Ross Ritter en modafoca.com
Aquí encontrarás textos que nos envía nuestro amigo norteamericano Ross, la mayoría de su autoría, aunque hay algunos más de otros autores.John Ross on Calderon's War on Drugs
Have Elections Split the APPO?
The Oaxaca Volcano Stews
On the first anniversary of the beginning of last summer's feverish uprising here, the city's jewel-box plaza which had been occupied for seven months by striking teachers and their allies in the Oaxaca Peoples' Popular Assembly (APPO) from May until October when federal police forced them into retreat, shimmered in the intense spring sunbeams. The only massive police presence on view was the city police department's orchestra tootling strident martial airs to a shirt-sleeved crowd of gaffers. Here and there, handfuls of burley state cops, sweltering in bulletproof vests and helmets in hand, huddled in the shade quaffing "aguas frescas" (fruit water) and flirting with the senoritas.
Evidence of last summer's occupation has been obliterated. Surrounding government buildings have been scrubbed clean of revolutionary slogans and no marches were scheduled to commemorate last May 22nd when the teachers first established their camp in the plaza. Indeed, militant members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) were not encamped in the stately old square for the first time since the section's founding 27 years ago. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), the object of their fury, was still the despotic governor of Oaxaca.
Despite the relaxation of U.S. State Department travel advisories and the apparent calm, few tourists were strolling the cobblestone streets of Oaxaca's "Historic Center". long ago designated the patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO, and the cavernous colonial hotels around the plaza were virtually deserted. The 2006 uprising has put a serious kibosh on the international tourist trade, the backbone of the local economy. If the experience of San Cristobal de las Casas after the 1994 Zapatista uprising is any lesson, the tourist moguls will take years to recoup.
"Apparent calm" is a euphemism oft utilized to describe the uneasy lulls that mark social upheaval in Mexico. True to the nation's volcanic political metabolism with its fiery spurts of molten fightback and sullen, brooding silences, the Oaxaca struggle seems to have entered into a period of internal contemplation.
Government repression, which featured death squad killings and the jailing of hundreds of activists, slammed the lid down on the social stew but did not extinguish it. Discontent continues to brew and fester, the bad gas building down below. The structures of the Popular Assembly and the teachers union, which served to catalyze this discontent throughout 2006, remain in tact.
To be sure, the rainbow of social movements that lit up red bulbs as far away as Washington last year, are not enjoying their best moments. Section 22, which itself is a loose
amalgam of left factions, is wracked with division and dissonance and its titular leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco is held in profound contempt for having forced the strikers back into the classroom last October and abandoning the APPO to savage government repression.
Moreover, in response to the 70,000-strong Section 22's rebellion against the leadership of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), union czarina Elba Esther Gordillo, a close confidante of President Felipe Calderon, chartered a new Oaxaca local, Section 59, to diminish the control that the militants exert over the state's classrooms.
The division has put a dent in the teachers' usual aggressive stance and instead of walking out this past May 15th, National Teachers Day, when new contracts are negotiated, Section 22 tentatively accepted a 4.8$ base wage increase (above the 3.7% Calderon had conceded to other sectors) and 122 million bonus pesos to "re-zone" Oaxaca for cost of living increases in this tourism-driven state.
Although the "maestros" did participate in a two-day boycott of classes in May to protest the Calderon government's privatization of government workers pension funds, whether the teachers will take part in an indefinite national walk-out June 1st that has been called by dissident education workers organized in the Coordinating Body of Education Workers or CNTE, remains unresolved at press time.
Nonetheless, the teachers' disaffection with Ulises remains strong and Section 22 spokesperson Zenen Reyes last week (May 23rd) called upon the teachers and the APPO to push for cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an "indigenous" dance festival in July that has become Oaxaca's premier tourist attraction. Last year, the strikers and the APPO destroyed scenery and denied access to the spectacle, forcing URO to suspend the gala event. In its place, activists reclaimed this millennial tradition of Indian cultural interchange by staging a "popular" Guelaguetza in the part of the city they were occupying, and plans are afoot to repeat that celebration this year.
The Oaxaca Popular Peoples Assembly, which came together after the governor sent a thousand police to drive the maestros out of the plaza last June 14th and which at one time included representatives of the state's 17 distinct Indian peoples and many of the 400 majority indigenous municipalities plus hundreds of grassroots organizations, is equally fractured. Having borne the brunt of the repression - 26 killed, 30 disappeared, hundreds imprisoned - the Popular Assembly has been reduced to a defensive posture when only months ago it was an aggressive lightning rod for social discontent.
Even more debilitating than the government crackdown has been the prospect of upcoming local elections August 7th to choose 42 members of the Oaxaca legislature and October 5th balloting for 157 non-Indian municipal presidents (majority indigenous municipalities elect their presidents via traditional assemblies.) While the APPO considers that its goals transcend the electoral process and rejects alliance with the political parties, some Popular Assembly leaders engage in a quirky dance with the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which last July almost catapulted Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) into the presidency.
Prominent APPO mouthpiece Flavio Sosa, jailed by Calderon as his first political prisoner, is a former Oaxaca party leader and the PRD has mobilized to achieve his release.
Perhaps the cruelest blow the APPO and the striking teachers struck against Ulises came during July 2nd 2006 presidential elections. Although URO had promised the long-ruling (77 years - at least in Oaxaca) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a million votes for his political godfather Roberto Madrazo, the popular movement inflicted the "voto del castigo" (punishment vote) against the PRI, handing the state to AMLO's presidential bid in addition to electing both PRD senators and nine out of 11 federal representatives to the new congress for the first time ever.
