Tag: Mexico

The Threat Diary

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The Threat Diary

Morning, November 25, 2012

~ Death threats. I have talked before about not understanding when it comes to culture. I suppose this has to do with any culture, including your own. It is good to arrive at a point where you know what you don’t know. I did not know to what extent we were touching up against dangerous elements in Mexican society. I still do not know. But this morning we found, slipped under the door, written death threats directed at us.

Background: The barrio organizing neighbors had held an election, and a man was elected as president. His approach is authoritarian: the law is the law—no drugs, no drinking in the alleys. The women (D and C) who started the whole barrio organizing had argued for talking to everyone, minimizing harm (drugs, alcohol, inhalants that destroy brains), not forbidding anything, simply trying to bring peace and security to the neighborhood. Ironically, and dangerously, those two women (and I) are the objects of the death threats. Next step: Try to talk directly to those who are issuing the threats—because they too probably feel threatened: their boys are out of control, their husbands sell drugs and therewith feed the family, they feel disrespected, they fear the army and the police. Breathe deeply. Be kind.

Evening, November 25, 2012

~ There is an emergency meeting of women, I think four, in our house right now, trying to deal with the death threat letter. It turned out to be only three. One of them may be (was) the aunt of the letter writer. The men have screwed this up up to this point. Conflict resolution always has to start at zero, just the way education has to. Assume nothing regarding what others understand or know, including oneself. Positive social anarchy, to use a friend’s phrase, appears here to start with women…

Morning, November 26, 2012

~ At the women’s meeting yesterday evening, E. read the threatening letter very closely and pointed out that it was really directed at the whole organizing committee, plus at D. specifically, and at a young man who lives kitty-corner from us. He is the lad who was involved in the brick fight some time ago. He received a death threat earlier, and we think we know what direction that one came from.

I have been counseled not to use the phrase “death threat.” I suppose because it might get the attention of people who make a point of killing people, as in the narco battles. Henceforth, maybe, I will not use that term and simply write the word “threat”.

Needless to say, we had a hard night. Threats put a strange strain on a couple: “Your activities have put us in this position;” “Your writing about it puts us in even more danger.”

But we have received support from various sources, as well as admonitions from friends to remain safe. The woman who gives me massages is an experienced neighborhood organizer. This morning she gave me good advice. While trying to organize her neighborhood, she and two other valiant women received threats. There was an illegal bar close by where you could buy women and drugs. Men and boys, drunk and high, trafficked the place and menaced the neighborhood. The community began to say the behavior in the alleys had to stop. People wrote her threatening letters with chicken blood, smeared blood on her door, threw mutilated chickens into her house. There were many threats—the usual ones of rape and murder (and implied mutilation). The women were not intimidated and continued organizing. The whole point, my friend said, was to paralyze me, make me stop, put fear in our hearts, shut us down, use threats to get their way—drugs and prostitution. The women made everything public; they went to the Presidencia and therewith put antecendentes in place, building a paper trail, so that if something happened the police would already know what was going on and who to look for.

Everyone feels impotent in this society, said my friend. Everyone feels menaced. When they feel pressured, they threaten those who are pressuring them. What you have to do is continue on. Furthermore, she said, this city is still “virgen.”

One weighs all this good advice against all the incidents of threats that are carried out here in this country. A person weighs and weighs. We are not investigating anyone. We are not trying to take your narco routes or markets. We just want a clean, beautiful, respectful, hopeful (for the children), and safe environment. Surely, you’re not going to kill us over that, are you?

At noon today, D. and I went to the Presidencia. We bumped into another couple from the neighborhood that had just come from there. They had dropped off a copy of the menacing letter. They are fine people; they are afraid but fearless at the same time. D. and I entered the great room where heads of departments hold court. We were soon in front of a young woman who represented Seguridad Ciudadana, public security. She was smart and welcoming. Things are already in motion. The Buddha-like comandante who came to one of our neighborhood meetings will be at the open meeting this afternoon, to calm things and to offer protection. The young woman also said there were agencies that could talk with the menacing parties. I mentioned that some of them were probably involved in illegal activities to feed their families and that we had no interest in interfering in such activity. She seemed to understand that.

So that’s where it stands. Threats, serious or not. A community that wants less police presence inviting the Comandante again. Neighbors that will send what in effect are spies and from whose corner will come more threats, until either we or they give up. And it won’t be us….

November 27, 2012

Yesterday, the neighborhood met. Fewer people came than ever before. The president of the steering committee, who is a man, overrode the method D and C had used, which was the personal touch: handing out flyers and talking to people. The president simply wanted them taped to telephone poles. He said that would suffice.

The second reason for the lower attendance may have been the threatening letter, whose existence was likely broadcast far and wide. Threats have an effect: fear. If you attend the meetings now, you may receive a threatening letter.

There is probably a third reason. The flyer—written by the president—was only about security, with no mention of community building. What was new and revolutionary, the idea of trust-building, had given away to the old authoritarian structure, which people know well and which they distance themselves from—for being more oligarchic than democratic. The old model of does not touch their hearts and minds, whereas trust building and community is something I think people yearn for. To correct matters, D and C have decided to form a “commission,” which will serve the committee but in the manner which will emphasize dialogue and reconciliation.

