Mexico's bicentennial fiesta

A night to remember, and to forget

A double anniversary amid a national funk

Sep 16th 2010 | MEXICO CITY

“THERE is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta,” observed Octavio Paz, Mexico’s greatest poet, “but there is also nothing so sorrowful.” The night of the fiesta “is the brilliant reverse to our silence and apathy, our reticence and gloom,” he wrote. On September 15th Mexico lit itself up in green, white and red for a double anniversary, and to try to shrug off its gloom. The night marked 200 years since the start of the war of independence against Spain; November marks a century since the rising against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz that unleashed a decade-long revolution. It was a chance to forget the violence visited on Mexico by drug-trafficking gangs (see article). This lacks the political motives of these previous events but is starting to rival them in intensity.

Ciudad Juárez, on the United States border, was forced to cancel some of its celebrations owing to security concerns. In the run-up to the festivities Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, warned that Mexico’s criminal organisations were “morphing into…what we would consider an insurgency,” evoking Colombia 20 years ago. Barack Obama diplomatically swatted this analysis down. On September 12th Mexico’s government arrested Sergio Villareal Barragán, aka El Comeniños (“the child-eater”), the latest in a string of suspected drug barons to be captured or killed.

Not so long ago, such a movie would not even have been made, let alone been backed by the government. Had they fallen a decade ago, the anniversaries would have coincided with Mexico’s first fully democratic presidential election; five years before they would have chimed with a free-trade agreement with the world’s biggest economy. In the bloody days of 2010 it is easy to forget the strides that Mexico has made towards prosperity and freedom.For a few days El Comeniños and co were almost forgotten, as town halls draped themselves in tinsel and tricolour flags were jammed into car windows. Even McDonald’s is advertising its hamburgers with a cardboard cut-out of Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the revolution who would surely have shot up every branch. As well as laying on fireworks, parades and commemorative banknotes, the government has sent every household a glossy 68-page booklet about Mexico’s history, and part-funded several bicentennial-themed films. “True Heroes”, a cartoon adventure, tells an idealised history of independence; “Hell: Nothing to celebrate” is a grittier affair.

From the Americas blog

A Grande catch

Sep 13th 2010, 17:43 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

MEXICO is on a roll in its pursuit of its powerful drug lords. Late on Sunday, the government announced that another one of the country’s most wanted bandits had beencaptured at lunchtime in the city of Puebla, not far from Mexico City. Sergio Villareal Barragán, a hulking figure who was variously known as “King Kong” and “El Grande”, is thought to have been a senior lieutenant in the Beltrán Leyva organization, one of Mexico’s seven main drug-trafficking groups.

His arrest came less than a fortnight after the capture of Édgar Valdez Villareal, known as “La Barbie” for his blond hair and blue eyes, who is believed to have led a rival faction of the same organisation. Members of the Beltrán Leyva gang have been fighting a gruesome battle for control of the organisation since December, when Arturo Beltrán Leyva (“El Barbas”, or the Beard), the leader of the mob, was killed in a gunfight with security forces. The latest capture is “a new and powerful blow by the federal government against organised crime,” said Alejandro Poiré, the co-ordinator of the national security council, who described the Beltrán Leyva outfit as “profoundly weakened”.

Other mobs have taken hits in recent months as well. In July, Ignacio Coronel Villareal was shot dead by troops in a wealthy suburb of the city of Guadalajara. He was said to have been the third-in-command in the powerful Sinaloa “cartel”, which controls much of western Mexico and has proved elusive. In January, another collaborator of Sinaloa’s, Teodoro García, was captured in the coastal city of La Paz. He was accused of ordering his victims to be dissolved in barrels of acid by his henchman, known as “the soup-maker”.

The string of arrests is welcome relief for the federal government from the run of mainly bad news that the war against the drug traffickers generates. It has been fortunate for Mr Poiré, who began his security role less than a month ago and already has two major scalps to show. A former politics chair at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, Mr Poiré is mentioned by some as a possible presidential candidate for the ruling National Action Party (PAN), which finds itself thin on potential nominees ahead of the 2012 election.

