The Disease Called Politics
Bright Lights and Cheers and Waving to the CrowdIn 2009 Mexican journalist Luis Hernández-Navarro perceived “discontent breaking out on all sides like the bubbles in a vat of water about to boil.” Citizen groups battling police in the Estado de Mexico, Morelia and Oaxaca filed thousands of criminal complaints against Mexican militaries they identified as “another of the organized criminal bands.” The wives of miners killed during a massive cave-in at Pasto de Conchas, Sonora tangled with police who tried to remove their barricading of the mine entrance and federal authorities pistol whipped women attempting to block trucks hauling U.S. exported toxic waste to a to a newly opened dump in the state of Hidalgo.In 2009 Mexican journalist Luis Hernández-Navarro perceived “discontent breaking out on all sides like the bubbles in a vat of water about to boil.” Citizen groups battling police in the Estado de Mexico, Morelia and Oaxaca filed thousands of criminal complaints against Mexican militaries they identified as “another of the organized criminal bands.” The wives of miners killed during a massive cave-in at Pasto de Conchas, Sonora tangled with police who tried to remove their barricading of the mine entrance and federal authorities pistol whipped women attempting to block trucks hauling U.S. exported toxic waste to a to a newly opened dump in the state of Hidalgo.
Shipping to cement kilns was a major "solutions" driven by the Mexico City government (GDF), through an agreement with CEMEX, for the treatment of Mexican capital's waste, after the closure of Bordo Poniente landfill (the largest in Latin America), in December 2011, and has been strongly criticized for its negative impacts on human health and the environment derived from its potential emissions of heavy metals, dioxins and furans, and other contaminants. Nearly 3,000 men, women and teenagers converged on state policemen sent to arrest three local residents in Tochmatzintla, Puebla and locked them in the local jail. Residents wielding clubs and stones in Santiago Tolman, Estado de Mexico, counterattacked armed police who’d just rescued two officers about to be lynched for detaining a primary school student. Thousands of striking teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca took over the city of 300,000 and held it for five months before tank- and teargas-equipped militarized police and soldiers drove them out. “One doesn’t know who’s on whose side,” a young university student named Guillermo Ruiz told me. “The police belong to the gangs, gang members to the police, guerrillas to both. You never know who you’re talking to. Even the campesinos fight against each other. Mexico’s become a no man’s land.” The drug corporations absorb hundreds of thousands of adolescents every year. Contrary to the stance of the Catholic Church hierarchy most of these ni-nis (ni estudiar ni trabajar—“neither study nor work”) haven’t lost faith. “How can one lose something one never had?” a seventeen-year-old that I interviewed demanded. “Life is short so you get what you can while you can.” Before the last half of the twentieth century most Mexican adolescents grew up surrounded by relatives and peers who created networks of inclusion and sharing (so-called “cushions against misery and loneliness.”) But with urbanization and the consequent breakup of both family structure and tightly knit homogenous communities more and more Mexicans perceived that the patrón (father, cacique, governor, president) no longer deserved unquestioned obedience, widening a crack that had begun to appear in the deeply ingrained paternalism that had dominated the country’s political system since the founding of the Republic. The majority of young people who perceive hypocrisy between their parents’ and grandparents’ morality and the society in which they find themselves have no viable new system to insert in the old one’s place. Combined with increased mobility among the population, including the rural-to-urban movement of millions of campesinos and small landholders and the magnet provided by work opportunities in the United States they’ve became increasingly less willing to accept lack of opportunity, poverty and oppression that the previous generation felt that it had to endure. Mexican writer Jorge Zepeda-Patterson described a Federal District fourteen-year-old who like millions of other Mexican adolescents “came to the conclusion that the only way not to be beaten and assaulted was to join a gang…” To do so he “…simply had to comply with the conditions of initiation: rape a woman and kill a rival, which he did.” La muerte me da risa! (“death makes me laugh!”) has become a catch phrase scribbled onto walls and boasted in cantinas. Better to live high and die young than slowly starve on dried-up plots of lands that can’t provide sustenance to burros, much less human beings. Nevertheless, despite migration and urbanization, towns and villages throughout Mexico strive to remain unified. Their inhabitants know each other, work with each other, intermarry and most share the same ethnic and cultural backgrounds. From 1810—the beginning of the revolution against Spain—until after the revolution of 1910 and the decade of bloodshed that followed many of these communities had little or no contact with the federal government and were controlled by local caciques who fought federalization or solidified their control by supporting regional governors. The revolutions of 1910-1926 battered but did not destroy this system. Caciques and ladino landholders supported one or another of the various revolutionary forces and emerged having lost territory but not their governing power. The various indigenous cultures retained their customs, their languages and to a large extent their systems of communal control. Entire