The left party seemed positioned to bump Ruiz again in 2007 by taking the state legislature and neutralizing the tyrannical governor's clout. But instead of rewarding the APPO and Section 22 for having dumped the PRI in 2006, the party has responded by excluding activists from its candidate lists.
"If, at one time, there was hope that elections could provide a solution to the conflict, exclusion of the APPO has canceled them," writes Luis Hernandez Navarro who follows Oaxaca closely for the national daily La Jornada.
One Oaxaca-based PRD insider who preferred not to be named confides that APPO activists were vetoed by the left party's national leadership least front-page photos of the candidates hurling rocks during last summer's altercations lend credence to the perpetual allegations of the PRI and Calderon's right-wing PAN that the PRD is "the part of violence." Most local candidacies were distributed in accordance with the laws of PRD nepotism and amongst the party's myriad "tribes."
The exclusion of the APPO activists so infuriated 50 members of grassroots organizations led by Zapotec Indian spokesperson Aldo Gonzalez that they stormed the PRD's Oaxaca city headquarters May 18th, leaving its façade a swirl of spray-painted anguish. The failure to select candidates from the popular movement, Gonzalez and others charge, throws the elections to URO, suggesting that the PRD has cut a deal with the APPO's arch enemy.
Given the hostilities the upcoming elections have sparked so far, the August and October balloting could well signal another "voto del castigo" - this time against the PRD.
The election season was in full swing by mid-Spring in Oaxaca. PRD leader Felix Cruz who had just coordinated Lopez Obrador's third tour of the Mixteca mountains (AMLO was conspicuously absent during last summer's struggle) was gunned down in Ejutla de Crespo on May 21st. Juan Antonio Robles, a direction of the Unified Triqui Liberation Movement (MULT), a participating organization in the APPO, met a similar fate the next day. That same week, a car carrying a local candidate for Elba Esther Gordillo's New Alliance Party was riddled with gunfire along the coast. Drug gang killings have also jacked up the homicide rate in the state - under Ulises' governance, drugs and drug gangs have flourished.
Meanwhile, in classic "cacique" (political boss) style, the PRI governor is out and about dishing up the pork to buy votes, passing out cardboard roofing and kilos of beans, building roads to nowhere and bridges where there are no rivers to cross, to pump up his electoral clientele. Gifting opposition leaders with pick-up trucks to enlist their allegiances is a favorite URO gambit, notes Navarro Hernandez.
Despite the ambitions of some of its members, the APPO is not enthusiastic about participating in the electoral process. At a statewide congress in February, APPO members were allowed to run for public office as individuals and only if they resign from any organizational function.
Miguel Cruz, an APPO activist and member of the directive of the CIPO-RFM or Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magon (Flores Magon was a Oaxaca-born anarchist leader during the Mexican revolution) is not a partisan of the electoral process. Seated in the CIPO's open-air kitchen out in Santa Lucia del Camino, a rural suburb of Oaxaca city where police gunned down U.S. journalist Brad Will last October, Miguel explains his disdain for how the elections have split the APPO "when they were supposed to bring us together."
"Everyone is working on their own agendas now and the so-called leaders are all looking for a 'hueso" (literally 'bone' - political appointment.) This is a crying shame. The APPO is a mass movement, not a political party. Our consciences are not for sale."
June 14th, the day last year Ulises sent a thousand heavily armed police to unsuccessfully take the plaza back from the striking teachers, is a crucial date. The APPO and Section 22 are planning one of their famous mega-marches which last summer sometimes turned out hundreds of thousands of citizens. Will June 14th signal a resurgence of massive resistance and if it does, will the popular leadership be able to restrain hotter heads and government provocateurs that last November gave the federal police the pretext to beat and round up hundreds? Miguel Cruz is hopeful the APPO will persevere. "Whatever the 'leaders' do and say, the APPO lives down at the bases."
Up the steep, windy hill in San Pablo Etla where the cognoscenti live above the hurly-burly on the streets of Oaxaca, political guru Gustavo Esteva views the popular struggle down below geologically. "The popular movement in Oaxaca is like an active volcano" he writes in La Jornada, "last year when it erupted, the movement left its mark in the form of molten lava trails. Now the lava has cooled and formed a cap of porous rock that marks the point through which the internal pressure will find its way to break through to the surface again."
John Ross is back in Mexico City hot on the trail of Brad Will's killers and re-immersing himself in the real world. Write him at johnross@igc.org
http://www.counterpunch.com/ross06022007.html
Our lives are worth more than their profits.
Olivier Besancenot
How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031507E.shtml
"Consume less; share better."
As the oil age dribbles to a close
http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Kunstler.html
AS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CONTINUES sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil, we have also continued dreaming. Our collective dream is one of those super-vivid ones people have just before awakening. It is a particularly American dream on a particularly American theme: how to keep all the cars running by some other means than gasoline. We'll run them on ethanol! We'll run them on biodiesel, on synthesized coal liquids, on hydrogen, on methane gas, on electricity, on used French-fry oil . . . !
The dream goes around in fevered circles as each gasoline replacement is examined and found to be inadequate. But the wish to keep the cars going is so powerful that round and round the dream goes. Ethanol! Biodiesel! Coal liquids . . .
And a harsh reality indeed awaits us as the full scope of the permanent energy crisis unfolds. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production peaked in December 2005 at just over 85 million barrels a day. Since then, it has trended absolutely flat at around 84 million. Yet world oil consumption rose consistently from 77 million barrels a day in 2001 to above 85 million so far this year. A clear picture emerges: demand now exceeds world supply. Or, put another way, oil production has not increased despite the ardent wish that it would by all involved, and despite the overwhelming incentive of prices having nearly quadrupled since 2001.