But the latest captures come with two caveats. Firstly, arresting suspects is not much good when Mexican prisons are so hopelessly insecure. Last week at least 85 prisonersescaped from a jail in the northern state of Tamaulipas, where the previous month 40 lags had escaped from a different prison. The prison’s director and guards are being questioned about their alleged involvement in the more recent case. Extradition to jails in the United States, where many Mexican criminals are wanted on charges of drug-running, is one answer, until Mexico can run more secure prisons of its own.

The other question mark is over the long-term effectiveness of the government’s strategy of taking out the heads of drug-trafficking organisations. The Beltrán Leyva case is an example: after the boss was killed last year, all hell broke loose in the gang’s home territory of Morelos, as Barbie battled King Kong and co. for control of the empire. Following the latest arrests, residents of the state can hope for things to calm down. But it seems likely that the business will soon pass into the hands of a new boss, or be subsumed into another mob. Removing even the most brilliant entrepreneurs of the drugs business does little to dent the forces of supply and demand.

People-smuggling

No safe passage

Add drugs gangs to the long list of dangers facing migrants

Sep 9th 2010 | AUSTIN AND MEXICO CITY

ON AUGUST 24th an 18-year-old Ecuadorean approached a military checkpoint in Tamaulipas, a northern state in Mexico. He had been shot in the neck and explained that he had just escaped a massacre. Mexican marines followed his directions to a barn a few miles away. There they found 72 men and women shot dead. The teenager told how the group, migrants from Central and South America, had been kidnapped on their way to the United States by bandits claiming to belong to the Zetas, a Mexican drug-trafficking gang. When they refused to work for the gangsters, they were executed. There were only two confirmed survivors.

It is the worst known atrocity committed by Mexico’s drug-trafficking organisations to date, and a grim illustration of the dangers migrants face as they travel north. Last year, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, 417 would-be migrants died while coming to the United States, felled by exposure, dehydration, heatstroke and drowning. The record was set in 2005, with 492 migrant deaths. Murders—by kidnappers, bandits, coyotes (people-smugglers)—add perhaps several hundred more to the official toll each year.

But the pace of unauthorised migration to the United States slowed dramatically during those years. According to a September estimate from the Pew Hispanic Centre, some 300,000 unauthorised immigrants arrived in 2009, down from 850,000 in 2005. One conclusion is that as the United States has increased its enforcement effort along heavily populated stretches of the 2,000-mile border, it has nudged more people to try their luck in the harsh south-western desert. Another is that despite the dangers, and America’s downturn, there are still hundreds of thousands of people frustrated enough to risk everything. Even reaching the border is hard. Each year some 20,000 migrants are kidnapped for ransom in Mexico, according to the country’s National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH). Victims are made to give the phone numbers of relatives, who must pay upwards of $3,000 or more to get them released. In Reynosa, a Tamaulipas border city, local human-rights workers know of five kidnap houses, and one reckons the kidnap problem is now twice as bad as it was last year.

Crooked police and migration officers are frequently complicit. Last year the CNDH interviewed 238 victims and witnesses of migrant-kidnappings. Of these, 91 said that public officials had been directly responsible; 99 saw police colluding with the gangsters.

Migrants from Central and South America are particularly easy targets. Illegal in Mexico, they must evade checkpoints throughout the country and risk deportation if they report a crime. Women and girls—about a fifth of the migrants making their way through Mexico—face additional dangers. Six out of ten are reckoned to suffer sexual abuse during their migration, according to Amnesty International, a human-rights watchdog.

Because the crossing is difficult, most migrants seek help. A 2010 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that human smuggling is a $6.6-billion industry in Mexico, and that 90% of unauthorised immigrants crossing into the United States through Mexico hired a smuggler at some point along the journey—for food, for shelter, for a hiding spot in the back of a tractor-trailer, for guidance about where to find water on the trail. “For many migrants, it pays off,” says Néstor Rodríguez, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin. He notes that some coyotes are members of their communities in good standing, esteemed for having helped friends and neighbours.

