Johnny Hazard : Tanks Versus Teachers in Mexico City

Striking teachers at Zócalo plaza in Mexico City, Friday, September 13, 2013. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

Tanks vs. teachers:
Federal police drive striking teachers
from Mexico's Zócalo plaza

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"In addition to promoting just causes and altering business as usual for awhile (and hoping that such alterations will be permanent), marches, rallies, highway blockages, and the collective taking of public spaces, but especially encampments and occupations, re-establish community and the liberating collective creativity that has been lost amid urban chaos." -- Armando Bartra, Mexican left intellectual

"Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexican president, doesn't know how his first wife died, can't name three books that have shaped his life, and can't name the capital city of the state of Veracruz, yet he's ready to evaluate teachers!" -- Sign on a tent at the teachers' encampment

MEXICO CITY -- 3,500 federal police, with their tanks and water cannons and joined by hundreds of the “progressive” police of Mexico City, expelled thousands of teachers, members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (dissident caucus but, today, the de facto teachers' union in Mexico) from the central plaza, the Zócalo, on Friday, September 13.

Violence, according to government and mainstream media, was limited, but images of 12 police attacking one woman have been widely distributed. In other times or other places, or with other actors, this may have been the end of the story: another social movement smothered.

But the teachers have not gone far. Many are in the plaza of the Monumento de la Revolución, about a mile away. And the level of public support for the teachers is much greater since the police action. Students at most of the campuses of all the public universities in the city, including technical schools and teachers' colleges, have voted in assemblies to shut down campuses and join in actions to support the teachers.

Police drive teachers from the plaza Monday. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

They are staffing the kitchens at the encampment and arrived on short notice for a candlelight march on Saturday night and for a much bigger march on Sunday night that culminated in an alternative Independence Day celebration.

The federal police attack on teachers had, perhaps, two main objectives:

1. To support the governments's bogus education reform that stems from the premise that teachers are to blame for whatever is wrong with education and with youth. (A movie called Panzazo, styled after Waiting for Superman, was funded by the corporate elite and served as the first shot by the other side in this battle.)


2. To open up the plaza for Independence Day celebrations tonight and tomorrow. It's a strange ritual in which hundreds of thousands of apolitical, mostly drunk people fill the square, shoot fireworks at other people, spray foam on people who don't want it, and listen to the president shout "Viva México" at a time when Mexico's lack of independence in the face of U.S., Canadian, and Spanish corporations has never been more severe. Television coverage of the event appears more stately, emphasizing pomp and circumstance inside the presidential palace (which faces the Zócalo), and muting the noise of the crowd.

This year was Peña Nieto's first Independence Day in office and images abound of his promenading with his new wife, a soap opera star. His relationship with her became public very soon after the mysterious death of his first wife. When he was still a state governor, he had a multi-million-dollar publicity contract with Televisa, the largest television network. It's common here for politicians to literally buy the media with taxpayer funds, but Peña Nieto has taken the concept to a new level.

The teachers and their supporters are now organizing -- gathering food, tarps, tents, and clothes -- to withstand extreme rains. (Normally in this season, it rains for a while every day in the late afternoon, but, since Friday, it's been raining most of the time as very severe tropical storms have hit both coasts. Guerrero, home to some of the most hell-raising teachers, is especially hard-hit, with damage exacerbated by systemic negligence. In Acapulco and Chilpancingo, and more in smaller communities, there is no running water, telephone, transportation, or Internet service.)

This week has seen marches every day and most of the local universities remain in active shutdown till Friday. Much of the coverage of the strike in the U.S. media, it should be noted, has been inaccurate or misleading, or often virtually nonexistent.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.

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Johnny Hazard : Mexico City Rocked by Massive Teacher Protest

Teachers mobilize in Mexico City, Wednesday, September 4, 2013. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

Militant teachers' strike:
Massive protests continue in Mexico

The actions were a continuation of protests against an education 'reform' package first passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2013 

MEXICO CITY -- Thousands of teachers, mostly members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), remain camped out in the center of Mexico City after having initiated a series of protests that have included blocking the airport for a day, blockades at the two major television networks in demand for equal time (they received three and five minutes, respectively), and marches that have forced the closure of various major thoroughfares and Metro stations.

Massive marches took place on Sunday, September 1, and Wednesday, September 4. The actions were a continuation of protests against an education "reform" package passed by Congress on new President Enrique Peña Nieto's first day in office.

There were also actions in other parts of Mexico including an hour-long shutdown of the border bridge by teachers in Juárez. A demonstration by teachers in Los Cabos blocked the airport there.

The actions of the CNTE do not represent, numerically, the biggest demonstrations in recent Mexican history, but have proven to be the strongest; the anti-election fraud movements of 2006 and 2012, and the militant protests after 45,000 electricians were arbitrarily fired by the federal government in 2009, pale in comparison.

Federal police mobilize in response to militant teachers' action on Wednesday, September 4. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

With the protests of Chicago teachers this year and last, the demonstrations in Mexico City represent the most significant resistance to big-business-based education reform thus far.

September 1 is, by law, the day the president delivers his annual report ("informe," similar to the State of the Union address). This year, the teachers planned to interrupt it or block roads leading to the Congress, so the president postponed his presentation until the next day, Monday, and had his top cabinet official hand over the written report to the Congress.

There was a march of about 50,000 teachers, with numbers disproportionately from Oaxaca. Since there were thousands of police and soldiers awaiting them at the Congress building, they began marching instead toward the presidential palace  Less than halfway, the rank and file (especially, again, those from Oaxaca) -- after receiving news that the Congress had already begun meeting to pass a remaining set of "reforms" that day -- demanded to go to the Congress.

So the marchers turned back towards the Congress building. As they got closer, some in the crowd -- many of them not teachers -- got into confrontations with police. There were a few arrests of "ultra" protesters -- including young urban "anarquistas" as well as bystanders and independent reporters. Most of these arrests occurred  miles from the original march route, as the police had surrounded marchers and forced them to a distant location.

A group of 30 police horses were spooked by loud noise when officers took them out of their trailers near the Congress building and they stampeded through downtown Mexico City, causing quite a stir and substantial damage, especially to cars.in their paths, and a number of horses were injured as a result.

Monday and Tuesday, the Senate met to approve the reforms. Several Metro stations and at least three major avenues were closed all day -- by the cops, not by the protesters -- an example of how the ostensibly leftist city government is cooperating with its federal allies, in this case by creating traffic problems and blaming the teachers.

Wednesday brought a 24-hour work stoppage by teachers, including many in Mexico City, and a massive "insurgent mobilization." Again, about 50,000 teachers and supporters gathered at the national auditorium, near the presidential residence, leading to speculation that the plan was to surround and shut down the residence, known as "Los Pinos."

Demonstrators rally in Mexico City on Wednesday. Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

But, perhaps because President Enrique Peña Nieto left Tuesday for the G-20 summit in Russia, the marchers instead headed toward other federal office buildings. After hours during which a group of teachers' representatives were inside negotiating with low-level government officials, the marchers were still on the streets, in the rain, blocking a stretch of "the most beautiful avenue in Latin America," Paseo de la Reforma -- and were making plans to return to their encampment and launch similar actions on Thursday, including the possibility of a nationwide work stoppage.

Tens of thousands of teachers in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca are already on strike. Teachers -- who have been disproportionately blamed for students' low academic achievement -- are demanding that they be evaluated by means other than simple standardized tests and that, in turn, president Peña Nieto and the television networks also be evaluated.

Among the non-teacher participants Wednesday were a girl of about five years old with a T shirt that read, "Today I didn't go to school. I came here to defend public education" and hundreds of women from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca in their bright red traditional dresses.

Peña Nieto's annual report -- echoed constantly in advertising paid for by the government to promote its agenda -- promised 120 days of major transformations in Mexico. That is probably true, but it remains to be seen whether the changes will be the ones that he has in mind.

Representatives of the CNTE have announced their intention to stay in Mexico City at least until Sunday, September 8, to participate in a rally organized by opposition political leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the privatization of the petroleum industry, and it is likely that they will try to hold out until September 16 to impede official Independence Day celebrations that take place every year in the Zócalo (central square) of Mexico City, exactly where the CNTE has its enormous tent city installed.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.

The demonstrators included young urban "anarchistas." Photo by Alejandro Mancilla / The Rag Blog.

