Violence, Corruption and the Drug War

In a town in southern Veracruz, I spoke to a young man who ran a small business. I’ll call him X, because although I doubt if los Zetas or any of the local police will be reading my blog, I don’t want to risk getting him in trouble.

Los Z, he said, are like the American mafia of the 1920s, but with less ethics. Every business pays protection. Murder is rampant, prosecution non-existent. The only law enforcement agency free of corruption is the federal army, and its resources are totally inadequate. (Others disagree and cite numerous instances of corruption in the army, and, according to Wikipedia, the organization was formed in the late 90s by elite army personnel, possibly trained at the School of the Americas.)

X plays on a local fútbol team, and they met and beat a team from the city police department. Some gangsters started harassing the ref. X protested; the police said don’t worry, it’s nothing, but X persisted. Some time later, two carloads of gun-toting thugs came and beat him up.

X recovered, with no permanent harm. It’s a small incident, a mere anecdote, but it speaks to the widespread corruption and disfunctionality that plagues Mexico and has significantly worsened in the last decade. Pobre Mexico, he says. My poor country. And I remembered the old saying: Pobre Mexico, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos. Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

It would be an over-simplification to blame Mexico’s problems on the US drug war, but it is a major factor. Just as alcohol prohibition was a major boom to the American mafia in the 20s, the drug trade is the indisputable source of the Zetas’ wealth and power. The US demand for illegal drugs, combined with the availability of arms in the US and their flow into Mexico, creates and sustains the culture of violence and corruption.

At the same time, the US offers an ideal and a solution. X spoke with admiration of the American justice system, and I am sure he is correct in this. Compared to Mexico, and for all its faults, we in the US can rely on our system and believe in it in a way that Mexicans cannot. If anything remotely like the soccer incident occurred in the US, we would expect protection from authorities and redress in the courts. Of course there are aberrations; they are the exception. When police or government officials are corrupt (and there will be corruption in any system), we expect that they will be found and prosecuted. Not so in Mexico.

Yet even in our country, the practice of justice falls too short of the ideal, as an important book published last year shows. In ORDINARY INJUSTICE, HOW AMERICA HOLDS COURT (http://www.ordinaryinjustice.com), writer and attorney Amy Bach shows in a number of examples from throughout the country how poor people, out of expediency rather than through malicious intent, are victimized by an overtaxed and under-resourced legal system with little regard for guilt or innocence.

In the US and in Mexico, and in many other places as well, the ideal of justice, so fundamental that experiments show that even little children and animals strive for it, is severely impacted by the misguided war on drugs. To be sure, drug prohibition, as alcohol prohibition in the past, has the positive effect of suppressing - however imperfectly - drug abuse, but at what cost?

In the US, the cost includes the drain of resources needed elsewhere to support the massive prison complex, choking the court system as described above, enabling gang structures that impact city life, and disrupting families and communities as petty drug violators are caught up in the criminal justice system. Not to mention the affront to the liberty of the millions of relatively responsible recreational drug users. Isn’t this a cure far worse than the disease?

In Mexico and many other countries, including Afghanistan, US drug prohibition enables and promotes powerful criminal organizations that intensify corruption and undermine the ability of governments to protect civil society.

I feel like a broken record. I know I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said a million times already. But after my conversation with X, I want to say it once more.

Americans have a lot to be proud of, but we should be ashamed of allowing this terrible, misguided, disruptive, unwinnable war on drugs to go on and on.

End drug prohibition now.

Language, reading and computers on the road

I was worried, flying into Mexico and making my way to Elissa’s on my own, that my poor Spanish would be inadequate, but I was fine. I was even able to have a conversation with the guy who helped me with my luggage, about our grandchildren (and his great-grandchildren) and with the cab driver about the nice weather and clear skies in Mexico City.

I’d say my Spanish, while crude, is better than I thought it was. I can make myself understood, and when someone is talking to me I can usually understand (I think!) Still, peor es nada...worse is nothing! And when people are talking among themselves, I really can’t follow the conversation. This can be disconcerting, and tiring, particularly when I really want to understand what is being said. Fortunately I have Xochi to help me.

