A little pre-Panamerican Games social cleansing and homophobia

While US culture has experienced a rather extended phase of political correctness that now approaches the comedic at its most extreme, Mexico could still use a course in the basics. It should come as no surprise that municipal authorities in GDL might very well be discussing a little social cleansing in preparation for the upcoming Panamerican Games. Sex workers, the window washers who swarm the cars at major intersections, and the homeless were allegedly topics of discussion, which should not surprise anyone, as you would no doubt find that similar conversations have taken place amongst those in charge of hosting such events in virtually any city in the world. It's a sad reality, but a reality nonetheless, that a city might seek to conceal these particular members of its citizenry from the gaze of outsiders, as they call attention to the uglier side of Mexico's socioeconomic contours. One additional group was the topic of much concern as well: Guadalajara's gay population. Apparently, preventing any public displays of affection among gay men and women is a matter of public import, in yet another striking example of this city's conservatism. While Aristoteles Sandoval, the mayor of GDL, denied any and all of the above and argued that GDL is a tolerant city, officials interviewed by Milenio journalists suggested otherwise. "Mi política y mi filosofía es de respeto, es de tolerancia, sí es de un orden, pero el orden no es con represión, [...] siempre he sido muy respetuoso de las preferencias sexuales. No será [...] Guadalajara quien reprenda o reprima, sí el que ordene," responded Sandoval. He'll go far if he keeps that kind of politicaly artistry up when faced with tricky questions from the press. (see the article here: "Denuncian plan de "limpieza social" del Centro para Juegos")
In an unrelated but nonetheless relevant incident, if only because it again illustrates the climate in the region toward gay people, the head of Colima's Human Right's Commission (CDHEC), Roberto Chapula de la Mora, declared that the Colimense government is full of closeted gays. It was actually said in a much more colorful way that defies translation without offending both myself and my readers, but you can take a stab at it on your own: "hay mucho puto tapado en el gobierno, que se toman dos, tres cervezas y piden hombre; empiezan de compadres y terminan de comadres." This tidbit was offered in an interview with a local paper just days before the celebration yesterday (or non-celebration, I would imagine, in this town), May 17th, of the International Day Against Homophobia and the story was picked up by the latest edition of Proceso (""Hay mucho puto tapado en el gobierno", declara Ombudsman de Colima"). How comfortable would one feel reporting an incident of homophobia to this agency after hearing that from its director?

Foot in mouth disease

The governor of Jalisco, Emilio Gonzalez Marquez, has long suffered from the tendency to shoot off at the mouth without much thought for the consequences. Take, for example, his homophobic condemnation of gay marriage, which resulted in a still pending inquiry into his behavior by the state's human rights commission (the infamous "asquito" comment). Now he has stuck his foot in it, by not just implying, but rather accusing the PRI of complicity with the narcos. They (the PRI, as he is PAN), he claimed, do not cooperate in approving legislative initiatives because they "still feel a taste, memory, or nostalgia for negotiating with the narcos." His party, of course, does not engage in such activities, he then argued, although the retorts to that assertion have been heated. It's an interesting use of the pax narco thesis, this idea that under the PRI, a sort of peace prevailed because the PRI had been willing to accommodate the narcos. According to the theory's proponents, the election of the PAN and their subsequent pursuit of the narcos upset the balance that the PRI had delicately maintained (at the price of their own integrity, of course). Not surprisingly, the Priistas are up in arms, with the mayor of Guadalajara, Aristoteles Sandoval, at the head of the pack. What gets their hackles up is not just the accusation, but the ambition of the governor, who is said to be considering a presidential run. Que asquito, one might say, about the whole brouhaha.