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Michael James : 'El Lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, 1962

'El lechero' in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, August 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
'El lechero' in San Miguel, 1962

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street... I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 21, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I’m riding in the back seat of a 1957 Plymouth, heading to Acapulco on a weekend adventure. Cliffs on the mountainside act as pages in the "People’s Book," catching my attention. Giant messages say: “¡Capitalismo No! ¡Comunismo Si! ¡Viva Castro!” I heard in one of my anthropology classes about leftist guerillas controlling portions of Guerrero, the state we’re riding in.

The car belongs to the Delamarter twins out of Michigan, Larry and Lou. Also on the ride are Bob Marks and a guy named Zeke from Long Island. I credit these four with introducing me to the wilder side of new things I experienced in Mexico.

In Acapulco there’s drinking at a back-street cantina where a little pimp, speaking a few words in five languages, introduces a parade of women. There is a party on a docked sailboat, where the Jamaican captain is very rude to the women he’s invited.

On a more wholesome adventure, we head south of Acapulco to a non-tourist beach, for a great swim in the Pacific. Older women sit on an old boat. A campesino couple is walking the beach. An old man is asleep in a hammacca.

I see Afro-Mexican kids, reflecting the slave economy of earlier times. Years later I will learn the extent to which African slaves were brought to Mexico and Central and South America. And later I will also learn that Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, long before it was abolished in the USA.

Early Sunday morning in Acapulco, at dawn, I’m awakened from a short night’s sleep by the barking of dogs, followed by the earth rumbling and the building shaking. Whoa! It’s short and then it’s over: my first earthquake.

On yet another occasion with the same four fellows, plus another gringo and three Mexican theater types, I take a Saturday trip to San Miguel de Allende. An artists’ colony with a long-running expatriate presence, San Miguel is about 175 northwest of Mexico City. Once a battleground between the Dominican and Franciscan religious orders, there are churches everywhere.

We arrive early and watch people setting up and selling their produce and wares. There are a few vaqueros stumbling up a cobblestone street after an apparent night out. Lots of burros, little beasts of burden, are loaded with bundles on their backs. An old man pulls a small cart, watched by a group of laughing Mexican teenagers modernos. What a contrast. I shoot an image of a lechero making his delivery rounds, a container of milk on his back.

Other new friends I meet at the Mex-Ci-Co apartamentos include Jack and Donna Traylor, and Jim Darby, who years later would become a Chicago public school teacher. Jim, an ex-sailor, had ridden the smallest model Honda motorcycle all the way from Chicago. Part of the trip his brother was riding on back, getting out of town after being shot in the leg.

I would see Jim just once back in Chicago, but after then was never able to find him -- that is, until I saw him in 2013 while watching public TV. Jim and his boyfriend were the focus of a story about how they are suing my pal David Orr, the Cook County Clerk, over the right to marry in Illinois. Wow. I ended up contacting him and having him on our Live from the Heartland radio show.

Jack Traylor was an Okie, his family part of the Grapes of Wrath migration that moved from Oklahoma to California in the late 1930’s. He and Donna were schoolteachers and graduate students. And Jack sang beautiful versions of Woody Guthrie songs. He has my favorite voice ever.

In the early 1960’s in San Jose, California, Jack taught Paul Kantner guitar riffs. Later in the 60’s he played with the Gateway Singers and toured the nation’s folk clubs. In the 70’s, his own group, Steele Wind, put out an album on Grunt. The Jefferson Airplane “stole” guitarist Craig Chaquico from Steel Wind. Jack wrote some tunes for Jefferson Airplane, and was the link that brought the Airplane to the Heartland Café 40-odd years later.

Jack and Donna have a VW camper. I ride around with them, and they are the closest thing to parental figures I have in Mexico. They look out for me. Once Jack throws me into the van and speeds off. We’d been drinking at the Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, a place full of bars, mariachi bands, and putas.

A well-dressed young Mexican with a smile asks me -- an inebriated, not-very-bilingual gringo — ¿Como se gusta tipico Mexico? How do I like typical Mexico? Thinking he means the bar we’ve been in, where solicitation for sex is constant, I say No me gusta, demasiado putas, “I don’t like, too many whores” -- whereupon Jack immediately shoves me into the van; an embarrassing episode to this day.

Mexico City. Wow! What a place. Years later I would become friends with the late, great leftist writer John Ross, who was a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and whose El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City covers the city’s dynamic history from early on.

My activities in La Ciudad that summer of ’62 include eating out, drinking, lifting weights at a Mexican version of a Vic Tanny gym, going to museums, taking classes, reading, writing letters, shopping, and getting the Triumph repaired. And I discover Sanborns.

Sanborns was a lunch counter/soda fountain operation similar to Howard Johnsons in the States. I meet a waitress there, a pretty counter girl in a tan uniform, little hat, and white apron. Getting my courage up, I make a return visit and ask if she would like to go on a date, go see a movie. And she accepts.

So, wearing a sport jacket and driving the Delamarter boys' 1957 Plymouth wagon, I venture into a maze of unpaved back streets, getting lost in el barrio. Eventually I find her family’s small adobe home, indistinct from hundreds of others. I go to the door and she greets me -- with the information that her father won’t permit her to go on the date. She says she is sorry. So am I.

At a party one night at the apartment complex, I am sharing a joint: la mota, la marijauna. I remember seeing this far-out, amazing golden waterfall as I take a piss. In the morning I wake up sick. Really sick. Very sick.

Yellow jaundus, hepititis. I’ve got it. It’s got me. Over the course of the next few days, through one of my dad’s connections (who he had repeatedly asked me to contact) --  I end up in the American British Cowdray Hospital. I stay there for 19 days. A benefit is eating big, part of the comeback.

While I am recovering I read a book filled with oddities about Mexico, called A Mexican Medley for the Curious. I read Kerouac’s On the Road. In posession of a portable Olivetti typewriter and probably influenced by Jack’s adventures, I write of my little Mexican adventures. I reference politics, drinking, women, and drugs.

A Panamanian nurse who speaks English and has been very friendly asks if she can read it; I say sure. When she returns a few days later, she hands back my would-be manuscript and leaves without a word, never to return. What? First glimmer of lessons I continue to learn.

For the short remainder of the summer I live with the Delamarter brothers who have moved to a modern apartment off the Carretera Mexico Toluca north of Mexico City College. A general lives next door. We never see him, but we do see his wife -- glamorous and modern, a bourgiois woman. Her two small boys come to play; other kids from the neighborhood come around too, checking out the gringos. The sexy neighbor wife has some Afghan hounds and, grinning, looks at us young fellows and asks, “You like my dogs?” Ay-yi-yi.

And then it’s time. Trecking north and back to school, I’m on the Triumph, following the gang of four in the Plymouth. We ride through San Luis Potosi, then the desert and Sautillo, and stop for the night in Monterrey. The next day we ride into dusk, heading to Nuevo Laredo during the night. Suddenly around a curve there are lights: a carnival, people enjoying a festive event. I shoot the picture. We move on, cross the border, and sleep in Laredo on the state side of the Rio Bravo, the Rio Grande.

In the morning we find a bike shop and I arrange to leave the Triumph to be shipped. Post-hepititis, I had been told not to ride the bike. But because Mexican law does not permit me to sell it; if I want to keep it I have to drive it out of the country, doctor's advice or not.

Then we cross back into Mexico, into Neuevo Laredo for a last-time look around. We walk through the red-light disctrict at noon, observing an abundance of women on the stoops of small shacks, their hair up in curlers.

The gang of four leaves me off at my college girlfriend Lucia’s new family home in Morton, outside Chicago. Her dad and I compete to see who can eat the most jalapeño peppers. A day later I’m hitchiking to Connecticut, somehow via the New York Thruway. A band of Gypsies picks me up in a beater Cadillac convertible. They ask if I have money. “No... I wouldn’t be hitchiking if I had money.”

Late that night I am pretty miserable, sleep-deprived, sort of hallucinating while waiting for a ride near Batavia, New York. I make it home to Connecticut sometime the next day and sleep till the day after that.

It’s good to be home. I talk with my dad. He tells me of his job in a fish cannery in Alaska back in the 1920’s, and lets me know that he had smoked marijauna then. He does encourage me not to smoke it every day.

Against my wishes, Dad had been editing and compiling my letters into what he called "The Mexican Oddyessy of Senior Miguel Gaylord James," then sending mimeographed copies to family and friends. Years later I am grateful to have that tamed-down version of my summer in Mexico.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : Fading Away: JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

JFK with Mexican President Lopez Mateos in Mexico City, July 29, 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Fading away: 
JFK in Mexico City, July 1962

At the time I was a Kennedy fan... I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

The run from Victoria, Texas, to Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capitol, on my Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle, was about 450 miles, 700 kilometros. That’s where I ended up, and where I checked into an old hotel. My room off the second floor balcony had a big bed and a big overhead fan, a good hot shower, and plenty of bugs on the ceiling in the night.