generations lived and died without coming into contact with either Spanish or Mexican governing authorities. The separation that existed between the elite and the hoi poloi during the Colonial period continues to exist in twenty-first century Mexico. Indigena leaders who aligned themselves with the country’s single-party political system replaced usos y costumbres with Spanish-style administrative government. Everything that takes place between the community and the autocratic federal and state governments goes through party politicians. Periodic local protests and uprisings erupt but are subdued and the families in power retained their caciquedoms. In the year 2000 the monopoly that the single-party political system that emerged as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario in 1928 and later became the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) gave way to “the party of change”: the ultra-conservative and pro-Catholic National Action Party (PAN). But PAN presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón changed only the name of the game not the way that it was played. They utilized the PRI pyramidal structure of regional strong men and caciques to control local legislatures and retaliate against social or political protests. Both, Presidents Vicente Fox (L) and Felipe Calderón are members of the ultra-conservative and pro-Catholic National Action Party (PAN). By aligning itself with the new PAN administration the hierarchy of the Catholic Church assumed more political power after Vicente Fox’s election. They achieved a lessening of restrictions against religious participation in politics and became major players in dictating anti-abortion legislation. Nevertheless the “many things to many different people” Church condoned, if not actually supported, stands taken against human rights abuses. Catholic bishops Raúl Vera and Samuel Ruiz openly supported the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, striking miners in Cananea and Pasta de Conchos and the massive anti-government protest in Oaxaca in 2006. Archbishop Héctor González of Durango ignited a controversy in April 2009 by telling his parishioners that the capo of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquín (“El Chapo”) Guzmán “lives a little past Guanaceví. Everyone knows this except for the authorities.” Ismael Hernández, Governor of Durango defended his state's law enforcement which triggered public derision. Durango’s governor Ismael Hernández huffily defended his state’s law enforcement and insisted that the Archbishop should go to the federal police with this information. The governor’s defense triggered public derision. Clearly, if everyone in Mexico except the authorities knew where El Chapo lived the authorities were lying about not knowing his whereabouts or they were stupider than everyone else in the country. (Various people that I talked to asserted that both were true, the majority conclusion being that the federal government was lying and was in cahoots with El Chapo or was afraid of him.) 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.” Independent transmission of news virtually ceased to exist after Vicente Fox’s “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs” government granted duopoly rights to the country’s two communications giants, Televisa and TV Azteca in 2005. Local newspapers continued to publish, most of them thanks to government advertising, but even those that maintained full editorial and reporting staffs increased dependence upon international wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. Carlos Payán, the founding editor of the daily La Jornada, told a “Mexico’s Situation” forum in Saltillo, Mexico that the Mexican media had ceased to be operated by journalists and had passed into the hands of entrepreneurs who “deform and erode information and any attempts at objectivity.” Federal incursions into the mountainous areas of southern Mexico demolished the facilities of community radio stations, many of which broadcast in indigena languages. Officials cited technical or licensing violations but the broadcasters and their audiences assured human rights advocates that the punitive actions, which including the assassinations of two young Oaxaca broadcasters, were launched because the stations were providing news and commentary that contradicted government propaganda. By 2006 the PAN administration, the television giants and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church had effectively joined forces to restrict citizen participation in political and social decision-making, paving the way for neo-liberal entrepreneurs to accumulate immense wealth and the Church to actively promote legislation that corresponded with its ideology. Protest demonstrations were described as “Communist-inspired” or “leftist-led” and the members branded as “dissidents” and “revolutionaries.” “[This] dissidence is attacked and in the atmosphere of false religiosity the existence of true dialogue is not just a ‘rupture of institutional order’ but a heresy,” Carlos Monsiváis insisted in Tiempo de Saber. “It is as though a hundred million people are crouched in the shadows watching a fictional television show called ‘our government,’” retired business owner Luis de la Vega told me as we chatted on the patio of his hillside home. “Like a lucha libre (pro wrestling) performance, bright lights and grunts and waving to the crowd, it’s all fake, everybody knows it’s fake. Our leaders have beautiful wives, they have mansions and big cars and herds of bodyguards and they tell us how good things are and we have less and less. But we’re just audience, hypnotized…” Clearing his throat and forcing himself upright, he insisted, “Nietzsche said religion is the opiate of the people. No, the media is.” The