Tag: Mexico

México, DF: What links the murder of dogs in Condesa to the Corredor Chapultepec?

Rich Will1 Comment

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I’m trying to write a novel, one set in Condesa, a nice, quiet, leafy suburb of Mexico City, in mid-2015. A number of things make this difficult, not the least of which is that it’s now 2016 and not only are events quickly moving way ahead of me, they are also, conversely, getting closer to home. Last Saturday night two people were shot within around fifty metres from our front door. I know this because a journalist from Proceso magazine was brave enough to write about it several days later:

“Last weekend, in the middle of Calle Saltillo in Condesa, outside the bar Dussel, which only opens in the early morning and closes when the sun hits its peak, a man on a motorcycle killed two people. Approximately seven months ago, on the same street corner with Alfonso Reyes the owner of a bar known as LIFE was executed.

“The Roma-Condesa area is not just one of the trendy zones of Mexico city because of its bars, restaurants, galleries and parks and because it’s inhabited by middle-class hipsters or by the millennial generation. It’s also an area which has for some time been under the control of the first chilango (Mexico City) organised crime gang known as La Unión.

“The boom in restaurants, bars, pubs and nightclubs in Roma and Condesa, as well as the real estate boom that has attracted the capital’s young population, has attracted the attention of La Unión because it is a natural market for adulterated alcohol and all sorts of drugs.

“The authorities of Cuauhtemoc, the most economically and politically important district in the Federal-District, have detected people from La Unión operating in the fashionable colonies Roma-Condesa, carrying out the transfer and sale of drugs in the central streets of Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Alfonso Reyes, Saltillo, Alvaro Obregon, Orizaba, Colima and others where the bars and clubs that are being subject to extorsion but do not want to officially recognize it are concentrated.

“Violence has become increasingly present in these two colonies where there have been invasions of land and buildings, assaults on passers-by, armed robberies at some restaurants and executions outside of some clubs.”

…which reminds me that on Sunday morning we walked past the spot where the double murder must have happened, because the road right in front of the bar in question was closed off by police tape. At the time we dismissed it as not much, because there was no media in sight, but I understand better now that just because some people have been violently killed doesn’t mean that the mainstream media can or will report on it. Ironic, of course, that I only learnt about the details of what happened on our doorstep when a friend in London sent me the article via the internet. This part of the city is mostly populated by transient funseekers and youngish expats like ourselves, with few restaurants and cafes that don’t turn out to be chains, so there is less of a sense of community than I initially assumed. The murders fit into a pattern of recent events which we read about when we were thousands of miles away just before Christmas. Not just read about, in fact — a neighbour of ours filmed this video out of his window, a couple of hundred metres away. This was apparently followed by an incident where twenty armed men burst into an apartment building on Avenida Amsterdam, held up the residents at gunpoint and ransacked the place. Stories, not all apocryphal, of raids on bars and restaurants in Condesa and the adjoining barrio of Roma abound, as well as reports of extortion (‘derecho de piso’) of bar and restaurant owners in the neighbourhood.

Although we, as people entirely remote from the tit-for-tat battles between drug gangs, are little more likely to fall victim to violent crime than we were in Hackney, it’s made us nervous. All the time we’ve been here the fact that we live in a nice, safe part of town has been a major opening conversational gambit. So many people in Italy and the UK asked us ‘How’s Mexico?’ that some part of my brain started to assume it was a new greeting that had taken off in our absence, so after I while I found myself asking friends and family the same question. But the automatic answer we’d happily been trotting out over the previous few months no longer rang true. An uncomfortable aspect of this is that we had come to assume we had some sort of privileged immunity to the violence that simultaneously destablises and sustains this society. In my novel I’d like to explore the ways in which this is also true on a wider and deeper level, explore its myriad contradictions and try to come to terms with the manifold hypocrisies it entails. For the time being it means we need to watch our steps. After all, as the Proceso article mentions, the reason there are so many vibrant and pulsating bars in this district is drugs, and those who take them have obviously obtained them somewhere hereabouts. There is a huge nighttime economy, and violence is a powerful currency.

All this connects with the novel I’m trying to write in a way which if I attempted to pass it off as mere fiction would make anyone who read it dismiss as profoundly implausible. You would not get away with making this shit up. It is possible, for example, that recent events are somehow to do with the poisoning of several dogs in two nearby parks last summer. In my novel it will be 43 dogs, for fairly obvious, but hopefully not too trite, reasons. Certain aspects of the plot I stole from someone who shall remain anonymous, because I have no idea who connected the events in the first place. Try this on for size:

In about early December last year I popped into an internet cafe on Insurgentes in order to print something as part of my ongoing battle with the tax authorities. This involved cutting and pasting some details from my email, but when I clicked paste what appeared in the word doc was not what I expected. Instead what popped up was a closely-worded text in capital letters which must have been some sort of letter-to-the-editor. Although I was too slow and in too much of a hurry to understand more than the gist of it, in essence it set out a bad-tempered conspiracy theory arguing that the deaths of the dogs in Condesa was part of a political strategy by the authorities to manufacture a sense of paranoia which would somehow lead to a positive result in the referendum (to be held later that week) on the future of the Corredor Chapultepec. This is a huge scheme to turn a neglected thoroughfare in the centre of the city into a version of Dubai. The text alleged that the police and political authorities were engaged in a complex plot to destabilise an emblematically tranquil part of the city in order to achieve their political and commercial aims.

So far, so mindbendingly odd. Or possibly just mad. There’s little reason to believe it wasn’t written by a local nutcase, and I don’t want to assume that goings-on here are any more wacky than in, say, London. But then I did know from the US-born DF-based writer Francisco Goldman, and from various other informants, that in very much the same way as criminal gangs compete and kill over the drug trade in Condesa, the national ruling party (Peña Nieto’s PRI) do have a long-term plan to take over DF. Ever since the mayoral system was introduced nearly twenty years ago, it has been won by someone (at least nominally) on the left. Listen to the local radio here and you are sure to hear an advert from the PRI boasting of their ability to run the city. According to Goldman and his friend the former mayor Marcelo Ebrard, the PRI will stop at nothing to get their hands on the prize. The current mayor (Miguel Mancera) was elected in 2012 as an independent, but his brutally repressive/staggeringly incompetent actions since have led very many people to suspect that he is doing a job for the PRI. His claim that there is no organised crime in Mexico City is endlessly ridiculed as there is countless evidence that it is a straight-up lie, not least the hugely increased police presence in the more salubrious parts of the city over the last few months. What may well be happening on a city-wide scale is what the drug gangs are apparently offering to bar owners in Condesa — the PRI may be roughing things up so that it can then offer ‘protection’. When the left-wing former and future presidential candidate Lopez Obrador (‘the Pike’) talks about the ‘mafia of power’ it is more than just an attention-seeking metaphor.

Ultimately in my novel I might end up taking a leaf out of one of Martin Amis’s better novels and having a character with my own name drifting in and out of the action (but hopefully not getting shot dead on page 16). At least for all of my extremely limited understanding of the dynamics of life in this city, there’s no way on earth I would do DF as much of a disservice as Amis has done in every novel he’s written about London in the last thirty years. The more I pick up on what’s going on around us, I start to suspect that capturing even the vaguest sense of it all might just be beyond my powers. I think even Thomas Pynchon himself would balk at some of the outlandish plot twists devices that reality comes up with in Mexico, DF. At least one other novelist, Roberto Bolaño, had a term he used to classify the level of surrealism inherent to this place: infrarrealismo. If I now proceed to get arrested for researching how to poison dogs online, it will fall into that category.