The problem is that other smugglers are predators, who abandon, kidnap or kill their charges. And experts fear that the massacre in Tamaulipas is a sign that Mexico’s drug gangs are taking an interest in people-smuggling. As border security has become tighter, the price of being smuggled has risen from perhaps $2,000 per person (the UNODC’s estimate) to as much as $10,000, according to STRATFOR, a global intelligence company based in Texas.

Mexico, a vocal advocate of migrants’ rights in the United States, has taken steps to reduce risks for migrants within its own borders. Ordinary citizens can help migrants without risking prosecution. In 2008 the maximum penalty for illegal entry to Mexico was reduced from ten years in prison to a fine. Last year Mexico’s migration authority had a purge of corrupt officers, and now runs a humanitarian wing which offers help to migrants, whether legal or not. Since 2007 illegal migrants have been able to apply for a humanitarian visa to enable them to report crimes committed against them, and see the prosecution through.

Yet most crimes against migrants go unreported. Migrants are still unwilling to jeopardise their journey by reporting them. In the first half of last year, just eight humanitarian visas were issued. The Ecuadorean survivor of the Tamaulipas massacre, for instance, has returned home—unsurprisingly, given that a senior detective in the investigation is himself believed to have been murdered.

Mexico's ruling party

The new old guard

How ten years in power have changed the former opposition leaders

Sep 2nd 2010 | MEXICO CITY

SKULKING around Morelia after dark, a 17-year-old Agustín Torres would wait until midnight before sticking up posters for the National Action Party (PAN). Any earlier, and he risked being photographed by authorities monitoring subversives in the western city. “I wanted to be against the system, so I joined the PAN,” says Mr Torres, now 33 and a congressman.

These days, the PAN is part of the system. After 61 years in opposition, it wrested the presidency from the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 and held it in 2006. Its strengths reflect its legacy as the protagonist of Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy. Unlike the big-tent PRI, the conservative PAN knows what it stands for. “Whereas the PRI is driven by power, the PAN tends to be driven by ideology,” says Luis Rubio, the head of CIDAC, a think-tank. And unlike the fractious Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), its leftist counterpart, the PAN runs a slick operation. It even boasts an international reach, winning 57% of the expatriate vote in 2006.

Yet its two presidents, Vicente Fox and then Felipe Calderón, are often seen as disappointments. Much of the fault for their failure to pass big reforms lies with Mexico’s gridlocked political system: with three big parties in Congress, forming majorities is hard, and the super-majorities needed to amend the constitution even harder. Moreover, the PRI has always retained the majority of state governorships. But the PAN cannot escape blame for a decade of limp economic growth and rising concern over crime. It lost the midterm votes of 2003 and 2009 badly. “It’s much simpler to be an opposition party than a governing party,” says César Nava, the PAN’s president.

The biggest difficulty has been managing relations between party and government, which, Mr Nava says, each have “their own temperament and their own ends”. Mr Calderón has often been criticised for appointing mere PAN loyalists to his cabinet. His inability to find experts within the party’s ranks shows that it has not developed a governing class to match the old regime. “The PRI had a lot of dinosaurs,” as traditional machine politicians are called, “but a very sophisticated elite,” says Soledad Loaeza, a political scientist at the Colegio de México, a graduate school.

The party’s ideological consistency also risks calcifying. Mr Rubio speculates that the PAN’s abundance of true believers may be hindering its intellectual development. Its social conservatism has limited its appeal in cosmopolitan Mexico City, where the mayor, the PRD’s Marcelo Ebrard, has legalised gay adoption. Thanks in part to the influence of a secretive Catholic society called ElYunque (The Anvil), the party has taken a hard line on abortion, which even rape victims find hard to obtain in some PAN-run states.

The party leadership is becoming more flexible. In July’s elections for state governors, it formed an alliance with the PRD that Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the PRI’s leader in the Senate, deemed “against nature”. Fernando Gómez Mont, Mr Calderón’s then-interior minister, left the PAN in protest. Yet the alliance beat expectations and took three large states from the PRI. However, the PAN has also begun to compromise its principles in less savoury ways: Mr Calderón was censured by the electoral authorities for giving a televised address 19 days before the vote.