Out on the streets I watched a crowd gather around a gray-haired woman, a man in a straw cowboy hat, and a policeman. I didn’t know what it was about. After I shot a few pictures I was approached by an older fellow; he spoke English and we talked for a time. He had lived and worked in Chicago years earlier... said he once had a 1947 Harley.

I walked and looked around. People were friendly. I was offered the affectionate services of women for $2 -- offers I graciously declined, declaring I was too tired.

My first meal in Mexico was chosen by indicating to the waiter, el mesero, that I would have the same fare that someone at another table was eating. It turned out to be cabrito, baby goat. It was delicious. I washed it down with a Carta Blanca that cost 16 cents.

Awakening in the night, I went to the window and used my best español to ask someone in the gas station below what time it was. I heard doce -- midnight -- but I took it for dos, two. Figuring to get a jump on my ride to Mexico City, “dos” seemed good. I loaded up, gased up, and was ready to roll before I realized the correct time. With an extra two-hour jump, my ride now spanned the end of a night and the dawning of a new day.

A misty dawn and I was in a mountain town, smelling unique jungle scents, and the diesel fumes of buses and trucks. There I heard for the first time the early morning pat-pat-pat of women making tortillas. I shot a picture of my trusty steed parked in the middle of the road, in the middle of the town, with no one around. It was still. It was quiet. I soaked it in.

During the night out on the highway I had barely missed the rump of a caballo that was on the road seeking warmth. I had seen some campesinos muy borrachos staggering on the roadside, and, after following a bus for better lighting, had ended up in a dirt wash while navigating a turn near Ciudad Valles.

I had also pulled up to a rural cantina and dancehall, gotten off the bike, stretched out, and walked into the club. My entrance had eyes looking at me -- blond, 210, 6’ 2” -- wearing a gray leather welding jacket, black jeans, and jet boots. I ordered a refresco from the bar, drank it slowly, and nodded at numerous folks before saddling up and rumbling off into the night.

The Sunday ride south was “far out,” amazing and magical for this 20-year-old gringo del Norte. I rode above, below, and in the clouds. Along the side of the road there was an ongoing parade of Indians carrying sticks, pigs, turkeys, bundled-this and bundled-that, goods I did not yet know about.

I passed a scraggly group of peasants standing at attention, led in drill by a man in a scruffy uniform who waved as I rode by. And when I stopped, camera in hand, on the mountain’s edge, I decided not to “capture the spirit” of two Indians sitting on a wall with their machetes when they turned away from me.

Closer to Mexico City there were more mountains, more horses, burros and carts, more cars, buses and trucks, small towns, and all manner of roadside activity. And there were hundreds and hundreds of fellows riding European bikes. Bicycles. They were all wearing colorful tight-fitting riding outfits, grouped in packs, creating a rainbow effect. This bike scene was way new to me. I was the product of the fat-wheeled American bicycle era, a la J.C. Higgins and Schwinn, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

By mid-afternoon I reached kilometro 16 up on the Carretera Mexico Toluca highway, 7,000 feet above sea level, 76 hours after leaving Lucia and central Illinois. I was there, at Mexico City College, planning to study, to see, to learn new things; and I intend to have a good time.

I took notice of the beatnik types, the early hippies, as well as straighter preppie types. Huaraches and woolen Indian sweaters were popular with all. I fell in with an interesting collection of gringo types living at the Mex-Ci-Co Apartments, and with people I met at school. All of them were older than me. I was, in fact, the young kid, being introduced to new and different things. That was my good fortune.

In my new world, Mexico summer 1962, these adventures included trips to the Museo Nacional de Arte, the central market, getting too drunk at a bar called Tipico Mexico in Garibaldi Square, climbing the pyramid at San Juan Teotihuacán, hitting the Toluca Thursday market, more climbing at las ruinas outside Toluca, and other trips out of town.

It also included discovering mangos, visiting eating establishments, hitting the Saturday night into Sunday morning after-hours dance halls, and going to the bullfights. And it also included drinking in the grand lobby of a palatial whorehouse, where I chatted with a very big and very black Cuban pro wrestler. Oh, and there was the discovery of la marijuana, the sacred weed. Hallelujah!

Twelve days after I showed up in Mexico City, so did President John F. Kennedy. He was attempting to bolster the U.S.’s role in Latin America via the Alliance for Progress. At the time I was a Kennedy fan, especially of his inspirational exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I was also, however, becoming aware that many in the world didn’t see the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I saw walls covered with anti-USA and anti-Kennedy graffiti. I photographed a man on a corner, and was able to discern the scrubbed-out words “Kennedy Largate” -- “Kennedy get out” -- on the wall behind him. My political awakening was continuing.

On July 29, 1962, an excited crowd lined the Paseo de la Reforma to catch a view of Kennedy in a confetti parade. I was there and shot two photos of Kennedy riding in an open air Mercedes with Mexican President Lopez Mateos. In the first one, which I call “Commotion in the Motorcade,” the secret service guys, riding behind Kennedy in a Cadillac convertible, are turned right and looking back. The motorcycle in front of the Mercedes had just hit someone who came too far out into the road.

That happened perhaps 20 yards to my right. I cocked my camera, immediately shooting again, catching a slightly blurred JFK who was directly in front of me. The vehicles had been moving fast, and after hours of buildup, the moment had come and gone. I took it easy, moving through the crowd, back to the Triumph and up the mountain to my Mex-Ci-Co abode, to eat, read Sons of the Shaking Earth, and reflect on some fading ways of looking at the world.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael James : 'El Triumph' in Tamaulipas, Mexico, 1962

Check Point, Tamaulipas, Mexico, June 16, 1962. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
El Triumph in Mexico,
Check Point, Tamaulipas, 1962

I’m working hard to keep the Triumph on the road through the flat, arid, brown, dry and desolate terrain. Its new, different, and I’m digging it, taking it all in.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / August 6, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Heading off to college I thought I might be a social worker, even a minister. I was attracted to the offbeat and rebellious, and felt an affinity for black people and other non-whites in general. I felt compassion for the handicapped and those I perceived to be underdogs.

My team was the “bums,” the Brooklyn Dodgers, and my hero was Jackie Robinson. At the Saugatuck Congregational Church during the offering, I put money in the foreign mission side of the donation envelope, not the domestic. And along the way I rapidly learned of class and racial divisions in the US of A.

Sociology Prof Don Roos clued me in to the notion that social, economic, and political forces shaped individuals and society, and I went for sociology and anthropology over the more popular major, psychology, that focused on the individual. Favoring the group over the individual, and the social forces dominant in shaping the individual, was my simplistic bent.

Like many of my generation I was attracted to the writings of C. Wright Mills, particularly The Power Elite (1956). And I was keen on the notion of participant observer or participant observation and things I heard the “Chicago school of sociologists” espoused.

Life was full in the winter and spring of 1962, lots going on both on campus and the outer world. I was inspired by the new Peace Corps, and became involved with cultural activities and the International Relations Club. I attended the required convocations, but wouldn’t sign in, telling Dean Hoogesteger that I showed up because I wanted to, not because I was required to do so.

I remember seeing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, who wrote the wonderful book, The Immense Journey.

The Garrick Players put on a rendition of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and recruited me, a football player, to play the executioner. I stood on stage bare-chested, holding a weapon, my head covered by the executioner’s masque. My little acting stint in that play meant that I couldn’t attend the February 16, 1962, anti-nuclear march in Washington put on by the Committee for a SANE nuclear policy and the young Students for a Democratic Society.

I drove friends to Hyde Park where they gathered around a fountain at the U of C preparing to board buses to DC. There I met one stoned Elvin Bishop, later of the Butterfield Blues Band, among the people gathered for the sendoff.

A friend early on at Lake Forest College was Carole Travis. Her dad was a renowned Communist, “Fightin'” Bob Travis, who led the UAW’s Flint sit-down strikes. Through Carole, Gloria Peterson, and others, I was introduced to people and events at the University of Chicago where my Dad had gone to school. Included were Skip Richheimer, Danny Lyon, and Norland Hagen, all motorcycle riding students with the nickname the "Blessed Virgin Mother Motorcycle Club.” They rode Triumphs and a Norton, the favored British bikes, not Harleys.

