Mexico

Oaxaca Neglects Indigenous Education

Posted on by Laughingnomad

You can read a discussion of the sad state of affairs in Oaxaca on the Yahoo Oaxaca Study Action Group discussion site:

An American expat in Oaxaca reports on the failure of the government to address the needs of indigenous peoples…a majority of the population:

“The Second National Congress on Indigenous and Intercultural Education was held in Oaxaca this week, with a colorful array of men clad in the short pants of Chiapas authorities moving among women in jeans or long skirts or crowned with beribboned braids. Lots of kids were present in the outdoor events like the sample classes held in Carmen Alto plazuela (never mind that the governor is once again renovating, the found space). I have photos which I will get around to archiving on the OSAG site.

Led by the Coalition of Indigenous Teachers and Promoters of Oaxaca (CMPIO, by its Spanish initials.) it’s been a long process of self-definition for preservation, and equal rights and justice. The front page of Noticias on Sunday /today, Oct 28) emphasizes their demand for equal rights.

Oaxaca is a state with 16 different language groups, many of them on the verge of disappearing when CMPIO stepped forward to promote bilingual education. Last July 30 I visited a workshop for teachers which focused on how grandmothers can renew their vanishing languages with their grandchildren: the in-between generation of parents were mono-lingualized by the state education system. Fernando Soberanes, present at that CMPIO event, said that the range of languages and experiences in all of Mexico is mind-boggling.
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One View Of “Plan Mexico”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

June 18, 2007
From the Folks Who Brought You Plan Colombia
The Annexation of Mexico
By JOHN ROSS
Mexico City.

Plan Colombia, the $5,000,000,000 drug war boondoggle cooked up in 1999 by Bill Clinton and then-Colombian president Andres Pastrana and subsequently transmographied into a War on Terror adjunct by George Bush and Alvaro Uribe brought U.S. troops, fleets of helicopter gun ships, spray planes spewing poisons, and a vast array of human rights abuses to that troubled Latin American country. It also made Colombia the third largest recipient of Washington’s foreign aid and the number one repository of U.S. military aid in the western hemisphere.

But Plan Colombia failed to stem the flood of cocaine pouring across U.S. borders nor has it even eradicated much Colombian coca acreage – 144,000 hectares continue to thrive under coca cultivation in Colombia concedes the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Narcotics Enforcement in its 2006 annual report, and while spraying massive doses of glysophate did force some farmers out of business, production simply moved south, spreading throughout the Andean region.

Indeed, the price of cocaine on U.S. streets dipped slightly last year and supply and quality remained constant, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. For the first time in five years, the DEA registered an increase in first time users. 90% of the cocaine confiscated in the U.S. last year continues to be Colombian-based.

Despite the abysmal results, the U.S. Congress has again budgeted $367,000,000 for Plan Colombia in 2008 although some congressional reps appear to be tiring of fighting this losing war and are beginning to call for an exit strategy. With the Democrats in titular control of both houses, doubts about Plan Colombia forced consideration of a bi-lateral free trade agreement to be shelved this spring. President Uribe, in Washington to lobby for the pact, complained to the press that he was being treated as “a pariah.”

Despite Plan Colombia’s fading allure, the Bush administration is about to debut a sequel: Plan Mexico, an interdiction strategy to confront the increasing “Colombian-ization” of Mexico by bi-national (Colombian and Mexican) drug cartels who have managed to spread their brand of mayhem into every nook and cranny of this distant neighbor nation.

The finishing touches for a Plan Colombia-like joint venture were worked out at the early June G-8 summit in Germany during a meeting between Bush and Mexico’s freshman president Felipe Calderon, a special guest at the conclave. According to insiders in both camps as reported in the U.S. and Mexican media, Calderon will make a formal application for increased anti-drug assistance from Washington come August. Mexico currently receives $40,000,000 in drug moneys from the White House.

If you liked Plan Colombia, you are going to love Plan Mexico.
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US Aid To Mexico For What?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

During the teacher strike and ensuing rebellion in Oaxaca in 2006, tear gas cannisters dropped out of helicopters and found all over the city were manufactured in Jamestown, PA. And it is rumored that Mexico’s PFP (Federal Riot Control Police) are trained at the School Of The Americas. During the take-over of Oaxaca City by the PFP on November 25, 2006, nearly two thousand people, including many who were never involved in the rebellion but simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, were arrested, beaten and incarcerated without being charged. Nearly 25 people were killed in night-time raids last year…a couple in plain daylight during the marches. The women have marched against the killings, arrests and rapes. Many are still missing. The “dirty war” continues.

