10th Oaxaca MegaMarch
Maria and I missed the 10th Megamarch in observance of International Women’s Day March 8. Probably just as well because Maria is mega cautious. Instead, we went to Teotitlan again in search of rugs for her daughter.
Mexico
Slim’s Pickings in Mexico
My Mexican cell phone air time is astronomically expensive. My Mexican friends have resorted to text-messaging…a few pesos cheaper than calls.
The TV stations are controlled by one man…and the news they give by the government.
Wonder why much of the graffiti on the walls of Oaxaca’s buildings decry the capitalist system? Here’s part of the reason:
$49 billion is Slim’s pickings in Mexico
By Marla Dickerson, LA Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2007
MEXICO CITY — Telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu has built a corporate empire so vast that it’s nearly impossible for most Mexicans to go a day without slipping a few pesos into his pocket.
Those pesos add up. On Thursday, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $49 billion.
That represented a stunning $19-billion increase from 2006, the biggest one-year jump in a decade for anyone on the magazine’s annual list of the world’s richest people.
——
Although his third-place ranking (Forbes Magazine) didn’t change from 2006, he increased his wealth by 63%. That’s a growth rate of $2.2 million an hour.
When Mexicans talk on the phone or use the Internet, they’re almost certainly doing it through a company controlled by Slim, who in 1990 bought control of the old state-owned telephone company Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, and turned it into a cash machine. Profits from that near-monopoly have bankrolled Slim’s telecom acquisitions around the region, propelling his America Movil wireless spinoff into the largest provider of cellphone service in Latin America.
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Mescal And Lamb With Consumme
10am Sunday morning, one of the mescal vendors at the Tlacalula Market latched onto Maria and I with a dozen sample cups of mescal..from Mango Crema to the rare Tuvala Agave…after which we made an imperative beeline to the food section. At a long communal table we scarfed barrega (lamb) soup while visiting with a friendly old compesino from the mountains.
We bought a bag of chivo (the prized goat meat BBQ’d in the ground) to take to Mica and Bardo’s in Huayapam…and of course a liter pop bottle full of barrel mescal.
On the way back we stopped in Teotitlan where Maria, overwhelmed by the selection of rugs, ended up not choosing any. We will have to make a return trip while she shops around and thinks on it. Before leaving, The Zapotec Gonzalez family demonstrated their natural dye process and demonstrated the weaving of some very complicated designs.
I took a picture of a forest fire in the distance. The pine forests fall victim to the dry season this time of year. I asked Gerardo, my landlord who happened to be there working on a tourism project, how they fight fires here. “No water,” he said…”just chopping the forest around the fire. We have no helicopters.” “Oh yes,” I said, “you can get helicopters from the Governor!” He didn’t think that was very funny. If you remember there were plenty of helicopters available to tear-gas the people in the Centro a few times.
In Huayapam, Mica fixed us, and Bardo’s sister, Pilar, a delicious chicken in coloradito sauce and rice with clams brought by a friend from the coast. Bardo showed us turtle eggs (illegal) but we reneged. Bardo and Mica had worked all day roasting, sorting and bagging coffee…so noticing their yawns, we exited early. But not before their architect friend, Renaldo, showed up with digital images of a house to be built on land adjacent to Bardo’s new house he is building for himself high on a hill overlooking Huayapam. Before we left, we tried to call friend Gerardo, working in Puerto Escondido now, but as usual no tiempo aero (air time) on his phone.
Graffiti At IAGO Library
Internationally renowned painter, Francisco Toledo, has approved the use of his IAGO art library and the Alvarez Bravo museum for many things-from conferences on the current situation-to the future of Oaxaca. The latest daring move is the recreation on the inside walls of the library of some of the anti-government graffiti that appeared on the city’s outer walls during the seven-month teacher strike. A visitor log contains many anonymous supporting messages from visitors critical of the Governor. However I doubt that many of his supporters will view the installation.
Arrest Of NYU Professor
He was picked up outside the “Curtaduria,” a space for arts and performance in the next-door barrio of Jalatlaco.
Last week, a professor of German citizenship from New York University was arrested, photographed, finger-printed and interrogated by elements of the State Judicial Police.
It is unclear whether the professor was harassed because he was in town to participate in an international forum on democracy and press freedom in Oaxaca (and Mexico), or as part of an ongoing series of harassments aimed at the Curtaduria itself, where painter Francisco Toledo has sponsored a show considered to be very anti-Ulises Ruiz (the unloved governor of the state). What is clear is that the administration of governor Ruiz is still doing its best –not very successfully – to stop independent observers and media from telling the truth about what is going on here.