worst months of the economic crisis (October 2008-May 2009) thrust nearly 750,000 Mexican workers out of their jobs as inflation increased and federal and local governments reduced services. Mayors and municipal presidents throughout the country abandoned construction projects and laid off employees, including police and firemen. The drastic reduction in money being sent by emigrants working in the United States further impoverished already struggling marginal communities. “The fatal bullet,” a retired aluminum plant foreman described the 2008-2009 crisis. “It killed what already was a quivering corpse.” Governing authorities enclosed in their “PAN-landia” make-believe, a country of happy people enthralled with bicentennial celebrations and the national soccer team, shunted aside all protest as germinated by “a tiny minority.” “In Oaxaca it’s a crime to write! It’s a crime to protest! It’s a crime to think!” newspaper correspondent Pedro Matias told members of a Rights Action human rights delegation of which I was a member. Protesting farmers in San Luis Potosí battered their state governor with eggs because he failed to acknowledge their complaints about inflation and unemployment. The wives of miners buried by a cave-in at Pasta de Conchos blocked access to the site of the tragedy shouting, “The government wants to forget what happened! Pretend we don’t exist!” The parents of nearly a hundred victims of a fire that destroyed a privatized government infant care facility in Chihuahua pounded on bureaucrats’ doors demanding, “Why are you ignoring us?” Oaxacans opposed to cyanide contamination of their water and farmland by Canadian mining firms blockade roadways despite deaths and arrests. “We have no place to turn, no one to turn to,” I hear over and over throughout Mexico. As the governments of Mexico and the United States continue to promote the “War on Drugs” the drug corporations have become better armed that the militaries of many Third World countries. Auto-sufficient farming has disappeared as men desert their crops out of fear or to take work constructing roads for drug smugglers and illegal lumbering operations. Competing marijuana and opium poppy growers and exporters commandeer huge swaths of territory in areas where they have become the only government that exists. For the exploited, those “desde abajo” (“from down under,” a term used by both the Zapatistas and Oaxaca’s Popular Assembly to describe Mexicans disconnected from the ruling elite), the gap between their lives and their needs and the operations by which government-supported entrepreneurs and the monied class control the flow of labor, goods and wealth has widened into an impassible chasm. Other than being able to vote (although not to select the candidates for whom they can cast ballots) those desde abajo and the organizations that represent them—NGOs, labor unions, human rights and environmental groups and university researchers and writers—lack input into the decisions being made by the ruling coteries of Mexico and the United States and by entrepreneurial associations like the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SSP) and the North American Competitive Council (NACC). Heavily armed security forces restrict access to SSP summit meetings, much as they do to other international collaborations of heads of state like the World Trade Organization. Most of the details of the so-called “Plan Mexico” (renamed the “Plan Mèrida”), which provides armaments and training to Mexican security forces, emerged from SSP meetings before the plan was presented to the Congresses of the two countries for modifications and approval. That federal police and the military were the primary anti-protest forces used to repress the citizen uprisings at Atenco and in Oaxaca, to contain possible expansion by the Zapatistas, to forcible evict union workers during the takeovers of the Luz y Fuerza del Centro and to crush strikes in Cananea and Pasto de Conchos has intensified the frustrations of those whose protests haven’t been answered. They share—and fear—what a Witness for Peace bulletin warned: …if the “Plan Mexico” proposal is any indication, the SSP is going well beyond the economic realm. Taking into account the wealth disparity, extreme poverty, and levels of migration exacerbated by policies such as NAFTA, many wonder if the next key ingredient to any trade agreement would be security measures to both quell the inevitable social discontent and protect private investment. “One of the objectives of the administrators of neo-liberal systems like those in the United States and Mexico is to erase all memory of social struggles,” La Jornada correspondent David Brooks quoted Noam Chomsky following a presentation by the latter in New York City on June 14, 2009. According to Chomsky neo-liberal economic philosophy masquerading as “democracy” spreads the costs of generating income among the masses but funnels the profits into the hands of a wealthy minority. PRI administrations from 1982-2000 made efforts to cloak the process that Chomsky described but the PAN “by, for and of entrepreneurs” governments blatantly rewarded a select few and impoverished millions, increasing emigration and opening channels for drug corporation capos to flourish. The legislative support given the administration by the supposedly “opposition” PRI enabled PAN operatives to defer tax payments by major corporations, including trans-nationals, and remove subsidies from gasoline and electricity. PAN pushed privatization of health services, social security and government daycare centers and systematically raised taxes, placing even greater financial burdens on the struggling middle- and working class. Chomsky revised the nineteenth century elitist pronouncement “an intelligent minority has to govern an ignorant and