The real test for the PAN will come in 2012. In the most recent presidential election, the PRI’s entrant was crippled by a bitter nomination fight. The party is bent on uniting around a candidate this time. The telegenic governor of the state of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, is now the front-runner. If he falters, Mr Beltrones awaits.

Mr Calderón cannot run again, and the PAN’s bench looks weak. The best hope for the party to keep the PRI out of power might well be to back Mr Ebrard. His social liberalism would test PAN voters’ loyalty, causing party leaders to say such a deal is unlikely, though not impossible. Even if their opposition could be overcome, an alliance would sink Mr Calderón’s legislative agenda—the PRI, which controls the lower house of Congress, is already vowing to block it in protest at the state-level PAN-PRD pact. Yet after 61 years in opposition, the PAN will now contemplate anything to keep its old rivals at bay.

From the Gulliver blog

Mexico: safer than Canada

Aug 27th 2010, 14:36 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

OK, so the headline is a bit of a fib. But a report on Mexico’s security situation has painted a more detailed picture than the one we hear about in the news most of the time. When I told friends I was moving to Mexico City, some asked if I would be provided with a bodyguard (no). Business travellers are thinking twice about coming, according to chambers of commerce here. But a detailed breakdown of violence released this week shows that, if you pick your state, you’re as safe—or safer—than in any other North American country.

Mexico’s overall homicide rate is 14 per 100,000 inhabitants: fearsomely high (and possibly an underestimate, given the drugs cartels' habit of hiding bodies in old mines), but quite a lot lower than its great Latin rival Brazil, whose rate is more like 25. As the chart below shows, Mexico’s death rate is bumped up by extraordinarily high levels of violence in four states: Chihuahua (home of Ciudad Juárez, widely labelled the world’s most murderous city), Durango, Sinaloa and Guerrero (see p.29 of this document). Of the rest, some are blissfully serene: Yucatán, where tourists flock to swim with whale sharks and clamber over Chichen Itzá, has a murder rate of 1.7—slightly lower than Canada’s average of 2.1.

Before I am buried an avalanche of polite Canadian emails, I should acknowledge that comparing an entire country with one quiet state is hardly fair: there are no doubt parts of Canada where no-one has been so much as kicked in the shin for decades. But Mexico’s predicament is worth highlighting, because the extreme violence around its border with the United States colours people’s view of the rest of the country, though much of it is pretty quiet. A third of Mexico’s states hover around 5 murders per 100,000, about the same rate as the United States. Another third are around 8 per 100,000, similar to Thailand, for instance. A handful of states have rates in the teens—like Russia, say—and a couple are in the low twenties, a little lower than Brazil’s average. Then you have the chaos of the four very violent states, which sends the average soaring.

The carnage in Mexico’s badlands is not to be underestimated, and nor does it seem to be getting any better. Business travellers should certainly watch out in places such as Juárez and, these days, even in cities such as Monterrey. But people doing business south of the Rio Grande should remember that, even on average, Mexico is a less murderous country than places such as Brazil, and that once you avoid the hotspots, it’s downright safe.

Gender politics in Mexico City

Pink cabs rev up

A blow for feminism—or against it?

Aug 26th 2010 | MEXICO CITY

SINCE electing its first left-wing mayor in 1997, Mexico City has been a self-consciously liberal oasis in a conservative country. The current mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, has legalised abortion on demand, gay marriage and gay adoption in his first four years in office. His latest move, cheered by environmentalists, was a ban on free plastic shopping bags, implemented on August 19th. Eye-catching reforms such as these are enhancing Mr Ebrard’s profile ahead of a likely presidential bid in two years’ time.

The latest controversy concerns women-only public transport. During rush hour, men have long been barred from a third of the carriages of metro trains. Some see that as offering a blessed sanctuary from wandering macho hands; for others it is a backward step on the march to equality. But whereas Puebla, a nearby city of more conservative bent, runs a women-only “pink taxi” service (pictured above), Mexico City had resisted. Susana Sánchez, a Mexico City taxista, first requested permission to run such a service in 1998. She was told it would be discriminatory.

City officials have now come round to thinking that cabs for women would be safer for both passengers and drivers (Ms Sánchez began her crusade after being stabbed by a male client). From next month, a fleet of pink taxis driven by and for women will roam the streets of the capital, charging the same fares as ordinary cabs. The city government is training a first batch of approved drivers in security and women’s rights.