There is no question that we are in trouble with oil. The natural gas situation is comparably ominous, with some differences in the technical details—and by the way, I am referring here to methane gas (CH4), the stuff that fuels kitchen stoves and home furnaces, not cars and trucks. Natural gas doesn't deplete slowly like oil, following a predictable bell-curve pattern; it simply stops coming out of the ground when a particular gas well is played out. You also tend to get your gas from the continent you are on. To import natural gas from overseas, it has to be liquefied, loaded in a special kind of expensive-to-build-and-operate tanker, and then offloaded at a specialized marine terminal.
Half the homes in America are heated with gas furnaces and about 16 percent of our electricity is made with it. Industry uses natural gas as the primary ingredient in fertilizer, plastics, ink, glue, paint, laundry detergent, insect repellent, and many other common household necessities. Synthetic rubber and man-made fibers like nylon could not be made without the chemicals derived from natural gas. In North America, natural gas production peaked in 1973. We are drilling as fast as we can to keep the air conditioners and furnaces running.
What's more, the problems of climate change are amplifying, ramifying, and mutually reinforcing the problems associated with rapidly vanishing oil and gas reserves. This was illustrated vividly in 2005, when slightly higher ocean temperatures sent Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slamming into the U.S. Gulf Coast. Almost a year later, roughly 12 percent of oil production and 9.5 percent of natural gas production in the gulf was still out, probably for good. Many of these production platforms may never be rebuilt, because the amounts of oil and gas left beneath them would not justify the cost. If there is $50 million worth of oil down there, why spend $100 million replacing a wrecked platform to get it?
Climate change will also ramify the formidable problems associated with alternative fuels. As I write, the American grain belt is locked in a fierce summer drought. Corn and soybean crops are withering from Minnesota to Illinois; wheat is burning up in the Dakotas and Kansas. Meanwhile, the costs of agricultural "inputs"—from diesel fuel to fertilizers made from natural gas to oil-derived pesticides—have been ramping up steadily since 2003 to the great distress of farmers. Both weather and oil costs are driving our crop yields down, while the industrial mode of farming that has evolved since the Second World War becomes increasingly impractical. We are going to have trouble feeding ourselves in the years ahead, not to mention the many nations who depend for survival on American grain exports. So the idea that we can simply shift millions of acres from food crops to ethanol or biodiesel crops to make fuels for cars represents a staggering misunderstanding of reality.
Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the "non-negotiable" American way of life. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Monsanto, and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of solar or wind energy, hydrogen, ethanol, tar sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, nuclear power, thermal depolymerization, "zero-point" energy, or anything else you can name. We will desperately use many of these things in many ways, but we are likely to be disappointed in what they can actually do for us.
The key to understanding the challenge we face is admitting that we have to comprehensively make other arrangements for all the normal activities of everyday life. I will return to this theme shortly, but first it is important to try to account for the extraordinary amount of delusional thinking that currently dogs our collective ability to think about these problems.
The widespread wish to just uncouple from oil and gas and plug all our complex systems into other energy sources is an interesting and troubling enough phenomenon in its own right to merit some discussion. Perhaps the leading delusion is the notion that energy and technology are one and the same thing, interchangeable. The popular idea, expressed incessantly in the news media, is that if you run out of energy, you just go out and find some "new technology" to keep things running. We'll learn that this doesn't comport with reality. For example, commercial airplanes are either going to run on cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuels or we're not going to have commercial aviation as we have known it. No other energy source is concentrated enough by weight, affordable enough by volume, and abundant enough in supply to do the necessary work to overcome gravity in a loaded airplane, repeated thousands of times each day by airlines around the world. No other way of delivering that energy source besides refined liquid hydrocarbons will allow that commercial system to operate at the scale we are accustomed to. The only reason this system exists is that until now such fuels have been cheap and abundant. We are not going to replace the existing worldwide fleet of airplanes either, and besides, there is no other type of airplane we have yet devised that can work differently.
There may be other ways of moving things above the ground, for instance balloons, blimps, or zeppelin-type airships. But they will move much more slowly and carry far less cargo and human passengers than the airplanes we've been enjoying for the past sixty years or so. The most likely scenario in the years ahead is that aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all.
Another major mistake made by those who fail to pay attention is overlooking the unanticipated consequences of new technology, which more often than not add additional layers of problems to existing ones. In the energy sector, one of the most vivid examples is seen in the short history of the world's last truly great oil discovery, the North Sea fields between Norway and the UK. They were found in the '60s, got into production in the late '70s, and were pumping at full blast in the early '90s. Then, around 1999, they peaked and are now in extremely steep decline—up to 50 percent a year in the case of some UK fields. The fact that they were drilled with the latest and best new technology turns out to mean that they were drained with stunning efficiency. "New technology" only hastened Britain's descent into energy poverty. Now, after a twenty-year-long North Sea bonanza in which it enjoyed an orgy of suburbanization, Great Britain is again a net energy importer. Soon the Brits will have no North Sea oil whatsoever and will find themselves below their energy diet of the grim 1950s.
If you really want to understand the U.S. public's penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the "housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.