The president had also neglected to specify when the meeting would begin, and so people straggled in from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. One of the first to arrive was Cesar, a bright young fellow, who came to tell us about security cameras. He slipped off his motorcycle helmet and began to talk in a strong articulate voice. A minute passed before the four policemen came down the stairs on the callejón, preceded by the crackle of their radios. Alas, the Buddha-like Comandante was not among them.

In mid-sentence, Cesar stepped to one side. The police’s leader launched into a soliloquy in language the likes of which I have never heard: fast burst, then long streams, jumping this way and that, whirling in circles, every six or seventh word recognizable in the sense that the others, though audible, seemed not to be necessarily words at all, rather sounds the man had made up himself.

D and C showed him the threatening letter. He read a few of the disturbing lines about rape and murder then began his rambling again. He mentioned detectives and handwriting experts. I had never heard anyone mention detectives, even in newspapers. He said the letter was legal evidence. Everything seems to be careening in the direction of the heavy hand of the police, and away from D and C’s open palm. He said we had to go to the Ministerio Público and present the letter as an antecedente, prior evidence of a peaking behavior that—after the rapes and murders, I assume—would show premeditation.

I interrupted him to protest that the Ministerio Público wouldn’t do anything if the offenders’ names were unknown. No, a denuncia needed names, not a antecedente, said the president of the our committee, in a voice so soft that perhaps three people could hear what he was saying.

At about this point, the two probable letter writers strutted down through the meeting, doing a kind of gangbanger walk, throwing one shoulder then the other forward, dressed in white baseball caps and long-sleeved white baseball shirts, perhaps for the first time gracing us with their albeit moving presence.

The police had already deployed—three of them at a slight distance, as if in a combat zone. One looked down the callejón, another looked up it, and a third looked along a third vista, guarding our flanks from a not improbable attack. This was the attack, or at least gangbangers showing the flag. M had to pass very close to the lower policeman. As M passed him, the policeman looked at him the way our cat in California once observed a bobcat passing close by—without any reaction at all, but probably with complete recognition. I greeted M as he passed me. He started to mumble something; I greeted Q as he passed; he moved his head to look a little more away from me.

Cesar interjected, and the police leader stepped back. Cesar brought out his laptop. He gave it commands with his iPhone. He showed us what cameras could see by daylight and at night. The men especially gathered around. I did too. Then Cesar left.

A drunk came roaring up the callejón where the bobcat-observing policeman stood. Seeing the assembly and the four police, the drunk put his hands in the air and kept them there the whole time he protested his right to be where he was. The police treated him gently and finally got him to move along. Then the police moved along.

I had gone in our front door, returning snack bowls, a stool, and the plywood easel. I heard an angry voice and went back outside again. After all, the police had left, and I knew D and C were exposed. The broad-shouldered uncle of one of the gangbangers had appeared. He always sounds angry when he talks, whispered the president of the committee, but he’s all right. He got into an argument with an older woman wearing a poncho that I knew sold illegal beer from her front door. He claimed she had insulted his niece. When he wasn’t shouting at her, he stood like a French wrestler with his legs apart, his small feet shod with something like mountain climbers’ slippers, in below-the-knee trousers, tilting his head back like Marlon Brando and looking downward at no one through his squinting eyes, as if at any moment he might still leap forward and eat someone. He finally left with a woman that was either his sister or his wife. I still don’t know which.

I went in the house again for something but then decided I should go back out. Just then chief suspects Q and M came strutting up the callejón from the direction of M’s privada and passed through us leaving a wake of marijuana fumes and disdain. Another showing of the flag, but a little bolder this time, and slightly menacing—after the police had left. A., our local Herculean cargador with little or no education, plodded along behind but without being able to pull off either the disdain or the menace. I released my hold on my pepper spray. When I commented on their passing, quipping, “Ay, mariguana,” D and the president shushed me. “Don’t provoke them.” The gangbanger in me had slipped out for a moment.

November 28, 2012

Yesterday, we went as advised (by the young woman at Sequridad Ciudadana and others) to the Ministerio Público and made a denuncia. There were no good choices: do nothing would imply that it was all right to make threats; or bring the matter to the MP and, in essence, stand up to the people making the threats who then might become more desperate.

The MP took an extensive report. Did we have suspects in mind? they asked. Yes, but we had no solid evidence. Were we afraid seemed to be the key factor. We said, not really. Then I said, “I am concerned for D’s safety. One of the young men we suspect shows a violent streak. I once stood right next to a neighbor, after the brick fight, and Q came up to him and, without warning or provocation, struck him four times on the forehead with a piece of conduit pipe.”

When I explain this, the investigator nodded his head and said the document had now become a denuncia (and not an antecedente). I asked whether a threatening letter was considered a crime. He said it was. D asked what the penalty was. Prison, said the MP man. How long, a year? “Years,” he said. “And then they will come out even more angry and alienated,” I said. “Yes, crime school,” by which he meant prison. D asked whether there could be an alternate treatment. There could be restitution instead of prison. What restitution would look like in the case of threats, we don’t know.

Outside, D told me she thought it was likely the suspects would disappear for a while. The detectives/investigators would find no one home—and then what? Would the detectives just go away?

Now it’s dark and cold; the mountain winds are blowing, and I for one do not feel particularly safe thinking about people who are not completely rational and whose next steps we can’t really predict. By now they must have heard that the written threats are going to bring trouble, and because they are not completely rational they will look around for someone to blame, and they will decide the people who brought the denuncia are the problem—which could end up making us victims twice over. Not exactly the kind of conflict resolution we were hoping for.