The good news/bad news debate and Mexico's tourism industry

As the federal government, specifically the ministry of Tourism, SECTUR and state governments signed an accord to promote the tourism sector, or in more realistic terms, salvage the industry in the wake of the recession, the swine flu epidemic, Oaxaca's teacher strikes and most significantly, the narco news, the governor of Nayarit, Ney Gonzalez, pleaded with the press to make more of an effort to cover positive news of Mexico rather than emphasizing the "nota roja," or crime news. This plea, which has been made by many in the industry as well as politicians and government officials hoping for the industry's recovery, sometimes sounds strangely akin to the entreaties made by the right for "good news" from Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's also a great deal of reason to their arguments (the tourism folks, not the US right-wingers). As the American press, or more specifically, the cable news networks, has seized upon the story of narco-violence, increasing numbers of potential tourists have dropped their plans for a stay at one of Mexico's many beach resorts, although in many cases it would be like dropping one's plans to visit Miami because a gang shooting had occurred in New York City. But the dilemma is also the perennial problem of dealing with American tourists, notoriously skittish for reasons of their geographic ignorance, fearful of all that is remotely distinct from their own culture, and simply not the seasoned travelers that their European counterparts have long been. (As an aside, would be interesting to know if European tourism numbers are down by the same percentages as American ones--will have to dig around for an answer to that one--and Canadian figures would likewise make for an interesting comparison)
Mass tourism has been the third most important earner of export dollars since the 1980s, right behind manufacturing and oil, and many coastal states, with few alternatives for development, have come increasingly to depend upon the industry, both in terms of real revenues and imagined futures.  Quintana Roo, the home of Cancun and now the Riviera Maya, was not so long ago ranked dead last, along with Chiapas, in terms of poverty, and now consistently ranks as one of the wealthiest states in the nation. Cancun, still the crown jewel, however tarnished, of Mexico's tourist sector, and the neighboring coast have long been the site of narco-related homicides but such stories rarely register with the tourists themselves, even as they make front page news in local papers. One would think that Acapulco is largely done for due to the ugly stories of beheadings and disappearances but its numbers, recently put at about 75% occupancy as we near spring break season, could be worse. Cabo rarely appears in narco-related news, perhaps because the narco-trafficking moves northeastward along the mainland coast, compromising Mazatlan more than destinations in Baja California. Nayarit's coast, starting just north of Puerto Vallarta, has grown tremendously in the last few decades and saved a state that otherwise depended heavily upon a flagging agricultural sector for the majority of its earnings. The Riviera Nayarit, along with Puerto Vallarta, remain relatively untouched by the stories of narco-related horrors, although the grenade thrown at employees of Jalisco's attorney general's office lunching in Puerto Vallarta, even if the site was at a remove from the tourism zone and led only to the death of one of the perpetrators (the grenade did not go off, and the agents gave pursuit) is cause for concern. There's certainly evidence that several cartels are active around PV/NV but so far, they've kept their heads down and stayed away from the tourist zone (well, in terms of conducting their dirty business--there's surely plenty of money laundering going on in both PV and NV). Ultimately, most of the major beach resorts are still safe and enjoy very low crime rates compared to many similar destinations around the world (as well as in comparison to many US and European cities, as those within the industry and those supporting the industry have frequently pointed out in recent months). But all it will take is a particularly gruesome incident, publicized by the news outlets up north, to sow more fear among Mexico's primary clientele.

Monterreyesque?

In the last few weeks, Guadalajara has experienced its fist narcoblockades, a grenade attack in a bar on one of the city's main thoroughfares that killed six, a shooting last night in a hotel just down the street from that same bar that killed three, and in addition to the usual murders among low-level gang members, the killing of two lawyers. The first lawyer, the brother of the Secretary General of the municipality of Guadalajara, was carrying a briefcase with approximately US$4,000 when he was executed, while the other was the son of the head of the department of transparency in the municipality of Tonala. There appears to have been some relation between the two, but the press has so far not been able to shed much light on the case. Add the videos,  really press releases, sent to El Blog del Narco (this site is not for the faint-hearted and the ads are likewise offensive, so visitors beware) sent by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion and countered with another clip issued by their rivals, La Resistencia MFG (Milenio Familia Golfo) in which public figures are named and threatened for their complicity with one or the other of said groups, it's been a rough couple of weeks here in Guadalajara. While life goes on as before for most residents, there is a nervousness in the city about what these events signal for its future. All we are lacking is a rash of kidnappings (which will focus on local business people, politicians, government officials, and/or their relatives) and GDL will start to look very much like Monterrey a year or so ago.

Five tons of pot confiscated without a single arrest

You might think, when first reading the headline that the Mexican army confiscated approximately five tons of marijuana in a small town in northern Jalisco without making a single arrest, that this incident is just another example of the impunity that characterizes this nation's judicial system. But read further, and you will discover that much of the pot was handed over voluntarily by the town's 200 residents. The general in charge of the operation was forced to admit that he could not arrest virtually the entire pueblo, and that given the limited economic opportunities in this region, the practice of growing the drug crop was widespread. These farmers ultimately are making the same kind of rational economic decisions that their counterparts in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia (and many other parts of the world) have made, growing the commercial crop, be it pot, poppy, or coca, that holds the best promise of allowing their families to overcome the vicious poverty of subsistence agriculture. Are they criminals? That's a tough call, given their choices.