It’s not an entirely negative experience. Without comprehension, the musical quality of speech seems more pronounced. Especially the fluid, lilting, unselfconscious sounds of the children can be really beautiful. And I just love the calls wafting up from the street...I’ll have to try to set them down or even record some: “Tamales, mole, ranchera...” Beautiful.

This seems curious: Elissa and Xochi speak English and Spanish to each other, mixed up, seemingly at random. Elissa says she doesn't think about it or in any way decide which language to use. I guess she thinks some things in one language and some in the other. I think for X, it's mostly Spanish unless she is talking to me or one of her other Norte Americano relatives.

READING IS ONE of the pleasures of travel. At home, with my endless NPR, computer, and TV inputs, I just can’t seem to make as much time for books as I would like. This trip, I’ve already read two and part of a third, and they were all excellent.

First, I read A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES by Janna Levin, a physicist who has written a novel about two prominent 20th century mathematicians, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Gödel, a highly disturbed man throughout his life, who eventually starved himself to death because he didn’t trust the food, proved – against established wisdom - that mathematics was incomplete, and that even in arithmetic, not everything could be proved. It was revolutionary, like the more famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that showed that on the quantum level at least it is just not possible to know everything. Turing basically invented the computer to help decode intercepted German communications in WWII and was instrumental in the Allied war effort. Later, convicted of homosexual activity and forced to undergo chemical castration, he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. Excellent book.

Next I read CROSSING by Jan Yoors. I bought his classic, THE GYPSIES, as a present for Elissa. Yoors is not, in my opinion, a great writer, but what he writes about is fascinating. As a 12-year-old in Belgium in the 30s, he ran off and joined a band of traveling Gypsies. His Bohemian parents did not interfere. He would come back to visit every year, and spend a little time in school, but most of his adolescence was spent with his adopted family. He writes about them with insight and compassion. CROSSING is the story of his experiences in WWII. As the specter of Nazi domination spread through Europe, Yoors left his Gypsy family, rejecting an arranged marriage that would have sealed his membership in the community, drawn by the wider world of which he was still a part. He tried to get to Britain to join the war, but before he could get there he was contacted and asked to recruit Gypsies to work with the Resistance. It’s a harrowing and compelling story.

Another present for Elissa, which I carried for her mother (the mail is slow and unreliable), was Patti Smith’s JUST KIDS. Unlike Yoors, who is adequate, Smith is a terrific writer, and her account of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe as young artists in New York in the 60s is compelling. I read a third of it before Elissa took it, but she is almost done and I’m sure I’ll finish it before I leave.

Next, Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time. And for the trip home, I’m saving INSPECTOR CADAVER, a 1944 mystery by George Simenon.

THE COMPUTER THING is more interesting than I thought it would be. Elissa’s internet connection has been down since I got here. She keeps calling them and they keep not fixing it. Yesterday the person she was talking to said that it looked to her it was working and then (probably inadvertently) hung up. So to get on the internet I’ve been going to her office, or downstairs to the computer place where you can use their internet-connected computers by the hour (very reasonable). Each computer is interesting in its own way. E’s MS Office is mostly Spanish, although spell check and certain other functions seem to be in English. I’m a keyboard shortcut guy, especially Ctrl S (save) and Ctrl A (select all), but those don’t work. Instead, you have to use Ctrl G (guardia) and Ctrl E (seleccionar todo). Not a problem; hard to get used to.

The other computers are totally in Spanish, and using the Spanish-English dictionary is not always enough to figure out how to do normal things. And the keyboards, which are designed to accommodate the accented characters of the Spanish alphabet, really take some getting used to. A lot of the punctuation marks are in different places. Yesterday at the internet place I had to ask the guy how to access my flash drive to upload some pix to Facebook (I think it was under Equipo). In general, finding normal functions is a challenge.