Torreón: What Connects Isis and Mexican Drug Cartels?

Rich Will2 Comments

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I’m sitting in a plush hotel bar in the northern city of Torreón (like a smaller, grubbier and emptier version of Monterrey) trying to understand baseball. I’ve enlisted the help of some Texans at the next table who are ably fielding my persistent enquiries (or, as they would call them, inquiries) about what’s happening on the TV, questions along the lines of: why, when the pitcher throws the ball, does the batperson almost never make the slightest attempt to hit it? and why, when he does deign to make contact with it, why does he almost never actually run to first base, but instead stroll nonchalantly? Surely it would make more sense for him to run? Eventually I give up asking questions about the game and try to watch it, which is hard because it appears to me to be extremely fucking boring, and it seems that the players agree, as at one point a massive fight is staged and as far as I can tell the whole thing is abandoned.

The following night I try again with American football (or, as Americans call it for fairly obvious reasons, football). I feel compelled to do this because in a few weeks I’ll be off on what is effectively (apart from an interflight wander around a bit of Queens a couple of years back) my first trip to the States and I want to learn some of the language in preparation. I’ve long noticed that whenever, let’s say, Larry David says something like ‘Hey, did you see that Nicks game?!’, I genuinely don’t know what he’s talking about, which is a bit ridiculous, as my very livelihood is based on my claim to have a perfect grasp of the English language, even though I was unable to get through Underworld by Don Delillo, apparently one of the greatest novels published in my lifetime, because it was basically a big book about sport, and I don’t really know what a quarterback is.

The key thing about understanding any sport is knowing some very basic rules so as to be able to follow what is actually happening. In the case of football this is made difficult by the very many stops and starts and by my not knowing anything about the roles of the people on the pitch (I think they call it a pitch). Who is supposed to be passing the ball to whom, and to what end? Why don’t they just get on with it rather than stopping to piss around every ten or possibly twelve seconds? In theory I don’t really need to know any of this stuff, but I am apprehensive about trying to join in sports conversations in bars and making a massive anglofool of myself. Also I would like to be able to read that particular Don Delillo novel one day after I’ve finished reading everything by Thomas Pynchon six or seven more times.

There’s also the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a massive amount to do in Torreón once you’ve eaten your way through a big pile of dead pig and read all the information on the internet. It apparently was quite a lively place until about eight years ago when a particular bunch of evil bastards called Los Zetas turned up and started contesting the territory with the Cártel de Sinaloa by, in their inimitable fashion, torturing and murdering (and, let’s face it, probably eating) as many people as they could. Torreón is located at a midway point between Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, all places synonymous with drug trafficking. In 2010 it was listed as the seventh most dangerous city in the world, although things have calmed down a good bit since about 2013, as, like in other areas of Mexico, the authorities appear to have taken the side of the Sinaloa Cartel, sitting back and letting them get on with the job of eliminating the Zetas and restoring some sort of uneasy peace.

The dynamics of these situations are no easier to understand than the rules of American sports, and unlike baseball and football asking people to explain to you what exactly is going on isn’t always a good idea. At least on TV you can see the ball being passed around, moves being made and attack and defence strategies being adopted, even if the adverts do get really annoying. With the drug trade there are an enormous amount of goods being passed around — the global narcotics industry is said to be worth over $400 billion a year (and counting), and a huge proportion of the produce which generates that revenue comes from or passes through the north of Mexico.

The official story of what happened on the 26th September 2014 in the town of Iguala in Guerrero State is that the corrupt local mayor handed over dozens of radical students who were getting on his nerves to a drug gang he was in cahoots with who then tortured, shot and burnt them. It is generally agreed by anyone with half a brain and a quarter of a moral conscience that this story is an utter lie. What is far more likely to have happened is that the student protestors, who wanted to commandeer a number of buses to take them to a rally in Mexico City, took one which happened to be stuffed with a huge shipment of heroin belonging to the drug gangs ready to be transported to the US. The municipal police, the army and the drug gangs therefore attacked the students, torturing and killing them and then burning their bodies in the incinerators in the army barracks, to which the military have steadfastly refused access. The official story therefore is a transparent attempt to cover up an intimate network of relationships between drug traffickers and very high levels of the State and army.

Of course, unlike in a film by Oliver Stone, there are no secretly signed documents recording all of this information. No-one had sat down and written out a detailed plan of operations which, if it could be found, would incriminate all the politicians and military figures involved. The fact that we know all this is thanks to very dedicated journalists and investigators who have painstakingly and at very great personal risk pieced together evidence which disproves the States’s explanation and posits a far more plausible one. Whereas I could, if I was so inclined, simply google and learn all about the rules of any sport I choose, in the case of the relationship between crime and politics successions of events and their causes are much harder to ascertain.

So far, so self-evident. The mere fact that corruption of this sort exists in Mexico is no revelation and is not worthy of a blog post based on tortuous and tenuous analogies. Bear with me.

It has become a minor trope of journalists over the last few years to refer to groups like the Zetas and the Cártel de Sinaloa as the ‘Isis of Mexico’, given the seemingly out-of-control growth of such organisations through the imposition of terror. In the case of drug syndicates, there is a clear meaning and purpose to their violence — a share of that $400 billion a year. The Sinaloa Cartel is said to have annual revenues of around $3 billion a year and although estimates that it employs more people than Walmart are downright silly it certainly has a huge number of people working for it. Salon.com lists several similarities between the drug syndicates and Isis:

They behead people by the hundreds. They heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as warnings to those who would resist their power. They have penetrated the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the country. They provide and services to an impoverished public, which distrusts their actual government with its bitter record of corruption, repression and torture.They seduce young people from several countries, including the United States, into their murderous activities.

However, there is something about this analogy which doesn’t work: the question of motivation. While drug gangs cause mayhem and kill thousands for money, Isis do so purely out of religious zeal. They have a barbaric interpretation of holy scripture and that is what inspires them to destroy entire societies of people they regard as ‘apostates’. In the declaration they released explaining their rationale for the horrendous attacks which took place in Paris last Friday they talked of killing ‘hundreds of idolaters…together in a party of perversity’. Clearly in the case of Isis the reasons for their acts of terrorism are ideological rather than mercenary.

Except…

In an article published over the weekend Oliver Tickell, editor of the Ecologist magazine, pointed to a revelatory FT report on how much money Isis earns from oil: something in the order of $1.5 million a day, or $500 million a year. If Isis was a Mexican cartel making that much money from drugs, it would be beheading probably about the same amount of people as it actually does in the Middle East. There is no quoted index of the value of a human head in dollar terms, but I would imagine the price in Northern Mexico and Northern Iraq must be comparable, and in the case of Isis, there is an additional holy premium to be earned.

So, as Oliver Tickell details, Isis has an interest in the price of oil. As we have recently discovered, oil producers will do anything to protect their profits. In the case of Exxon and the potential threat to their future income represented by climate change, they mounted a hugely successful decades-long campaign together with other fossil fuel corporations to cover up the facts — in the words of climate campaigning hero Bill McKibben, “no corporation has ever done anything this big or bad”. As for Shell, they attempted to go ahead with drilling in the Arctic even though their own scientists had specifically warned them that doing so would inevitably mean that any attempt to control carbon emissions and thereby limit global temperatures would be blown to pieces. It is simply impossible to imagine anything such companies would not do in order to protect their future incomes.

