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Land of Job
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Land of Job
Since 1994, when Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas shocked the world by taking over the capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas, eruptions against that country’s authoritarian control of political and economic life have occurred with ever increasing frequency. During the administration of President Vicente Fox (2000-2006) thousands of residents of the Estado de Mexico north of Mexico City massed, machetes in hand, to oppose the takeover of their lands for the construction of a new airport. When the governor of the southern state of Oaxaca, Ulisés Ruiz, dispatched police to evict striking schoolteachers from the center of the city of Oaxaca in 2006, a spontaneous uprising opposed to the governor’s authoritarian tactics arose overnight and for five months occupied the city’s central business and tourist district and many other locations in the state. That same summer, followers of liberal presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador turned the central business district of Mexico City into a months-long campground, paralyzing traffic, business and commerce after Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN for its initials in Spanish) was declared the winner of 2006 election with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. López Obrador and many of the country’s best-known writers, scholars and intellectuals accused Calderón and the federal electoral commission of fraud and demanded a recount of the actual ballots cast, which Mexico’s supreme court refused to authorize. Meanwhile competing drug smuggling organizations, vying for the millions of dollars flowing southward every week from the United States, escalated their increasingly macabre competition with executions, beheadings and the occupation of towns and cities close to the United States border. Public officials, police commanders, military commanders and members of current President Felipe Calderón’s cabinet have been implicated for complicity with leading capos (chieftains) of the smuggling operations. By November, 2008, the unrest—ungovernability—had reached the point that a U.S. Joint Forces Command report described Mexico as one of two countries in the world on the verge of collapse (the other was Pakistan). “We [Mexicans] feel like Job,” a teacher named Silvia told me as we watched a scant crowd of people sift through the city of Oaxaca’s Zócalo. Most of them were wearing surgical masks because of the outbreak of porcine flu that had hospitalized hundreds, caused a number of deaths and prompted the federal government to close schools and ban all official public gatherings. On wrought iron benches and the low concrete wall that divided the Zócalo from the Cathedral, little clusters of men and women conversed, or sat alone, waving off ambulatory vendors of candies, wall hangings and trinkets, reading newspapers, playing with the cell phones they held in their hands. “It’s one plague after another,” Silva forced a smile. A sturdy, broad-faced woman with twinges of gray apparent in her neatly combed short black hair she enumerated a series of recent events that had heightened the discontent that was manifesting itself in anti-government demonstrations and work stoppages throughout Mexico: inflation, corruption, drug organization violence. The gap between the wealthy and the poor in Mexico has widened to such an extent that while several Mexican entrepreneurs rank near the top of Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest men (including “El Chapo” Guzmán the head of Mexico’s most lucrative drug exporting organization), over 60 percent of Mexican families lack income enough to obtain food, shelter, employment and medical care and 20 percent earn too little to adequately feed themselves. “We’re caught between the corruption in the government and the criminals in the drug organizations,” she continued. “There seems to be no place to turn. Many say we’re on the verge of another bloody revolution, like happened in 1910.” Faith in public officials is at one of its lowest ebbs in Mexican history. Over 80 percent of Mexico’s population now lives in urban areas disconnected from traditional communal roots and emigration to the United States has become a way of life for millions of men and women. These two factors—urbanization and migration—have triggered a dramatic increase in the number of single-parent families and homeless and runaway children. The consequent lack of adequate incomes has created what Mexico City priest Father René Jiménez calls “a rootless agglomeration of young people who’ve lost faith in government, society and religion” and has nourished petty crime and gang membership. An increasing number of both young and old participate in public protests, many of which are becoming more violent. “When the Church seems to support the government, many of those who are striving for change pull away, creating social divisions within the Church as well as with the populace,” a Mexican theologian told me. Realizing that they must act independently, Church officials throughout Mexico are speaking out. Archbishop Héctor González of the state of Durango, in mountainous northwestern Mexico, caused a national furor in April 2009 by telling his parishioners that the capo of the