At the U of C folk festival I sat on the steps to the stage, tears and emotions welling to the surface as the young Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers belted out gospel tunes. There too from the back of Mandel Hall I saw the great American Socialist Norman Thomas and the writer Michael Harrington.

Harrington’s book, The Other America, opened my eyes, uncovering the extent of poverty in the U.S. That book, that hit stores in March of 1962, rocked the minds of not only students who were becoming activists, but had a big effect on the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and the government.

Later, in 1964, as a graduate student at Berkeley involved in the Free Speech Movement and then Students for a Democratic Society, I had a memorable discussion with Harrington at a party while drinking freely from a gallon jug of cheap red Pirate wine.

The biggest deal for me that spring was bringing a big yellow 650 cc Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle into my life. I found The Triumph at Sunset Cycle Sales in the old religious and still nuclear town of Zion, Illinois, on the great Lake Michigan at the border of Illinois and Wisconsin.

Not long after getting the Triumph I was riding with my college sweetheart Lucia Crossman from town toward the college’s South Campus. It was pouring rain and the Triumph went out from under us, the three of us sliding as if on ice, the machine in the lead, followed by Lucia then me, we two humans looking clearly into each others’ eyes in a state of amazement, all in slow motion.

My performance in Old Pinky Williams’ Spanish class was dismal. I needed more “foreign language” credit for graduation. I was reading Robert Redfield and his theories on the growth of cities and the creation of the peasantry based on "field work" from Mexico. The plan developed: I would ride my machine to Mexico City College and take Spanish language and anthropology courses. It would be a far-out summer.

On Wednesday, June 13, I took my last exam, packed, and attached my stuff to the bike: saddlebags plus two aluminum boxes and a black attaché case fastened to the luggage rack. Lucia’s parents picked her up and I followed them three hours south to Morton outside Peoria. After dinner Lucia and I had a nighttime ride in the country and made out in a cornfield before I entered a restless anticipatory sleep.

In the morning I moved on. Outside of East St. Louis I met a guy on a new Honda motorcycle and asked “are these fast?” He said, “Let’s go!” The Honda wiped the Triumph. So much for the perceived inferiority in those days of the “Jap bikes.”

“Man from Lincoln land” was what the black man said, waving at me as I pulled away very early in the morning from a dingy motel on the side of a busy road on the edge of Little Rock, Arkansas. Sleep was restless, fleeting, and passing, trucks rumbling through the night beside the room where I slept. The long day’s ride took me through Texarkana, and the hills and piney woods of East Texas. I hit big-time traffic and alternating combinations of showers and sun riding through Houston on a new highway.

They say that if you had a Triumph you needed four hands, two to ride and two to pick up the parts. My Triumph was leaking oil. I made it to Victoria, Texas, by sunset and headed to a motorcycle shop. Nobody home. They were out at the airport testing their dragster.

I got a motel room across from a diner on the main drag, linked up with the cycle shop guys who fixed me up with missing screws for the crank case, and engaged in devouring a giant sizzling steak served on a big hot metal platter. C & W spun from the jukebox. I finished my pie, gulped down my milk, cleared the tab, crossed the wide Texas highway 77, and slept oh-so-soundly.

At daybreak I rode through the King Ranch, checking the speedometer, doing fundamental math, figuring time and miles. I felt lonesome -- and very alone. A bus emerged in the distance; as it neared I read its marquee: “BB King.” Wow! The blues man! My mood lifted. I felt so good, my excitement on the rise, heading to the border, looking forward to what was to come.

Here comes Brownsville; there went Brownsville. I’m on the other side of the little trickle of the Rio Grande aka Rio Bravo and am immediately dealing with Mexican border guards. I’ve got to be 21 to cross this line. I’m 20, and I’m giving him a rap, telling him I’m going to school in Mexico City.

I knew the age requirement. I thought I was ready and had typed a letter from my dad with my deft portrayal of his signature. This little work of forgery that I pulled from my trusty attaché case didn’t carry much weight with this particular border dude.

I also knew about la mordida, the bite, the little bribe. For a few bucks I was free to move on, after a little frenzy of handing out small change to a cluster of beggars, handicapped kids, and Chiclets gum vendors.

Quickly -- but only momentarily -- I was lost in Matamoros on skinny dirt streets lined with adobe buildings, looking for the Pan American Highway, a road I figured someday I might ride all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Then I’m riding through Tamaulipas heading south with a strong wind blowing off the Gulf.

I’m working hard to keep the Triumph on the road through the flat, arid, brown, dry and desolate terrain. Its new, different, and I’m digging it, taking it all in. A Brahma cow, a horse, a burro, an old guy in sombrero and serape, and people on the side of the road. I’m waving as I fly by. People wave back. I like that.

I see people getting on an old bus, a team of oxen, roadrunners and other birds. There are tiny settlements with fewer then 10 little huts made of sticks, and larger settlements of adobe huts. A guy is riding a burro, bouncing along, trot-trot-trot, his legs nearly touching the ground. There are old cars and trucks, beautiful to me, a product of the '50s hot rod and custom culture.

We’re in el mundo de kilometros; I’m doing division, translating miles into kilometers and kilometers into miles, long before I knew that a 5k run equaled 3.1 miles. I am eating up those kilometros.

Uh-oh, a roadblock and Federales coming out of a stick shed to check my papers. No problema aqui. I hang out, do my best to communicate and take some shots: a man in uniform, two kids, a young woman hanging on the back of a pickup truck beside a 1954 Chevy wagon under a sunshade made of sticks and straw, next to a refreshment stand with a Coca Cola logo on the side.

It is hot. I shoot the picture of El Triumph, south of the border in Mexico, enjoying the rippling, fizzing, and refreshing iced soda. Then, I get on the bike, wave goodbye, and hit the road.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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Shirley Youxjeste : Mexican Teachers Take to Streets on 'Teachers' Day'

Militant teachers demonstrate in Mexico City, May 15, 2013. Photo by Fritz Schtickelmeyer / MexDFmagazine.

Marching against education 'reforms':
Teachers' Day in Mexico:

Teachers who earn about $600 a month, work two jobs, and bear constant insults in the media, see that, just this one day, government and media sources thank them.

By Shirley Youxjeste / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2013

GUERRERO, Mexico -- "Take a bus or taxi to the Aurrerá supermarket on Jacarandas Avenue. Walk from there because we have the streets blocked." With these words my contact told me how to get to the starting point of Wednesday's teachers' march in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, Mexico.

(Chilpancingo was also the scene in April of large militant protests by teachers. Those demonstrations were met with violent response from Mexican federal police.)

The teachers' encampment occupies about five blocks of streets in an outlying area that is home to the state education and health departments and the offices of  CETEG (Coordinadora Estatal de Trabajadores de la Educación en Guerrero), the dissident (and numerically strongest) faction of the teachers' union.

May 15 is Teachers' Day in Mexico. It's a frustrating day: Teachers who earn about $600 a month, work two jobs, and bear constant insults in the media, see that, just this one day, government and media sources thank them.

It's also a day of protests. This year, teachers marched in most major cities, especially in the four adjoining southern and western states where resistance has been strongest in recent times: Guerrero, Morelos, Oaxaca, and Michoacán. But there was action in the North, too, where teachers blocked the border crossing in Tijuana for several hours.

Why so much anger? The new president and new congress rammed through a Chicago/Richard Daley/Rahm Emanuel/Arne Duncan/Barack Obama-style "reform" earlier this year and teachers are not having it.

CETEG  leader Gonzalo Juárez Ocampo.

In Guerrero, in addition to Wednesday's march in the capital city of Chilpancingo, teachers took over city halls in Tlapa and Iguala the previous day to protest the sudden decision of local and state governments (of all parties) to "recognize" teachers' efforts on May 15 and not, as is usually the case, on the following weekend. And the "recognition" was to take the form of a raffle of cars and, in the case of the coastal town of Zihuatenejo, even of houses.

The militant teachers took this as an attempt to buy off teachers who would otherwise attend the march.

According to Concepción Nieves, a regional representative of the CETEG from Ciudad Altamirano, Wednesday's march was planned more as commemorative than as a heavy protest, given that "Guerrero has given all it can give" -- highways blocked, teachers and their supporters beaten by federal, state, and local police, headquarters of the four major political parties damaged by teachers in retaliation, four leaders briefly imprisoned hundreds of miles away, and weeks without classes.

The idea was to hold an assembly afterwards to determine the future of the movement and coordinate and expand it to the national level. At the end of the march, instead of receiving government "incentive" bribes, teachers partook of a feast provided by parents.