Next month in the French capital world leaders will come together and seek to reach a new agreement on carbon emissions. This is D-Day for fossil fuel companies. This could potentially have been be the point at which, after so many previous summits at which corrupt lobbying campaigns have successfully managed to stall any meaningful moves towards preventing a global ecoapocalypse, world leaders were forced by the pressure of millions of ordinary human beings to challenge the interests of some of the most powerful and dangerous corporations on the planet. The chance of that happening is almost certainly now reduced to zero. The very word ‘Paris’ now stands for something else entirely.

If I wanted to I could easily go online, find a list of rules governing the sports of baseball and American football and learn all about the different moves, strategies, and tactics, and then when I next watched a game I could look at the way the players try to move the ball around the pitch and score points while others try to obstruct them. In the case of financial interests and politics, most business takes place off the field and away from the cameras. I can only proceed by analogy, inference and interpretation, looking at results and surmising what the causes may have been. In the case of the climate talks in Paris, they have now been destabilised on two fronts by powerful forces which have specific interests in the continued production of fossil fuels. That is not remotely to suggest that there was a secret agreement between energy corporations and Islamic terrorists to murder people on the streets of Paris, but it is apparent that they share an interest in making sure that the talks are a failure.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the setting out of facts which seem to correspond in some way. Ironically, those people who instinctively shout ‘false flag!’ in response to any event of this nature are extremely unlikely to develop such theories about this particular topic. Those supposed radicals who pride themselves on consistently challenging the official version of events were long ago duped into thinking that the vested interests in the climate ‘debate’ were those scientists who patiently set out their reasons for grave concern rather than the corporations seeking to protect their profits at any cost.

The people who committed the atrocities in Paris are now dead. A certain kind of justice has been served. Whether the inhabitants of Raqqa, suffering under the brutal regime of Isis and now subjected to a massive retaliatory bombing campaign themselves deserve to be punished is highly debatable. In the case of Exxon, it is extremely unlikely that anyone will face justice in this lifetime. We saw a few months ago that the Mexican Government was unable (and, let’s face it, unwilling) to hold the CEO of the Sinaloa Corporation inside the justice system. As we sit and watch this game develop and try to figure out what is actually happening and why, what chains of events are triggered by particular moves, it seems to be the case that some players are simply too powerful to be punished. In the immortal words of Bodie, the teenage drug-dealer from The Wire, this game is rigged, man.

Does “Mexico City” live up to the hype?

Rich Will1 Comment

485738354I’m walking down the street in a pleasant upmarket neighborhood and as I walk I have to tread carefully, as the ground beneath my feet is covered in often quite deep cracks as a result of a huge earthquake which is said to have taken place 30 years ago. Such is the level of detail you find everywhere you look in what must be by far the most ambitious and fully-realised piece of immersive theatre yet produced. While companies such as Punchdrunk, Secret Cinema and You Me Bum Bum Train may have awed us in the past with their transformations of abandoned post office sorting offices and the like into exquisite dream palaces of theatrical imagination, ‘Mexico City’ is on an entirely different scale.

Something that strikes one again and again throughout this experience (in truth, more of an installation than anything resembling a play) is the sheer number of actors and or/other visitors (it’s not always easy to tell who’s who). On both of my visits (one trip is certainly nowhere near enough) there seemed to be a cast of literally millions. Even someone entirely jaded with the by now often very standardised rituals and tricks of promenade or participative theatre could not be anything other than blown away by the astonishing artificial world that has been brought into being.

Despite the epic scale, this is no Wagner opera. Visitors are in no danger of losing the plot since the action, which erupts non-sequentially like any number of volcanoes of all shapes and sizes, means that there are an infinite amount of threads, so the spectator is left to wander around at leisure and weave his or her own narrative. Thus no two experiences could ever possibly be the same. The production is of such a vast size that any meaningful opportunity for the casual punter to work out what the hell is going on flies out of the window, but the great pleasure of the production — chasing round and attempting to fit the various pieces together — never feels like a chore, and everywhere you turn your senses are constantly assaulted by fresh stimuli, whether it be the sight of someone standing in the traffic juggling fire, the bursts of mariachi and norteño music assailing you as you stroll down the street, or the intoxicating smell of sliced chillis mixed with arrachera cooking on a neighbourhood grill.

Indeed the physical extent of the show is such that not just walking is involved. Being part of and struggling against the traffic is part of the frustration and therefore part of the fun. Anyone who has been to the Glastonbury Festival will know just what I mean — you set off in good time to reach a particular attraction, but along the way find so many unexpected and delightful things happening that whatever you intended to see quickly gets forgotten. My advice for first-time visitors is: forget about Uber and Google Maps — let yourself go with the flow instead. You will soon find yourself feeling like less of a spectator or even a voyeur, more of a flâneur. The sensation is rather like watching a blue whale glide by an inch from your face, simply too big to take in, but even this does not begin to do justice to the level of detail involved.

The audience is also encouraged to investigate and interact with their surroundings. A large part of the pleasure of the production lies in what you might discover if you have a root round amongst the almost insanely detailed sets: the markets, the parks, the squares and pretty much everything else that the human mind can conceive of and cities can provide. There is even a full-scale metro system, which also functions as a chaotic underground shopping centre, with all manner of goods on sale, often at ear-splitting volume. It is particularly by poking your nose into the hidden recesses of the installation that you will be able to make the most of your visit: a careful inspection of a mere one hundred square metres of the set will yield much more in the way of meaningful insights into modern urban existence than a whole lifetime of visits to the National Theatre or the White Cube.

For those who choose to investigate it there is a hugely complex and thrilling backstory written into the production, involving former civilisations, floating cities, and colonial invasions followed by bloody struggles for independence and violent revolutions — once again, the intricacy of these elements is mind-bending. There are even murky rumours about recent presidents murdering their wives and intriguing tales of high-level corruption involving government contracts and bloodthirsty drug gangs. You might even be able to ask some of the characters about such things — although the show is said to be largely improvised, the actors have been very well prepared in terms of their knowledge of the world they are depicting. Although other reviewers have expressed some disquiet about the occasionally menacing nature of their interactions with the characters I found them to be very cordial at all times. Strike up a conversation and you may find yourself being led to a part of the set that few get to see. 66 Minutes in Damascus it is certainly not!

For me, the best moments were often the smallest: reclining on a vast brightly-painted bench stretching my legs in the dappled sunshine as New Age music played around me, or chatting with a storytelling Cuban ice-cream salesman in the midst of the most vibrant and colourful market I have ever seen in or outside a theatre. The superb choreography and the extraordinary logistical flair of the staging mean that such moments are never far away.

Given the scale, the complexity and the level of detail involved, not everything about the production could be said to be perfect. Some miscasting is evident, with 70-year old men stacking shelves in supermarkets and a very high proportion of street stall workers clearly too young for the roles they are playing. Indeed there is a level of implausibility in the sheer number of people selling things to each other and to the visitors — it is unlikely that in a real city so many people could eke out their existence in such a way. There was also, despite the variety, a certain amount of repetition. I swear that over the course of my two visits I must have heard the recorded voices of the woman collecting old appliances and the one selling local snacks over a thousand times. There have also been concerns expressed about the ways in which the actors themselves are treated on and off set — certainly it seems that spectators are given VIP treatment in comparison with the conditions in which the participants work. In some places the set is starting to come apart, although in many cases it is hard to say whether that effect is deliberate or not.