meddlesome majority” by substituting “an elite technocracy” for “intelligent minority” but he insisted that the same motives—enrichment of the few at the expense of the many—guides the neo-liberal oligarchs just as they did the nineteenth century financial barons. Control of this “ignorant and meddlesome majority” in Mexico necessitates repression of mass movements, including those originating with labor unions, curbing education and supplanting indigenous culture with a media dominated “reality show” that exalts consumerism and only peripherally discusses poverty, un- and under-employment and social issues. This substitution of participatory government for a state-controlled telenovela also keys Mexico’s international relationships, even with countries and agencies that see through the sham. One of the most critical of these agencies, Amnesty International, repeatedly admonished President Calderón’s government for failing to acknowledge and respond to human rights violations. AI’s secretary general, Irene Khan, called Mexico’s attitude towards human rights “schizophrenic,” a label that syndicated journalist Ricardo Rocha insists she applied “with good reason. “We fight for human rights in the exterior, signing whatever treaty is put in front of us, while we stomp on those same principles inside out frontiers.” Fernando Gómez-Mont defended military personnel after the slaying of 2 children and assassinations of 2 university students in June 2010 Government Secretary Fernando Gómez-Mont defended military personnel after the slaying of two children in June 2010 and the assassinations of two university students in Monterrey by charging human rights investigators with bias. Oaxaca governor Ulisés Ruiz blatantly rejected AI’s documentation of assassinations, disappearances and beatings in 2006 by joking that “they read like they written by the APPO” (the initials of the Peoples’ Popular Assembly of Oaxaca). Summarizing AI’s documentation, Rocha insisted, “If those in power evidence a lack of respect for human rights it creates a pernicious and corrosive impunity that corrupts the entire governmental apparatus.” Journalist and environmental activist Gustavo Esteva asserts that corrupt or incompetent governments can ruin a country’s economic well-being when its institutions “produce the opposite of what they try to do… Instead of protecting the citizenry the state security apparatus [in Mexico] has dedicated itself to spying and repressing it in order to protect the government and its institutions.” After federal troops and federal police swept members of the People’s Popular Assembly, passers-by and shoppers into prison without allowing them to consult lawyers or relatives in Oaxaca in 2006 I questioned a state government attorney, “What if most of them are innocent?” “All the better,” he responded, “it will make the rest of the people more afraid.” PAN’s government by, of and for entrepreneurs turned former federal functions over to private individuals and corporations (including trans-nationals), increasing their political power as well as their wealth. As the result these entrepreneurs and corporations—including the major drug exporting organizations—control many aspects of the government instead of the government controlling them. “We don’t know who’s calling the shots,” one participant in a “What Happened to Democracy?” forum in Mexico City complained. “Is the government taking orders from Televisa? The capos? The United States?” Many of those attending concluded that whoever was giving the orders cared only for their own wealth and were willing to see the country deteriorate. “For the Spanish crown of the sixteenth century,” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos insists, “like the neoliberalism of the beginning of the twenty-first century, the only culture is the one they dominate. Indigenous lands were nothing but an abundant source of labor for the Spanish powers, as they are now for savage capitalism.” Despite countless so-called reforms, constitutional guarantees and supposed concessions on the part of the federal government the majority of Mexico’s indigena population “remain unheard and unattended,” journalist Juan Pablo Montes-Jiménez quoted labor leader Raúl Hilario Sánchez during the latter’s appearance in Oaxaca’s poverty-wracked Mixteca in 2009. “The conditions of poverty and margination of the pueblos are the road for an upcoming social revolution and the government of Mexico alone is responsible,” Sánchez insisted. The victims of military aggressions, including destruction of property, theft and rape, flail desperately at whoever will listen because the federal administration denies that the offenses occurred. Courts refuse to examine testimony from community members protesting the arrests and assassinations of those who tried to stop illegal clear cutting of their forests. “We want to be heard!” human rights advocates whose documented reports of violations are shelved, journalists who coworkers have been beaten or killed, indigena communities whose homes are raided and burned by government-equipped paramilitaries, churchmen who see drug dealers openly recruit adherents in their communities, writers who report the private enrichment of high-ranking government officials and have defamations charges filed against them and thousands of others throughout Mexico shout, write and demonstrate to no avail. Meanwhile the government of the United States sends millions of dollars worth of military hardware to Mexico, drives migrants who want to work into the hands of the drug exporting organizations it is trying to contain, whitewashes the massive exportation of arms and military-type weapons and ignores the dangers that the country with which it shares a 2,000-mile border faces as it becomes explosively desperate in its desires for change. First published in AxisofLogic.com clic aquí para modificar.