Meanwhile, the outsourcing of manufacturing to other nations has spurred the development of a "global economy," which media opinion-leaders such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (author of The World Is Flat) say is a permanent state of affairs that we had better get used to. It is probably more accurate to say that the global economy is a set of transient economic relations that have come about because of two fundamental (and transient) conditions: a half century of relative peace between great powers and a half century of cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy. These two mutually dependent conditions are now liable to come to an end as the great powers enter a bitter contest over the world's remaining energy resources, and the world is actually apt to become a lot larger and less flat as these economic relations unravel.
This is approximately the state of the nation right now. It is deeply and tragically ironic that the more information that bombards us, the less we seem to understand. There are cable TV news networks and Internet news sites beyond counting, yet we are unable to process this deluge of information into a coherent public discussion about the fundamental challenges that our civilization faces—not to mention a sensible agenda for meeting these hardships. Meanwhile, CBS News tells millions of viewers that the tar sands of Alberta will solve all our problems, or (two weeks later) that the coal beds under Montana and Wyoming will sustain business as usual, and CNN tells another several million viewers that we can run everything here on ethanol, just like they do in Brazil.
Of course, the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs. Even the environmental community is guilty of this. The esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute ran a project for a decade to design and develop a "hyper-car" capable of getting supernaturally fabulous mileage, in the belief that this would be an ecological benefit. The short-sightedness of this venture? It only promoted the idea that we could continue to be a car-dependent society; the project barely gave nodding recognition to the value of walkable communities and public transit.
The most arrant case of collective cluelessness now on view is our failure to even begin a public discussion about fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system, which has become so decrepit that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of it. It's the one thing we could do right away that would have a substantial impact on our oil use. The infrastructure is still out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The restoration of it would employ hundreds of thousands of Americans at all levels of meaningful work. The fact that we are hardly even talking about it—at any point along the political spectrum, left, right, or center—shows how fundamentally un-serious we are.
This is just not good enough. It is not worthy of our history, our heritage, or the sacrifices that our ancestors made. It is wholly incompatible with anything describable as our collective responsibility to the future.
We have to do better. We have to start right away making those other arrangements. We have to begin the transition to some mode of living that will allow us to carry on the project of civilization—and I would argue against the notion advanced by Daniel Quinn and others that civilization itself is our enemy and should not be continued. The agenda for facing our problems squarely can, in fact, be described with some precision. We have to make other arrangements for the basic activities of everyday life.
In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial "inputs," and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.
We'll have to reorganize retail trade by rebuilding networks of local economic interdependence. The rise of national chain retail business was an emergent, self-organizing response to the conditions of the late twentieth century. Those conditions are now coming to an end, and the Wal-Mart way of doing business will come to an end with them: the twelve-thousand-mile merchandise supply line to Asian factories; the "warehouse on wheels" made up of thousands of tractor-trailer trucks circulating endlessly between the container-ship ports and the big-box store loading docks. The damage to local economies that the "superstores" leave behind is massive. Not only have they destroyed multilayered local networks for making and selling things, they destroyed the middle classes that ran them, and in so doing they destroyed the cultural and economic fabric of the communities themselves. This is a lot to overcome. We will have to resume making some things for ourselves again, and moving them through smaller-scale trade networks. We may have fewer things to buy overall. The retail frenzy of recent decades will subside as we struggle to produce things of value and necessarily consume less.
We'll have to make other arrangements for transporting people and goods. Not only do we desperately need to rebuild the railroad system, but electrifying it—as virtually all other advanced nations have done—will bring added advantages, since we will be able to run it on a range of things other than fossil fuels. We should anticipate a revival of maritime trade on the regional scale, with more use of boats on rivers, canals, and waterways within the U.S. Many of our derelict riverfronts and the dying ports of the Great Lakes may come back to life. If we use trucks at all to move things, it will be for the very last leg of the journey. The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives and, increasingly, a luxury that will be resented by those who can no longer afford to participate in the "happy motoring" utopia. The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.
We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational. We will probably see a reversal of the two-hundred-year-long trend of people moving from the country and small towns to the big cities. In fact, our big cities will probably contract substantially, even while they re-densify at their centers and along their waterfronts. The work of the New Urbanists will be crucial in rebuilding human habitats that have a future. Their achievement so far has been not so much in building "new towns" like Seaside, Florida, or Kentlands, Maryland, but in retrieving a body of knowledge, principle, and methodology for urban design that had been thrown away in our mad effort to build the drive-in suburbs.
It is harder to predict exactly what may happen with education and medicine, except to say that neither can continue to operate as rackets much longer, and that they, like everything else, will have to become smaller in scale and much more local. Our centralized school districts, utterly dependent on the countless daily trips of fleets of yellow buses and oppressive property taxes, have poor prospects for carrying on successfully in an energy-scarce economy. However, we will be a less affluent nation in the post-oil age, and therefore may be hard-pressed to replace them. A new, more locally based education system may arise instead out of home-schooling, as household classes aggregate into new, small, neighborhood schools. College will cease to be a mass-consumer activity, and may only be available to social elites—if it continues to exist at all. Meanwhile, we're in for a pretty stark era of triage as the vast resources of the "medical industry" contract. Even without a global energy crisis bearing down on us, the federal Medicaid and Medicare systems would not survive the future as currently funded.
As a matter of fact, you can state categorically that anything organized on a gigantic scale, whether it is a federal government or the Acme Corporation or the University of Michigan, will probably falter in the energy-scarce future. Therefore, don't pin your hopes on multinational corporations, international NGOs, or any other giant organizations or institutions.
Recent events have caused many of us to fear that we are headed toward a Big Brother kind of governmental tyranny. I think we will be lucky if the federal government can answer the phones, let alone regulate anyone's life, in the post-oil era. As power devolves to the local and regional level, the very purpose of our federal arrangements may come into question. The state governments, with their enormous bureaucracies, may not be better off. Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally with local solutions.