Sinoloa drug cartel, Joaquín Guzmán “lives a little past Guanaceví. Everyone knows this except for the authorities.” That Durango’s governor, Ismael Hernández, insisted that the Archbishop should go to the federal police with this information bought guffaws from members of the press. A columnist for the daily La Jornada commented that if everyone in Mexico except the authorities knows where El Chapo lives, either the authorities are lying about not knowing his whereabouts or they are stupider than everyone else in the country. (Although various people that I interviewed asserted that both were true, the majority conclusion was that the federal government was lying and was in cahoots with El Chapo or was afraid of him.) Many people (including high-ranking government officials) expected the Church to censure Archbishop González for his criticisms but the Council of Mexican Bishops (CEM for its initials in Spanish) supported his stance and his contention that the Church needed to provide leadership and become a lightning rod for organizing popular resistance against the drug organizations’ domination of social and political life. Father Manuel Corral, spokesperson for the CEM, called it a need for “a Catholic crusade against narcotics traffickers” and suggested that the Church would create an anti-Mafia organization similar to Italy’s Red Libera that has successfully combated deeply entrenched criminal activities in that country. (Father Luigi Ciotti, the director of Red Libera, had accepted the CEM’s invitation to come to Mexico to discuss such a project.) Columnist Denise Dresser of the weekly magazine Proceso suggested, “The fact that the Archbishop’s parishioners have confided information concerning the whereabouts of El Chapo reveals something both preoccupying and important: The people have no confidence in the government and do not feel protected by the authorities.” This lack of confidence is not confined to Calderón’s National Action Party but to the entire political system. Statistics published by the Mexico City daily Reforma revealed that less than 5 percent of reported crimes are solved and not all of the perpetrators of those crimes are sent to prison. Citizens throughout Mexico refuse to report violations because they become victims of police who threaten them, extort money from them or assault them. Throughout Mexico police operate under what a former journalist who’s now a private investigator in Baja California calls the “Amway system.” Plazas (positions within the force, such as motorcycle patrol, vice investigation, etc.) are purchased and the purchaser pays a weekly or monthly quota to the higher up from whom he purchased the position. That higher up in turn pays his superior, since he too acquired his position after serving an even higher up loyally for a period of time. As officials are promoted, they take their hijos (“children”) with them, thus perpetrating a chain of money collection. Often the amounts of the quotas of those on the lower rungs of the ladder exceed their salaries, making it necessary that they extort money through bribes, theft, concealing the activities of criminals and protection services. Consequently, in many areas of Mexico citizens prefer the drug organizations to the authorities supposedly being paid to protect them. Though no high officials in the federal government officially have commented on the Church organizing anti-crime crusades, such an activity would seem to go against the policies of the executive-led oligarchy that controls Mexican politics. It has forcefully—sometimes brutally—repressed numerous pacific popular movements over the past decade, utilizing the military and the federal preventive police (PFP), both of whom receive armaments and equipment from the United States. Protests in Oaxaca and Morelos exposing government corruption and demanding union autonomy led to hundreds of arrests and, in Oaxaca, at least twenty-three uninvestigated deaths. The army’s participation in northern Mexico, illegal according to the Mexican Constitution, has aroused bitter criticisms. Citizens have filed charges against individual soldiers and military units for robbery, assault, murder, torture and rape. Military officials have refused to allow the soldiers incriminated to be tried in civilian courts and the majority of them have gone unpunished. “Simply stated, the drug dealers kill and rob each other, the police and soldiers kill and rob us,” pre-school teachers Mónica Figueroa attested while I was conversing with her and her husband, a manufacturing plant foreman. Although both admitted that was an exaggeration, her message was clear: Except along the Mexico-United States border, where criminal groups virtually have taken over the government, one doesn’t have to deal with the drug organizations; police and soldiers are much more difficult to avoid. Much of the criminality, and the social unrest, are rooted in unemployment and poverty. The drug organizations openly recruit young men, particularly those who have completed military basic training. A nineteen-year-old who called himself “El Ibero,” told me that his Oaxacan parents had accepted that he worked for a drug cartel because he was sending them money and the cartel had issued him a life insurance policy that would help provide for his parents if he were killed. Although Calderón’s National Action Party government is confirmedly pro-Catholic