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Mexico is the Middle Ages with a cosmetically redesigned face. The power structure is an oligarchy, not a monarchy or vice-regency, but it operates in the same inept Feudal fashion as its pre-Renaissance predecessors. Most important policy decisions are not made in Mexico City but in Washington, D.C., Madrid and by the World Bank (and by the capos of competing drug corporations). Transnational businesses plow through the legal system as well as the environment, flinging restrictions aside and enriching those who pave the way for unrestricted profit taking. Those in Mexico who devise the rules (called “laws”) also are the referees who monitor them. The laws enhance the elite and castigate those who don’t belong—i.e. 98 to 99 percent of the population. Non-eliters are allowed to complain but not to organize groups of complainers. When groups of complainers grow too large they are forcibly repressed (this repression is labeled “public security”). Roman emperors provided Coliseum spectators with gladiator fights and Christian-eating lions; Mexico’s elite fills television with dawn to midnight game shows, football (soccer) games andtelenovela soap operas. A president of Mexico who also was a one-time president of Coca-Cola de Mexico made “tell-people-how-good-your-product-is-often-enough-and-they’ll-believe-it” the guiding principle of his six-year administration. It worked—but not because the 98 to 99 percent believed it. It worked because 98 or 99 percent of the 98 or 99 percent have low paying jobs, medical bills, children, migrant husbands, collapsing roofs, Church holidays and empty gas tanks. Television gives them something besides broken drains, double commutes, rotting tomatoes, cancelled credit cards and snatched purses, even if what television gives them is fluff and falsehoods. By increasing poverty among the non-elite, those wielding power force those afflicted to spend more time and energy eking out a living, thus increasing conformity and eliminating ability to forge change. Like the government the Catholic Church (which itself is a government) is divided between possessors of power and wealth—the elite—and a massive non-elite (that includes priests), the struggling but employed middle and working class and millions of disenfranchised campesinos andindigenas. A United Nations report described living conditions in parts of rural Mexico as squalid as those of Equatorial Africa. Despite these reports, verified and presented to the governing elite, the Church hierarchy focused pastoral and political efforts on criminalizing abortion. Similar to Medieval kingdoms, dukedoms and baronies, the ruling elite and their hangers-on have barricaded themselves in walled fortresses protected by conscripted mercenaries who augment their meager wages by raiding the non-elite. Caught between these mercenaries and those of competing invader bands (journalistically called “drug cartels”) the 98 to 99 percent—like Middle Ages serfs—find themselves systematically victimized, their lands taken, their crops robbed and their women raped. The invader bands, a twenty-first-century version of the barbarian invaders that swept through Medieval Europe, emerged from disenfranchised have-nots who were kept from participating in the world created by the elite. They created their own world, one with different values and different rules but one that provided money, power and various diversions. As their world (or worlds—a savage interplay of competing drug corporations, kidnapper bands, caciques, paramilitary enforcers and turf warriors) increased in size and potency, the elite surreptitiously joined forces with them. To do so the elite had to appear as though it was not doing so; consequently, it formed criminal bands of its own (called “federal police,” “the Army,” “the Marines”). These bands fight the invader bands with weapons supplied by the ruling elite of their neighbor to the north—the United States—and the invader bands fight each other and the elite’s criminal bands (also with weapons supplied by the ruling elite of the neighbor to the north). By 2012 over 100,000 of the 98 or 99 percenters had lost their lives and over 20,000 had disappeared with no end to the warfare nor the elite’s acquisition of wealth in sight. Making the “War on Drugs” a holy crusade—good against evil—and propagandizing non-existent achievements, enabled the ruling elite to shield from the 98 to 99 percent’s awareness that the products involved—cocaine, marijuana and designer drugs—are the country’s primary source of income. Undeclared income that is, sliding from bank to bank, investment house to investment house, politician to entrepreneur to stock trader. The little that trickles down to the 98 or 99 percent is sucked back up by taxes and escalating prices for basic commodities. Even after the nineteenth century war of independence from Spain and the twentieth century revolution against dictator Porfirio Díaz, Mexico continued to be a country of royalty, Church and serfs. Both those administering the divine right of the state and those administering the divine right of the Church cloaked themselves in invulnerability. Political, economic and social life originated with the elite and was delegated by them. Justice? Petition the divine right of the state. Food? Beg the divine right of the state. Happiness? Heed the divine right of the state. If these fail pray for a miracle from the divine right of the Church. To minimize protests—or at least organized groups of protesters—the elite had to convince the 98 or 99 percent that (1) there is no real reason to protest and (2) it is useless to protest. They achieved this through a complicated interchange of faces and