It's a daunting agenda, all right. And some of you are probably wondering how you are supposed to remain hopeful in the face of these enormous tasks. Here's the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities.
Exercise your brain! Try Flexicon.
US military aid to Colombia
Time to End Military Aid to Uribe Government
Colombia's Civil War and the US
By JOE DeRAYMOND
Colombia's civil war is the United States war in the Western Hemisphere. Each year the US provides over a half billion dollars to the Colombian police and military, and trains thousands of Colombian soldiers. Colombia is the largest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq. The US has nurtured the war in Colombia over many years, for the specific purpose of controlling the resources and politics of this rich nation.
Civil war has been the history of Colombia for over 40 years - poverty and/or dislocation remains the condition of the majority of its people. There are over 3 million internally displaced people in Colombia and many more have fled the country for the US, Canada, Europe and other nations in South America. Every day, 20 are killed for political reasons, and hundreds become refugees in a war that simmers and boils over periodically in massacre. When I was living in Colombia, I was fascinated by the weekly map of the war published in El Tiempo, with symbols showing the assassinations and massacres of the week, much like the weather maps in our daily papers.
Since 1964, the government has been fighting Las FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a guerrilla army that began with dozens of peasants in ragtag groups that barely survived the initial combat, but that today number 17,000 under arms. Las FARC has been labelled a terrorist group by the US, or, more recently, "narco-terrorist". It used to be "communist", but communism has lost its evil edge in terms of inflaming revulsion in the US masses and Congress. There have been other armed guerrilla groups over the years, some assimilated into legal society, such as M-19, and some that still fight, like the ELN (Ejercito de Liberación Nacional).
While there has been a guerrilla army since 1964, there has been a counter-insurgency effort, sponsored by the US Army, since 1962. In the years following World War II, Colombia was identified by US foreign policy makers as a key American element in the Cold War. Its keystone geostrategic location in South America, proximity to the Panama Canal, and natural resources made it a crucial area to control. In 1948, the popular Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was primed to become the next President of Colombia. During the Pan American Conference of that year, held in Bogotá, he was assassinated in the street. The United States press and leaders incorrectly labeled the subsequent spontaneous uprising "communist".
The social upheaval triggered by Gaitán's murder lasted for ten years, cost an estimated 200,000 deaths, and is now known as La Violencia. During this period, the Liberals and Conservatives fought a dirty war, which saw the rise of death squads and massacres as political tools. In 1958, a power sharing agreement was reached by the elites of the Conservative and Liberal Parties. The social dynamic did not change, and many self-declared autonomous regions of the country did not cede power to the federal government. This has been a theme throughout the history of Colombia: the central government has never controlled this entire nation of a million square kilometers of rich mountain, plain and jungle. There was a great concern in the Eisenhower administration after the successful Cuban revolution in 1959. Would Colombia follow Cuba?
In 1959, a survey team was sent to Colombia by Eisenhower to investigate whether the US should start a counter-insurgency effort. The team concluded that the societal violence that remained was largely "banditry", and that military aid was necessary. The survey team also recommended a change in doctrine, from conventional warfare to counter-insurgency. In 1961-1962, helicopters were being deployed with US instructors accompanying Colombian pilots during "Public Order" missions.
In February of 1962, General William Pelham Yarborough conducted a mission to Colombia. General Yarborough was the Commander of the US Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was responsible for obtaining approval from President Kennedy to grant special warfare units the right to wear a Green Beret. He introduced foreign troops into the training cycles at the school and unconventional warfare and anti-terrorist tactics into the curriculum. His report in 1962 stated:
"[A] concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States." (Emphasis added.)
General Yarborough went on to advocate the use of sodium pentothol, polygraph tests, and "exhaustive" interrogation of suspected insurgents. The Colombian military adopted his doctrine, and codified it in six manuals of counterinsurgency published in 1962, 1963, 1969, 1979, 1982, and 1987. These manuals focus on the civil population as both the source of conflict and the battlefield. For example, the 1963 manual states, "the citizen, inside this battlefield, is found in the center of the conflictwhether he/she wants it or not, they are obliged to participate in the battle, in some form to become a combatant". The 1979 manual gives advice to the soldier: "it has to be understood that, in an irregular war, the enemy is in all places at all times." The 1987 manual concludes: "the civil population, therefor, is one of the fundamental objectives of Army units", and. "the conquest of the mind of the person, of control of his activities, the improvement of the standard of living and of the ability to organize against threats are respectively the objectives of the psychological and control operations of civic action and organization that are developed through all phases of counter-insurgency". ("Deuda con la Humanidad", published by Banco de Datos, CINEP, 2004).
Since 1962, the United States has trained and equipped this paramilitary effort, and given it cover to fight, in the name of anti-communism, any social reforms that have been proposed by Colombian civil society. Colombians form the single largest group trained at the School of the Americas, and the largest group trained in-country by US units. Military aid has been provided consistently through the decades and very vigorously since Plan Colombia began in 1999.
In the 1980's, the cocaine economy took hold, fuelled by the huge northamerican appetite for the drug. The drug trade is dominated by the paramilitary groups, who were mobilized, increased and eventually became the drug barons who required their own private armies for protection, and who very quickly became enemies of the guerrilla groups. Billions of dollars in fast cash mutated Colombian society and corrupted every level of the economy and government. Paramilitary units became institutions, called "Blocks", and ruled entire regions of the country. They formed alliances such as the AUC (Las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), led by multimillionaire drug dealers such as the Castaño brothers and Salvatore Mancuso. Soldiers pass between paramilitary and military service easily, and it is common for paramilitary and military units to act in concert, with the paramilitary units entering a region first with maximum brutality, leaving the land and the control to the military.