November 28, 2012

I woke up this morning in good spirits, thinking about painting lines on the vacant lot, graffiti-covered walls to indicate soccer goals, for kids in the alley. I thought of restoring the basketball hoop I put up several years ago and which the adolescents destroyed, even though younger kids had loved using it. Planning renewed efforts on behalf of the kids in the neighborhood felt empowering.

We are also planning to put up eight surveillance cameras in our immediate neighborhood, and we will have a few of them guarding any new basketball hoop. Cesar, the cameraman, has worked out municipal wrinkles whereby the police can also see what the cameras see. He is also installing forty cameras on a street called the Calzada de Guadalupe (and other streets and alleys), so students can reach the University of Guanajuato without being mugged.

My writing partner and wise Mexican friend R. quickly analyzed the threat letter and declared the writers one adult and two pandilleros, which I loosely translate as gangbangers or wannabe gangbangers. There is really no good, respectful word. Teenagers? He did not sound worried. He counseled showing respect, cordiality, and kindness, no matter what happened. And I agree with him…mostly, since I still don’t know the exact parameters of danger.

November 29, 2012

The doorbell rang right on schedule, just as I was closing my eyes for an afternoon siesta. I looked out the kitchen window blinds, just to check on who was at the door. It was Manuelito, the boy no one washes—although I must admit his ears look cleaner these days. I think it was D, as I remember now, who told him he needed to wash one new part of his body each week if he was to continue borrowing books.

He held a beat up soccer ball. I pumped it up. That is my chief function here. D lends books to the boys (Manuelito is the only taker now), and I pump up destroyed soccer balls.

Jesús sat on one of the steps of the callejón, a little higher than us. He had a blank look on his face. I greeted him. I asked him if he was bored. He said he was. They’re both about 8, 9, or 10. I can’t tell.

I walked toward Jesús.

“How would you like to draw a picture on this wall?” I said, pointing to the nearby graffitied wall of the problematic vacant lot?

Jesús hesitated one beat, and then his mouth widened in a smile and his eyes lit up.

“How about you, Manuelito?” I asked.

He said he wasn’t that interested. I turned back to Jesús. “We could paint a landscape or people. We could paint faces,” I said, and I made a circle gesture around my face. Jesús beamed.

“I like to draw,” he said.

“I could do it with you. We could do it together. I can buy paints.”

I was making it up as I went along. I ran my hand over the rough brick face of the wall. To hell with a finished surface. We’ll just start painting. We will be muralists. And they will be young Mexican muralists, and I will show them examples from Diego Rivera and Siqueiros.

“I will get paints,” I said.

“I know how to paint,” said Manuelito. I already knew that. He had drawn pictures twice at the neighborhood organizing meetings.

We will start graffiti-style, but with paper masks as well as spray cans. We’ll make birds and horses like in the Chauvet Cave in France and Mexican Americano hens running with their heads down and portraits of Ratón, the Siamese I try to pet every time I climb up the steps of the callejón. And we’ll paint the things that are bumping around in Manuelito and Jesús’ heads—and mine, and all of Mexico’s.

December 12, 2012

Each morning now, I’ve stepped outside our front door to see if someone—especially the usual suspects—has destroyed Manuelito, Jesús and my mural efforts: a rabbit, a cougar, a French cave painting horse, and a similar elk.

Two days ago, I heard P. whooping out on the callejón, followed by loud cordial greetings to passers-by, who carefully maneuvered around him. He is a man of indeterminate age—but below forty, who long ago destroyed his mind with inhalants. He probably is also bipolar and a few other things to boot. He lives in a dark world most of the time, with brief breaks of drinking and exuberant mania. He lies on the alley, or stumbles around with a mad look on his face, unwashed, his pants dirty and falling down over his behind. Everyone avoids him, except for the person who gives him a home during his dark periods.

I noticed that my copy of the Chauvet cave horse was smudged. I looked closer. Someone had placed their fingers on the horse’s body, then pulled downward, as if to test the material used in the painting and leaving vertical chalk smudge marks. Or, someone had reached out to touch art, as a wise friend suggested.

A vandal, I think, would have rubbed his palm around in a smearing effect. Or sprayed a gang symbol across the horse and the deer, in black paint. But I suspect P. and I think he reached out to touch the image of the horse—not to destroy art.

There is another mystery. Why didn’t the gangbangers attack the animal paintings? I have a theory, and that is that Mexicans of all sorts have a certain knowledge of and respect for art. They know about the tradition of Mexican murals. They may not know the names Diego Rivera or David Sigueiros, but they know about artists who paint on walls. And I like to think that somehow the animal images that the gangbangers saw us painting on the wall penetrated, in some way I don’t understand, into their alienated and disaffected brains. That is the only way I can explain it.

December 12, 2012

(or as they say: 12 12 12, but not yet the end of the world)

I have lost count of the number of yesterday’s neighborhood meeting. Six, seven, or eight. Fewer people come now, possibly because word got around about the threatening letter. People don’t want trouble.

As far as I can see, no one from the Ministério Público has come to investigate. The steering committee president seems to have dropped out. His approach was authoritarian, and he could not tolerate D and C’s insistence on inclusion and reconciliation. Their two positions are, in my mind, emblematic of the on-going struggle here in Mexico: top down, or bottom up.