So when President Bush announced Monday in Washington that he will ask Congress to approve a $500 million package to help Mexico fight drug cartels, the largest international anti-drug effort by the United States in nearly a decade, human rights groups were alarmed.

The Washington Post reports that the much-anticipated Mexico aid plan, which is included in the president’s $46 billion supplemental budget request for war funding, would pay for helicopters, canine units, communications gear and inspection equipment, the State Department said.

The program also would include training and technical advice on vetting new police officers, and case-management software to track investigations in a nation where drug kingpins have infiltrated many state and local governments and infighting among drug traffickers has cost more than 4,000 lives in the past 22 months.

The aid packages are part of what the Bush administration hopes will be a multiyear, $1.4 billion initiative.

Bush administration officials have praised Calderon for deploying more than 20,000 soldiers and federal police officers to fight drug gangs, but human rights groups have complained about use of the military after a series of rapes and rights violations in which security forces were allegedly involved.

Joy Olson, director of the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, said Monday she is concerned that the Bush administration did not say which Mexican agencies would receive aid money.

“If they are allocated to civilian control structures, the funds are more likely to have a positive effect in strengthening the rule of law and civilian institutions,” Olson said. “If funds are sent directly to the receiving countries’ military forces, the plan could undermine civilian control of the armed forces and weaken efforts to strengthen civilian public security institutions.”

Many in Mexico and elsewhere suspect the aid will also be used to put down rebellions by Mexico’s poor who are fighting for better education and against the illegal confiscation of ejido land (owned by the people) by multinationals for mining and other activities.

Expect many more human rights abuses in Mexico in the future.

Who Are The Mexicans & Why Does It Matter To The U.S.

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I refer to the “U.S.” instead of “America” in the title because if there is one thing I have learned in the last year it is that Mexico, Central and South America is also part of the Americas.

There is an interesting article in the LA Times this morning about where Mexicans come from by Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the opinion pages, director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation and author of the just-published “Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America” that will be released on Tuesday October 23.

“Mexicans,” Rodriguez says, “mythologized a tale of the violent and tragic conquest of Mexico by Spain to explain their birth as a people: the story of the Spaniard Hernan Cortes and his indigenous translator and mistress, Doña Marina, a.k.a. La Malinche.

Marina was Cortes’ victor’s prize and, in 1522, she gave birth to Martin Cortes, one of many mestizo children born to the conquerors’ mistresses and paramours. Four and a half centuries later, in 1950, the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote that the “strange permanence of Cortes and La Malinche in the Mexican’s imagination and sensibilities reveals that they are something more than historical figures: They are symbols of a secret conflict that we still have yet to solve.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the psychic power of the Cortes-Malinche story, you won’t find many monuments to them in Mexico City. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in the early 19th century, Mexican nationalists, who sought to distance themselves from their European heritage, demonized the conquerors in general and Doña Marina in particular.

At the imposing two-story stone house at 57 Higuera St. in the Coyoacan district of Mexico City, for example, there is no plaque to indicate that Marina once lived there. Though for centuries she had been described as a beautiful, noble woman who commanded respect, 19th century depictions began to condemn her for her role in the Spanish conquest. Out of these portrayals arose the peculiarly Mexican concept of malinchismo, which means the betrayal of one’s own.

Paz contended that the Mexicans’ fixation on — and ultimate rejection of — both progenitors in their origin story left them in a state of “orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All.” The history of Mexico, he wrote, “is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins.”

This alienation resonates profoundly throughout the culture. On the one hand, Mexico proudly acknowledges its Indian ancestry; on the other, it clearly prizes whiteness as a status symbol. It endlessly questions its identity: Is it modern or ancient, Spanish or Indian? And the Cortes/Malinche story, instead of defining Mexico’s origins in a constructive way, merely prolongs and exacerbates the country’s ambivalence about its history as a conquered nation.

Mexican mestizaje — racial and cultural synthesis — may have begun in a violent conquest, but it didn’t end there. Interracial love and attraction also played a role. Ultimately, racial mixture was rampant, and it combined with a rigid colonial caste system to create a society in which race was a malleable category. Mexicans developed — in the words of Mexican American poet Gloria Anzaldua — “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,” particularly in the realm of race and culture.