Las FARC also profitted from the drug dollars. It acts largely as a middle buyer between the campesino farmer and the drug refiner and exporter. It grew in power with the influx in cash, which enabled the purchase of arms, and the ability to pay for more soldiers. Las FARC began to challenge the Colombian Army militarily, and there were waves of negotiations through the 80's and 90's, none with serious intent or result.
There were also waves of repression. An entire political party, the Patriotic Union, a political offshoot of Las FARC much as Sinn Fein is of the IRA, was destroyed by the paramilitaries in what is now being investigated as a "political genocide". Paramilitary groups through the mid-1980 assassinated thousands of Patriotic Union members, who had been assured of their rights to participate in the political process. This massacre ended a real opportunity to end non-violently the civil war, and created increased scepticism in the leadership of the armed groups of any hope for a real negotiation.
Colombia is a very dangerous nation for union organizers, journalists, human rights workers, anyone trying to organize in civil society for social change or an end to the war. The assassinations continue daily and the United States support for this system has remained constant over the decades. The US/Colombia program of military action and violence as a solution to the civil war culminated in the Clinton Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia pumped over $4 billion in military aid in 5 years into the conflict, caused enormous environmental and human damage with a misguided fumigation policy, and failed miserably in controlling the civil war, the violence, or the drug trade. Cocaine in the US is actually cheaper today than in 1999, when Bill Clinton ushered his murderous policy through Congress.
Bush's friend, President Alvaro Uribe, leads Colombia in 2007. As Governor of the Department of Antioquia during the 90's, Uribe implemented a classic and sinsister paramilitary program known as Convivir that armed and equipped civilians to aid the Army in its fight against insurgents. He is in his second term as President, and is popular among elite voters who appreciate his "hard hand' policies. He is linked to Colombian legislators, military officers and bureacrats who have aided paramilitaries, as revealed in recent news from Colombia. While he has yet to be directly identified as a paramilitary, it is the difference in Colombia between a nod and a wink as to whether he has paramilitary support and connections or is just surrounded by others who do.
Much has been made of the recent paramilitary negotiations and demobilizations, sponsored by the Uribe administration. As Javier Giraldo points out in his book, Guerra o Democracia (War or Democracy), the phemonomon of governmental dialog or negotiation with the paramilitary institutions is not new. It has happened before, for example, in 1995, under the Samper government. The government and the system are based on the power of the extrajudicial ability of the paramilitaries to protect wealth and maintain themselves in power. Giraldo correctly points out this is a form of "state schizophrenia". A government claims to be negotiating with an outside party, believes it is negotiating with an outside party, when in reality it is making deals with itself.
As the United States continues its occupation in Iraq, can we recognize the similarities in policy and result? Very quickly, US policies in Iraq have created a huge internal and external refugee population and are creating a series of paramilitary solutions and institutions in Iraq, some intentionally organized, some in opposition to our brutal actions. As the resistance to the occupation deepens in Iraq and becomes more costly in troops' lives, the US seeks to deflect its responsibility for its actions, to deny its own brutality, to project the conflict onto unseen, unknown enemies. The citizenry allows our President to openly violate national and international law, to wiretap, to lie, to steal, to waste, without consequence. As Blackwater guards our military leaders, and war is privatized for the benefit of corporate profit centers, we can see the paramilitary influence in the United States, as the contradictions mount-- War or Democracy?
Certainly, US policies in the Americas have provided some measure of a template for the war in Iraq (see "Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin, or the various articles about the "Salvador Option", some published in these pages). A question for US peacemakers is: can we combine our activism against the war in Iraq to include policies in the Americas? There are efforts to do so. This year, the American Friends Service Committee nominated the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartadó and the Indigenous Communities of the Northern Cauca for the Nobel Peace Prize. These communities of nonviolent resistance to the civil war in Colombia stand out in the their courage and sacrifice to end the war and change the society. Support for this award is support for a strong and nonviolent solution to the conflict in Colombia.
In early May of this year, dozens of United States individuals and groups active in Colombia, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Angela Berryman of the American Friends Service Committee, the Lutheran Peace Fellowship, Kathy Hoyt of the Nicaragua Network, Global Exchange, School of the Americas Watch, and the US Office on Colombia (for a complete list, see www.forcolombia.org), made an appeal to Congress to end military aid to Colombia. Currently, 25% of aid to Colombia is contingent on State Department certification on human rights. The last $55 million certification was held up for ten months, till April 2007-- it should have been stopped. Congress should end all military aid. This idea is taking hold in the Congress, as Senators and Representatives recognize the toxic nature of the para-scandal in the Uribe administration, and the contradiction in our support for a paramilitary government, as our government rails against "terror".
Also, right now Congress is considering giving fast track authority to President Bush to sign trade agreements with Colombia, Peru, Panama and Korea without Congressional oversight. This is an outrage, to grant this President the right to further codify Free Trade Agreements that will penetrate markets and destroy local economies. There is a campaign ongoing in Colombia to defeat the Free Trade Agreement, and a concurrent campaign in the US to not allow Bush to fast track anything. The son of a Bush should be facing impeachment, not negotiating for the US to exploit more markets. Check it out at www.nofasttrack.org.