On Saturday, we had breakfast in a restaurant in the Jardín, the center of the old city. The restaurant’s clients are middle and upper middle class Mexicans. On her way out, an acquaintance approached our table. She introduced a man in her party–the mayor of Guanajuato. She mentioned that he was following our case. He said he was monitoring its progress. We thanked him and shook his hand. He is a pleasant, handsome man. I did not believe him.

A PEN friend recently told me that during Calderón’s six-year presidency, some eighty journalists were assassinated. Not a single assassin has been convicted. Some 300–600 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez over the last five or six years. Very few of these cases have been solved. Top down does not work very well when it comes to law enforcement. 60,000–90,000 people have died in the drug wars during Calderón’s six-year term; there is a long list of the disappeared during the same period.

Largely, no one bothers to investigate these murders—partly because it’s dangerous to do so and partly, I suspect, because the field of investigation—social and family relationships (narcos, Army, police, government, everyone)—is impossibly complex and dysfunctional, where no one can or wants to tell the truth, and where everyone already carries a quiver-full of remembered insults and slights.

The last thing on anyone’s mind is reconciliation. The mixture of remembered insults and alcohol (or certain drugs) can lead to havoc and mayhem—all fueled, of course, by the unexamined conviction that the other person is wrong.

Dianne was reading the accords that neighbors were to sign: “I agree that we want a clean and safe neighborhood”—an agenda they think better of now. The usual spies were in attendance. There was some movement from the troubled area down the callejón–a spike in foot traffic, a child or two running out in front.

At this moment, K—our chief neighborhood nemesis—stormed around the corner and leapt the two steps into center stage in the middle of the alley crossroad, waving his beer bottle and bellowing insults in all five directions. At his house, they had been celebrating the christening of his granddaughter. Just before the beginning of the meeting, D had called down to him, “Felicidades, abuelo!” Congratulations, grandpa! He had looked up, at first puzzled, then gave her a broad smile.

Now, minutes later, fortified with a mix of alcohol and victimhood, he was roaring with outrage. A menacing moment, where we all sat around like rabbits, frozen, hoping the pissed-off hawk wouldn’t notice. He wheeled back and forth, calling us putas, pinche perras, maricones, perros, pointing at people and spitting, “You have offended my family, it’s my house, you have no right…!”

K, with flair and emphasis, bent over and set his beer bottle on the pavement in front of him, with a force that should have made it break. A moment later, when he wasn’t looking, his wife and chief spy whisked it away. K mainly confronted women, accusing them of a whole long line of affronts toward him and his family, as if these women were the cause of all the neighborhood’s troubles—when it was quite the opposite, as all of us knew.

It was a menacing moment. I was sitting next to S, who is on the committee and runs the tienda at the top of the callejón. Handsome and tough, he isn’t afraid of anyone. After a five minutes or so, he got up, shook D and C’s hands and left. I was disappointed. I had felt safe sitting next to him. D deduced afterward that S had gone to the tienda to call the police, and last night he told us he had.

The women K harangued began standing up to him. They denied his accusations. A young woman with a baby gave it back to him. K said she had insulted his family. “You called my son a mariguano….!” Fearlessly, she put the tip of her finger under her right eye and said, “I saw him, he saw me.” That’s all I got of it; I didn’t have the whole history. No one was speaking high Spanish. Her baby started to cry and she left.

More people came up from K’s side-alley. A, the gorilla-like porter with little education, took up a position leaning against Manuelito, Jesús, and my chalk copies of the Lascaux and Chauvel cave paintings—the horse and the elk. He wasn’t going to miss the show.

K’s son T (the alleged mariguano) arrived. His hair was spiked and his appearance was newly gangbanger-ish. Which worried me a little. I had thought him the most level-headed of the at-risk lads. He kept coming closer to his father, in alliance, I thought. Two smartly dressed policemen appeared from the other downhill alley, climbing slowly, in no hurry, sort of easing into the theater, assessing the situation—the kind of social explosion they see all over the city.

Now things took another turn.

The young woman who have left with the crying baby and who had stood up to K now returned with her father, the man with similarities to a French wrestler who, if you remember, “stood with his legs apart, his small feet shod with something like mountain climbers’ slippers, in below-the-knee trousers, tilting his head back like Marlon Brando and looking downward at no one through his squinting eyes, as if at any moment he might (still) leap forward and eat someone.” He walked right up to K and, to my astonishment, began reasoning with him. French Wrestler is the uncle of the most dangerous of the gangbangers, a boy of sixteen who is already the father of a very young baby and who has already badly damaged his brain with paint thinner and glue.

Four more policemen, smartly dressed and professional looking (a new concept for Guanajuato), without guns or dogs or bright lights, descended from the direction S had gone to call them. One of them was our Buddha-like comandante. He seemed happy to see us. He greeted us and then watched as K’s wife and son tried to move K away from French Wrestler and from the stage in general. K resisted them, they grabbed him, he threw them off—a wildebeest not giving in to the lions.

I did not see what happened next; D and C did. K’s son T picked up a rock the size of the palm of your hand. Facing his father, he raised the rock high enough to bop his father on his head. A woman came up from behind and snatched it out of his hand. The tug of war continued.

What exit was there for K, trapped as he was in his outrage and injured dignity?