As Mexicans came north to the United States, that long history of mestizaje was also brought to bear on another cultural force, Anglo America. One scholar, Roberto Bacalski-Martinez, has described Mexican American culture in the Southwest as “incredibly ancient on the one hand, and surprisingly new on the other. Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo elements have gone into its formation, and they continue to affect it. In each case, the introduction of new elements began as a clash between two peoples which eventually resulted in a newer, richer culture.”

I can hardly wait to read this book which has been said to offer an unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.

Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and former United States ambassador to the United Nations says “In the midst of a narrow, polemical debate on immigration, Gregory Rodriguez has written a generous, sweeping, prodigiously researched, and judicious history of Mexican Americans that helps us understand their long-term influence on American society. Smart, fun, and eminently readable, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds explores five centuries of cultural collisions and convergences, and dares us to imagine a new way of thinking about the future of America.”

In my perception, on the one hand, Mexicans purport to celebrate their indigenous history…but on the other hand the racism based on color in that country is systemic. The dilemma: how to love the conqueror’s blood in themselves. And then what happens when they migrate to this country?

Timely.

Courtyard Music

Posted on by Laughingnomad

My friend Max waxed recently about living in Oaxaca City.

“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why most Oaxacans aren’t deaf. I mean, take Charlie the drummer over there:

Charlie got deaf playing rock and roll, in band after band, for decades. After all those years of having huge pounding speakers near his ears, he ended up with speakers in his ears: he has to wear a hearing aid when he wants to listen; a lot of the time, he’d just as soon tune out.

Us old folk, who have been hangin’ in Oaxaca for a while, but are still sensitive to loud noise, have for the most part figured out how to avoid much of it (if you think you’ll be able to dodge all of it, you just don’t know Mexico). Some of us own a bit of acreage out in the Etlas, with a good-size house on it. Others opt for separate bungalows in compounds – with or without gate – in residential suburbs. Still others are in townhouses, apartments or bungalows in the center of one of the downtown blocks, far back from the traffic.

The less fortunate among us, either because we made bad choices or just can’t afford the Gringo luxury of peace and quiet, have to live with the noise. There are only two advantages to this: after a while, you stop noticing it so much; and you can still grumble about it to anyone who hasn’t heard your story before (or the forgetful folk who have). Usually they lodge with families, or in a family compound, or small apartments in working class neighborhoods. These are the ones most likely to hear the ‘Courtyard Music.’

Courtyard Music is a blend of two or more loud radios tuned to different stations, shrieking kids, barking roof dogs, and people yelling back and forth at each other. This is a more or less constant accompaniment. The bass line; the left hand on the piano.

The melody constantly changes. Motorcycles are revved up. People wander in from the street and stand in the courtyard hawking 5 gallon bottles of water, tortillas by the handful, tanks of propane gas, and other more exotic items. There may be a carpenter’s shop in the courtyard: sawing and nailing provide the percussion. One poor unfortunate lives next door to a recycling center where they do cans and bottles.

From time to time there will be a wedding or a birthday party, accompanied by a three piece, amplified electric band adept at the three traditional Oaxacan party music modes: Marriachi, Tex-Mex and Oompah.

A musically inclined friend who lives in a noisy, two or three hundred year old courtyard with a big extended family, a dozen kids and four neurotically barking poodles, has become resigned to this aural environment after two years there. He has this to say:

“Sometimes the courtyard music is just annoying – if you’re trying to sleep or think deep thoughts. Sometimes, it all comes together, the children’s singing and laughing blends with the vendors cries and all the rest into a kind of counterpoint that is as complex and beautiful as anything Bach or Villa Lobos could do. Sometimes…”

Of course, this is someone who is clearly a little crazy. Not that he wasn’t a little weird when he got here. Probably, it was the courtyard music that drove him around the bend.”

It Isn’t Over In Oaxaca

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Marches in Oaxacas continue to call attention to the occupation of 128 schools by section 59 and the PRIistas, the continuing incarceration of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and to commemorate the assassination of APPO and teacher sympathizers by the local and federal police in October of 2006.

October 18: 16:00 leave Fuente de los Siete Regiones and march to zocalo
October 27: 7:00 Santa Maria Coyotepec
8:00 march leaves from office of Procuraduria Gral. de Justicia and Callicanto, Santa Lucia del Carmen and goes to zocalo
October 29: October regional marches
November 2: political cultural “jornada” and I don’t know exactly what that means
November 25: teacher-popular march

More On The EPR

Posted on by Laughingnomad

New York Times
September 26, 2007
With Bombings, Mexican Rebels Escalate Their Fight
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and ANTONIO BETANCOURT

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 25 — The shadowy Marxist rebel group that has rattled Mexico three times in recent months by bombing natural gas pipelines has a long history of financing its operations with the kidnappings of businessmen, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors say the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, or Popular Revolutionary Army, a Marxist guerrilla group, has committed at least 88 kidnappings since 1999, collecting millions of dollars in ransom.