The United States has been the architect of much of the Colombian dynamic that we see today. Military historian Dennis M. Rempe states the matter clearly in "Small Wars and Insurgencies", as he acknowledges "the unique role played by the United States in facilitating the development of all aspects of Colombia's internal security infrastructure". This half-century of United States policy has failed. We can put it to rest by ending the misguided fumigation and military policies of Plan Colombia, by cutting off military aid to the Uribe government, by addressing drug addiction with treatment, and by defeating, with Colombian civil society, the Free Trade Agreement currently under consideration.
Joe DeRaymond can be reached at: jderaymond@rcn.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/deraymond05232007.html
Our lives are worth more than their profits.
Olivier Besancenot
Mexican electoral fraud
A Year of Calderon
Ballot Burning Time in Ol' Mexico
By JOHN ROSS
"As the first anniversary approaches of Mexico's tumultuous July 2nd 2006 presidential election in which rightist Felipe Calderon nosed out leftist Andes Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) by .58% of 41.5 million votes cast amidst allegations of spectacular fraud, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the nation's maximum electoral authority that was responsible for staging the much-questioned balloting, is poised to burn the evidence.
Since the election, Lopez Obrador, who insists he won and says he is the legitimate president of Mexico, has demanded that the 130,000 ballot boxes ("urnas") be opened and the ballots counted out one by one. Despite having been rebuffed by the nation's chief electoral tribunal, codenamed the TRIFE, which declared Calderon the winner last September 5th, AMLO has been joined by a number of eminent journalists and private citizens in his crusade.
In their quest for the truth, the journalists, led by Rafael Rodriguez Castaneda, director of the long-lived left weekly Proceso, have sought access to the ballots via Mexico's Freedom of Information law, one of the most progressive in Latin America. Rodriguez and others model their petitions on the aftermath of the highly redolent Florida U.S.A. 2000 presidential debacle which that distant neighbor nation's Supreme Court awarded to George Bush amidst charges of rampant flimflam. A subsequent independent ballot by ballot recount by the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and other major media concluded that democrat Al Gore would have been the winner if Bush dirty tricks such as barring thousands of Afro Americans from voting were factored into the total tally.
Proceso filed its petition for access to the ballots with the Mexican Supreme Court soon after the election and despite repeated turndowns, continues to pursue its demands. Meanwhile, the IFE has barred the door to a review of the ballots, arguing that Mexico's FOI only applies to government documents and the ballots are not "documents" but rather "expressions of electoral preference," a position that John Ackerman, a specialist in election law a the National Autonomous University (UNAM) writing in the current issue of the Mexican Law Review, characterizes as "metaphysical."
On the other hand, the eight-judge panel sitting as the TRIFE concedes that the ballots are indeed documents but are simply "unavailable" to public review. In signing off on Calderon's victory, the TRIFE readily conceded that the election had been seriously marred by myriad anomalies but could not or would not quantify their impact on the final vote count.
The nearly 42,000.000 ballots utilized in the July 2nd vote taking are currently under guard by thousands of Mexican army troops in the republic's 300 electoral districts. Ackerman, who would like to see the material transferred to the General Archive of the Nation located in a former Mexico City prison, the Lecumberri Black Palace, considers that the negatives of the IFE, the TRIFE, and their colleagues on the Supreme Court to grant FOI access to the ballots, makes Mexico's vaunted Freedom of Information Act a "hollow" document.
In legal briefs filed to challenge Proceso's request, lawyers for the IFE's General Council argue that opening up the ballot boxes would constitute "a danger to national security" i.e. that the process could result in "public disturbances." The IFE excoriates journalists like Rodriguez for pressing the case for accountability, intimating that their probes are designed to tear down the electoral system: "(the plaintiffs) attack fundamental human values" and put the state "in danger." In the IFE's opinion, the plaintiffs "should be stripped of their political rights" (Ackerman.)
Actually, the IFE's refusal to revisit the votes and its intentions to burn the ballots as is contemplated by Mexican election law, may well spark "public disturbances." After Calderon was declared the winner last July, Lopez Obrador mobilized millions in protest, the largest political demonstrations in the nation's history. Tens of thousands of supporters encamped in the streets of Mexico City, shutting down the capital for seven weeks.
Proceso and other plaintiffs have good reason to be suspicious about what is inside the ballot boxes - thousands of which were illegally opened by IFE operators in the weeks following the balloting despite judicial constraints on violating the seals of the "urnas." Although the TRIFE refused to order a vote-by-vote recount, it mandated a partial review of about 9% of the total 130,000 "casillas" or polling places, (11,000 ballot boxes.) The results of the TRIFE recount, which have never been officially published, are instructive. According to Ackerman, Lopez Obrador picked up 10,000 plus votes on Calderon, marginally reducing his already narrow victory to 233,000 votes. In the recount alone, slightly more than that number - 250,000 votes - were annulled by the TRIFE, which eliminated whole polling places where the numbers could not be explained.
AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and two election allies provided their own ballot-by-ballot analysis of the partial recount in the face of TRIFE stonewalling.
In 31% of the recounted precincts, less votes were cast than the number of ballots allocated to the polling place yet no blank ballots were returned to the IFE as the law mandates, suggesting vote stealing by Calderon partisans. In 33% of the casillas under review, more votes were cast than the number the IFE allocated, suggesting ballot-stuffing in about a third of the recounted polling places.
Nationally, the PRD found anomalies in 72,000 out of 130,000 polling places, 63%. While some of these may have been minor arithmetic errors, a shift of 1.8 ballots per ballot box would have given the election to Lopez Obrador even by the IFE's dubious count.