I am not a hero rabbit, and I am not young. But I stood up and walked slowly over to K, took his hand in mine and put my arm around his shoulder. I have known K for years, and we have greeted each other cordially for all these years. As his wife and son pulled at him, I held onto him and told him he didn’t have to leave this place. They pulled at him. I told him he didn’t have to go. I told him he was a leader in our neighborhood (I didn’t say he had been meeting his responsibility) and that I respected him and that we all wanted peace. His family pulled. I told them K didn’t have to leave.

K calmed down, and I honestly think he felt supported by the oldest guy in the neighborhood. He was not losing face. I think he knew I was speaking from the heart. I have always liked him, and if we do not respect each other—porters, gangbangers, rabbits, do-gooders, and grudge-holders all—then there is no hope for us. And K—the man who may have been one of the authors of the threatening letter—finally let himself be led down the two steps, exiting stage left, staggered around the corner, past the Chauvet elk and horse (now smudged by crazy A), past the other A, the carrier with no education, down the callejón to his house, guided by his chief spy wife and their patricidal son, K’s dignity partially restored, and the curtain closing for—proabably—anything but the last act.

D and C were in shock. The police walked over to look down the callejón on which K and his family descended. Later, unwisely I thought, they descended toward K’s domain, and I like to think they went right on down to the city center without bothering him further.

I was pleased, I said to D and C. The man we had not known how to (or dared) approach had presented himself of his own accord and, in a sense, joined our meeting. I like to think also that he and his family saw that we were not really their enemies. I do not know whether K, after the alcohol wears off, will remember that he left with a certain measure of dignity. I hope so. In the meantime, the elected president of the committee has not written or shown up—unable to grasp D and C’s concept of compromise and reconciliation, and we are all left once more with the possible promises of good-willed social anarchy as a way of bringing peace to our troubled community. In a few days, five cameras will go up on four different houses. And it remains to be seen how K and his kingdom will react.

December 14, 2012

After two full days of laying cable, planning, and figuring angles, workers finished putting up five surveillance cameras on four different houses. It remains to be seen how this affects the neighborhood dynamic. The installers’ manager returns tomorrow to adjust angles and teach us how to access and use the system. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Except that I prefer possible predators feel observed, and it’s not just me alone who has this experience. I have also decided—given the statistics cited by me above about the longevity of journalists—not to make accusations about people’s livelihood or night-time occupations. That’s because there are now a lot of people who can read what I write on both Facebook and my blog; and who knows who can find their way to this information, who also know English, and who might mention something to someone, who then mentions it to someone else, like in a game of telephone—but the consequences unpredictable. So, if you find me talking around issues, you will have some inkling why.

The Mexican War Chronicles

Posted on by sterlingbennett

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.

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.”

Heie Boles’s Puppet Show

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Last night, at the Teatro Cervantes, in Guanajuato, Gto., Mexico, I had the extraordinary experience of watching three generations of puppeteers from one family–el Teatro de pájaros–present the “La flauta mágica (Magic Flute)” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder.

Heie Boles’s puppet story begins many years after the Second World War when, in her fifties, she mounted props and equipment on her old bicycle and puppet-staged Grimm’s fairy tales in the pedestrian areas of German cities. For children, it was often new material; for adults, a chance to re-live an important part of their childhood.

Last night, I caught a glimpse of her and Dan, sitting in the audience. She had already done her work (Concept, Text, and Direction) and now watched her daughter Ester Boles and two grandchildren, Antar Trejo and Danae Trejo– along with their colleague Artemio Rovinski–make the puppets moves in ways I could not begin to explain. The figures swooped and dipped and matched their gestures in the subtlest ways with the speech spoken through them. I know Ester, Antar, and Danae, but their spoken parts were so delightfully professional and animated that I did not think to try to recognize their individual voices. Heie sprinkled German exclamations here and there throughout Mozart’s perfect Spanish, to the laughter of German speakers in the audience.

Mozart’s music was live and played by the Capella Guanajuantensis, which included Djamilia Rovinskaia (Barock violin and viola), José Suárez (clavichord), and Antar and Danae’s father Cuauhtémoc Trejo (Barock transverse flute. Cuauhtémoc enjoys the distinction of being entrusted to play Emperor Maximilian’s surviving Claude Laurent glass flute)—three gentle and gifted musicians, who seemed to enjoy the puppets just as much as I did.

For me, it was all a play within a play, something like Russian dolls, with so much cross-cultural history, so much family history, so many layers of talent and dedication—the extraordinary thing that is a family, in all its parts and pieces, creating a work of art together, for the enjoyment of the larger community.

Again—and for this I thank the whole family—I began asking the old question: What is it about puppets? I thought again of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (Regarding Puppet Theater, 1810) and the theory that human actors and dancers cannot achieve the grace of the puppet that responds to its center of gravity, or Schwerpunkt, in this case the central pole’s movements (managed by Ester, Danae, Antar, and Artemio)–to which the limbs respond.  And, behind them all, Heie Boles.

To my mind, the whole performance had to do with Grace, a concept we don’t talk very much about anymore. I’m not even sure how to define this word, except that it has to do with a moment full of giving, modesty, great and understated talent, and gentleness, where the heart sighs as a child’s might and our lips form a smile.

Muggers and Smoochers

Posted on by sterlingbennett

We have begun a conspiracy. We are plotting strategies for neutralizing the muggers in the alleys of my small colonial Mexican city. I will not mention the name of the city. Enterprising young Mexicans respond to challenges, and I think I have already issued one at the beginning of this screed.