Just this year, the rebels have taken at least four people hostage, including two prominent businessmen and the relative of a reputed drug dealer, law enforcement officials and anticrime advocates say.

The bombings of gas pipelines are a drastic escalation in the group’s tactics. Seemingly overnight, the rebels have evolved from an organization devoted mostly to kidnappings into a much larger threat to the stability of Mexican industry and, by extension, to the state itself, officials say.

“The E.P.R. is a guerrilla organization with a political vision of taking power, and in this sense, has carried out violent acts,” Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, said last week. He added, “It’s a severe worry for the government of Mexico.”

On two days in early July and again on Sept. 10, several bombs went off simultaneously at junctures on the pipelines and disrupted gas supplies to factories and businesses. Together, the attacks shut hundreds of factories in 10 states, some for as long as a week, including Volkswagen, Nissan and Honda plants. Losses have been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In all three attacks, the bombers filled fire extinguishers with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, then detonated them with plastic explosives wired to digital watches and batteries.

The power of the bombs and the logistical skill in setting them off at the same time took many top officials here by surprise. Before the blasts, the Popular Revolutionary Army was considered a moribund group that had peaked in 1996 and then splintered into several smaller groups.

After each bombing, the group issued communiqués demanding the return of two of its members. The group maintained that the men — Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez and Edmundo Reyes Amaya — disappeared last May in Oaxaca, a state that has a long history of peasant insurgencies and brutal government repression. Mr. Medina Mora and Oaxacan officials insist that the men are not in government custody.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the guerrillas are using the men’s disappearance as a pretext to destabilize Mexico and set off a leftist revolution. The bombings, they theorize, probably stem from anger among radical leftists over the federal crackdown on violent political protests in Oaxaca last year and the outcome of the presidential election, in which the leftist candidate narrowly lost.

The Popular Revolutionary Army has deep roots in Oaxaca, having been founded there in 1994 when 14 small insurgent groups banded together. The core leadership came from an extremist Marxist organization known by the acronym Procup, the Spanish initials for the Clandestine Revolutionary Workers’ Party-Union of the People.

Founded in the 1970s, Procup waged a campaign of kidnappings and executions against other leftists in the 1980s.

The Popular Revolutionary Army made its presence known in June 1996. At an event in Guerrero State commemorating the first anniversary of a massacre by the state police, masked guerrillas in the group read a manifesto calling for a socialist revolution. Many leftist politicians believed at first that they were government provocateurs.

But two months later, the group mounted coordinated attacks on police and military posts in five states, killing 13 people. Small columns of rebels continued to ambush police convoys and skirmish with soldiers for the next two years.

By late 1998, the military, the federal police and the Oaxacan authorities had made strides in dismantling the group, arresting several leaders and scores of people suspected of being tied to it, mostly from Oaxaca.

The group splintered into several factions after a shootout with the army in 1998 in El Charco, Guerrero. While the splinter groups continued to carry out bombings, the Popular Revolutionary Army seemed to slip into the background.

“They have been really quiet for the past several years,” said Bill Weinberg, a New York author who has written a book on Mexican insurgencies, “Homage to Chiapas.” “A lot of us thought they were finished.”

Law enforcement officials here say the group has only been underground, not dead. Its fortunes revived in late 2000 after the governor of Oaxaca, José Murat, granted amnesty to about 135 people suspected of being members who were being held in state prisons, officials say.

Today, officials say the rebels’ main base of operations is not in the mountains of southern Mexico, but in the teeming slums of Xochimilco and Tláhuac in Mexico City. Active members are believed to number no more than 100, officials say.

Mexican law enforcement officials say the leadership of the group includes figures like Tiburcio Cruz Sánchez, a Oaxacan whose involvement goes back to the 1970s when he was a member of Procup. “Most of the leadership is Oaxacan,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about a continuing investigation.

Felipe Canseco, a former Procup member who is now a lawyer, said the Popular Revolutionary Army is organized in underground cells, so that the members do not know the names of the upper echelon of commanders. “These groups are very clandestine and compartmentalized,” he said. “The E.P.R. does not recognize a chief.”