I can only imagine what it would be like if I were in China!

And this is weird...editing this blogpost, the computer thinks I should be writing in Spanish on some paragraphs only...every word is underlined as if it's misspelled. Other paragraphs it thinks are fine.

Expatriate for a Day

Home alone in Elissa’s third-floor shotgun apartment on Calle Moctezuma, a narrow two-block cobblestone street named, E says, not for the Aztec ruler but for the beer that was made here and is still made in Orizaba. I didn’t go with Jose to take Xochi to school, or walk with Elissa to her office as I have the past three days. Just staying home alone, working on my pix, thinking about what I’ll write for my blog, and indulging for a few hours in one of my favorite life-long fantasies: The expatriate writer in a foreign city, bathed in foreign sights and sounds, free of habitual assumptions, free of daily interests, commitments and concerns, free of NPR, free of the familiar.

I pace the hall from the kitchen to the open door and the tiny balcony. Across the street, a woman hangs her wash on the roof. Behind her house, a block over, is a small hill covered with dense housing. Concrete, brick and adobe. Balconies. Water tanks. Laundry hung to dry on the rooves. And at the top, partially obscured by a tile roof, a Mexican flag waves in the breeze, and I remember when I landed in Mexico City a few days ago, the title of a song came to mind, “Mexico Linda y ...” only I couldn’t remember the last word. I asked the woman sitting next to me. “Mexico Linda y Querido.” She smiled, glanced out the window, and clasped her hands over her heart. Mexico, beautiful and loved.

The walk to Elissa’s office is down one of the main city streets, Xalapenos Illustres. Narrow, busy with vehicles and pedestrians, small shops, offices and apartments butted up against each other, two or three floors high. It leads past the old church, a cultural center, a rec center and in half a mile or so gets to the colonial state capital, across the street from the colonial cathedral, but Elissa cuts up and over to avoid the center and has another half mile or so down a more narrow but still busy street, Juarez. Between the architecture, the people, the businesses, the occasional dog and some crazy signs (one had the E with the slash for no parking, and underneath it said “se ponchan llantas” - tires will be punctured), there is something interesting every few steps.

The other day, looking south at an intersection, there was a great view of Pico Orizaba, a beautiful classic snow-covered volcano.

THE MARKET is just a few blocks away, behind a large colonial church. I walked over Tuesday for lunch, and today, market day, I went back for some fruit and cheese. I have a serious problem with farmers’ markets at home, and it was the same here...I buy too much! And pesos are so much easier to spend then dollars! Soon my two shopping bags were full, and I had to lug them home. The cheese is fantastic...a kind of string cheese. I ordered a kilo (momentarily forgetting that a kilo is more than two pounds. The vendor unwound it from a big ball. And I brought some strange red flowers I’d never seen before, called here gasparitos, although apparently they are known by other names in other parts. Gathered, not farmed. The vendor explained how you fry them with eggs. Elissa was familiar with them and cooked them up this morning. Muy bien sabrosa!

Trip to Xalapa, Veracruz

Sunday, Mar. 21 - Plane from LA to Phoenix. Another to Mexico City. Taxi to Tapo station. Bus to Xalapa. All connections smooth as silk. No rushing and no waiting. The bus is really incredible, with plush, roomy seats, airplane-style bathroom, no stops. Four and a half hours on a smooth, modern toll road, for just $24. You go through a security check, then as you board you are given a complimentary water or soda, and the makings for tea or coffee, hot water and cups available at the back of the bus. Movies and music, which I didn’t take advantage of.

We head east. To the south, great view of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl, the magnificent snow-covered volcanoes, Popo recently active, part of the ring of mountains surrounding the Valley of Mexico. Between them, the Paseo de Cortes, where the conquistadors marched on their way to conquer Mexico in 1519.