I prefer to call this a manifesto. Unite, citizens of the city! You have nothing to lose but your wallets!

My friend Jorge lost his laptop two nights ago. He is only now entering the post-traumatic stress zone. He cannot stop talking about the attack. Jorge is the barista and beer-ista at my favorite coffee house, the Café Acropolis. He heads home every night at about 12:30 am. That is when the twenty-year old highwaymen come out—alley boys, here. These two ruffians had a knife and a screwdriver–the latter, possibly sharpened on a grinder. They took his laptop and five hundred pesos in tips. He cannot replace that kind of loss. He asked me to consult with a local intellectual friend and café-ratón like me. That’s a cafe mouse, a regular client, who hangs out drinking strong cappuccinos, reading La Jornada, and writing fiction—or some other questionable material.

Perhaps I am the perfect consultant–being someone who pursues fiction, i.e. things made up. For that is exactly what we need here, where the police are not respected, are underpaid, untrained, and ineffective in combatting street crime.

Here are my suggestions. We find an attractive 30-year old woman who is fearless and very strong to walk up Jorge’s alley, carrying a laptop under her arm, at 00:30 in the morning. Military time seems appropriate here. Before hand, we position people along her path, couples that are locked in public embraces which they believe make them invisible to the public. These embraces have always provided an outlet for the hot temper of the young man or young woman, or both. But when it comes to recruiting smoochers, for the operation I have in mind, it is not always easy to find authentic couples that are already thick into the politics and clutching of new love. And so some of the smoochers have to be actors who do not necessarily know each other.

At their feet, there will be two plastic bags of cheap commercial Mexican eggs with their thin shells and pale yokes. The kissing, or pretending-to-kiss couples—the latter may experience some embarrassment—will have to smooch with one eye on the bait’s progress up the alley.

In order not to spook the young assailants, the clutchers and smoochers–real and pretend, both groups in the moment less than spontaneous–will have to fill the doorways and corners and not appear to show any concern for the public they are shutting out.

This will relieve the young highway robbers, who are circulating on motor scooters and underpowered motorcycles, looking for marks to hit. These víctimas would include students with laptops returning from study groups in friends’ apartments, theater and concert goers who have had a post-theater drink and aren’t paying attention, and anyone returning home after a very late dinner.

One lone thirty-year old is the perfect target, and when the lads park their scooter ahead of her and approach with the knife and screwdriver, she blows on her silver whistle in continuous short blasts. The smoochers pick up their bags of fragile eggs–a bag for each smoocher–and run toward the whistle blasts. As the teams–say, four of them–approach, they take out their eggs and begin throwing them at the assailants. Tomatoes are good, too. They throw hard and continuously. The bait woman keeps on blowing her whistle, flushing the neighbors out of their homes and confusing the robbers. A fifth pair–smoochers or non-smoochers–rush to the scooter and lock a chain through the front wheel so that it cannot turn.

The muggers find the scooter won’t save them, as planned. They run from the continuous barrage of eggs. The throwers stop throwing. The lovely bait-woman is also covered with egg. She has wrapped her laptop in plastic before hand. She goes home to shower, escorted by one of the four smoocher teams, having done her citizen’s duty. The fifth team leaves on the motor scooter. The muggers have left the key in place for a quick getaway. Some of the real smoochers discontinue their relationship from the stress of the operation.Some of the acting smoochers and clutchers form lasting relationships, from the stress of the operation.

The muggers never find their scooter again. Team number five has delivered it to the Municipio Público, the city police headquarters. The assailants give up attacks in the city’s alleys, even though they still have the knife and possibly sharpened screwdriver—because everywhere they look there are young, embracing Mexican couples, every night at 00:30.

I asked Jorge what he thought. He said he liked the plan and wondered when we could begin.

The Secret

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Dianne has become a lending library for very young people in our barrio. She got one 11-year old started; he spread the word. There are four borrowers now. She lends the book, notes the child’s name and age and where the young reader lives (“Black door down the alley.”) When they return the book, they have to tell her the story contained in the book; sometimes they have to draw a picture. M. is the 11-year old. He is very bright; his father is gone; like a boy shipwrecked, he has landed on a related family, close by. No one washes him. Dianne has told him he has to wash his hands before collecting the next book. She intends to increase the number of body parts he has to wash, without hurting his feelings. J. is eight years old. Dianne is quite sure he can’t read. For his book report he makes things up. A grandmother has started to help him. We suspect there have been no books in his house. When other boys are around, he withdraws, to protect his secret: that he can’t read. Recently, Dianne reached up to touch her hair. J. flinched, thinking she was going to hit him.

Bodyguards

Posted on by sterlingbennett

After the knives of Mexico–the incident in our alley–my love of thirty-some years, a resourceful and practical person, hired a bodyguard. His name is Luis. He is thirty-five or forty, not tall, but also not short. His biceps are not quite the dimension of my thigh muscles. He is low key and handsome. Our mason hires him, and our mason recommended him, when my love jokingly suggested she needed a bodyguard.

My love attends the symphony on Friday nights. I am a person who cannot sit still for two hours. So I don’t attend. My love, again jokingly, asked Luis not to bring a gun. He replied–quite seriously–that, no, he would not bring it. He also said he welcomed the work since it constituted experience for the career he wished to pursue: private security.