Monte Alban & The Miss Universe Contest
I had worked with my friend Maria, psychologist & nurse practitioner, for some ten years in Oregon. On Saturday February 24 she arrived for a ten day visit with me. I have been leading her all over Oaxaca ever since…beginning with Monte Alban, the Zapotec ruins high on a hill overlooking the city.
Around 500 BC ancestors of Oaxaca’s present day Zapotecs founded what many experts believe to be the Americas’ earliest metropolis. Today the ruins of platforms, pyramids, palaces and ceremonial ball courts still remain…much of it decorated with inscriptions in a language yet to be deciphered, recording the exploits of their god-kings. Monte Alban flourished as a city for a millenium with as many as 40,000 people at it’s height. The city was repeatedly reconstructed over the centuries, like a peeling onion, first by the Olmecs, two periods of Zapotecs and finally succumbing to the Mixtecs by A.D. 1000 who used it mainly as a burial ground.
So it is with anguish that Oaxacans are anticipating the besmirching of this ancient site. Mexico’s national tourist bureau has decided to hold the “costume competition” phase of the annual Miss Universe contest at the Zapotec shrine of Monte Alban in May.
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Protestor In The Zocalo Fountain
Last Friday Ana and Steve saw a man take off his clothes down to his shorts and climb into one of the fountains in the Zocalo. I got a call from Ana: “Eunice get down here with your camera!”
it didn’t take very long before two municipal police told him to get out. He carried a sign that said, “señor gobernador, necesitamos agua.” He was from Santa Ana-one of the many communities and colonias here that have no supply of water at this time of year. When the drought kicks in people have water trucked in to fill cisterns…just as we do in the Centro.
Unfortunately, just as I arrived, a group of 5 officers talked the man out of the fountain, watched as he got himself dressed again, and then calmly escorted him away in their truck. So no photos. He probably will be beaten.
Why is it that we can have fountains running, but people don’t have water for washing??
Following Trouble?
Good grief! Either I am following trouble around the world or trouble is following me! First a violent demonstration on a university campus in Istanbul…then the tsunami in Thailand…then the coup in Thailand…then the subway strike in New York City…then the teacher strike in Oaxaca and now this just as I am planning on returning this fall. Or maybe it’s just that there is always trouble all over the world!
Security in Bangkok To Be Tightened
Bangkok Post 2007-02-21
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Solitude In The Sierra Norte
In search of a little alone time yesterday, I drove 40 miles (but two hours) north of Oaxaca City up into lush, pine-clad crests descending deep into river canyons to the Sierra Juarez, the birth-land of Benito Juarez, Oaxaca’s beloved favorite son.
Born in 1806 in the municipio of San Pablo Guelatao in the village of Santo Tomas Ixtlan, his parents died tragically when Benito was three. His uncle took him in and his childhood was spent mostly herding his uncle’s flocks in the surrounding hills. But Benito left for Oaxaca city in 1818 to live with his sister in the genteel, well-to-do Maza family where his sister worked as a cook. He gained exposure to music, books, politics and people that was not possible for a poor boy in the country. He ended up studying law and eventually entered politics…rising from state to federal legislator, then Supreme Court judge, and finally was unanimously elected governor by Oaxaca’s legislature in 1849. He was elected Mexico’s president for three terms…interrupted first by civil war and then by the French Intervention. He toiled day and night to realize his dreams for Mexico but died “from exhaustion” in 1872.
I stopped in nearby Ixtlan de Juarez, quickly perused the small rotating Monday market but skipped the huge baroque church built with fortunes made with slave labor growing cochineal (used to make the magnificent red dye) where I would have seen this:
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Wedding In Teotitlan del Camino
My friend Bardo is from Teotitlan del Camino near the Puebla border and his parents, three brothers and a sister still live there. Bardo’s father, Don Bardo, a furniture maker, and Dona Mari raised six children in their big open-air three story house in this town of 6000 so there was plenty of room for all of us who made the four-hour trip: me, Ana and Oscar from next door, Bardo’s wife Mica and her two children, Pavel and Angelita and Bardo’s sister Pilar. At the last minute Bardo didn’t go and missed the trip entirely.
We took the four lane Mexico City toll highway NE to Tehuacan and then through Puebla back down into Oaxaca again to Teotitlan del Camino (or de Flores Magon) and Pilar drove ahead with Pavel so that we could follow – which did us no good as I drove faster than she did. When it was time to leave the carretera Mica directed us to Miahuatlan instead of the road to Teotitlan so we ended up detouring slowly on pot-holed dirt roads through a couple tiny scenic villages…San Sebastian and Coxcatlan, the birthplace of corn…which was fine with me.
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Laughingnomad 