Mr. Canseco said he worried that the government would use the bombings as an excuse to harass peaceful left-wing organizations, like his group, the Democratic Popular Left, a collection of former guerrillas trying to participate as a political party.

“These bombings make it clear that after 40 years the military insurgents continue to exist and that they have become strong,” he said. “More than anything else, this gives the government a motive to start up the dirty war again.”

Guerrilla Band Wages War In Mexico

Posted on by Laughingnomad

When I was living in Oaxaca during the teacher strike in 2006, people would often speculate about whether the EPR (Popular Revolutionary Army) in Guerrero was also operating in Oaxaca. At the height of the rebellion, when we were expecting the Federal Preventive Police to descend on the city, there would sometimes be rumors that the EPR was coming in. Most people doubted it. No one seemed to know. But then during the rebellion that lasted from June until the “hard hand” of the federal police came down on November 25, 2006, very few ever really knew exactly what was going on behind the scene.

Now that the APPO (Popular Assembly) consisting of thousands of teachers, activists, Unions etc have moved it’s activities from Oaxaca City to the pueblos around the state, it would seem that if the EPR is in Oaxaca, it is a significant development. It is also significant to the U.S. where the bombings of the pipelines pushed up the price of oil futures in New York.

Eduardo Verdugo / AP
The national oil and gas company’s pipelines were bombed this summer in attacks by leftist guerrillas that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses. The rebels are seeking the return of two missing militants. A rebel group responsible for costly attacks on pipelines accuses the government of having a role in disappearances.

By Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 20, 2007

MEXICO CITY — — Edmundo Reyes is a slight, unassuming man of 55 who loves baseball and children’s literature. Until recently, he sold candy and soft drinks from his family’s corner grocery store in this city’s Nezahualcoyotl district.

In May, he left to visit relatives in the state of Oaxaca and never returned. His disappearance might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that it has set off a small war that has twice shut down a sizable chunk of the Mexican economy.

Unbeknownst to family and friends, Reyes was conducting a double life: He was a leader of a group calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR in Spanish. His comrades are convinced that he has been captured by “the enemy.”
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Vicente Fox On Bush

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Past President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has written a new book called “Revolution Of Hope. In it Fox found the legal fight over the 2000 U.S. election “ironic.”

“At our request the United States had sent election monitors to protect the balloting process in Mexico,” Fox says. “But where they might have been more useful that year was in Florida.”

Which is an ironic statement in itself, of course, because the next election that gave Mexico Felipe Calderon is considered by many to have also been fraudulent.

The following has been taken by an article by The Washington Post this morning:

Mexico’s Fox, in Book, Chides and Praises Bush

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; Page A19

ANTIGUA, Guatemala, Sept. 18 — President Bush and Vicente Fox once portrayed themselves as diplomatic allies and close friends, but the former Mexican president takes some jabs at Bush in a new autobiography, calling him “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life” and a “windshield cowboy” afraid to ride a powerful horse.

Fox sprinkles anecdotes about Bush and other world leaders throughout “Revolution of Hope,” recounting disagreements with Bush over the Iraq invasion and a shared hope for immigration reform that was undercut by security concerns after Sept. 11, 2001. The former Mexican leader also chides Bush’s administration for unilateralism.
……
Fox left office in December, six years after his election ended seven decades of one-party rule in Mexico. His book, written with Texas political consultant Rob Allyn and scheduled for release by Viking on Oct. 8, is likely to rattle Mexican traditionalists accustomed to former leaders quietly fading away.

“We’re going to get this done,” Fox recalls Bush telling him [about the immigration reform package before Congress]. Three days later, planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and “our revolution of hope came face to face with the walls of fear,” Fox writes.
…….

Fox, who writes that one of his aunts is a cloistered nun in Cincinnati and that his son, Rodrigo, attends the University of California at Santa Barbara, says that years before entering politics he passed up an executive job with Coca-Cola in the United States. (He had been a supervisor of Coca-Cola’s operations in Mexico.) “I didn’t want the Statue of Liberty, the streets paved with gold,” he says.
……..

Thoughts After Re-entry

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have been back in the house in Salem Oregon nearly a month now…a house I lived in for 35 years while raising the children…after traveling for over four years. Re-entry…always the most difficult part of traveling.