Huge auto factories – VW, Mercedes Benz and others – surrounded by half-finished, half-decayed concrete towns where the worker live. Occasionally, far off in the midst of this concrete mishmash, the unmistakable towers of a colonial era church. Then miles of irrigated fields that could be in California’s San Joaquin Valley, except for the occasional horse-drawn wagons and (I think) plows. Some smaller farms, in the hills, with fields no more than 100 yards across, separated by rows of agave, source of pulque, the ancient beverage which was still the popular beverage of the Mexican peasantry as recently as 1950, now almost gone. After I discovered Mexico in 1991, and started making frequent trips to many parts, I tried to drink pulque every trip. Sometimes it was quite a project to find some. I wonder if I’ll come across any this trip.

Then it is dark. There’s a Wal-Mart. I’m in Xalapa, capital of the State of Veracruz and home of the Universidad Veracruzano, where my daughter has a faculty position. A two-dollar cab ride brings me to her apartment. It’s the first chance I’ve had to visit her in the three years she’s been here.

Meditation on Bolaño

Midmorning, sitting in my backyard, reading THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. Page 517…almost finished. The October sunlight on the wisteria is beautiful. A noisy squirrel stops for a minute to look at me. I take his picture. I feel a little bad that I evicted Lupe, the black widow spider, from the corner in my bathroom where she’s been hanging out for the past month. She did nothing to harm me…showed not the slightest sign of aggression. During the day she would disappear in the crevice between the tub and the wall where a corner tile is missing. At night she would come out and hang in her web. I wonder if she ever got anything to eat. Nothing wrong, but nothing very interesting, either. I would have liked to see her eat. Then I thought about Jack Kerouac. I just heard someone made a documentary about his book BIG SUR, which I read a long time ago, and which I remember was not as accessible as his three greats, ON THE ROAD, DHARMA BUMS and THE SUBTERRANEANS. But more accessible than most of his other work. And I wondered, what right does a person have to be like that…drunk, unreliable…really a flake. That’s not right. For that matter, it can’t be right for me to be sitting here in the middle of the day, reading, watching the cats and squirrels, admiring the play of light in the garden. This is for the weekend. This is no way to live. What about work? What about money? What about striving to accomplish something worthwhile? I guess that’s always been my problem, I’d just rather sit in the garden and listen to the squirrel, the birds, the distant freeway noise, watch the play of light, smell the air, read a little, play around in the garden, take some pix.

And that brings me to the “jobless recovery.” I remember back in the early 70s, I was setting type for a little weekly newspaper in Pacific Grove, and I guess it was in something I was setting, about our assemblyman, advocating something (can’t remember what) environmentally questionable because it would create jobs. And I remember thinking, that’s no reason to do something. Not to create jobs. We should only do what we need to do, what adds value, what we need for the good life, and if that takes less jobs, that’s good! Remember the industrial revolution? Wasn’t that supposed to be so that we could have more by working less? Wasn’t that the idea? Well that was my idea at least. Work less and still have a good life.

“Lupe looked at him and then at me. I could feel the insects hopping from her eyes and landing on my knees, one on each knee.”

But maybe that wasn’t really the motivating idea behind the industrial revolution. Historically, it’s probably more accurate to say that the idea was that some few could have more by harnessing the masses to the machine to make more. Just think of the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, a great and important innovation. It allowed slavery to expand and flourish and reach new levels of atrocity in the American south. At the same time in England, the logic of capitalism combined with the power of industrialism to devastate the working class; young children worked torturous days in the mines and mills. By the way, do you know what they called the owners of those mines and mills? Liberals! They thought they were making a better modern world. And in a way they were.

But they had to be tamed, the capitalists and their technologies. A lot of modern history is the struggle to defeat the cold logic of capitalism and enlarge the warm logic of human rights. Unions, the eight-hour day, universal education, health care for all. (What? Not yet?)