irresponsibilities called “elections.” Like perennially losing baseball teams that every year or two replace the has-beens and never-bes on their rosters with different has-beens and never-bes, Mexico’s tightly controlled electoral system shuffles members of the elite and their hangers on among available offices. At the end of each of their terms governors become senators, senators become cabinet ministers, cabinet ministers become Congresspersons, Congresspersons become governors, ambassadors and party heads. And like fans that boo or applaud, criticize, Twitter and get into bar fights, the voters are not participants but outsiders—spectators—ignored by the ruling elite’s redistribution of political plums. Separation between the elite and the 98 or 99 percent is validated by procedures and regulations assembled in more or less comprehensible fashion (i.e. arranged alphabetically and/or numerically with appropriate $, % and similar symbols). These regulations and procedures include agendas, bonuses, expensive accounts, administrative assistants and invitations to cocktail parties, dinners and exclusive entertainment. Occasionally those administering them require contact with the 98 or 99 percent—contact that usually can be dismissed after an interview, teleprompt or promise. Frequently these contacts begin or end with the phrase “according to the law”—a reference to the alphabetical/numerical assortment the elite have compiled . The keepers/interpreters of procedures and regulations comprise a “sub-elite” who remora the elite. As legislators and bureaucrats they define their world as “apegado a la ley,” a definition that is rhetorical, not emotional, although a riotous conglomeration of shouts, threats, recriminations and bribes may have gone into the forming of its various sections, subsections, appendices, etc., not to mention lengthy delays and countless detours through procedures required by other sub-elite-originated laws and regulations. Almost without exception the $ symbol and/or phrases associated with it appears. Although those composing the sub-elite generate no $$$, they are very suspicious of those who do; consequently, they fill the sections, subsections, appendices, etc., with alphabetically/numerically arranged conditions and restrictions rooted in the distrust that they feel towards the 98 or 99 percent and towards each other. Membership in their world is limited “according to the law” by the election process during which the 98 or 99 percenters vote for one of two or three candidates that the elite and their hangers-on have allowed to compete. These candidates have free reign to promise, promote, suborn and lie as long as they adhere to the sections and subsections regulating procedure (procedure is extremely important to the sub-elite since content is missing ). Often the winners of these competitions are those who spend the most $$$; consequently, they become indebted to those who provided the $$$ for them to spend (i.e. the elite who script their performances). Seldom do these scripts admit the entrance of any 98 or 99 percenters except as generalities loftily eulogized as the “pueblo,” “the citizenry,” “the voters.” Although well enough rewarded financially, the sub-elite lack the security of the elite; consequently they find it necessary to safeguard their ascension by creating a sub-sub-elite to curry political favors, disguise financial transactions and misinform the media and the 98 to 99 percenters with fanciful propaganda. Those in the sub-sub-elite who are most successful in performing these services eventually wedge themselves into the sub-elite; those less successful slide away to seek real work or to develop ways to remora those who do. As in all Medieval kingdoms displays of wealth accompany displays of power. They effectively proclaim to the 98 or 99 percenters “behold this wonderful world we give you to admire!” The financing of these displays (like the financing of the elections and the expenses of the elite, sub-elite and sub-sub-elites) is “privileged,” protected from public scrutiny by sections, subsections and appendices to the laws (i.e. “not something for you mere serfs to concern yourselves about”). Aware that the 98 to 99 percent feel trapped by the need to eke out a living, victimized by constant shortages and under constant threat from invader bands, the elite and their minions divert them with circus spectacles, troubadours and witch burnings (i.e. soccer games, rock concerts and the War on Drugs). The performers—court jesters—achieve a limited independence, public notoriety and sometimes relative wealth, but they entertain according to limits that the elite prescribe. These jongleurs, jesters and circus performers understand that people who laugh are less likely to revolt than people who have nothing to laugh at. They also understand, consciously or unconsciously programmed by the Medieval chain of command, that having someone beneath them to mock, degrade, abuse and ridicule gives one a (false) sense of superiority. Feeling superior to certain others or groups of others perpetuates a downward chain where everyone except those on the very bottom, being of little or no use to the elite, have someone to beat up and blame (this top-to-bottom process effectively segments the 98 to 99 percenters and prevents them from uniting to overthrow the elite). The Church participates in this Wonderful World of the elite with jongleurs, entertainers and magicians of its own. They regale the 98 to 99 percent with an illusory future where all of them can be wealthy, happy, without problems and without pain—but only if they conform. To rebel is not to conform. To be different is not to conform. Those lowest on the conformance pyramid—atheists, homosexuals, women who have abortions—deserve their punishments and enable those along the top-to-bottom process to feel virtuous by oppressing them. “Conform and we will take care of you.” The Medieval government and the Medieval Church benignly disguise the murderous wars against invader hordes, the unremitting depletion of natural resources—oil, gold, lumber, corn—and offer festivals, television, and sports extravaganzas to keep the 98 to 99 percenters poverty strapped, disorganized and deceived. “Fail to conform and you’ll be punished,” with shortages, inflation, excommunication, clubs, is the other side of the coin. To pray for change—a miracle—is honorable and inoffensive. To try to create even minor changes is a crime—and a sin. The elite have yet to line their castle walls with the spiked grimaces of beheaded protesters. That could be next. First published in Red Savila Review The Realities of Tourism