What can be said to be the themes of such an ambitious production? Given the scale at which the producers of the piece are working, they resemble the same issues which we all struggle with every day, highlighted and exaggerated in subtle ways as is proper to such a complex and colossal work of art. Human survival in the face of great inequality is one, along with the subtle and less-subtle ways in which we work together equanimously to resolve and/or avoid conflict in the face of ubiquitous injustice. In the end the themes which emerge reflect the nature of the piece itself, the challenges inherent in putting such an endeavour together. If there is a single strain of thought informing the work, it must be that of the sociologist Erving Goffman, according to whom “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”. Goffman would certainly have appreciated this stupendously varied and infinitely entertaining production.

Monterrey: Welcome to Amexica

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monterrey_photoshop3There is a line in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Steven Dedalus lists the central elements of the British empire: beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops. A similar list for the city of Monterrey, situated as it is within what Ed Vulliamy has called ‘Amexica’ — the badland borderzone encompassing Northern Mexico and Southern Texas — would certainly include the first two, along perhaps with business hotels, broad-brimmed hats, bullets, big cars and black gold.

Certain cities, particularly in this part of the world, are designed more for cars than for people. To get safely across the road from the hotel to the pharmacy to try to get hold of some wax earplugs in case I need to block out the sound of the traffic at night takes me about ten minutes of very hard work. It would be quicker to take a taxi. The highway is lined with the kind of restaurants in which the quality of the parking is valued much higher than that of the food — in Mexico, that means Chili’s, PF Chang’s, VIPs, El Portón, the ineptly named Italianni’s and other establishments which specialise in very generous quantities of meat (generous, that is, to the human diner, not to the animated being which provided the food). The whole thing would make for a refreshing antidote to anyone suffering from optimism about the ability of human societies to cut carbon emissions any time soon, or to adjust their diets to make them more sustainable and less cruel.

There seems to be a growing consensus on social media that the ‘environmental problems we are facing’ (this is starting to sound like a euphemism) are caused not by cars, but by cows — not fossil fuels, but farting. I suppose that becoming vegetarian is, although highly laudable, easier than addressing one’s over-reliance on motor transport and the products of petrochemical innovation. Many years ago I happened to be stepping out with a plastics engineer, and it occurred to me to ask her something which had never crossed my mind before: what is plastic? Plastic, she explained, evidently confused and embarrassed that someone with whom she was closely and publicly associated could be so very ignorant, is derived from petrol. The computer I am using now is made of petrol. This may not be news to you, but for me back in 1999 it triggered a traumatic memory of my total confusion as a child upon being told that glass is somehow made of sand. As it happens, between them petrol and cows account for a very high proportion of the increasingly limited natural resources we depend upon every day, and it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to find that the enormously successful documentary ‘Cowspiracy’ had been helped into existence by forces determined to protect one of these industries at the expense of the other.

I’m not sure how much methane gas deer produce but I do catch a glimpse of one or two (it is hard to tell the difference, unless you see them together) at the private university I visit for the afternoon. It’s a pleasant place to walk around, perhaps a bit too pleasant in fact. I feel a bit like I’m on a set where an advert for a private university is being filmed. Everyone is very shiny and extremely young, they all seem to be studying Finance, and unlike everywhere else in Mexico I can see no mention of the number 43. It’s the diametrical opposite of a escuela normal. Of the exam candidates I interview several have come up from Tampico, somewhere I hope never to visit, and may well not, given that the organisation I work for stopped doing exams there two years ago in case their examiners got shot (not necessarily by the candidates, but you never know). As he booked into his hotel on his last visit there a colleague of mine was advised to stay away from the windows por si acaso.

On the way back to the hotel the taxi driver warns me we’re in for a pretty wet evening (I don’t think he’s flirting). I always learn a lot from taxi drivers; in South Africa on honeymoon last year we basically covered the main points of a Master’s course on race, society and politics just by talking to the people transporting us around. Here in Monterrey taxi drivers are very used to gringos, especially ones that don’t speak a word of Spanish, which I presume is why several of them a) repeat the same things to me in slow Spanish and broken English while gesticulating wildly in order to indicate difficult words like ‘hotel’, and b) try very hard to rip the fuck out of me. In Mexican Spanish (and possibly in Venezuelan and Patagonian Spanish too, I don’t know) people use the phrase ‘ver la cara a alguién’, to see someone’s face, meaning to rip someone off*. There is of course little I can do to disguise my cara de gringo, which means one taxi driver tries hard to sell me some prostitutes, and then when I express a strong lack of interest in that, a trip to some waterfalls instead. So not just a taxi driver then, but a pimp tour guide taxi driver. Triple jobbing. This kind of abuse gets so ubiquitous and annoying that I end up sitting silently in the back and wondering whether I should give up, sell out and start using bloody Uber.

Thankfully, however, my faith in cab drivers is restored by Agustín, an enormous and enormously tattooed twenty-something whose car is adorned with disco lights and tiny skulls and soundtracked by some sort of surprisingly catchy death metal music. He tells me an entertaining tale about how one of his neighbours out in the suburbs was shot dead this very morning by another neighbour, who at the age of 14 is hooked on some sort of fairly unpleasant-sounding but certainly very more-ish glue/crack concoction**. Some people are desperate for money — as I leave for the airport one taxi driver drives in front of another, jumps out and grabs my bag, puts it in the trunk and drives me off at top speed. He then conducts a furious argument over the radio with the first taxi driver over the fact that he has just stolen a clearly lucrative customer. I can see how things can turn violent. Given the level of barbarity involved in the drug trade, it seems likely to me that the taxi business must have some cartel involvement, and it’s obviously not the only one. In August 2011 a group of comandos belonging to the particularly vicious Zetas gang raided a casino which wasn’t paying its dues***, in the process burning it down and killing 53 people****. This brings the death toll for this short series up to almost a hundred, and we haven’t even got to Torreón yet.

Nevertheless, most of that was a couple of years ago, and now Monterrey is officially much safer than it used to be. Hopes are high that things will continue to improve. A lot of those hopes have been invested in Jaime Rodrigues Calderon, aka El Bronco, the new State Governor of Nuevo León, who is the first ever to be elected without the support of a political party. His campaign is already being talked about as a masterpiece of political marketing strategy — on the way to the airport in DF I passed a billboard advert promoting the man credited with his success. It really is a remarkable achievement, given that Calderon has never been associated with any political party, neither the governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional, nor the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (in Mexico, rather like in Ireland, with whom its political system has rather a lot in common, the two main parties are even more corrupt and right-wing than each other). He has always stubbornly insisted on remaining outside the established political networks as a matter of moral principle, free from the influence of what former-and-future failed presidential candidate Antonio López Obrador has labelled the ‘mafia of power’. All, that is, except for one brief 31-year period in the PRI. Sorry? Yes, right, there is that. El Bronco was in the ruling PRI for 31 years, until September 2014.