On Tuesday, teachers received indirect support from an unlikely source: conservative hotel and restaurant owners angry because when the federal government lodged more than 2,000 troops (federal police in Mexico are soldiers with different uniforms) in local hotels during the peak months of "unrest," no one paid the bill, and owners allege damage to rooms and maltreatment of their employees.

Meanwhile, a few days later, president Enrique Peña Nieto, never one to miss an opportunity, cut the ribbon for “the world’s largest instant coffee processing plant," owned by Nestlé.

[Shirley Youxjeste is a retired teacher from Wisconsin who now lives in rural Mexico.]

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Shirley Youxjeste : Mexican Feds Crack Down on Teachers Protesting Educational 'Reform'

Mexican federal police confront protesting teachers in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, on April 4, 2013. Photo by  EFE / STR. Image from La Prensa (San Antonio).

Mexican teachers take the streets
against standardized tests

Teachers in Guerrero, tired of the hostility of the business class, shut down two department stores in Chilpancingo for eight hours, using shopping carts as barricades.

By Shirley Youxjeste / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

GUERRERO, Mexico -- The image had an impact in and out of Mexico: an older man with the appearance of a campesino, surrounded and subdued by five federal police officers who employed fists, boots, and three fire extinguishers. The man’s crime was to attend a demonstration in support of his children’s teachers in Chilpancingo, capital of the state of Guerrero.

Guerrero is home to tourist centers like Acapulco and Zihatanejo/Ixtapa, but the rest of the state is among the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. It is here where resistance to the attempt to convert teachers into test preparers is strongest.

In December, Enrique Peña Nieto was inaugurated president after controversial elections led to the return of the traditional ruling party, the PRI (Partido de la Revolución Institucional) after 12 years out of office. Within days, Peña Nieto had rammed an educational “reform” package with the assent of all registered political parties.

The new law forces even more standardized testing for teachers and students and facilitates the firing of teachers whose students don’t “perform” as expected.

The march of April 5 in which the above-described incident took place was the first of many attempts to occupy the Autopista del Sol, the freeway that runs from Mexico City to Acapulco during the final days of school vacations, when traffic tie-ups were sure to be more severe.

About 3,000 teachers and supporters kept it blocked for a few hours until police moved in and used violent tactics to subdue demonstrators. This spot on the freeway, incidentally, is where state police killed two protesting education students in a similar blockade in December 2011.

Most news media reported the April 5 protest as a gathering of “lazy and violent” teachers; the more violent police actions have been publicized mainly through social networks. Teachers responded with  more marches the following Wednesday, with an estimated 100,000 marching in Chilpancingo (whose total population is not much more than that), and teachers in the neighboring states of Oaxaca, Morelos, and Michoacán also demonstrated.

Among the marchers in Chilpancingo and other cities in Guerrero, in addition to teachers, parents, students, and members of other unions, were members of various Policía Comunitaria organizations, grassroots defense groups that have more in common with the Black Panthers than with the real police.


Shopping cart barricades

On Saturday, April 13, teachers in Guerrero, tired of the hostility of the business class, shut down two department stores in Chilpancingo, Wal Mart and Liverpool, for eight hours, using shopping carts as barricades to prevent people from entering.

On April 25-27, the CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), the dissident caucus within the dominant teachers’ union, will hold a national conference on alternative education in Mexico City.

Business organizations have reacted with extreme hostility toward the teachers, with executives and business owners offering themselves as scabs so classes can take place. Other business groups (apparently more local) and, of course, groups of parents have expressed support for the teachers.

[Shirley Youxjeste is a retired Wisconsin teacher now living in southern Mexico.]

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Gregg Barrios : Cantinflas 101 in San Antonio

Dia de los Muertos altar honors the memory of Cantinflas at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
Catinflas 101:
Don Mario's silent empire

Known for his 'little tramp' outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican 'peladito,' an everyman.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2012

SAN ANTONIO -- On a recent afternoon in San Antonio’s Market Square, a German tourist asked one of the vendors for a uniquely Mexican souvenir. After pointing to a plethora of Aztec calendars and rebozos, the vendor produced a ceramic Cantinflas.

“Es muy mexicano, es único,” she said. Behind her, a display shelf held dozens of Cantinflas figures depicting roles that had made the actor famous. A short legend was inscribed below the figure of Cantinflas as a doctor: “I’ll cure you of whatever ails you.” The tone in español is almost picaresque.

The tourist asked if the shopkeeper had statues of other national heroes.

“Solamente Benito Juárez y la virgen de Guadalupe,” she replied.

The German took the Cantinflas.

This year marks the 101st anniversary of the beloved comic’s birth, and appropriately the San Antonio Public Library, KLRN and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation celebrated Latino Heritage Month with a long overdue Cantinflas retrospective. In addition to an exhibit of film posters and photos that span his life and times, local library branches screened the lion’s share of his 50-plus films.

Known for his “little tramp” outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican “peladito,” an everyman. His use of convoluted, hilarious wordplay was later aped by Abbott and Costello in their “Who’s on First?” routine, and on TV by Professor Erwin Corey, an Anglo legacy that hints at the impact this Mexican comic genius had on Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.

Film purists still insist that Hollywood’s golden age of comedy ended with the talkies. And although Spanish-speaking audiences enjoyed the slapstick comics of Hollywood, their interest waned as movies began to speak in English. That’s when the Mexican film industry took off.

Its most successful star was Mario Moreno, aka Cantinflas. His slight build was perfect for the screen, and fame came quickly, starting with Está es mi tierra (This is My Country) in 1937. His most famous films dealt with the everyday life of a penniless vagabond, el peladito -- not unlike Chaplin’s Little Tramp-- who wore his pants lower than even today's hip-hop standards might allow.

Both comics had worked in the circus and vaudeville and began their film careers in one-reel comedies. After a Los Angeles screening of Cantinflas’ Ni sangre ni arena (Neither Blood Nor Sand), Chaplin called Cantinflas the best living comic in the world. That film’s daring and hilarious bullfighting sequences are especially impressive because Moreno, an amateur bullfighter, did his own stunts.

But Cantinflas was so much more than a physical comedian. There was a method to the madness of his Spanish-language double entendres and verbal nonsense. He befuddled and jabbed at politicians, diplomats, lawmen, and the wealthy in his films. His brand of humor spread like wildfire, so much so that the Real Academia Española added the verb cantinflear -- to speak in a nonsensical manner -- to the dictionary.

The golden age of Mexican cinema began in 1936 and lasted more than 30 years. Latino families made weekly treks to el cine and a new Cantinflas film was often the reason. San Antonians of a certain age still remember when the small comic occasionally appeared at the Alameda theater along with such stars as Jorge Negrete, María Félix, Gloria Marín, Pedro Infante, Dolores Del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, and Tito Guízar.

By the 1950s the era of great Hollywood comics had faded, but Hollywood came courting the populist and popular Cantinflas. His role as Passepartout, David Niven’s valet in Around the World in 80 Days, remains the one high point in the 1956 Best Picture Oscar-winner. Cantinflas also won a Golden Globe for best motion picture actor in a comedy/musical for his role -- beating out Yul Brynner and Marlon Brando.

But when Hollywood attempted to cash in on Moreno’s newfound fame by casting him in as the lead in 1960‘s Pepe, the film bombed. Jorge Camara, vice president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which sponsors the Golden Globes, says the reason for its failure is simple.

“In Around the World in 80 Days, Cantinflas was able to use his physical comedy, something he didn't do in his followup film, Pepe,” Camara said by email. “His genius and one of his greatest talents was the comic way he used (or misused) the Spanish language to fit his character and his situations. That ability, unfortunately, did not translate into English.”

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980, many downtown movie palaces were programming Spanish-language films to meet the demand of recently arrived immigrants. The new waves of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua had one thing in common: Cantinflas. Most had grown up watching his comedies. He not only was a first-class film star, but also a cultural hero to his countless fans, especially the working class who identified with el peladito.

Cantinflas lookalike at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
But the end was near. The Mexican film industry was beginning to churn out substandard films filled with gratuitous nudity and blue humor.

Writer Sandra Cisneros has kept a ceramic figure of el peladito in her bathroom for nearly 20 years. “Isn’t it from the street that all fashion and pop culture ultimately comes from?” Cisneros asked.

Every time I see someone walking down the street with their pants falling off, I think, mira, hay va Cantinflas. El peladito was ahead of his time for showing his calzones and dragging his pants down to his hips like hip-hop kids do.