Flat-footed in GDL

Guadalajara awoke Wednesday morning to the nightmarish news that perhaps seven narcobloqueos and grenade and molotov cocktail attacks had occurred during the previous night. Speculation about the provocations of such actions on the part of the gang known as La Resistencia run the gamut from the extradition of Lobo Valencia to anger at a recent drug bust at the airport or the detention of nearly a dozen members of said gang to the nasty but possibly credible accusation, made by Resistencia gang members themselves, that the government has pursued them while protecting members of a rival cartel. The hastily called meeting of municipal and state leaders on Wednesday morning revealed the extent to which the metropolitan and Jalisciense leadership has been snoozing, on the take, or perhaps just in denial. Yet anyone who can read a newspaper, and certainly those living in the neighborhoods, largely to the south of GDL proper, where the majority of the spiraling number of narco-murders have occurred, could have predicted that such events would come the city's way at any moment. The most revealing moment of the press conference entailed a speaker backtracking on his comment that the various levels of government and neighboring municipalities would now begin to cooperate on a greater level in matters of security. Of course, they had already been coordinating efforts, he quickly corrected himself, although the press and the public might well draw their own conclusions from the degree to which the attacks took the multiple police forces in the ZMG by surprise the other night. And as far as the shock and dismay of the citizens themselves, well, again, one must surmise that they have been snoozing, on the take, or in denial as well. The notable presence of narco-money here in the restaurant and construction businesses amongst others, the widely-held belief that GDL has long been a haven for the families of the narcos themselves, and then the death or capture of various narco-capos within the last year who were known to have maintained the peace in the city would all suggest that GDL could easily follow in Monterrey's footsteps. City and state officials, while easy to blame, cannot reasonably confront such a threat with such paltry resources at their disposal. They must either hope that Resistencia is on the run and weaker than one might think in spite of their Michoacanesque show of force the other night or swallow their pride and call in the feds, which will not be pretty either.

Cashing in on Playa del Carmen

The city council of Solidaridad, known to tourists/gringos as Playa del Carmen, is currently preparing a new urban development program (what we might call zoning ordinances) that anticipates the growth of the town from about 150,000 inhabitants to a million by 2050, with 80,000 hotel rooms providing the means for supporting those residents (see the article in La Jornada today, "Crecimiento urbano y turistico sin orden amenaza a Playa del Carmen"). In short, Playa's councilmen and women are hoping to replicate the kind of growth that Cancun experienced in the 1970s up through the mid 1990s. Of course, many are scandalized by the lack of sustainability of this plan, which disrespects the environment and the carrying capacity of the tourist industry to a degree that if not so tragic would be laughable. But the end result of a construction boom--the negative impact on the fragile ecosystem, the area's underground rivers and cenotes, the inevitable overbuilding of the area which will ruin the city's current charm (although for some it already passed the mark of being overbuilt some years ago), the cheapening of Playa's cachet among international tourists, as well as the price of its rooms--is not really the point. What the Solidaridad city council knows is that the money is in the construction, the outcome be damned. And it will be damned, as Solidaridad will not be able to count on the steady flow of federal subsidies for infrastructure that made Cancun what it is today. Keep in mind that Cancun, for all its flaws, is still the top earner of tourist dollars in the country. It was able to build the kind of infrastructure for the hotel zone that at least hid the worst of the environmental consequences during the phases of major construction, while in Playa, five years ago, one could already see the sewage seeping into the water table mere meters from Mamita's, a popular beach club just north of the city proper. And without federal monies for urban infrastructure for the city's residents, migrants to Solidaridad will find themselves waiting even longer than Cancun's residents for basic services, especially in recessionary times with a near civil war between the feds and the narcos siphoning off the funding that was once allocated to such social projects. Nor will new jobs materialize for them once the construction work is completed, because much of it will be condos and time shares and most don't even have the skills to make the transition to working in the hotel industry anyway. So it will be a disaster, no doubt, but it will be a profitable one for some. It's a train that is nearly impossible to stop because the money that the construction industry brings into the region creates jobs and provides an easy way to launder money and is highly profitable for all involved at least in the short term, from the developers and their narco financiers to the politicians revising in this case or looking the other way about zoning violations (for a price of course) to the poor Mexicans who so desperately need the work. And as the article correctly noted, with an affirmation from Playa's mayor, there's no choice but to draw up a new plan as this train has already left the station (in my estimation, starting in the 1990s, so it's surprising it's taken the city council this long to formalize the process and cash in while they can).

