Some developments on the struggle to keep the Mexican press free… and alive.

In Sinaloa, the Reporters’ unions are demanding federal action in response to last week’s Army standoff (and beatings) at El Debate.

In Coahuila, “perioricidio” has been added to the criminal code. Under the legal theory that an attack on a journalist is an attack on civil society as a whole, killing a journalist has been made a separate crime than just ordinary murder and deserves a stiff sentence — 60 years.

in the Senate, PAN (yes… PAN!!) has proposed a “Ley de la Libertad de Conciencia de los Profesionales de la Información” which would codify both the citizen’s right to receive information, and the journalist’s right to provide it.

in the last year (February 2007 to February 200 fifteen reporters were murdered, and there were 219 cases of death threats, extortion attempts or attacks on journalists in Mexico.

In telephoning in his resignation as Guerrero Cattlemen’s Association, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez — whose two sons were killed in one massacre, his daughter kidnapped and was the target of a hit at a hotel meeting in Iguala (where seven more people were gunned down) said he has no idea who wants him dead… but that he’s not involved in the narcotics trade.

I’m tempted to believe him, or at least assume that it isn’t narcos that want Alba dead. Mark Stevenson’s report for the Associated Press begins with the assumption that whomever it is behind the attacks are connected to narcotics, tending to downplay other facets of Alba’s career that might make him enemies.

Although AK-47s and AR-15s were used in the Iguala attack, and “luxury cars” were mentioned on the attack that killed his sons, this doesn’t have the feel of a narcotics hit. Stevenson’s article in Bandaras News is headlined “Massacre of Mexican Strongman’s Family Breaks All the Rules”… a While the attacks may yet turn out to be related to the narcotics industry, these attacks don’t fit the “rules.” Narco hitmen don’t normally shoot up a whole meeting room just to get one guy (and miss), nor do they go after families.

(– added before posting — However, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzmán’s son and another gangster’s kid was taken out last night with a bazooka in a Cuilican parking lot. Young Guzman was a student working on a degree in Business Administration, so maybe the second generation in family “enterprises” are now legitimate targets).

Maybe “goodtimebob” (who know his Latin American weaponry) will correct this, but I don’t think sawed off shotguns (used in Petatlan where Alva’s sons and seven others were lined up and shot) are normally used by narcos.

Alva’s cattle operations have dislodged a lot of local farmers, and he may be the kingpin of an illegal logging operation. Despite assurances from his successor as Mayor of Petatlán that “everybody knows everyone, and we all get along,” as a politician, and as a cattle baron — and as a timber smuggler — Alva was going to make a lot of enemies. Including environmentalists.

In rich countries like the U.S. and Canada, we think of environmentalists as middle-class people. And, in Mexico, there are the middle-class and urban environmentalist types too. But there are also the dirt farmers, for whom issues like over-logging and over-grazing are life and death issues. Guerrero is in the middle of a prolonged drought, and the small farmers, already threatened by NAFTA rules changes and transgenetic corn (at the same time that corn producers are feeling pressured to adopt a mongenetic strain, cattlemen are welcoming genetic variety), are in a double bind. The big cattlemen are a theat, as are the loggers.

Violent confrontations between Alba’s people and the farmer/environmentalists are nothing new. Alba remains a suspect in the dummied up suicide of Mexico City attorney Digna Ochoa, who represented several Guerrero farmers who were accused of murder. In 2004, several Guerrero farmers were imprisoned in connection with blockades to stop timber harvesting and the alleged murder of timbermen connected to Alba.

Which makes me wonder whether the release this week of Palemón Cabrera González, who was accused of murder, battery and cattle rustling back in May 2000 might be significant. The cattle were owned by, and the murder victims worked for, one of Alva’s “lieutenants,” according to Jornada.

If the original charges are not completely bogus, it suggests that the environmentalists (or pissed-off dirt farmers) are willing to kill those only slightly connected to the operation (like the cowboy Cabrera was alleged to have murdered), or… the attack on the cattlemen’s association may have been aimed at the association in general, and not just Alba, the then-leader.

Of course, by calling one potential set of suspects “environmentalists” I may be doing what I’ve accused others of doing… applying modern political labels to Mexican traditions. A few years ago, rumors about Marxist guerillas, right-wing death squads and other ills of modern life were circulating after a massacre in Oaxaca. Which turned out to be a 500 year old feud between two neighboring village over water rights (and water is worth killing for in rural Oaxaca… and Guerrero). The attacks in Guerrero — for all their flashy cars and high-powered arms — may just be an old “kill the rich bastard” movement… nothing even particularly Mexican.

Rainy season is coming… which made me think of this.