The first Friday, Luis met my love at the assigned spot, where there’s a lovely fountain and where a lot of people gather. Then he walked her home. She paid him the modest fee they agreed on. As they said good night, he asked if he could bring along his eleven-year old son next time. My love said of course.

The next Friday, with his eleven-year old son, Luis preformed the same duty, delivering my love to the garden gate. She paid him, and he asked if his nine-year old daughter could come along next time. My love said of course.

I don’t think his nine-year old daughter has come along yet. Still, as we get older, I can see Luis guiding us through the old colonial streets at night, perhaps with his whole family–whom we then invite in for something warm to drink, cookies and hot chocolate. Some years away, we watch both kids graduate from La Prepa-high school. Maybe then, a wedding or two. And always, safe.

Nailed to Reality

Posted on by sterlingbennett

There is a theory circulating, around me mainly, that Mexican writers–because of their national history, the church, the social structure, and their mothers–see reading their writing in public as the kind of adventure that can have no good ending. In all my considerable humility, I believe this is because, for Mexican writers, the distance between fiction and reality is not great enough. As if one were nailed to the other, and impossible to pry apart.

The writers I have seen at the local salon either don’t read at all or read so quickly that one can’t absorb what they’re saying. A cloud of anxiety rises around them and then streams out over their listeners like fog from dry ice.

My friend the fiction writer teaches Theology at the local university. He is a very good writer, but he will not read for others. That is, I suspect, partly because he has a built-in safety mechanism which keeps him from showing parts of himself that are not perfect. Comedy, irony, and the ridiculous are all too dangerous, even when only directed at others. He takes Goethe’s famous line from Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, most seriously: Es irrt der Mensch solang’ er strebt. Man errs however much he strives.

Mexican writers know instinctively that something like fiction, or irony, can be taken literally. For example, my friend wrote a story about a conversation with the Devil. When he read it to his wife, she looked at him with astonishment.

“Was that this morning?” she asked.

He thought she was referring to his writing session with his French writer friend. She meant, it turned out, an actual conversation with that lisping cloven-hoofed personage she would never invite to her house for all the reasons learned from the priests who have taken her confessions over the years.

After lunch, while washing the dishes with her daughter, she mentioned, “Your father had a conversation with the Devil.” The daughter, a lovely intelligent creature, assumed her mother was referring to her former boyfriend.

My friend published the story “A Conversation with the Devil” in a local literary journal, bowing to pressure from his French friend. Rather than use his own name, he chose F. Scott Fitzgerald Cruz as his nom de plume–and was immediately recognized by half of the city’s bureaucrats, municipal and ecclesiastical.

The results came quickly. The Federal Commission of Electricity moved him up into a consumer category no longer eligible for government subsidization. His wife and daughter, at communion, each received three red Cheerios on their tongues, instead of the holy wafer. When he went to pay his predial, his property tax, they directed him to a different window, one that had bars on it, as if the bars might offer better protection for the person waiting on him. Half of those who rented his several business properties began to pay their rent more than ten days late. The men who passed his house regularly in the morning, calling “Gaaaassss!” for natural gas and “Aawaa Ciel,” for water, which is a product of the Coca Cola Company, no longer came by, and his wife had to call the companies and demand delivery. Even then, the water garrafones and the gas tanques leaked, spilling water on their floor tiles and seeping gas into the family lungs. When he gave up his briefcase at the central university library, where he went to write, the receptionist and the guard, who accepted his briefcase for a numbered tab in return, gingerly examined the item, as if it might explode or have the capability to fly around over the city at night.

When I learned about the story, the fictional conversation with the Devil, I suggested he read it at the local literary salon. He looked at me very seriously and said, “You know the iron cages at the top corners of the Alhóndiga, where they hung the heads of Allende and others, rebels against the Spanish, and let them rot for years?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s why they do it,” he said, as if he were talking of just yesterday.

I nodded again, as if I understood.

I told a friend of mine, who has written many books in Northern California, about my Mexican writer friend. I told him about the conversation with the Diablo, and that it was a fine piece of writing that should be published in the States. My California writer friend asked for a copy. My friend sent the story north, but then, after a week of consideration, asked that it be returned, since he feared that it might affect his visa status.

Hoping to help finalize things–move them along, so to speak, I mentioned, in a pique of disappointment, that the National Security Agency had probably already detected the word “devil” in the email transmission. It was, after all, a country where at least 40% of the people followed an orthodox religious conservatism. Perhaps a higher percentage in the intelligence agencies. And those people were probably sniff-sensitive to something like conversation with the Devil, and detected either the smell of heresy or a whiff of conspiracy.

That was several Mondays ago. Monday morning is when he and his French friend write at the café that has the best coffee in Central Mexico. His email transmissions have ceased, I learned from the Frenchman. Telephone calls go unanswered. He does not show up at the café. And I do not think he will be coming to the next literary salon reading, scheduled for a week from today.

Any good Mexican publisher who reads this report should consider sending men in black, at night, with flash lights, to find the manuscript. And take it. Out of his hands, so to speak. They should publish it, change his name entirely and, here and there, elements of his style, to protect him from recognition. Mexico’s federal attorney general will have to work out ahead of time the mechanics of full protection from any foreign or domestic governmental or ecclesiastical agency, observing the Constitution’s strict reaffirmation of the co-existence of fiction and reality. In this way, all of us will be able to read one of Mexico’s great writers. Whoever that may actually be.