Cantinflas is a cultural icon like la virgen de Guadalupe. You have to have an image of the Virgen and Cantinflas whether or not you’re Catholic or have seen his films. They are omnipresent in Chicano culture and in some ways the antithesis of themselves because each one in a sense is god: the Guadalupe is the compassionate face of god, while Cantinflas is a symbol just like the Virgen of the oppressed. For a few moments, he makes you laugh, and if that isn’t God I don’t know what is

For a mural at the Teatro de los Insurgentes in Mexico City, Diego Rivera painted Cantinflas as a Christ figure with an image of the Virgin on his clothing -- a latterday Juan Diego. The mural drew outrage and was later modified and the Guadalupe removed. Today it depicts Cantinflas taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor. In real life, Moreno was a co-founder and president of the Mexican actor’s union, ANDA, and funded La Casa del Actor, a haven for needy film industry workers.

Herbert Siguenza, a founding member of the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, considers Cantinflas a muse and a hero. Siguenza wrote a one-man show that pays tribute to Moreno, commissioned by Houston’s Alley Theater. Part biography, part comic sketches, his Cantinflas! illustrates el peladito’s influence on comedy today and introduces the character to a new generation that perhaps only knows the him from the animated children’s Cantinflas Show on Spanish-language TV.

“There is a new generation, a second generation of young Latinos growing up, and these kids don’t know who Cantinflas is,” Siguenza said in a recent phone interview. “They know who Will Smith and Jim Carrey are, but I wanted to show them that we also have a comic hero; we have someone who was as big as Charlie Chaplin. And we should remember that. He was one of the first crossover stars that we had.” Still, Siguenza admits it's a hard sell to English-only audiences. “The verbal antics aren’t transferable. It’s like trying to translate Groucho in Chinese.”

In 1983, on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed Don Mario in Mexico City two years after what was to be his final film, El Barrendero (The Street Sweeper), which at the time had made more money at the box office than any other Mexican film. He was still upbeat about his art, and expressed a desire to have el peladito cross the border into California to join César Chávez’s farmworkers and perform with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino.

He spoke of his screen counterpart in the third person:

Cantinflas has changed because he is part of the world, part of the people. We all change. The little guy isn’t the same one from 30 or 40 years ago. He has the same ingenuity, but he is better prepared than he was before to deal with life. He may see the same problems of years ago occur again today, but he sees them from a different perspective. Cantinflas has changed but he still carries the essence of being part of the common people. The clothes he wore before aren’t worn anymore, so he doesn’t wear them, but he’s the same guy underneath. That won’t ever change.

Later, watching his penultimate film, El Patrullero 777 (Patrolman 777), I saw what he meant. His comic style of cantinfleando had morphed into the everyday doublespeak of politicians everywhere. In the film, Moreno portrays a patrolman, but he still sports his signature bigotito, his thin mustache. When his commanding officer asks why he no longer wears his pants low, he retorts: "Todo a subido” (“Everything’s gone up”).

Yet the old Cantinflas, more the social reformer than the social satirist, makes an appearance at the end of the film. In a speech that contains little of el peladito’s double talk, he laments the loss of trust and dignity in public officials in a speech in front of a building named for former Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, under whose orders hundreds of university students were killed during the 1968 protests in Mexico City.

Cantinflas then lifts his gloved hand, echoing a moment during the 1968 Summer Olympics -- also held in Mexico City -- when African-American medalists raised clenched fists in a human-rights salute. By that time, I was in tears.

This article was published at Plaza de Armas and was crossposted to The Rag Blog.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

• A clip from Cantinflas’ 1940 film Ahí está el detalle (There’s the Rub) with English subtitles, can be seen here.

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Philip L. Russell : Mexican Elections Widen Political Chasm

Members of #yosoy132 protest alleged election fraud in Mexico. Image from Center for International Policy.
The Mexican elections:
Decision and division

The court decision once again showed how divided Mexico is and how inured to election violations its population is.

By Philip L. Russell / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2012

MEXICO CITY -- The 2012 Mexican presidential elections widened the political chasm between the political mainstream (aka. neoliberal) and the Mexican left. A poll taken after the July 1 presidential elections showed that 60% of Mexicans felt that the elections were clean, while 40% declared they were not clean.

Ricardo Monreal, the campaign coordinator for leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) summarized the position of the 40%: “Torrents of money, from unknown sources, which moved outside normal financial channels, formed the basis of the electoral fraud. We estimate the PRI candidate spent 4.6 billion pesos [$353 million] while the legal campaign limit is 336 million pesos.”

Rather than accepting what they considered to be election fraud, AMLO’s coalition of political parties, the Progressive Movement, filed a 624-page challenge to the election. While acknowledging that the apparent winner, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), received more votes than AMLO, the challengers declared that the elections should be annulled due to their having failed to meet the constitutional standard of fairness.

The principle challenge to fairness was spending in excess of the legal limit. The $353 million of estimated spending included the cost of an “imperial” fleet of private airplanes and helicopters, massive campaign publicity, and the distribution of millions of items including home appliances, T-shirts, farm animals, and prepaid gift cards.

The challengers also alleged that there was outright vote buying using cash, prepaid phone cards, and other items. Other charges leveled by the Progressive Movement included the use of pre-election polls, not to measure public opinion, but to create the image of an inevitable Peña Nieto victory.

Mexico’s special election court rendered an unappealable decision affirming Peña Nieto’s victory. It ruled that excessive spending had only been suggested but not proved -- proof which would not be available until final campaign accounting was due in January.

Similarly it rejected the many items, such as prepaid phone cards, used to show vote buying by declaring that the challengers only showed that the cards existed, not that they were used to buy votes. The other challenges were also dismissed. Flawed polling, the court ruled, was simply an exercise of free speech, not a cause for invalidating the election.

The court decision once again showed how divided Mexico is and how inured to election violations its population is. A poll after the ruling showed that 55% of Mexicans thought the election court made the correct decision, while 71% felt that vote buying had occurred.

The now officially victorious PRI candidate welcomed the decision and set about arranging the political transition. The PAN, the party of incumbent president Felipe Calderón, also accepted the decision but did suggest an obvious change to electoral procedure -- requiring parties to submit their records of campaign spending before the election court rules on the validity of an election.

Not surprisingly, the ruling dismayed the progressive intelligentsia. Criticism centered on the court’s failure to use its investigatory power to determine the quantity and origin of the massive campaign spending obvious to everyday Mexicans. This, critics allege, would have likely uncovered money coming from illegal sources (such as drug traffickers), money channeled through illegal channels (by law money must be channeled through political parties), and money being spent in excess of the 336-million-peso limit.

Critics noted requiring those challenging elections to document cash flow constitutes a virtual invitation to illegal spending. Political parties lack the power to subpoena bank records to document cash flow, while the court has full subpoena power. Similarly pundits noted the court set an almost impossibly high bar for proving vote buying since both material objects (as phone cards) and sworn testimony were deemed insufficient evidence to prove vote buying.

Response to the court ruling went beyond the written word. The day after the August 30 court ruling, #yosoy132, the student movement which sprang up to protest the “imposition” of Peña Nieto as president, staged a demonstration. Some 4,000 marched in a Mexico City “funeral procession” for democracy. A sign at the protest summed up the tenor of the march “Those on top say we should give up and accept Peña Nieto as president, those on the bottom say ‘surrender prohibited.’”

The following day another 2,500 turned out to protest as the new members of the Chamber of Deputies were sworn in. In other cities, such as Guadalajara, some 4,000 marched. A sign there read, “We block streets, we unblock minds.”

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former presidential candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), gives a thumbs up to his supporters at Mexico City's Zocalo Plaza, Sept. 9, 2012. Photo by Christian Palma / AP.
Although members of the PRD, the main party of the coalition nominating AMLO, did not welcome the court ruling, the party not only failed to endorse protest demonstrations, but declared it would work within the system. PRD president Jesús Zambrano stated that since it was their duty to serve their citizens, state governors belonging to the PRD would recognize Peña Nieto as president and work with him. Similarly Miguel Barbosa, the PRD Senate leader, declared that the PRD congressional delegation would engage in dialogue with Peña Nieto.

The PRD is pinning its hopes on creating a responsible image and thus building on the 15.9 million votes its candidate received in the 2012 presidential elections. This could position the party to challenge the PRI in the next presidential election in 2018. The best-known potential PRD candidate for 2018 is Marcelo Ebrard, current mayor of Mexico City. He is popular at the end of his six-year term and has already declared that when his term ends in December he will begin campaigning for the presidency.

