbed a narrow iron spiral staircase to get to the office on the second floor. There was one police officer, sitting in front of a tiny TV and various hand-held radios that he was charging. He seemed skeptical at first, then, later, glad to have company.

Dianne explained our problem. The local paint thinner sniffers were morphing into gangbangers with uniform: white, long-sleeved baseball-like jerseys and white baseball caps, long black shorts, large white tennis shoes. The women of our barrio, she told him, were organizing; they needed increased patrols, in fact, on-going police presence at night.

We had already learned, you can hire police for an eight-hour shift for roughly $700 U.S. per month. You need two, for their own protection: $1,400. The officer said we would need four: $2,800 U.S. per month. We told him, no one had that kind of money.

A reasonable person might argue, it is the responsibility of the city to provide security. But there is no money. And, a reasonable person might ask, “Where did the money go?” There are two answers to that: one, taxes are not high enough; and, two, public funds often disappear into the pockets of elected high officials, as happens frequently through the country.

We learned–if we understood correctly–on any one shift, there are only twenty-five officers for the whole city. And a third of these are either sick or on vacation.

While Dianne’s discussed things, I peered out the one small permanently open window. I saw him immediately–half a block away–in his white uniform, a gangbanger, holding a liter beer bottle and, at three in the afternoon, drinking from it with easy gusto. He saw me as well, and his buddy, who I thought I recognized from our own neighborhood, stuck his head around a tree and gave me a small mocking wave. I have no idea whether he recognized me.

At about eleven that night, there was a knock at the door. Dianne peered through the wooden flap window in our mesquite door. A woman she recognized was whispering something to her. Dianne could not hear, but she looked behind the woman, and there were fifteen to twenty young men, in white baseball caps, sitting in such a way as to block passage through the alley. She shut the flap door quickly and called the police. She assumed that that was what the woman was whispering. They said they would come: the lads in black.

I watched from our kitchen window, through the Venetian blinds. The guys in white were older and from another neighborhood–a disturbing fact.

In a piece called “About My Stories,” in my blog at http://www.sterlingbennett.com–I write about the plague surrounding the storytellers in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and how, for writers in Mexico, it’s the narco-danger that surrounds. Now, the plague has gotten closer, and it’s difficult to judge its danger. The young neighborhood glue sniffers appear to be allying themselves with older, more sophisticated outsiders. And it has been stressful wondering what the gathering means.

One of our local kids, with cell in hand, appears to be coordinating their mission, whether it is to deliver, sell, or receive drugs in various areas of the city; or, to assign muggers to different neighborhoods. Their appearance, in any case, seemed like a show of defiance, of reclaiming the plaza (the center of Mexico public life) for themselves–and a social warning to those who would oppose their activities.

We have heard from many sources that the Mexican Army is coming in to patrol areas of the city. I am apprehensive about this. The Army is trained to use force. Their tendency is to abuse the people they detain—or worse. I suspect they will be seen as intruders, and the situation will escalate from the side of the small-time criminal groups, and that could mean weapons in the hands of the glue sniffers.

The solution, I think, is to organize the neighborhood, so that, when the gangbangers assemble, everyone calls the police. Over and over, until the municipal leaders start to allocate funds where they belonged in the first place: with the local cops.