Orale. That fact may help to explain why the newly-elected independent Governor has recently gone on the attack against that self-same Obrador, the left-wing candidate who just happens to be the PRI’s main bugbear. He has also distinguished himself not only by telling the families of people kidnapped by the State and by the State’s close friends in the drug gangs to shape up and face up to the fact that their kids are dead, while also blaming the mothers of the disappeared for not having done more to keep their kids in line, given that, as he puts it, they must have been got rid of for some reason. He’s started to sound a bit like one of his good friends, former President Carlos Salinas de Gotari, who is regarded in Mexico in much the same way as Fernando Collor de Mello is in Brazil or Charlie Haughey is in Ireland. All this has led some sage observers to the eminently reasonably conclusion that he is being maneuvered into position for a pop at the 2018 presidential race as a secret PRI candidate. He’s definitely got better intellectual credentials than the current office holder — when EPN was asked to name a book which had inspired him, he was famously unable to name a single one that he’s even read, whereas El Bronco says that this classic of national literature is his own personal favorite.

Speaking of books, at the airport bookshop I come across a newly-published book about the current state of Mexican politics — it’s called The Authoritarian Return of the PRI.

Nevertheless, the state of Nuevo León certainly has a lot of very attractive scenery, with some very oddly-shaped mountains dominating the skyline, containing some beautiful waterfalls, and probably more than a few prostitutes. One night I do manage to get out for a look around, ending up in Monterrey’s flagship restaurant, Rey de Cabrito, eating goats in a room decorated by goat heads next to a table on which two of my fellow diners are sporting goatees, which seems to me a bit risky under the circumstances (I subsequently discover you can buy Rey De Cabrito-branded whole dead goats, attractively packaged, at the airport). The next night my plans to go out and see a different side to the city with some actual local people I’ve been introduced to are scuppered by the fact that it is raining more than anything I have ever experienced before, with thousands of melted glaciers drowning the city, including quite a few cars and their occupants. Ultimately, if human beings used their cars less, it would rain less in some places, and more in others. In a not dissimilar way, flying around doing absurd exams while writing self-important rambly blogs criticising others for their bad habits don’t do no good neither, but qué se puede hacer?

*In Spain the word for rip-off is ‘timo’. Whether or not this has affected the fortunes of a certain major multinational mobile service provider I don’t know, but I suspect the Spanish have noticed the connection.

** I didn’t mention the issue of drugs in the introductory list because I couldn’t think of a synonym for narcotics beginning with ‘B’.

*** Subsequently the new Governor (see below)’s recently-estranged brother accused the newly-elected Governor of running a protection racket of his own, involving charging local casinos $40,000 a week to operate.

**** At the risk of being slightly controversial, I do think that it’s a shame that the new James Bond film wasn’t being filmed there at the time.

Veracruz: Shot dead in the pick n’ mix aisle

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La transición mexicanaIt’s a shock to walk into a branch of WalMart to be greeted by the sight of three security guards brandishing the kind of major weaponry currently being used elsewhere to pulverise Isis and their victims to pieces. It’s simultaneously comforting and disconcerting to see that no-one else is paying the slightest attention to their presence, in fact the three Robocop clones are acting just like security guards might elsewhere, except for the fact that they are dressed for World War Three, or possibly Four. I don’t ask. They are strolling around, yawning and playing disconsolately with their Motorolas, eying up the Pick n’ Mix and looking ready to blast into space anyone who looks like they might try to smuggle a 48-inch flatscreen down their trousers. I only popped into the place to buy a tiny bottle of Mezcal to entertain myself with post-work while watching the IT Crowd on Netflix; not finding one, I contemplate the possible consequences of trying to leave empty handed. For the first time in my life I am genuinely apprehensive that someone might shoot me dead unless I purchase some alcohol.

Security (or, rather ‘security’) is generally pretty visible these days in Boca del Rio. This seaside suburb of Veracruz was the site of an incident remarkable even by the standards of Mexico’s mid-level civil war, when, on 20 September 2011, 35 corpses were dumped in the street outside a shopping centre by one of the rival gangs of narcos said to dominate the state. The Governor of the State of Veracruz, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, called the episode ‘abhorrent’. Duarte is doing his best to control the situation as he knows best, taking regular lessons from his idol and role model General Franco. He is particularly keen to control the media, particularly when it takes photos of him looking overweight, and he also keeps a keen eye and a heavy fist on the activities of groups of students who try to challenge his rule and hold him accountable. He also keeps himself busy violently refuting persistent and seemingly well-founded allegations that he is directly connected to the activities of narco cartels in his state.

So whenever I come here (it’s my third visit) I find that the word regime tends to play on my mind, partly because in this state, unlike in Mexico City, the ubiquitous state police tend to wear military camouflage uniforms and drive around with heavy armoury mounted on the back of their jeeps. Still, largely because the role of the repressive apparatus is partly to keep the city safe for tourists and business travellers, it feels safe enough, indeed extremely pleasant, to walk around in the sunshine. As I stroll along the malecón I come across a monument to a century of Lebanese immigration, possibly paid for by the country’s most famous Lebanese descendant, who is also one of the world’s richest (and quite possibly dodgiest) men. A hundred metres further on a similar monument, unveiled by the country’s President in 2012, commemorates Jewish immigrants, presumably many of whom fled what Benjamin Netanhayu apparently regards as the Palestinian-inspired Holocaust. Certain kinds of visitors and migrants are therefore welcomed by the regime, others not — in a stark contrast with the two monuments, right across the street above a hair salon is the Honduran consulate. According to Amnesty International (the organisation under whose auspices I myself am ultimately here in the country), Mexico has become a “death trap for migrants”, with tens of thousands of people who are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America and trying to reach the US facing a serious risk of mistreatment, kidnapping and murder along their tortuous route at the hands of both state authorities and drug gangs (in Mexico these are very often the same people). It’s hard to correlate this with my own direct experiences, which are better reflected in a separate report by something called Expat Insider magazine, which places Mexico in second position in terms of its ‘expat quality of life’, with “nine out of ten expats describ(ing) the attitude of the Mexican people toward foreign residents to be friendly”. My instinctive abreaction to this is to vomit; however, a moment’s honest refection exposes the fact that while I may abhor the status of ‘expat’, I enjoy the many protections and freedoms it affords me.

This profoundly simple contradiction sharpens my reflections on my experiences this very morning, when I spent a reasonably difficult hour or so buying tickets for my upcoming trip to Los Angeles (during which I discover that when I try to pay on Expedia using my Mexican card, the price automatically doubles). Nevertheless the level of frustration I experience confirming my passage to the land of the free is put into some perspective when I leave my room and head towards the rooftop pool. Leaving the lift one of the maids greets me, asks me if I speak Spanish and also where I’m from. She then asks to speak to me in private.

Yolanda’s Story

I haven’t seen my husband since eight years ago, when I left Miami and came back to Mexico to be with my children. Now he has contacted me and told me that he wants a divorce. He has met a woman, twenty years older than him who tells him she can get him papers if they get married. He says she doesn’t want any money, and that there is nothing going on between them; she says that after the marriage he will get his papers in three months. I don’t know what to do. He insists that the only reason he wants to do this is so that our children will be able to travel to and live in the US when they are older.

Do you think what he says is true? What do you think I should do?