Another potential PRD candidate for 2018, Miguel Mancera, elected on July 1 to succeed Ebrard. Mancera, who outpolled the PRI mayoral candidate by 44%, faces the immense challenge of enhancing his image while administering the huge city characterized by the late writer John Ross as El Monstruo. While Mancera has to struggle with administering the monster, Ebrard, who will have no official position after December, must keep himself in voters’ minds.

While the PRD vows to work within the system, its 2012 (and 2006) candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador took the opposite course. At a massive September 9 rally in Mexico City’s main plaza he declared, “I am not going to recognize Peña Nieto as president.” He also announced he was resigning from the PRD -- a party he had been a member of for 23 years and which he had served as president of.

In the future his political vehicle will be Morena (Movement for National Regeneration) -- the grassroots movement he built up to support his 2012 candidacy. He laid out plans to convert Morena into a recognized political party. Rather than retiring from politics, as he had previously announced he would do if he lost the election, he declared, “We will continue to struggle our whole lives until we reach our goal -- the transformation of Mexico.”

The rally very much personalized AMLO’s leadership. Speakers warming up the crowd referred to him simply as “the Leader” -- as if it were foreordained that he would lead Morena into the future. Similarly, during the rally the crowd repeatedly chanted, “Es un honor luchar con Obrador (It’s an honor to struggle with Obrador).”

The meaning of AMLO’s leaving the PRD is still unclear. It will blur the image of the left. The PRD will attempt to serve as a responsible legislative force worthy of the presidency, while AMLO and Morena have specifically rejected such a course, saying he and his followers would not be errand boys for the Peña Nieto administration.

Looking ahead to 2018, it is hard to see AMLO declining Morena’s presidential nomination. (It should be noted that George Grayson’s biography of AMLO is entitled The Mexican Messiah.) Similarly it seems unlikely that Ebrard would step aside in 2018 for AMLO (as he did in 2012). As columnist Sergio Sarmiento observed, as a result of AMLO’s leaving the PRD, “The left’s possibility of winning the presidency in 2018 was significantly reduced.”

[Austin-based writer Philip L. Russell has written six books on Latin America. His latest is The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (Routledge). Read more articles by Philip L. Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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David P. Hamilton : The Physics of the Drug War

Mexican soldiers at site in Acapulco where three dismembered bodies were found in March 2012. Photo by Pedro Pardo / Agence France-Presse /Getty Images.
Drug War futures:
The dynamics against
an end to prohibition

The reliable physics of the drug war is that the more pressure the Mexican government puts on the drug cartels, the more violent they become.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2012

Recently, Tom Hayden traveled through Austin with the Caravan for Peace composed of Mexican drug war victims. In his talks here, he sought to link the antiwar movement with the anti-drug war movement. This is a promising strategy that would unite and broaden both movements. But the forces that are rallying in support of drug prohibition include a powerful new alignment that will fight to its last billion to preserve the status quo.

Some think the dam was broken with the advent of medical marijuana in California, that legalization, at least of marijuana, is inevitable as a result. But those in favor of maintaining marijuana prohibition are likely to become less violent and better organized, have covert official sanction and new allies joining them in the fray.

Hayden spoke hopefully of how Latin American leaders, especially those in Mexico and Central America, were beginning to rebel from having to pay for U.S. drug prohibition with the blood of their citizens. As a case in point, earlier this year Guatemala’s new president, Otto Perez Molina, called for complete legalization of the prohibited drugs, including their manufacture and transit.

Unfortunately, it now appears that Perez Molina’s threat was a ploy to extract further U.S. drug interdiction money. The ex-general, chief of intelligence and serial human rights violator decided that the bad part of the deal was that Guatemala was required to pay for its own bloodbath.

Blood has a price and apparently that price has now been met. However inconsistent with his earlier gesture toward legalization, Perez Molina just allowed two hundred U.S. Marine combat troops and four of their attack helicopters to enter Guatemala to help the local police in chasing Zetas through the jungle.

In Mexico, the invariable result of this approach has been increased violence. Perez Molina’s threatened exit from the drug war has quickly morphed into an escalation thanks to cash and guns provided by the Obama administration and the U.S. taxpayer.

But however much the governments of Central America groan over being located in the drug transit corridor, even collectively they matter little compared to Mexico. Mexico is the colossus among them, with more people, more money, and a 3,169 km border with El Norte. What Mexico decides governs the approach to be taken by all the countries to the south through Panama.


The changing face of the drug war in Mexico

Major transitions have taken place recently in the drug war violence gripping Mexico. The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is falling very fast, down over 50% since the peak in 2010. In July 2012, there were 40 murders in Juarez, 33 of them drug related. This compares to 8.5 a day in 2010.

The most plausible explanation is that the Sinaloa cartel seems to have largely wiped out the Juarez cartel and taken over complete control of drug trafficking in that city. It should also be noted that the murder rate in Juarez climbed to being the highest in the world after the Mexican army was sent in to fight the cartels and dropped precipitously as soon as they left.

Tijuana has now quieted down so much, a result of the Tijuana cartel taking over all of Baja California Norte, that now the mayor of San Diego has begun encouraging tourists to cross the border again.

The murder rate in Mexico topped out at 21 per 100,000 per annum in 1986, a time when many of us thought it was such great fun to go there. I drove to Mexico City with my seven-year-old daughter that year. The Mexican murder rate declined steadily until 2007, when it bottomed out at 10. The decline in the murder rate in Mexico was steepest during the administration of Vicente Fox, from 1 December 2000 through 30 November 2006.

Mexico officially declared war on the cartels 12 years ago when the PAN took over the presidency from the PRI. In contrast to the corrupt PRI party that colluded with the old drug lords, the new PAN plan was to arrest the leaders and break up the cartels using the military.

Vicente Fox endorsed this approach and did send troops into Nuevo Laredo with disastrous results, but he mostly just talked. The murder rate nationwide continued to decline, the drugs continued to flow, and eventually, after he left office, he came out for legalization.

Calderon put into practice the continuous aggressive military approach with far more disastrous results. The Mexican Drug Wars began in earnest on 11 December 2006 when newly elected PAN President Calderon, in office for just 11 days, sent 6,500 Mexican soldiers into his home state of Michoacan to fight the growing power of the La Familia cartel.

During the Calderon administration, the murder rate nationwide doubled with 50,000 drug war related deaths, tourism went into recession as a result of the violence and Mexico, its honor besmirched, is now called a failed narco-state.

This military-judicial approach has failed. Since the election of his replacement, Calderon was jeered in the Mexican Congress while defending his drug war policy. His strategy of arresting the leading cartel figures has invariably triggered greater violence between those who aspired to take over the positions being vacated, victory usually going to the most vicious.

As arrests were made and troops deployed, these battles heated up and corruption was exacerbated as more police and politicians had to be paid off or killed. The cartels, with vast financial resources and roots in Mexican society going back generations, were strengthened in the process of the struggle.

Drug warfare in Mexico has migrated and in different locations you have different combatants. While Juarez and Tijuana have calmed down, on the Gulf coast the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, the latter allies of the Sinaloans, are slugging it out from Vera Cruz to Monterrey. On the Pacific coast, the Sinaloans fight the La Familia/Knights Templar and Zetas in Acapulco. Throw in the military and the police fighting on both sides and you have a confusing battlefield.

The general configuration of the Mexican drug cartels is that there are two large “federations” fighting for dominance. The biggest and oldest is the Sinaloan cartel and their allies in the Sinaloan Federation.

The Sinaloans cover the northwest, except for enclaves in Tijuana, previously in Juarez and in the area of northern Sinaloa where the Beltran/Leyva cartel rules. Now the Sinaloans are reputedly in control in Juarez. Their principal ally is the Gulf cartel.

The next largest group, the Sinaloan’s principal adversary, are the aggressive newcomers, Los Zetas, who broke from the Gulf cartel in 2010 and now dominate in 11 states, mostly along the Gulf and Caribbean coasts. Their headquarters is in Nuevo Laredo.

The were founded by deserters from the Mexican special forces who had been trained to fight against drug cartels, bought off originally by the Gulf cartel, but soon they became independent. They are notorious for their military expertise and brutality and they are ascendant.

Member of Javier Sicilia's Caravan for Peace against the Drug War during rally in New York City Sept. 16. Photo by John Moore / AFP / Getty Images.

The El Paso phenomenon

In 2010, Ciudad Juarez claimed the highest murder rate in the world with 3,111 homicides or over 200 per 100,000 residents per annum. Some estimates put that figure at nearly 300 per 100,000. As the Rio Grande isn’t very grand at that point, Ciudad Juarez and El Paso sit side by side with only a shallow stream dividing them. Ciudad Juarez has about 1,400,000 residents, and El Paso another 750,000.