Now we are worried, because there aren’t enough jobs; and how can people live if they can’t find work? But look, we invented the wheel, the cotton gin, the computer. Just how many hours a day for how many years does everyone have to work to get done what needs to be done? How much of what we do to create jobs and wealth would we be better off not doing at all? Those metallic party balloons come to mind. Wouldn’t we really be better off if we made and sold LESS plastic crap that makes its way so quickly to our over-burdened land fills? Maybe five hours a day, five days a week, for 20 or 30 years is all a person really should have to work. Maybe we’d all be better off.

The logic of capitalism mitigates against it…we need to make more and more and more. We need to grow the economy. And this is very creative, and leads to all the things that make our lives so pleasant. But the cold logic of capitalism also leads to the jobless recovery, to the concentration of wealth and the exploitation of poverty. Society, which is to say government, has to balance the logic of capitalism with the logic of humanity if we are to move toward a better world. Maybe this is the time to think about the 30-hour work week.

“The search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind.”

From a personal point of view, we need more jobs. I need more jobs. I guess. I’ve got some retirement. My income is a third or less of what it was a couple of years ago. I’m not really suffering. I buy less, but eat well, and I’m in no immediate danger of losing my house. I’m happy as a clam. But I know a lot of people who are really hurting, and young people with few or no prospects. I worry about it.

But from a societal and global point of view, I think we need fewer jobs, less consumption, and an economic paradigm that does not depend on endless growth, but on sustainability. A better world with less time in the office, and more time in the garden.

“What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

(Quotes from THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES)

Remembering Artaud

Every once in a while, I think about Antonin Artaud and his great essay, All Writing Is Pigshit.
I think I first read this essay 30 years ago. Mostly I remembered the name. Last week, thinking about writing for my blog, I thought about it again.

This time, unlike past times, I have the internet at my disposal: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube.

First I found it at http://endingthealphabet.org/019valentines.html and read it. Really beautiful!

“All those who have vantage points in their spirit, I mean, on some side or other of their heads and in a few strictly localized brain areas; all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words hae a meaning; all those for whom there exist sublimities in the soul and currents of thought; all those who are the spirit of the times, and named these currents of thought – and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic griding that delivers their spirits to the winds – are pigs.”

Then, of course, Wikipedia, where I got some idea of who this insane poet was: “In November 1926, Artaud was expelled from the surrealist movement, in which he had participated briefly, for refusing to renounce theater as a bourgeois commercial art form, and for refusing to join the French Communist Party along with the other Surrealists.”

Then this fantastic reading: http://welcometopilot.blogspot.com/2009/04/blog-post.html.

And finally, this gem of contemporary Surrealism: To Read Antonin Artaud's "All Writing is Pigshit" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oinqQ0C7GNc.

I love this about the internet: The depth of information and ideas, so readily available. So easy to access…What a great pigsty!

Anarchy rules

In 1992, Camille, Elissa and I had a great trip to south-central Mexico. One day, we went to Tepoztlan, an ancient religious center, where pilgrims came from as far as Guatemala to worship the god of pulque, the pre-Colombian alcoholic beverage made from maguey.
To get to the pyramid, we had to hike about two miles up a volcano. It was a beautiful hike. There were a lot of pilgrims out that day, and there were hikers coming and going. At one point, the trail involved climbing a 20-foot iron ladder.

It was a bottleneck that called out for traffic control, since people couldn't be going up and down at the same time. But it was a seamless, anarchistic kind of traffic control. No one directed it. No one said, now you stop, now you go. The crowd controlled itself effortlessy. Some people went up. Then they stopped and some people came down. That was it.

It was anarchy. There was no government, no schedule, no director...and no effort. It was obvious that a certain amount of organization was needed, because otherwise traffic couldn't flow through the bottleneck, but the organization arose spontaneously from the good nature and common interest of the hikers.

Sometimes, say driving on the freeway, I think about that, and I wonder at the beauty, the coordination, the relative safety of what we are doing. I guess rules and regulations are necessary for smooth, safe traffic flow. But I think the primary enabler is the good will and common purpose of the drivers. The Tepoztlan principle.

See pix at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=112007&id=649538674&l=2b8156d9cd