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that nowadays power is measured in mobility. The benefits I enjoy in being able to live in and visit different countries at will constitute profoundly unfair privileges, but this incontrovertible fact is one I find very easy to forget when judging people and situations around me. The sacrifices necessary for Yolanda to guarantee some chance of a future for her family and maintain some some of connection with her husband (who, as I delicately suggest to her the following day when I’ve done a bit of research online, sounds a little bit ingenuo if not a total pendejo) are the result of injustices so absurd that it is hard for me to express to her how abject and awkward they make me feel. As many have commented in the past, one of the damaging and damnable things about privilege is how quickly and insidiously it generates a sense of automatic entitlement.

The exam candidates I interview in the few hours of actual work I do during my visit are mostly trainee sailors, who dream of seeing the world and being able to travel the world with impunity. From 2004–2005 I taught, as it happens, in a maritime university in China, where I tried my best to work my way through the separate, but connected, labyrinth of contradictions which my presence there implied. Over these few days it becomes clear that representatives of what I have gradually and grudgingly been forced to accept is my own government suffer no such moral qualms on their visit to the Middle Kingdom, having cut their way through the maze of ethical considerations and abandoned overnight any notion that the UK has a responsibility to at least pay lip service to a human-rights-and-democracy agenda. In Veracruz I am surprised to see the first Chinese English language school I have ever seen outside China. Media allies of the Cameron regime have themselves seemingly been taking lessons from their Chinese counterparts in how to deal with the opposition, launching a vicious campaign of slander against the Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, who Jeremy Corbyn has had the temerity to try to appoint as Director of Communications without first asking their permission, while also in another transparent attempt to impress their new best friends banning the artist Ai Wei Wei from working in the UK.

China is of course not the only repressive regime the UK Government has been working more closely with of late. In addition to its renewed deep personal friendship with the Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, this is also the strictly-not-political Year of Mexico UK; ironically, I’m here in Veracruz on behalf of the main organisations involved in promoting this. If it is fair, as I believe it is, to talk about a global neoliberal regime, I myself am working for it.

The day before I leave I pass through the lobby of my hotel and see another first — a banner advertising $10,000 executive trips by luxury yacht, complete with champagne buffet and shark fishing, which warns potential customers that such trips are ‘subject to climate change’. The following day I wake to a text from Ch. warning of a hurricane on the Pacific coast. Dozily, I look at the bright blue sky out of the window and check the weather for Veracruz online. Nothing — little wind, no hurricane. It is only when I browse twitter for all the latest outrage about Israel and Palestine, the global refugee crisis, Corbyn and Milne, George Osborne’s visit to China and all the rest that I see a post about the biggest hurricane ever, which is headed straight for the opposite coast, the part of the country I am due to fly into that very evening — it is scheduled to arrive in Guadalajara at exactly the same time as I am. On the BBC website there is a startling image making it clear that, while everyone on the coast will die and all the buildings will be destroyed, the bright orange section a little inland is probably the second worst place in the world to be flying to any time soon. Meanwhile on the TV news I hear Enrique Pena Nieto boasting that car sales in Mexico hit 900,000 in the first nine months of the year. Unprecedented hurricanes and record-breaking car sales. I am relieved, in a way, at such clear evidence that the immense contradictions to which I am subject do not only exist in my own head. Subsequently, I delay going to Guadalajara, the destruction caused by Hurricane Patrícia turns out to be a lot less than expected, and I am glad that it is not just me who is enormously lucky.

Distrito Federal: Un Encuentro Infrareal

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It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the myriad contradictions and the hyper-surreality of life in Mexico City. Ambling homewards along a sun-dappled tree-lined street in La Condesa, the well-to-do district we have called home for the last few months since moving here from London, feeling simultaneously buzzed and at peace after a coffee in our local cafebrería, I encounter an almost entirely naked man. He has unkempt hair and an actually quite natty beard, and he is attired in a few remaining strands of what must have been a woollen jumper, and also in what I can only describe as a loincloth. He asks me for 5 pesos (20p) and I am so shocked and disoriented that I take a 500 note out of my frankly consternated pocket and try to hand it to him.

He lets it fall to the floor while telling me an urgent tale which seems to involve former President Benito Juarez, his family home outside the city, and some sort of exile or loss, all in a way I can’t follow the thread of, mainly because it becomes increasingly clear that there isn’t one, he has lost it, and as he talks (he actually has a very nice voice, kind of lilting and very well-suited for storytelling, although it would be a lot more entertaining if the story had some sort of a plot) he literally unravels his suéter to the point where it’s just a few strands of wool and his dark skin is almost, but thankfully not entirely, exposed.

I try to sympathise and also to interject and find out what sort of help he needs, but at the same time to try to extricate myself from the bundle of incoherence he is weaving around me. I am also trying hard to draw his attention to the note that has fallen to the floor, and is probably about as much use to him as my first-world anxieties, even though it would, if he was remotely in control of his faculties, be enough to buy him some new threads and quite a few street tacos. I have the impression of talking to, or rather being talked at by, someone from a long time in the past, or possibly, more realistically, the future. But the encounter is taking place right now, in the present, because I am in Mexico City, and I do not understand what is going on.

As he talks, gesticulates and repeats again and again the same apparently unconnected details people pass by shaking their heads sympathetically (mostly at my plight rather than his, it seems), and I realise that what is taking place is not a conversation, and that there is nothing whatsoever I can do to help this man. It is abundantly clear we are living in two separate universes, so I apologise with embarrassment and go home, to our oversized and frankly overpriced apartment. I pack my bag and then the following day we go off on a nice air-conditioned bus ride to a very pleasant holiday, during which no-one tries to shoot us with impunity, no one attempts to evict us from our homes, and at no point do we have to worry about where we are going to sleep or how we will find anything to eat. When we return home it is with our clothes and our sanity largely intact.

Qué pasa realmente con los perros en la Condesa?

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A mí me caen bien los perros; juro que nunca los maltraté ni los maltrataría, y seguramente nunca en mi vida pensaría en envenenarlos. Ultimamente he salido rayado, ya que vivimos en una zona del DF en donde nuestros amiguitos perritos abundan. Aquí en la Condesa no es de extrañar ver a un cuida-perros arrastrando por la banqueta hasta quince de ellos, y confeso que deambulando por el quartier — por Calles Tamaulipas y Michoacán, por Parque España und so weiter — paso muchos y bellos momentos observando y admirando los animalitos caninos que se encuentran en tanta variedad y abundancia.

Sin embargo, no todos son como yo. A los perros de la Condesa alguién les está haciendo mal. En los últimos meses han aparecido avisos en las farolas de esta bien iluminada parte de la ciudad advirtiendo a los ciudadanos proprietarios de perros que algun(a) malhechor(a) anda por aí dejando en los parques alimentos apetitosos que hacen muy, muy mal a los estómagos normalmente tan robustos de las pobres criaturas. La notícia se propagó como la pólvora entre los dueños, y el número de perritos que se ven por Parque México ha disminuido notablemente. Incluso se hizo noticia en los telediarios nacionales — hace dos semanas las autoridades de la Procuraduría capitalina anunciaron que habían detenido a una viejecita de setenta y tal años sospechada de ser la autora de los delitos. Sin embargo, después de un breve periodo de investigación y (hay que admitir la posibilidad) mal trato del posible responsable la hipótesis de su participación fue abandonada y se le permitió volver a casa y al presumible desprecio de sus vecinos y ex-amigos.