Kneeling

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I am an unwilling participant in my own demise. In October 1969, for example, as an off-duty flight-deck officer, standing at the rounded forward edge of the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. The ship is positioned fifty miles off the coast of Vietnam. The evening is warm, the sea is sleepy. The bow cuts through the water at a restless three-quarters speed – something like twenty-five knots. That in itself should have been a clue. Also, pain has made me careless. My first wife has left me for my best friend. I turn and see a green light six hundred feet away at the other end of the flight deck. I hold up my hand and block out the green. This lets me see the area around the light. The starboard catapult has launched an un-programmed flight, and it is coming right at me. I have less than three seconds before it hits me. I leap off the bow. The safety net catches me six feet down. The sound of the jet passing over my head stuns like lightening that is too close. The safety net fails, breaking away at one end, and I drop, head down, until I am ten feet over the Niagara Falls of the ship’s bow wave. I am wrapped in the net, hanging like a fly in a spider web, my arms pinned, unable to move, swinging back and forth, in the dark. No one will find me until dawn. If the net fails completely, the ship will drive me down and drown me under its eight hundred and forty feet of hull – until one of its two great barnacle-sharpened props, turning at 472 revolutions per minute, cuts me in half, and the wake turns red – visible to no one.

These are the things I see in the half light of morning, just before my black cat pats me once on my forehead, to let me know it is time to unlock the door and let her out.

On a recent trip to Manhattan, an air-conditioned bus rushes at me. I no longer hold up a hand to block out the green lights. I have gained more confidence in the world. I step back in plenty of time. It stops in front of me, and kneels with a hissing sound. That is, the whole front of the bus settles so that it is closer to level of the street. The bus driver – a perfect stranger, with lots of experience – has decided that I need help in reaching the first step. Never mind that I climb 203 steps, all a little irregular and some quite high, in order to reach my house in the Mexican city where I live.

But that is not the point. The point is that the bus driver has some reference, some paradigm through which he views me, which lets him see something I do not see. In short, he has determined that I have reached the Age of Adjustment.

This is not a laughing matter. I am not sure how much he sees. I sight back over the idea of him, and I sense there are things to be aware of, beyond those that are air-conditioned and go whoosh and kneel.

I step aboard. I am relieved that he did not think it necessary for the bus to lie down, so I could roll onto it. I stick my Metro Card into the driver’s scanner and am accepted into the bus’s agreeable safety. The bus rocks me gently over Manhattan’s small irregularities, over the suggestions of dark complexity that lie beneath the city. My head nods. I lean back in my seat. I am in a gondola, gliding through a late Venetian afternoon.

At about 82nd Street, the bus hisses again and, like an elephant, kneels, and I step down onto the germ-covered afternoon pavement. I walk the one remaining block. I wear my wide-brimmed hat, that blocks out the sun. I buy a Senior ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The woman selling me the ticket, less than half my age – but old enough to be a flight-deck officer – hands me a pamphlet that will guide me through the labyrinth.

The publication is about the size of a large letter envelope. Two colors make up one side of the pamphlet. Two grey blues, in different values. One fairly dark, the color of an approaching thunderhead, the other a considerably lighter value, like a thunderhead still at some distance.

I do not know what has makes me do this, but at some point I begin holding the blue-grays of the pamphlet up and sight across them, to the paintings of the renowned nineteenth century English landscape painter Samuel Palmer. I hold them up against the Impressionists Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Morisot. And then, in another room, I hold them up against Rembrandt.

A guard approaches me. She stares down at my blue-gray pamphlet, as if I might be holding a nine and a half inch knife or something that will cast a bean on the portrait of “Tito Reading,” by Rembrandt, 1658, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – and turn it all black.

She asks, “Can you see through it?”

No, I see over it.

But I do not tell her this. I smile and say, “It’s the pamphlet, available to us at the front door.”

For the most part, she is satisfied. Still, she gives me a last disapproving look, turns, and walks away – leaving me to my secret device.

The guards continue to track my progress. Suspicious remains suspicious. Other visitors stare at my motions. For a fraction of a second, they ask themselves, what is he doing? And then the question recedes, and they lean over to read the titles placed underneath the Great Paintings.

What I am doing is this. If you hold thunderhead grays in a way that blocks off the bottom part of the gold frame, then the eye and the brain see things that are otherwise denied to visitors to the Met.

Do not take my word for it. Try it, and you will see things emerge. A small smirking figure with a stem of grass between his teeth. Or something that moves, something that glimmers. Old oranges (the colors, I mean) answer the rumbling blue-grays of the pamphlet and come forward, secret, illegal, that have waited long-suffering through the years – for a friend.

I do not know what you’re thinking right now. Maybe a reluctance to believe what I’m saying, about this or anything else. Perhaps you are thinking my device with its grey blues will not save me, and you don’t want to be the one that has to tell me.

After all, what emerges when I block out distraction will not always whoosh and kneel to give me sanctuary. Or wink from within the Palmer, shift the grass stem from one tooth to the next, and smile and say hello, old friend.

Rather, you might be saying, in the end, the last rope holding the safety net pulls farther apart, and I drop the last ten feet through the soft Pacific evening, down before the Ticonderoga’s thundering bow wave, and – still unwilling – meet the demise that has been hurtling toward me all along. All I had to do was lift my hand to block out your friendly faces, and I would have seen it.