“Leave us your money and go home…” isn’t published in Mexico’s tourist propaganda but is the underlying theme behind promoting maquilado Mèxico (“Mexico cosmeticized”). The government “of, by and for entrepreneurs” spends billions to present a fairyland of bikini-clad young women strolling immaculately white beaches, smiling indigenas happily weaving straw ornaments, golf courses and five-star hotels transforming pre-Colonial excavations and Las Vegas-type performances simulating authentic” folk festivals. In this fabricated fairyland the realities of malnutrition, unemployment, war on drugs-related crime and political repression don’t exist. “The more money you have the more welcome you are…” is extended not only to tourists but to investors and potential investors. Tourism as part of neoliberal marketing economy is a product like sugar, like steel, to be sold for the highest possible profit. Drug cartel domination of the countryside, shantyhouse slums, oil-crusted beaches mitigate profits; consequently, they have to be camouflaged and an alternative devised, an Oz splayed across curtains that prevent viewing what exists behind them. In fact tourists in Mexico are much like late-night revelers in a dancehall or hotel lounge. That some of the locals are wearing heavy makeup or attired in contrived pseudo-opulence doesn’t matter if they’re entertaining to talk to, dance with, even spend the night with. “A week’s vacation, I came to relax, to enjoy myself. I can’t change the world. I don’t want to try,” a visiting California mathematics professor told me. That Mexico was fantasyland he perceived but he also perceived that there was nothing he could do to alter it so for a week he could accept it, not question it. Enjoy what he could and not look beyond. “Enjoy what you can…” extends beyond tourism. It’s the offering extended to the country’s one-hundred and fifteen million inhabitants, the vast majority of whom watch television and listen to the radio. Outgoing president Felipe Calderòn’s administration spent over twenty billion 500 million pesos—nearly one billion 700 million dollars—on publicity during his 2006-2012 presidential term “most of it misleading and much of entirely false,” according to editorials in the Mexican newspaper El Universal. Those figures don’t include the billions poured out for the ornamental Estela de Luz monument in Mexico City, lavish centennial celebrations which only invited dignitaries were permitted to attend and alterations to historical sites, including the pyramids of Teotihuacàn and the Basilica de Guadalupe. The creators of Fantasyland Mexico understand that a population struggling economically to survive, men and women working two or three jobs, clinging to a few possessions, lacking both time and mobility, is relatively easy to control. The struggle to earn a living, to survive, creates intellectual passivity. Alcoholism increases, curiosity diminishes. Television replaces community—or becomes community, a common denominator, a cultural unifier. One-hundred and fifteen million people, from Tijuana on the U.S. border to Cancun on the Caribbean, see the same telenovelas, hear the same news analyses. Although viewers perceive that in their own non-fairyland lives they confront very different, often degrading if not actually dangerous circumstances, this Fantasyland-mirror, television, tells them that they are exceptions, that they are not in sync with the norm. Not only does it control—transform—individual and family life it supplants many aspects of communal life. Becomes a nationally shared pseudo reality. That this pseudo-reality is trimmed in U.S. colors makes touristed places more comfortable for visitors. In them one can buy U.S. products, watch cable television, communicate through internet. Golf tours, nightclub tours, culinary tours proliferate. (No slum barrio tours or indigena village tours; slum barrios and poverty-wracked indigena villages don’t exist in Fantasyland.) In many locations it’s difficult if not impossible to find Mexican-made goods or Mexican-grown fruit or vegetables. Even the drug corporations cooperate with the pretty picture painted for tourists. The few U.S. casualties among the more than 90,000 victims of so-called War on Drugs have been Mexican-Americans with dual citizenship or persons connected with government operations (U.S. consulates, the CIA). The drug exporters, like the Televisa/government, don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them: U.S. citizens are the drug corporations’ principal customers. Although ostensibly privately owned and managed, television in Mexico is intricately interwoven with the federal government. The government has been one of its principal advertisers, promoters and confederates since television wedged its way into Mexican households after World War II. During the presidential administration of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) the federal government granted monopoly—“duopoly”—rights