The politics of placas

License plates, in combination with make and model, have become very telling here in Narcolandia Lite, aka Guadalajara. Newspaper articles chronicling the weekend's homicides habitually list the plates and details of the cars spotted near the killings. Apparently the sicarios tend to drive often older sedans with out of state plates, which makes sense given that they are usually narcochavos seeking to prove themselves and move up the narcoladder. In general, the more pesado (heavyweight) narcos tend to favor Suburbans and Ford Lobos, to the point that Lobo sales have actually fallen recently because the model is so clearly associated with the narcos. Things get more complicated in a wealthy town with a strong agricultural sector surrounding it, as one must also consider that these models have also been popular with suburban (with a small s) moms and ranchers, albeit for different reasons.  Around the fancy malls and in the wealthy neighborhoods of the ZMG (the greater metropolitan area of GDL, but doesn't it have a nice ring not unlike DMZ?), the combo of plate, make, and model makes for a diverting anthropological game. The Volvo with Sinaloa plates is probably someone here on business, visiting family, or perhaps a refugee fleeing threats of kidnapping or extortion, but the Escalade SUV with the same plates merits at least a raised eyebrow. The Hummers appear to be old money, hijo de papi vehicles of choice, and most sport local plates. But enormous and enormously expensive tricked out SUVs from states like Sinaloa, Michoacan, and even Colima require wide berth and not too much curiosity, even if the windows are too darkened to afford more than a shadowy glimpse of what rides alongside.

Not feeling the cheer: Mexico's minimum wage

Among the more ambitious clauses of the Mexican constitution is Article 123, which mandates the provision of a living wage for Mexican workers. After a predictably nasty legislative battle in the Mexican congress, the government has raised the minimum wage to just under 60 pesos a day. That translates to less than $5 dollars a day (about US$4.80 at current exchange rates, to be more specific, with slight variations by region). Consider that figure, in a country where perhaps half of its citizens work in the informal economy and the narcos can recruit at will from among the so-called ni-ni (those that neither work nor study) and one finds the snow machines at the malls and the Hummers with reindeer ears and the garish decorations of the wealthy neighbors rivaling those in that horrible Tim Allen movie some years ago to make one feel slightly sick to one's eggnog.

Boo to boots on the ground

Edward Schumacher-Matos said the unsayable when he recommended that it was time for Mexican elites and the military to call in the U.S. Marines. Mexican editorialists will be up late tonight, drafting heated replies, and Schumacher-Matos is not wrong to fault them for clinging to a nationalism forged during the nineteenth century in the wake of the U.S.'s devastating show of force, although it's really more a cultural tick, much like our need to compulsively talk about bringing democracy to the world. But Schumacher-Matos is off the mark when he defends Secretary of State Clinton's remark conflating the narcos and a growing (and by the way--nonexistent) insurgency. That's what stuck in the craw of the Mexican intelligentsia, as it is fairly obvious that no one out there in the campo is offering any sort of political alternative a la the guerrilla in Colombia several decades ago, and while the leading narcos occasionally engage in the some populist hospital-building or vigilante justice, neither has anyone been fooled into thinking that the cartels themselves are offering a political alternative. They don't need to, as they are part and parcel of the existing political system, even if Calderon had the poor grace to go and rock the boat by actually aspiring to bring them to justice. It's easy from the comfortable perspective of the U.S. to stand in judgment of the precarious position in which the Mexican state now finds itself. The study Schumacher-Matos cites, on the growing threat that the cartels pose to states within the hemisphere, appears to build on a concept, that of the "captive state," that has been a fashionable alternative to the highly inaccurate notion of the failed one for some time here in Mexico. The corruption issue, the other side of the coin of some (imagined?) debate Schumacher-Matos suggests is occurring in the U.S. on what to do about its southern neighbor, might better be understood as complicity, both willing and coerced, as the influence of the narcos has penetrated virtually every aspect of Mexican life, even if there is still much more than narco-trafficking to Mexico today, a point easily forgotten if one relies upon the U.S. media for one's perspective. But retaining one's honesty and integrity as a public servant, or even as a private citizen today in Mexico is far more complicated than what most gringos can imagine, and in many cases, might well be suicidal if one has been approached by the narcos. Perhaps only someone who takes it at face value that Plan Colombia has indeed succeeded, regardless of the costs (which were not merely financial) or the rather obvious fact that the Colombian cartels still exist, still produce most of the cocaine consumed on the planet through their control of poppy production throughout the Andean countries, and still exert tremendous influence, whether financial or otherwise, within Colombia, can suggest that a few boots on the ground will make the difference here in Mexico.