Quiero ser claro: esto no es una confesión. Me di cuenta, al leer el primer aviso que vi por la calle hace varios meses, que el interés de un pinche gringo gabacho por los perros locales podría parecer sospechoso en este momento a alguién buscando a posibles culpables. Quiero nomás destacar varios aspectos del caso que me parecen significativos.

Vamos a abordar, antes de todo, un posible, y (a mi juicio) peligrosa pista falsa. Un aviso que me encontré la semana pasada convocava a los dueños de perros a una manifestación en el propio Parque México el sábado seguinte. Se les pedía a los asistentes que trajieron las correas (N.B.) de sus mascotas sin el animal para expresar su solidaridad con los caninos caídos en los últimos meses. Esto, hay que admitirlo, es un paso falso. Aunque ha siempre habido rumores maliciosos contra aquella comunidad asiática tan bien arraigada aquí en el DF, no existe ningun tipo de evidencia que los restaurantes de los que hay tantos en la Zona Rosa de la cuidad hayan sequestrado a nuestros compañeros caninos para preparar sus deliciosos bosintangs o apetitosos 개고기 전골s, y tampoco tienen razón los que les apuntan el dedo con respecto a la campaña de intoxicación de los perros. Tal sugerencia taimada y (hay que decirlo) francamente racista tiene que ser claramente rechazada. Es más probable que las personas que se la plantearon estén buscando un cane espiatorio — quizá ellos se han hartado de pagar a los cuida-perros y decidido que sus animalitos son un coste que ya no soportan más?

Yo quiero delineare una teoria sobre lo que está pasando con en envenenamento de perros en la Condesa. Yo creo que hasta el momento las indagaciones han, como solemos decir en inglés, ladrado al árbol equivocado. Es que hasta aquí se ha buscado a los culpables entre la comunidad humana. Pero no son humanos los que han sido envenenados. Son perros. Si quieren saber mi opinión, es que hay que enfocar la investigación entre la sociedad perrina. Sabemos que los perros son animales inteligentes, con emociones, capables de actos inspirados por el amor, la lealdad, la bondad…porqué no la crueldad, el pique, el resentimiento — sentimientos, digamos, mas animales? En vez de mandar unidades de policías aburridisimas y effectivamente inutiles a patrullar Parque México, porqué no pedir la ayuda de Scooby Doo, Inspector Rex o incluso el siempre-intrépido Dogtagnan para olfatear el sospechoso? Así el caso de los perros envenenados en Parque México podría venir a ser simultaneamente más sencillo y más complejo que parece.

Frida y México: Imágen, identidad e ideología

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La imágen mejor conocida y mas difundida de México en los últimos uno o dos decénios es la de una mujer colorida, bella y fuerte con trajes y rasgos aparentemente indígenas. Sin embargo, con un poco de reflexión queda claro que esta imágen en nada corresponde a la realidad en la que viven las mujeres y (especialmente) las mujeres indígenas en el México de hoy. Hace mucho que la prensa internaciónal habla de un ‘pandémico’ de violéncia contra las mujeres en México, y no solamente en el ya tristemente celébre caso de Ciudad Juarez. En cuanto a los indígenas, no es por acaso que en la mayoria de los escandalosos masacres de los últimos años las víctimas eran de origen indígena.

Parece entonces que El Comandente Marcos tenía razón cuando dijo que en México lo que se valora de los indígenas no es su realidad, pero sí una foto suya. A fin de cuentas se trata de una imágen, producida por una industria cultural. Nada anormal. Todos los países tienen sus industrias culturales. Pero esta imágen es tan difundida, y los valores que promueve tan ubícuos, que alcance el nivel de una ideologia naciónal. Nos basta un ejemplo: este verano el Museo Franz Mayer luce una exposición especial sobre el esbozo, titulada, reveladoramente en inglés, Made in Mexico. Aprendemos de la información expuesta que este traje, es “una de las prendas femeninas mexicanas por excelencia … tiene (mucho) significado en la creación de la identidad de la mujer y del país”. El texto que introduce la exhibición no habla principalmente del rebozo, pero si de la intentidad naciónal:

‘México es un rico tapiz en el que se entretejen múltiples hilos. Su larga y tumultuosa historia, desde los antíguos pueblos prehispánicos hasta la modernidad de su cultura urbana, ha traído múltiples influencias e ideas al país, adaptándose en un cosmovisión y modo de vida singularmente mexicanos. Las artes decorativas, parte integral de la cultura mexicana, reflejan la intersección de la cultura tradiciónal, el legado colonial y la vida contemporanea y política. El rebozo ha sido — y continúa siendo — un resistente emblema de la identidad mexicana’.

También en la exposición aprendemos que hoy dia hay ‘planes gubernamentales…que se han creado para fomentar la producción de rebozos de alta calidad (y) cooperativos para ayudar a las comunidades a elaborar rebozos y para aconsejarlos sobre la manera de comercializar los textiles y volverse autónomos’. Nos presenta una imágen muy positiva, y no poco consoladora. Deja la impresión que en este pais se valora las tradiciones indígenas y el trabajo de las mujeres indígenas, en la orgullosa tradición de Frida Kahlo (quien de paso no era indígena, pero bueno…). Es una idea que (en principio, dada la caída del peso…) vende muy bien en el exterior (hay que recordar el nombre de la muestra, dirigida a un público o bien gringo o ya sea suficientamente malinchista…). Es una imágen que legitimiza la violencia y la desigualdad, el rebozo transparente de un estado que quiere continuar a ser visto como esencialmente liberal y progresista (y, demás importante, inversionable) al mismo tiempo que brutaliza, ensclaviza su población indígena al punto de encogerse de hombros y lavarse las manos cuando un niño indígena de 12 años que estába nomás comprando pañuelos es asesinado por un soldado que evidentamente no estába disparando “hacía el aire”; enseña la imágen de un estado que se ríe cuando 43 estudiantes indígenas son matados, que es liderado por un presidente responsable de la violación de decenas de mujeres indigenas por sus policías…

Hablar de la industria Kahlo, de su papel cultural, economico e ideológico no implica, evidentamente, echar la culpa a la rica y compleja obra de Frida…aunque cabe recordar que ella tampoco era indígena, pero sí urbana, de clase alta, que en su tiempo, en el acto de hacer valorar las culturas indígenas, tambien les exproprió, mezclando vários elementos de diversas culturas que no tenían ninguna conexión entre sí y “mexicanizándolos”. A fin de cuentas, una nación necesita una cultura. En todo los casos subyace a esa cultura un mundo sordido de contradiciones y contrastes, que apenas vislumbramos, un mundo, además, que puede ser explotado fructíferamente por los artistas – como, por ejemplo, Frida Kahlo. Pero en México estas contradicciones son brutales, y vivas. La mayoria de los turistas que están dispuestos a desembolsar 200 pesos a cambio de una playera con una imágen de Frida Kahlo en la que lleva pusto, junto con sus adornos indígenas, una playera del Daft Punk (indígeneidad y modernidad en perfecta sinfonía!) por cierto desconocen que en el Estado de México diez veces más mujeres han sido asesinadas que en Ciudad Juárez en los últimos 21 años sin que el Estado mexicano ni pestañeara. Pocos fuera del país entiendrían que en el caso Iguala la indiferencia de las autoridades se debe en gran parte al hecho de que eran indígenas los que fueron (presumiblemente) masacrados. Pero en el México de hoy, una mujer indígena es la más vulnerable y menos visible de todos. A no ser que sea colorida, bella, y muerta.