to Televisa and TV Azteca, the country’s two national networks. Collaboration between the duopolers and the government makes it impossible to distinguish who is regulating who. No one really knows to what extent the federal government controls television or to what extent the duopoly controls the federal government. For a populace that historically has had a high rate of illiteracy and semi-literacy television is a pervasive force. When it is the only source of news and entertainment it becomes so webbed into daily life that it becomes a basic part of existence like buses, electricity, beer. Mexico's tightly controlled television programming and governmental publicity seldom report anything that doesn't reflect prosperous Mexico filled with happy people. Nor does it detail the government’s failures to solve crimes or effectively deal with powerful drug organizations. During President Calderòn’s six-year term the television duopoly consistently aired his boasts about creating jobs, the country’s economic solvency and its successes against narcotics commerce, boasts that exaggerated and misrepresented the facts. When anti-government marches, takeovers of roll booths, environmentalists chaining themselves to trees, hunger strikes to regain employment and blockades of foreign-owned gold-mining contamination appear in news reports they are presented as criminal activities or the work of dissidents attempting to destroy Fantasyland. The propaganda controlled media glorifies the slaying of drug corporation capos as victories in the war against organized crime despite evidence that six years of military intervention has increased, not decreased, drug-connected profits, the numbers of individuals participating in the trade and the amount of territory the so-called cartels control. “How can people believe this b.s.?” I asked a suburban Mexico City video maker. “They don’t,” he replied. “They know it’s a lie. But the truth has become so mangled it’s impossible to sort through it. So most people shrug off what government politicians say. They just try to get through today and see what they have facing them tomorrow.” The greatest danger to this artificial reality is that someone will break through and expose what really is happening. One person—even one small community—disrupting the fantasy can be thrust aside as deviant, ignorant—even criminal—but united protest efforts have to be repressed before they become too strong. Mexican police and military beat, tortured, raped and arrested hundreds at Atenco in the Estado de Mexico in 2006 and in Oaxaca the same year to prevent anti-administration demonstrations from becoming area-wide or nationwide movements. For nearly thirty years armed military have surrounded the Zapatista communities in Chiapas in southern Mexico to “prevent the cancer from spreading,” as one of President Ernesto Zedillo’s advisors commented. A force of over 1,500 state and federal armed military and police violently quashed a student protest in Michoacàn in October 2012, beating and arresting hundreds in a state wracked by corruption and drug-related crime. That no equivalent large scale operations had been launched against criminal organizations in that state demonstrated which the governing elite considered to be the greater evil: gangland violence or organized protests. The gangs—the drug-exporting corporations—are part of the status quo, the protesters are not. That is not to say that the artificial Mexico created for tourists and residents isn’t fragile. The curtain needs to remain in place, the actors (politicians, television producers and personalities, NAFTA-benefitted entrepreneurs, etc.) need to stick to the script. Revelations about the emperor’s new clothes have to be repressed or the emperor (those same politicians, television personalities and entrepreneurs) incur drastic income reductions. In much the same way that slums and poverty-wracked rural villages remain out of sight to visiting tourists, drug commerce-related violence has remained behind the Wizard’s curtain. The drug corporation capos and their acolytes have tremendous amounts of cash at their disposal—cash that they invest in so-called legitimate enterprises, including tourist facilities. Fervent competition to construct larger and more elaborate marinas, beachfront hotels and condominiums, Five-Star resorts and extravagant sports facilities straps available financing: Insertions of ready cash are always highly appreciated. Not only the capos but bureaucracies of underlings associated with them purchase million-dollar homes, airplanes, ranches. They number among the expensive tourist resorts most lavish clients. “The more money you have the more welcome you are…” knits transnational entrepreneurs, drug exporters, tourists and foreign governments eager for oil, gold and silver and lumber with a mythology of Aztec and Mayan heroism, brightly costumed and carefully choreographed traditional dancers, colonial architecture and resort-strewn tropical beaches. A fairyland of happy people and quaint customs, impressive history and artistic creations that is seventeenth century traditional and luxuriously expensive. It’s a show, a costume party, a scripted travelogue: sun, volcanoes, tlayudas, tequila, photo albums…. “The less money we have the less welcome we are…” Those of us who live behind the Wizard’s curtain, excluded from Fantasyland, numbed by television, cannot eat words, cannot clothe ourselves in propaganda. The wizard is in danger of losing his curtain. When that happens poverty-ridden Mexico will again be the real Mexico and the tourists will have to see what’s really here or pocket their money and go back home. First published in Fifth Estate, Vol. 47, No. 3, Winter 2013Red Savila Review, Spring, 2015 |
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