In Mexico, as in Asia, people practically live outdoors which offers great opportunities for interaction and friend-making. Here in Salem, I am savoring the fresh clean air and the QUIET! I can actually choose whether to listen to TV or not. Even the massage parlors in Thailand and the “comida corridas” (luncheon cafes) in Mexico were blaring with afternoon soaps. And driving here is heavenly! I totally understand why some people are objecting to Mexican trucks driving in the States! But I have to make an appointment to see old friends…no place to go to mix with people. I loved the Zocalo in Oaxaca…when I wanted to be with people I could just walk a couple blocks and always see someone I knew and could sit and talk for hours over a coffee. Even with my Mexican friends. I think though, even for Mexico, the layout of Oaxaca City, with the Zocalo and even the Centro as a whole, is a unique place and one of the reasons people love it there. I do miss it.

And then of course there is the shock of coming face to face again with a consumer society even though I am relishing the efficiency and customer service that comes with it. But the shock will never be as devastating as it was when I returned from Europe in 1965…a very radicalizing experience that shook me to my core. There is so much I could say about this… In the states we generally keep ourselves so insulated from death. I just groan and roll my eyes when I listen to people here complain about the most minute inconsequential things.

In Mexico you hear a lot of vitriol about global trade and NAFTA. The price of corn, the staple food for the poor in Oaxaca (the birthplace of corn), has risen and tortillas are 7% more expensive this year…a huge increase for people whose minimum wage is 50 cents an hour…even if they qualify. What’s worse, the people favor criollo (heirloom corn) which has a wonderful taste and the hand-made tortillas are delicious and moist…unlike those horrible sawdust-tasting things made by machine that you get in the states. The imported corn is cheaper than the criollo corn now and most people can’t afford the good stuff. And even worse, it is putting criollo corn farmers out of business which will cause the price of it to rise even more.

Yes, many people in Mexico are mad…except for the ones whose jobs and perks are tied to the power structure and benefit from the favors and the money creamed off the top by the government…money that never trickles down to the most destitute. With little rule of law, separation of powers, corruption and no transparency, the poor feel they have little choice other than to openly rebel. The middle class (many of whom are actually lower class by our standards) feel they have little choice other than to hold onto the status quo by it’s finger tips and was the most threatened by the 2006 uprising. It’s short term thinking, I thought to myself. If they only realized that if they were in solidarity with the calls for reform, justice and the end of corruption they too would benefit in the long term. But I also understand their desire to keep their distance from the internal disputes that have arisen within the rebellion because of the pursuit of personal and political agendas. The political and social implications are incredibly complicated and after a year in Oaxaca I felt I knew and understood little more than when I arrived.

And many expats in Oaxaca suspect that the CIA was afoot during the teacher strike last year…it is in the interest of the US and the Mexican governments to keep uprisings down because of the fear it could spread all over Mexico and to other leftist-leaning Latin American countries. And that is another story entirely!

For the moment I am occupied with tree trimming, pruning an overgrown yard, moss on the roof, resealing the deck, utility bills, auto maintenance. The housing market is in the tank right now so no time to sell. I am sorting through boxes and boxes of ___t that have been stored in the basement…stuff that I never needed in the first place and am now wondering what to keep and what to throw out…or give away. Four years living out of a backpack..a few t-shirts, couple pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes…taught me we certainly can live just fine without a lot of stuff in our lives although I do admit that half of what I carried was tangled computer and camera parts. Life was people centered those four years… I am struggling with incorporating perspective.

While traveling I got my news over the internet. After years of no TV I am now aghast at the trivia that is called news. I am noticing that almost every single maddeningly repetitious ad takes place in million dollar homes. “Average” families in the movies are filmed in million dollar homes. No wonder many people in the whole world, most of whom have never been out of their neighborhoods much less their countries, have a skewed view of beyond rich Americans! Even though by their standards we ARE rich. But when I told my motorcycle taxi driver in Viet Nam that one of my jobs here before retiring was managing a homeless program he was shocked. “Why they no work?” I didn’t even know where to begin. And “retirement?” Incomprehensible to most people in the world. “Jubilado” is the word in Spanish…I certainly didn’t have to live off the local economy where the minimum wage is 50 cents an hour and 68% of the people live on less than $90 a month.

In the zocalo in Oaxaca one day, I brazenly told an older Mexican man that I was amazed that the poorest of people living in squalid conditions all over the world could still laugh and be joyful. He just looked at me with incomprehension. That one look told me about all the preconceptions I was still unknowingly harboring about what is necessary for a person to be happy. This moment I will never forget.