it also is confirmedly a “government of entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs” in the words of Calderón’s PAN predecessor Vicente Fox. Many in Mexico, particularly young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, equate “pro entrepreneur” as being “anti-working class.” Every year since 2000 the federal government has cut funding for public school systems and universities and gradually dismantled the normal schools that provided the majority of primary and secondary school teachers. Over half of the country’s work force is involved in the informal economy, primarily as street vendors, day workers and servants. Fourteen percent of Mexico’s permanent work force lives and works in the United States, nearly seven million of who lack proper authorization and survive in constant fear of being deported. Many who had been working for years in construction and manufacturing—and who had been sending money to relatives in Mexico—joined the ranks of the unemployed because of cutbacks and layoffs after the downward plunge of the U.S. economy. Despite fears that a massive surge of returning emigrants would inundate Mexican communities, the vast majority of laid off workers remained in the United States. But their struggles to earn what they could greatly reduced the contributions they were sending to their communities of origin. That Mexico’s federal government exhibited more concern for the stability of its banks than for the drastically increasing poverty of those marginally making a living heightened criticism of President Calderón’s policies and commitments. Worker and campesino blockages of highways, temporary takeovers of government offices, business shutdowns and strikes became daily events throughout the country. Although the government won international praise for quickly and effectively combating the sudden outbreak of porcine influenza, the potential epidemic demonstrated the vulnerability of the country’s health system. Privatization of many former governmental functions and industry and business replacing much of their permanent work force with temporaries greatly reduced the percentage of workers and their families covered by social security health benefits. Although both the Fox and Calderón administration constructed new hospitals and clinics in various rural areas, many of the new facilities lack doctors and an even greater number can’t provide medicines. In Mexico’s southern states nearly 95 percent of deaths have been attributed to curable diseases. The infant mortality rate has soared to 50 percent in some rural areas and life expectancy has decreased. “For years we have urged that people demonstrate their faith and back the Church,” Father David Manuel Ramírez told me, “now it is time that we demonstrate our faith and answer their needs.” Another priest, Father Manuel Arias, the spokesperson for Oaxaca’s Catholic presbytery, told me, “Many, many people have reached the limit of their endurance. Our obligation [as priests] is to do something for the poor, not just serve the Church itself and the faithful. We would be traitors to our calling if we didn’t speak out.” “Speaking out” isn’t limited to denouncing the drug organizations. Father Carlos Rodriguez opened criticized President Calderón’s government for its failures to enforce mining regulations and work stoppages after an underground explosion at the Pasta de Conchos mine took the lives of sixty-five miners in 2008. Investigations by both the government and the International Labor Organization showed multiple irregularities in the management of the mine, inadequate safety procedures, maintenance and upkeep failures and the absence of the medical personnel required by law. Efforts to retrieve the bodies of those buried by the explosion were abandoned after a few days and the federal government filed charges against the leader of the miners´ union for mismanagement of funds. More recently it has declared the twenty-two month-old strike in Cananea illegal, giving the mine owners, Grupo Mexico, the right to end the employment of any union members who refuse to adhere to the findings. Father Ramírez commented that the CEM pushing for greater Church involvement socially and politically “seems to be rooted” in recognition that Mexican citizens are pulling away from traditional values and replacing them with social and legal values that have little or no spiritual basis. To regain—or maintain—confidence in the Church he insists that parishioners need to be actively involved in those things that most affect their lives, including their health, earning a livelihood and being safe from crime. To that end, the CEM distributed a voters’ guide for the 2009 elections. The guide did not advocate the election of any specific candidates or the representatives of any established political parties but it did list values that voters should look in the candidates, specifically a background of honest business and political dealings, commitment to the disadvantaged and moral integrity. Although the country’s political leaders emphasize “we must work together” a vast number of Mexican citizens interpret the call as “do what we say and don’t question why.” Even conservative middleclass workers and professionals are expressing their dissatisfaction, openly and covertly, with Mexico’s government and its ties to the United States and no longer are willing passively to sit by