Mexico - A Failing State?

Godzilla in Mexico

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

by Roberto Bolaño

Lessons From Latin America

Unlike in Europe, the left in Latin America is still winning elections – albeit with difficulty. After 12 years in power, President Hugo Chávez has just seen his party win Venezuela's election with a much reduced majority. In Brazil the Workers' party is on the way to its third presidency in a row – though Dilma Rousseff must run off against the centre-right José Serra. And Ecuador's Rafael Correa has survived an attempted coup. They all face similar challenges – heavy pressure from regional oligarchs, and civil unrest from their grassroots social base. To understand this, look at how the left came to power in the first place.

In the 80s Latin America emerged from the dark days of military dictatorship with the hope that democracy would bring social justice. It was not to be. Forced to accept the free-trade doctrines of the Washington consensus, the weak and ill-prepared governments of the day auctioned off public resources at bargain-basement prices, mainly to Spanish capital and were drawn into global capitalism. The elite benefited, while the majority gained nothing. Jobs barely increased, public sector wages were "readjusted", and poverty rose dramatically. Workers suffered a double disadvantage: their labour cost more than that of their Chinese counterparts, and they were less well educated than eastern Europeans.

As the redistributive and welfare roles of government were progressively abandoned, the image of the old nation state began to erode. Poorer sectors of society dissociated their idea of national identity from the state. There was a deep crisis of political representation: traditional parties alienated voters, and the politicians who replaced the military quickly exhausted their credibility.

This was the context in which the left came to power. In the last two decades mass mobilisations – particularly of indigenous peoples – brought down four presidents in Argentina, three in Ecuador, and one each in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Social movements challenged US hegemony and stopped the privatisation of state enterprises and natural resources, building a new sense of identity forged by ethnic and regional demands and uniting the excluded and marginalised. Before the centre-left's electoral victories, a cultural victory had already been won.

In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador new constitutions were the expression of these new pacts: a legal framework recognising collective social and environmental rights and creating the conditions for radical democracy, emerging from the decolonization of states.

These progressive governments have driven a reconstruction of the architecture of power and geopolitics. Throughout the continent there has been a profound redefinition of the relationship with the US and global financial organisations, expressed in the rejection of the policies of the White House and the emergence of new institutional arrangements favouring regional integration on the continent's own terms.

It was no accident that the ambitious US-backed initiative for a free-market framework – the Free Trade Area of the Americas – was torpedoed, or that Ecuador did not renew the contract for a US military base at Manta. Foreign relations are flourishing in other directions, however: solidarity with Cuba and active diplomatic ties with Iran, and growing Chinese investment.

The central element of this redefinition has been the demand for national control of natural resources – which has produced major conflicts with multinationals. Today the states have greater control over resources, but social and indigenous organisations have criticised governments for continuing to base their strategies on an "extractivist" model – in which they remain primarily producers and exporters of raw materials.

These grassroots challenges over the exploitation of natural resources are gaining in strength, despite the international boom in the price of raw materials. Additional challenges have emerged – the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador accused Correa of being authoritarian, and environmental groups argue that he has given undue concessions to large mining companies. In Brazil the MST – the landless workers' movement – has criticised President Lula for failing to make advances in land reform. In Venezuela there is discontent with the ruling bureaucracy and the "Bolibourgeoisie" – those who have become wealthy under Chávez's socialism, which reveres Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who won Venezuela's freedom from Spain. In Bolivia, the more radical indigenous groups have criticised new gas exploration projects.

The extraction of natural resources has brought considerable new income to the continent, which these governments have used to finance social programmes and to combat poverty. During Lula's two terms his family plan has reached 50 million of Brazil's poorest people. In Venezuela 60% of tax income was dedicated to social programmes between 1999 and 2009; the poverty index fell from 49% to 24%, and the level of extreme poverty from 30% to 7%. Economic elites in each country have attacked this social spending, but corporate profits have actually increased – in Brazil under Lula, three banks earned $95bn in eight years.

The social transformation under way in Latin America has not yet produced definitive results. Disputes over the role of the state and the direction of regional integration and development policy have not been resolved. The waters of change are turbulent – and are likely to remain so for several years to come.

But How Big Is The Universe?

If In Arizona...

Don´t forget your "Gringo Mask"!!

Very useful so the Police with Neo-Nazi powers don´t arrest you!

Mexico Spied On Gabo

Mexico´s intelligence service spied on the writer Gabriel García Márquez for decades and considered him a Cuban agent, it emerged this week.

The defunct DFS agency bugged the Nobel laureate's phone and monitored his movements from 1967 after he moved to Mexico with his family. The authorities suspected the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude because of his leftist sympathies and friendship with Fidel Castro. Declassified documents published in the newspaper El Universal revealed the DSF kept a bulging file at least up until 1985, after which documents remain secret. It was era of the "dirty war" waged by rightwing Latin American governments against suspected subversives.

In a tapped conversation with the director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency, Jorge Timossi, Márquez mentioned he had made over the publishing rights for his book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, to Cuba's communist government.

"The above proves that Gabriel García Márquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent at the service of the intelligence agency of that country," a DFS document said in 1982. The same year he won the Nobel prize for literature.

The agency closely monitored the author's mediation between leftist movements and the French president, François Miterrand. It also kept tabs on Mexican writers such as Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel prize in 1990, and Salvador Novo.

Márquez, 82, affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, divides his time between Mexico City and Cartagena in Colombia. He still visits Havana and has maintained his friendship with Castro.

His masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera was made into a film but an effort to film his most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was derailed by objections to its alleged promotion of underaged sex.

Guadalajara (Mex) Book Fair