Day 38

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so in London listening to the Songlines CD there’s a track we love by Mexican Institute of Sound, a track called México, kind of politico-funk mariachi. In Mexico I see, along with an actually infinite number of other wonderful things, several references to a book called Pedro Páramo, and I also happen to watch a documentary about Mexican music called Hecho en México which features a mix of famous and well-known names. There’s a kind of bedroom DJ with this kind of absurdist electro track about how it’s really hard for him to get any action in DF because he’s just too weird. I look him up and it turns out that his name is Camilo Lara and he’s also the guy behind Mexican Insitute of Sound, which is actually called, for fairly self-evident reasons, Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, and he uses a lot of spoken samples in his work from a guy called Juan Rulfo, who I’ve never heard of, but it turns out he’s the guy who wrote Pedro Páramo, which I now realise is the book that Hussain told me that I must read, and which I will now actually read, once I’ve finished reading this book in which I now remember I more recently came across a reference to Pedro Páramo (and I also must get round to reading El Laberinto de la Soledad, because it crops up everywhere), and I now also want to listen to everything by Insituto Mexicano del Sonido, and other similar bands and singers, such as Natalia Lafourcade, who, in 2012

Mexico City and London: Striving to Survive

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A neoliberal writes

You don’t come across many shirkers in Mexico City. Not even that many beggars. People work, and when there isn’t any work, they work. Six in 10 Mexican workers, or 30 million people, work in the informal economy — take the metro and at every stop there is someone who has got hold of some cough sweets, a few soft drinks or a box of cooking magazines and who is working as hard (and as loudly) as they can to convince people that they want them. As I sit and write this I lose count of the number who have passed my window selling food, collecting broken appliances, gathering garbage in that particular local combination of recycling and scavenging… . Mexico is a country of strivers and entrepreneurs.

*****

What can we make of this? It’s true that in DF that you don’t come across many people simply begging — not, at least, in relation to the amount of poverty that undoubtedly exists. It’s also true that there are people selling things everywhere — the area around the Zócalo (the enormous central square) has more face-to-face economic exchange taking place than anywhere I’ve ever seen. It’s a kind of economic activity similar to that which in Brazil is called biscate — hand to mouth existence sustained by small-scale informal activity on a massive scale, without any of the protections we are (quite reasonably) so very accustomed to and dependent on in most of Europe and/or the UK. People may be striving, but it’s not to succeed — it’s to survive in the absence of any kind of welfare state.

What doesn’t announce itself quite so visibly or so loudly are the immense difficulties which underpin this unprotected way of life. The consequences of failure in this intensely fragile and fraught fight for sustenance are immense. Not selling a sufficient amount of merchandise on any given day means hunger on a level that I for one am unable to imagine without great effort (although it is imperative that I try). Healthcare, for the poorest, is simply not an option. And as for housing, it turns out that most people working informally in DF do not live in large rented flats in the middle of Condesa… . Also less immediately noticeable is all the activity that goes on behind the scenes: the violence which so often mediates all kinds of informal transactions, the extortion, the drug gangs, the prostitution and trafficking in women, and so on. Not to mention, of course, that there are very many people who beg on the streets of DF, who live an even more precarious existence — the people from indigenous backgrounds, those right down at the bottom of society. Plus there’s also the fact that Mexico is a primate city, meaning that it concentrates huge amounts of economic activity which the rest of the country doesn’t get to enjoy. People in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán live an even more radically unprotected existence — there, any contact with the forces of public security is to be avoided at all costs. The Afonso Cuarón film Y Tu Mamá También (2001)is a subtle but forceful exploration and indictment of these contractions.

How does this relate to the UK? One interesting thing about the coverage of the 2011 riots, particularly in relation to the abolition of ESA , was learning just how much the economic lives of teenagers in some parts of London revolves around the circulation of small amounts of money for and from dealing in hash and weed. On the whole though, the culture that I’ve been trying to describe hasn’t really existed in the UK in my lifetime. Firstly, nowadays there simply isn’t the space to sell things informally. Service and retail industries are very tightly controlled, with supermarkets and aspirational malls having taken the place of (in the words of the 6-year-old daughter of Newham Mayor Robin Wales) ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’ street markets and carboot sales. Public space is also very restricted and controlled — anyone setting up a tamarind stand in Paternoster Square would be given very short shrift, and it’s hard to imagine what kind of response someone would provoke if they took to the tube in an attempt to knock out cut-price Juan Gabriel DVDs at very full volume.

Of course, if you want to sell goods or services, there is also the internet. Nowadays, while there is a distinct, but suspicious, lack of people who say they’re unemployed, there is an abundance of individual freelancers, hustling their products and skillsets online, always on the lookout for a creative opportunity in the brutal new world of the knowledge-based economy. Nowadays in the UK being an ‘entrepreneur’ is increasingly the only available or permitted mode of economic survival — just count the amount of times today you see the term ‘your business’. But this sexy fantasy hides the reality of people scrambling around doing odd jobs in a heart-racing struggle to be able to pay the rent. It is a term desperately in need of détournement — someone depending on Taskrabbit to survive enjoys fewer rights than a medieval serf, and to think of them in the same terms as Alan Sugar is something of a category error.

In Mexico this struggle for day-to-day existence is visible, on the surface. In the UK, it is less so. So much of the postmodern biscate economy takes place behind a screen, on smartphones whose expensive monthly tariff is even more important than rent for people whose basic survival depends on an occasional email or text message. For neoliberals, the internet appears to be a free market utopia: no taxes, no minimum wage, no contracts, no state regulation, just infinite human labour deprived of all social protection and begging to be exploited. For people who need to work to obtain food, shelter and healthcare (and, nowadays, communication), it is in many ways a nightmare come true.

*****

In the UK and elsewhere, the state than has sustained our lives, administered our births, fed, guarded and healed us is on the retreat, falling to its feet and discarding unused ammunition as it flees. In its absence, without the manifold protections it has afforded us, where do we find ourselves? It increasingly seems that in the imagination of many, we no longer live in what we’re now forced to call the ‘real’ world, amongst buildings and people and shouts and smells and incessant hunger and ugly human need. We are in the process of migrating instead to another realm, one safer, cleaner and easier to control (albeit almost impossible to switch off). But how will these screens we have erected around ourselves give us shelter from the gathering storms? How will these infinitely precious and meaningful religious icons, these handheld shrines, that we cling to for dear life redeem us from our all-too-earthy earthbound physical existence, our dependence on air, on water, on food, on the human touch? Increasingly, it seems, we live in gnostic times. The Gnostics believed that all matter is evil and the body is a prison to escape from. Perhaps, then, the essence of neoliberal faith and practice is not bare, brutal, atheistic social Darwinism, an animalistic fight of all against all unto death, but a belief in a higher realm, in an infinitely cruel deity which hovers over the furnace into which our physical environment and all our infinite hours, years and lifetimes of human toil and endeavour are currently being sacrificed. A Taskrabbit economy (final-stage turbocapitalism as a cupcake-cute bunny apocalypse) is a façade covering a fullscale hollowing out of social protection, increasingly desperate poverty and an economic existence just as vulnerable as that which I see around me every day on the streets of Mexico. And when George Osborne warns us of the need to strive, it’s not our aspiration to wealth and success that he has in mind, but the battle for survival.