as inflation eats away their incomes. “The protests are not about politics, or money,” insists Father Arías, “but about víveres (food, clothing and shelter).” As always, those with least are the most severely affected and more and more of them are invading vacant land, blocking highways, taking over government buildings and—regrettably—joining criminal gangs. In the words of Father Corral, “It has become necessary to urge our lay people to organize. We know that combating the traffic in drugs will be a long hard fight.” Long and hard because traffic in drugs is intrinsically connected with political corruption, with the vast gaps between the haves and have-nots, with inadequate health services and with migration and U.S. attitudes towards it. It is not something that can be solved by increasing military force and increasing repression of social protest. The payoff could be a new social awareness which replaces frustration and victimization with hope and a willingness to act according to Christian principles. But the verdict is still a long way off and there are no guarantees. Further plagues could be on the way for this twenty-first century Land of Job. First publishd in Social Justice Review, Sep-Oct 2009. |
Nothing Is Left: Interview With Rosario Gabino
“You want to know about Oaxaca? The native crafts, the artesanias, the colorful dances? That’s not Oaxaca! You want me to tell you about Oaxaca?” Yes, I want you to tell me about Oaxaca. “There is nothing left. There is no agriculture. Not like before, when there was corn. When there was water.” Jarring bus ride from Tlaxiaco, then on muleback, upwards. Here and there a clearing, a rancho, a village, houses abandoned, dust devils skimming rows of stunted corn. Children trudging along the path. The oldest, perhaps eleven or twelve, carrying a baby. ‘Where are your parents?’ A crooked, tired smile. ‘There. On “The Other Side.”’ ‘In the United States?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Who cares for the little ones?’ ‘I do.’ ‘You alone. No one else?’ ‘No one else. My grandmother is sick.’ ‘Your grandfather?’ ‘On “The Other Side.”’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘To the house of my cousins. To get tortillas.’ ‘Can’t you stay with your cousins?’ ‘No. If I did someone would take our house away. Then we would have to place to live.’ “For centuries the people here were self-sufficient. On their little milpas they grew enough to eat. In the rows between the corn they planted beans and squash and chilies. The bean plants put nutrients back into the soil. Most of the campesinos had chickens and a goat or two for milk and for most of them it was enough. “Then the coffee growers came. They offered jobs to the men, seasonal jobs, and the men earned a little money, although the work was hard. And the foresters began cutting down the trees, to sell the wood. They also hired men to work. Many of the milpas became coffee plantations, or places to graze cattle. But one can’t eat coffee beans and the cattle weren’t to eat, they were to sell. Many of the children left and went off to work in the cities.” Through dust coating the windshield my friend Pedro and I pick up moving shapes as the pickup bumps along ridges of the Sierra Oriental. Brahmas and half-Brahmas, ribs visible through tawny hides. Heads lowered they snort as we edge past. A few miles further on a bloated Brahma corpse. Then another. Vultures circle slowly, flapping heavy wings as they descend onto hillsides swept bare by the wind. “Some call the Mixteca ‘The Land of Widows.’ The only men are those too old or broken down to work. Years ago the land belonged to everyone—there were no fences, no boundary lines but that has changed. Caciques snatch territories from each other. There are killings and the friends of those who are killed go out to kill the killers.” He hunches on a stool made of a tree stump and sips mescal as he hones the blade of his machete. ‘We defend our property,’ he says. The hills visible from his dirt floor shack are steep and matted with tangled dry scrub. Now and then a bent figure emerges through it, a huge bundle of kindling strapped to its shoulders. ‘Can’t you negotiate with them?’ I ask. ‘They don’t negotiate.’ ‘And you?’ ‘I defend my land.’ “Children begin working when they are five or six. The teachers tell them to keep coming to school but if there is work to do they go into the fields.” Front teeth missing from his smile he leans against the wheel of the wagon, already having fed weeds to the burro that pulled it up a rocky trail that only a burro could climb. ‘I can write my name,’ he boasts, forming the letters A-L-B-A-N-I-S in the roadside dust. ‘And I can read.’ He tugs a mutilated comic book from a pocket of his ripped jeans. As he flips from page to page I realize that he is inventing a story from the pictures, not following the words. I say only, ’That’s good, Albanis. The more you study the more you will learn.’ “Almost every community is controlled by a cacique, everything that happens goes through him. He and his network of associates take the money that comes in from the government and buy things for themselves. If someone wants to start a business they go through him. If someone wants a road built they go through him. The marijuana growers pay him from their profits. So did the coffee growers. If someone objects they are beaten or they disappear.” ‘Don Jesús, a sus ordenes,’ he clasps my shoulder with his left hand as he shakes my hand with his right. Sturdy, barrel-chested, he flashes an ingenuous smile and promises that the mescal he offers is the best to be found anywhere in Oaxaca. Before I can answer he waves an ‘excuse me’ and tugs a cell phone from his belt. The brief conversation is imperative and profane. ‘Take rifles with you!’ I overhear. As he slaps the lid of the phone shut he grins and shakes his head. ‘One has to be forceful,’ he explains. ‘It’s the only thing the indigenas understand.’ “In many of the villages the only businesses that function are the Cajas de Ahorros—the savings and loans. They accept wire transfers from emigrants in the United States. Without the money sent from family members working there, there would be no Oaxaca.” In the kitchen of Isaias Caldera’s house is a butane stove. The chairs are white plastic. The plates are microwave proof although he has no microwave. ‘On the farm,’ his wife says, ‘we made our own things. Here we buy them.’ Isaias worked for five years in the United States but now he only goes to the border to purchase used cars that he drives to Oaxaca to sell. His brothers working in South Carolina send him money to buy them and he shares what profits he makes with their families. ‘It is a good business,’ he says. ‘My wife waits at the Caja de Ahorros to collect from those who pay me when their remesas come in.’ “There is a lot of sickness. Many of the deaths are from curable diseases, malnutrition, pneumonia, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis. Every week I hear stories about children dying because their parents could not get them to a doctor, or because they could not afford a medicine.” At first glance a high school student, hitchhiking. Young innocent face but angry obsidian eyes. ‘I am the only doctor they have,’ he groans, ‘and I am only just out of medical school, doing my public service. I beg medicines, I invent cures, the only clinics anywhere in the region have no supplies. Polluted water, mold, rancid meat—there are thousands and I’m only one. I can do so little. And they need so much!’ “The governor flies all over telling the world how wonderful Oaxaca is. He lives in a beautiful mansion and all of his friends entertain at expensive restaurants. Some of the waiters who serve them have college degrees. Their education does them no good. There is no employment. What good is a degree if one can’t find a job?” Few of the faces looking up from the native crafts being peddled on the sidewalks show any signs of hope. Scattered among them are withered little women with outstretched hands. A musician seems not to care that no one listens to what he is playing, nor that the yogurt cup he has set out to collect money is tipped on its side. “There is no accounting. The governor controls everything—the legislature, the judges that he or his party have appointed, the police. He is like a king, dispensing favors to those he chooses. No governor ever has left Oaxaca without having become extremely rich. Don’t they care about the people? “To them ‘the people’ are the blancos—those with fairer complexions. To them the indigenas are not people. They are like burros, cattle. If they starve no one in the government cares. Only on election day are they important. On that day they’re paid to vote.” José Lorenzo’s house is one of the largest in the village. In it he lives with his wife, his four children, his sister and her two daughters and ‘a cousin or two, I’m never sure how many.’ He is Zapotec and speaks the indigena language, plus Spanish and a little English. ‘I am an outcast,’ he admits, ‘because I have a government post. Many Zapotecs resent me. Both they and the government people treat me as though I don’t belong.’ “Changes have to be made. Not just with the leadership but throughout the government. The people need to mobilize. They need to elect new leaders. To form news ways of government that includes all of the people, not just the elite.” Laughing, chanting, waving banners the marchers arrive at the city center. They are tired but despite the deepening chill they are exhilarated. Their demands for reform have attracted thousands, their insistence that the governor resign reverberates throughout the state. They do not see the federal police until it is too late. Snipers atop buildings fire tear gas grenades. Huge tanks move forward as grenadiers carrying shields and wearing visored helmets, gas masks and leg armor surge against the crowd. A few youths try to defend themselves with slingshots and pyrotechnic rockets but the police sweep over them, indiscriminately beating everyone they come into contact with—demonstrators, shopkeepers, street vendors, women getting off work. Screams echo against the convent walls, sirens shriek, bloody and devastated men and women are thrown into piles, stomped on and beaten and carried to prisons. When the tear gas finally dissipates the next morning the governor strides through the city center as workmen with power hoses wash away the blood. ‘Oaxaca,’ he boasts, ‘is safe for tourists!’ “Everywhere one goes one feels the resentment—in the churches, in the cantinas, in private homes. Everything in polarized, the society is very divided. No longer is there any dialogue.” Guns are on their way. First published in Black and White, Spruing 2012 http://www.redochrelit.com/robertjoestout.html.. |