Probably the only statue to a cop in all of Mexico (except for the generic one to the night watchman in the Insurgentes Metro Station Plaza) is here in Mazatlán. Though it’s not to a cop, but to Harley riders … and specifically to Mazatlán’s favorite favorite son, the singing Harley riding cop … Pedro Infante:

Pedro was the epitome of cool… and motorcycles, pretty girls, a singing sidekick (OK, Pedro had Luis Aguilar … and nobody’s gonna top that)… is never going to go out of style.

I don’t know that stupid court cases are particularly Mexican, but this particular stupid court case has its own Mexican flavor. Translated from Condena juez a poeta por ultraje a la bandera, reported by Lorenzo Chin in Thursday’s Jornada.

Court fines are multiples of the “salario minimo” which is usually translated as “minimum wage,” although it is more a benchmark figure for the cost of living in geographic areas of the country, as well as the lowest minimum daily wage. With Mexico having gone through devaluations several years ago, this was a handy way of not having to change the legal code every time the country went through a round of inflation or there was a currency change.

Campeche, Camp., 7 May 2008: Second District Court Judge, Jesus Bañales Sanchez, fined the outspoken poet Sergio Hernán Witz Rodriguez 50 pesos and gave him a “public reprimand” after finding the poet guilty of “outrage to the flag” for authoring a poem” to find it responsible for the crime of ultraje to the national standards, by his responsibility of the poem Invitation to a country full of shit [Invitación: La Patria entre la mierda]

Later that afternoon, the writer and university professor appealed his sentence, which he considers “ridiculous”. In spite of the very small fine (one “salario minimo” for Geographic Zone “C” which includes Campeche), Witz said that he will not accept that he has committed any crime by exerting his right to free expression.

In addition, Witz claims Federal Prosecutor’s office for Campeche Delegation prejudged the case. He noted that the Prosecutor’s office issued a press release about his sentence three hours before his court appearance.

Interviewed in person moments after his hearing, the poet said that once again the Mexican judicial system has held itself up for ridicule.

“But, seriously, it’s less the fifty pesos than the arguments on which they based the sentence.”

Of course, for writers in Mexico, fifty pesos could be a big deal.

PHOENIX—The arrest of a gun shop owner on Tuesday broke up a suspected firearms trafficking operation that supplied violent Mexican drug cartels, authorities said.

Agents raided X Calibur Guns and arrested George Iknadosian after undercover agents bought guns at the store indicating they were to be trafficked to Mexico, said Carlos Baixauli, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Iknadosian, 46, knowingly sold at least 650 firearms, including high-end semiautomatic pistols and assault-style rifles, to drug cartels, the ATF said.

Trailero, at Mexico Trucker Online, has the only possible response:

And the looney toons of the right will decry this arrest and whine about Second Amendment rights while they are demanding a border fence to keep out all of the illegals and the violence spilling over into the United States, while refusing to acknowledge, that in many cases, the cause of the problems in Mexico can be found right here at home! Imagine that!

¡Viva los capitalistas!

The small shopkeeper is the kind of guy who will fight for his right to vend his wares.  As they did yesterday in Itzapalapa, turning over a police car and requiring 200 coppers to close them down in the process.

This always seems to happen when cities spruce up their downtowns. “Cleaning up the city’s image” forces shoppers to hit the ‘burbs for some essentials and favorites.  Most of the Central Mexico City informal merchants agreed to a relocation deal earlier this year, but there were a few holdouts and dealers in … uh… specialty products … who didn’t take up the city’s offer, but did manage to find new outlets in the suburbs.

I gather these merchants put some thought into their new location.  With San Martha Acatitla prison looming in the background, maybe Acatitla Metro Station brings in a good walk-in trade for these businessmen, specializing in counterfeit jeans and pirate DVDs, and a few specialty goods like narcotics and handguns.

The corporations are free of pesky union regulations, and can trade off basic human rights for profits…

Less than 24 hours after President Bush met with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom at the White House on Monday, a worker from a union that filed a trade complaint with Washington against the Guatemalan government was murdered.

Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the Guatemalan government was not upholding its labor laws and was failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against union members–which include rape and murder. The complaint states that violence against trade unionists has increased over the past two years (since CAFTA was ratified) and that the Guatemalan government may be responsible for some of the violence. The violence from this year alone includes 8 murders, 1 attempted murder, 2 drive-by shootings, and the kidnapping and gang rape of a top union official’s daughter who was targeted because of her father’s union work.

(Full article, “Bullets and Bananas: The Violence of Free Trade in Guatemala” by Cyril Mychalejko at Upsidedownworld.org)

Burro Hall reviews “La decada perdita” and its’ author very nicely, I think.

It’s harsh, I know, but a lot of fortunes have been made in the past by those who profited from human misery or dirty businesses. And, with time, those fortunes were laundered into more legitimate enterprises. Think of all the Carnegie Libraries around the United States. Or the fortunes made in the slave trade or opium trade (where do you think Barbara Bush’s family got their money?). For that matter, think of Duke University (founded by tobacco money).