El Paso had five murders in 2010, or 0.8 per 100,000. That tied Lincoln, Nebraska, for the lowest murder rate in of any city in the U.S. At the same time, Ciudad Juarez had more murders than that on the average day. To a lesser extent, this same striking contrast is also apparent in Brownsville-Matamoros, San Diego-Tiajuana, and Laredo-Nuevo Laredo.

What can explain the fact that murders are easily over 200 times more common in Juarez than in neighboring El Paso? Since the main function of drug cartels is moving illegal drugs across the border, it cannot be the case that the cartels just don’t exist north of the border. Captured cartel affiliates in the U.S. also testify otherwise. So why aren’t there piles of decapitated corpses in East LA or South Tucson? LA’s murder rate is at a 40-year low.

There are only a few logical possibilities to explain this phenomenon. The drug cartels either have truce agreements that are in effect when they operate inside the U.S. or they have an implicit truce because they all recognize the negative consequences of arousing the U.S. police unnecessarily or they have territories in the U.S. that are firmly established and uncontested.

The last of these possibilities seems unlikely given their lack of a similar territorial agreement in Mexico. Given the peacefulness of the U.S. side, some level of agreement seems likely. If they do have an agreement, it would not be unprecedented.

All the present day cartels used to be part of one confederated organization headed by Miguel Angel Felix Gallado who founded the Guadalajara cartel in 1980 and established an alliance with Pablo Escobar of the Medellin cartel in Columbia. Gallardo was the “godfather,” the “lord of Mexican drug lords.”

According to Peter Dale Scott, ex-Berkeley professor, Canadian diploma,t and author of Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America¸ Gallardo’s organization prospered “largely because it enjoyed the protection of Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), under its chief Miguel Nazar Haro, a CIA asset.”

In 1987, after DEA raids on his properties, Felix Gallardo “decided to divide up the trade he controlled as it would be more efficient and less likely to be brought down in one law enforcement swoop.” He “convened the nation's top drug narcos at a house in the resort of Acapulco where he designated the plazas or territories.” Thus were born the modern cartels.

This event was the first of many instances where pressure from the police fragmented the industry, producing violent power struggles.


Nieto’s choices

Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI will be the next president of Mexico, an office he won with only 38% of the vote. He also lacks a majority in the Mexican Congress. His position is not strong and his potential to maneuver is limited. In that sense, it will indeed be a new PRI.

But the old PRI was notorious for making corrupt deals, including those with drug lords that were partially designed to institutionalize the industry so as to minimize competitive frictions and keep them from becoming violent. This policy did nothing, of course, to reduce drug trafficking, but it was successful in minimizing violence.

Polls show that the majority of Mexicans tell pollsters that they support the war on the drug cartels. Polls also show that the primary issue in the collective mind of the Mexican electorate was reducing drug violence. This is contradictory.

Although vague about his plan, Nieto ran on a platform that emphasized the reduction of violence, not the smashing of the cartels. He gives lip service to the continuation of the war on the cartels, but everyone knows that when his party was last in power the PRI made deals and the murder rate was half what it is now.

Back before 2000, the drug gangs were far less violent. Then the government facilitated agreements between cartels and safeguarded their leadership, while drugs moved silently north. Police were paid. Politicians were paid. People weren’t being decapitated. A network of trade that has been around since the 19th century was expanding, another growth industry for Mexico.

Violence has spiked since the government was taken over by the PAN. The PAN strategy was anti-corruption and war on the cartels using the military. Lots of kingpins were knocked over and the ensuing leadership struggles invariably instigated greater violence. The harder the government has pressed, the higher the level of violence. The peak murder rates in Juarez occurred after Calderon sent 20,000 army troops into that city. Those rates drastically declined when the army was removed. Coincidence?

The reliable physics of the drug war is that the more pressure the Mexican government puts on the drug cartels, the more violent they become. If Nieto is going to reduce violence, he must reduce that pressure. It is patently ridiculous to think that these venerable institutions, the contrabandistas, a part of Mexican life for many generations, are somehow going to go away while that massive market in the U.S. continues to beckon with such highly profitable opportunities.

As long as there is drug prohibition in the U.S. there will be drug cartels in Mexico. Legalizing cannabis, cocaine, and opiates in the U.S. would cause a major market collapse, with the ensuing deflation possibly triggering a depression.

As limited as are Nieto’s options and despite his pledges to continue the drug war and his acceptance of further U.S. anti-drug largesse, he was put in office by constituents who hope that his promise to reduce violence must necessarily involve traditional PRI willingness to make deals with the cartels.

Reducing that violence requires leadership in making peace treaties between the warring parties after a lot of blood has been spilled. This will require difficult agreements about territories and establishing a disciplinary system where those who break the treaties will face the combined forces of the offended cartel and the government. The inevitably attendant corruption must be institutionalized. With decades of experience, who better for this difficult task than the PRI?


The lineup of forces

If Nieto is successful in his campaign promise to reduce drug violence in Mexico by 50% during his term, it is not good news for the advocates of marijuana legalization. It will instead mean a better organized and less repugnant illegal drug industry streamlined by Mexican government regulation.

All parties involved in this nascent arrangement know that legalization would severely deflate the entire burgeoning industry. Those addicted to the tens of billions generated annually by illegal drugs include cartel affiliates like Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and every other major bank, the ultimate repositories of all that money, which would evaporate like the morning mist with legalization.

It is reputed that the above mentioned cartel affiliates have considerable influence within the U.S. political power structure, so much so that the drug war policies of Obama are indistinguishable from those of Bush.

Opposition to legalization would also seem the logical course for any Mexican government that wanted to stay in the good graces of the cartels in return for the cartels restraining themselves from the ancient tradition of ritual bloodletting. Cleansing the cartels is a PR problem solved by reduced violence.

The value of the illegal drug trade is a not insignificant element of the Mexican gross domestic product or its foreign currency earnings. There can be no doubt that marijuana is Mexico’s most valuable agricultural export. The tentacles of the drug trade reach into the deepest recesses of the Mexican oligarchy. If you sell luxury goods in Mexico, you’re in the illegal drug business.

The long-standing Mexican consensus has been that the nexus of the problem is north of the Rio Grande, so don’t damage Mexico in the process of fighting the Yankee’s drug problem.

The result of Nieto’s success will be reduced violence and a better organized illegal drug industry, both dedicated to not killing the goose that keeps laying those golden eggs -- drug prohibition in the U.S. As long as U.S. prohibition stays in place, this system can keep paying off with the big bucks even while European and Latin American governments are drifting steadily toward decriminalization.

As a concession to the American consumer, Mexico will soon be able to ship north connoisseur quality to compete with California medical grade pot at $250 an ounce. Cheaper, but still five times the price were it legalized.

The traditional vested interests in favor of marijuana prohibition include the prison-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol industries, gun manufacturers and dealers, police associations and prison guard unions and, of course, the banks.

But there is a relatively new player joining their cause, the medical marijuana industry. This industry is a rapidly growing manifestation of California’s most valuable agricultural export. It is already generating billions. And those ex-California hippies now making those big bucks do not want to kill off that golden goose either.

Since prohibition is universally hated by their clientele, the medical marijuana industry must endure the special requirement of coming up with a plausible cover story to justify their opposition to legalization, hiding both their hypocrisy and financial self-interest. Such an obfuscating devise is currently in evidence in Washington where the medical marijuana industry is opposing legalization because the law specifies questionable levels of driving impairment.

In California, they claimed to be protecting the interests of their “patients” in opposing legalization. In fact, marijuana prohibition is very much in their class interest.

This is another issue where the opposing forces are both strengthening and polarizing and the U.S. government seems incapable of devising a sensible solution. Despite the unpleasant side effects, the drug war still works quite well as a means of social control.

Although most U.S. citizens favor marijuana decriminalization, almost no establishment politician of either mainstream party will take any initiative in that direction. It is a taboo issue in federal elections despite majority support for reform.

The forces in favor of prohibition have to clean up the PR embarrassment of the violence, but with tens of billions annually at stake, this coalition of forces, the cartels, the big banks, and the pot growers, pot script doctors and pot dispensaries, have unlimited money, a huge financial interest in the outcome and the support of governments in both the US and Mexico in maintaining prohibition.

[David P. Hamilton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in history and government was an activist in Sixties Austin and a contributor to the original Rag. David writes about France and politics (and French politics) for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog The Rag Blog

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