The suburban railway and buses have followed the metro in providing women-only services. Victor Ramírez, a transport official, says he is now fielding requests to segregate the pesero microbuses which rattle around town.

From The Guardian

Cycling lessons from Mexico City

The Mexican capital is a surprisingly bike-friendly city, but are the British nice enough to follow its lead on our roads?

The author rides his bike on the streets of Mexico City

Twenty million people, most of them bad drivers, whizzing around a smoggy city a mile above sea level: Mexico City doesn't seem like the ideal place to navigate by bike. Before I moved here a few months ago, I almost put my Bianchi into storage. But I packed it at the last minute, and thank goodness. Mexico's sprawling capital is one of the most bike-friendly cities I've been to. It beat London to the bike-hire business with the launch of its Ecobici scheme in February. And it's still ahead in two other areas, which cities in Britain could and should copy.

The first is shutting off stretches of road to cars. La Reforma, the eight-lane highway that runs through the middle of the metropolis, is closed to cars every Sunday and turns into a riot of bikes, rollerskaters and joggers. Families come to whoosh round and round the majestic Ángel de Independencia, and shoppers and tourists use it to zip into the city centre, which is far quicker by bike than by metro (though that is speedy, too, and at 15p somewhat more tempting than the Tube). Nor does it seem to mess things up too much for motorists: I drive in the city as well, and Sundays are no more clogged than the rest of the week.

Britain has a few similar schemes. This month and next see a series of "Skyrides" across the country, where roads are shut off in the same way. Last year there were five; this year there are 13, from Glasgow to Southampton. Long may they proliferate.

But Mexico City shows how much further Britain could go. The La Reforma route is 24km (15 miles) long, and open every week, while a longer 32km (20-mile) route is open once a month. Last year's London Skyride was just 15km long and lasted all of one day. Boris Johnson says, admirably, that he wants his city to be the world's cycling capital. But London is being trounced by a country whose average income is just over $10,000.

Mexico also has lessons for Britain in what urban planners call "shared space", and what everyone else calls a free-for-all. One of the distinctive features of British roads is that space is strictly allocated and ruthlessly guarded: cyclists give an earful to motorcyclists who nudge into the cycle-box at traffic lights; pedestrians vent fury at cyclists who stray on to the pavement. It's horrible.

Other countries are more relaxed. In Seville, for instance, the city centre is open to pedestrians, cyclists and trams, all of which just have to keep an eye out for each other. Here in Mexico, cycling on the wider pavements, carefully, is allowed (even the police do it). And a lot of the quieter crossroads are unmarked, relying on cyclists' and drivers' caution rather than forcing people to sit at red lights when no one is around.

This kind of thing must seem like blasphemy in Britain, which likes to think of itself as more liberal than its Euro neighbours, but actually rather likes its rules and regulations. The ban on cycling in some parks reminds me of the extraordinary law against so-called "wild camping" (known to the rest of the world simply as "camping"), and relies on the same dismal logic that because some people are thoughtless, no one can be trusted.

Some parts of Britain are experimenting with loosening the rules: a "shared space" project is planned for London's museum district and in Ashford, cars, cyclists and pedestrians have equal priority. The best thing to happen to Leeds when I was growing up there was thepedestrianisation (and, from memory, bike-ification) of most of the city centre. In these cases, at least, fewer rules has meant better behaviour.

I have one reservation about recommending these schemes more broadly in Britain: I'm not sure we are nice enough. I always resisted the temptation to complain about London being unfriendly – it's the same with any big, anonymous city, I told myself, as people shouted at me for being in their bit of road (women have it much worse, as this illuminating blog reveals).

Well, Mexico City is nearly twice as big and faces social problems graver than anything Tower Hamlets has seen in a few decades. But its inhabitants are much, much more easygoing. Last week I saw a cyclist almost taken out by a thoughtlessly opened car door – he and the driver ended up having a joke about it. Would that happen in London or Leeds?

Shared space works very well over here. The only thing that might stop it working in Britain could be Britons.