Mexico does not have a particularly serious drug problem… and if the narcotics money is going to roll in, it could be put to a lot better use here in Sinaloa. In Mazatlán, a lot of our 19th century architecture is thanks to earlier smuggler’s civic generosity, and no one — even hard-care Alcoholics’ Anonymous types — are going to complain that our local brewer left his fortune (and his home) to an orphanage. Maybe an “Biblioteca Arellano Felix” wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

However, we say that narcotics is somehow different, that the narcotics trade corrupts the democratic state, and the people. OK, if that is true, why is it that the fight against it takes the form of attacking those of us who ARE the people, and the institutions on which a democratic state depends?

Border Reporter posts this morning on the police attack on El Debate, the Cuilicán daily:

Three reporters for the Culiacán daily, El Debate, were attacked by federal preventive police yesterday. One of the reporters was forced into a police car and held for ten minutes with a gun to his head. The attack tops off a deadly week of murder in Sinaloa, with six cops killed, gunfights exploding outside the state capital and cops running scared.

“They told me, you don’t know who you’re fucking with; we’re not cops from here. Go complain with whomever you want,” says one of the El Debate reporters, a young man I’ve known for several years, Torivio Bueno Leon.

The incident started when the two reporters and a photographer were taking photos of the federal cops’ checkpoint. The cops didn’t want them shooting the checkpoint, a common wish most of them seem to have, and an argument started. The photographer told his own paper they used a knife to slice the camera strap but he still managed to retain the camera.

The federáles chased them into the newspaper building where a guard shut the steel cage door and the photographer snapped them pounding on the bars outside the building.

What’s interesting is that the PFP commander called the newspaper to apologize, saying his officers were nervous because of the number of cop murders in the past two weeks.

El Debate’s coverage adds that the Federal Police were “locked and loaded” and where threatening to shoot into the newspaper’s offices.

The reporters — Torivio Bueno, Leo Espinoza and Geovanny Elizalde — all say they were physically injured for doing their jobs. Espinoza has 28 years experience as a photojournalist, and the others were clearly identified as members of the press. Putting a guy to someone’s head for ten minutes is considered “psychological torture” in Mexican criminal law.

El Debate and Border Reporter have conflicting information on who offered the “official explanation”. El Debate says Eduardo Cano Camacho, who is “Social Communications Chief” for the Federal Secretaría de Seguridad Pública made the statement. Despite his imposing title, Cano is only a press liaison, not the police chief. A minor matter, but it suggests the SSP is taking this as merely a public relations problem, not as an attack on Mexican civil society.

Border Reporter does a good job explaining why the police are nervous and likely to over-react, and why a lot of us here in Sinaloa are less than enthusiastic about the “War on (some) drugs”. But I would go further. For one thing, I’m not working as a reporter here, and am free to speculate.

Thankfully, it was the police, not the Army involved in this incident. While the Army is better disciplined (in theory), there are too many reasons to go into here (I’ve done that before, again and again) on why military forces should not be involved in civilian law enforcement. And, while the Army has traditionally enjoyed high levels of respect as a state institution, soldiers are trained to protect themselves at all costs. The results could have been a disaster, going far beyond the fallout from the apparent federal crackdown on a free press.

Incidentally, the policeman’s remark that “We’re not from here” is an excellent argument AGAINST using hired guns (aka “security contractors”, aka mercenaries) for things like border control or drug interdiction (as the U.S. does under “Plan Colombia,” and suggests doing under “Plan Merida”).

If there need to be confrontations between suspected narcos and the forces of the state, then the Federal Police are the people who should do the job. But, obviously, they need more training. My strongest objection to using the Army has been that soldiers MUST see all civilians in their “war zone” as potential enemies. The police are supposed to be on the same side as the civilians. Always.

And, police paramilitary operations should be the last resort. The problem with this “War on (some) drugs” has always been that we don’t see the kinds of police work that really destroys criminal enterprises — the old “follow the money” investigative technique that’s always worked since the days of Eliot Ness and Al Capone.

The Sinaloa growers and exporters provide a lot of local employment, and there isn’t the money locally to provide the resources they enjoy. I’m not the least concerned when some gangster gets his head chopped off, or a cop on the take gets a bullet in the back of the head… but I can understand how it happens. People do things they wouldn’t otherwise not just when they feel threatened, but when there is money involved as well. And… I don’t see much effort being expended to find the money source.

Other than some vague promises, I don’t see that expanding Mexican anti-narcotics efforts is at all directed at drying up the narco’s resources. The Mexican military budget increases were supposed to be to give the soldiers and sailors a well deserved raise. But “Plan Merida” funding is all about hardware. And intimidating the populace.

There is probably no need to say the photo was taken in Texas.