But there is good reason to be skeptical about the IFE count. For example, in six states won by AMLO - including Tabasco, his native state and that of the third candidate in the race, the Institutional Revolutionary Party's Roberto Madrazo - 250,000 more votes were cast for senators and congressional representatives than for president.
Meanwhile in seven states claimed by Calderon, 80,000 more votes were cast for president than for senators and deputies.
Extrapolating from this morass, AMLO's chief election statistician Claudia Schienbaum calculates that Lopez Obrador won the presidency by more than a million votes. The only way to prove or disprove this conclusion, Ackerman insists, is to exhume the ballots.
Other electoral memorabilia has recently come under scrutiny. A spot by spot accounting of how the political parties spent millions of state-subsidized pesos for television and radio ads, contracted by the IFE with a Brazilian company (IBOPE) that specializes in such arcane matters, reveals that tens of thousands of Calderon hit pieces aimed at AMLO between January and July 2006 may have been financed by national and transnational corporations, a violation of campaign financing laws. Of 757,000 spots now stored on 35,000 CDs (it would take a single auditor 248 years to listen to them one by one), who paid for 231,000 of them is masqued. Calderon's spots, designed by U.S. political consultant Dick Morris, a champion of right wing causes, are suspected to have been underwritten by two business councils that group together such U.S.-based mega-corporations as Wal-Mart and Halliburton, both of which have significant interests in Mexico.
Under Article 254 of Mexico's much-amended electoral code, the COFIPE, all election material including the ballots must be destroyed when the electoral process is concluded. But operating on the Yogi Berra theorem that Mexican elections are "never over until they are over", when the electoral process actually ends is up for grabs. When the new president is declared the winner? When he is sworn in? Or when all the appeals have been exhausted? The final determination has yet to be made by the IFE General Council, that has twice now postponed incineration of the ballots.
The COFIPE's injunction to destroy ballots once a presidential election has been concluded is open to loose interpretation. In elections where there were few disputes, there is apparently little hurry to torch the "material expressions of voter preference" - the ballots from Vicente Fox's relatively calm 2000 election victory remain in tact albeit under lock and key. But in presidential contests where vote stealing was patent, Mexican election authorities have been in a big rush to eliminate the evidence.
In 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of an impromptu left coalition, is thought to have upset the PRI's Carlos Salinas - he was leading by a sizeable margin when the vote counting computers mysteriously crashed. Reports of stolen ballot boxes were widespread and tens of thousands of partially burnt ballots marked for Cárdenas were found smoldering in garbage dumps and floating down rivers. Two months after Salinas was inaugurated, in January of 1989, the PRI, which then controlled congress as well as the electoral machinery, in connivance with the right wing PAN, Felipe Calderon's party, ordered the military to burn the ballots.
Under the threat of a new round of angry demonstrations by AMLO's supporters and with one eye on the approaching first anniversary of this still-disputed election, the IFE General Council voted once again May 30th to postpone destruction until all appeals are exhausted - Rodriguez's latest appeal to the Supreme Court remains pending. Another appeal, filed with the InterAmerican Human Rights Court by independent journalist Delia Angelica Ortiz could also delay destruction.
How to dispose of the 1571 tons of electoral evidence that now take up 2261 cubic meters of space in IFE warehouses perplexes members of the General Council. Incineration is not the only option and councilor Teresa Gonzalez argues that burning the ballots would contribute to air pollution and increase global warming. Carting the materials off to a sanitary landfill would not be an ecological solution and given the toxicity that the ballots have radiated could contaminate water sources.
Instead, Gonzales advocates going green and shredding and recycling the ballots. The recycled paper would then be donated to the National Text Book Commission to print textbooks "for Indians" (sic.)
The concept of converting the tainted ballots into text books tickles barber Lalo Miranda as he trims a U.S, reporter's mangy beard in his stand at the Pino Suarez market in the old quarter of the capital. "If you ask me this sounds like a text book case of fraud" he chuckles.
John Ross is recovering from six months on the road flogging "Zapatistas! - Making Another World Possible" in Gringolandia, and contemplating what book to write next. Write him at johnross@igc.org with further information.
http://www.counterpunch.com/ross06152007.html
Our lives are worth more than their profits.
Olivier Besancenot
Chomsky-long and good
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=13171
Imminent Crises: Threats and Opportunities
The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. The maxim of Thucydides
Our lives are worth more than their profits.
Olivier Besancenot
Mexico-where bad elections are a fine art
August 20, 2007
Mexico's Broken Ballot Boxes
The Fine Art of Bad Elections
By JOHN ROSS
In its most revealing set of elections since the July 2006 fraud-marred presidential balloting, this not-so-distant neighbor nation proved conclusively that its electoral system is irreparably broken.
The August 5th vote-taking in Baja California Norte, the nation's wealthiest state, to select a cohort for Upper California's action figure governor featured an eccentric candidate given to wearing vests fashioned from the penises of donkeys and a shaved-headed bureaucrat from a party that has controlled the electoral machinery for 18 years, in one of the filthiest electoral face-offs yet in a country where bad elections are a fine art.
At the other end of Mexico at the same hour of the Baja California fracaso, Oaxaca, a walking wound of a state where 26 activists have been killed and hundreds wounded and jailed in an on-going revolt against tyrannical governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the much-dissed URO locked up a "carro completo" (full car) when his party, the once-ruling PRI (it has never lost power in Oaxaca) took 25 out of 25 districts in the 42-seat state legislature with perhaps the highest absentee rates ever recorded in a recent Mexican election.
The exact extent of the no-shows is inexactly quantified. On election night, the State Electoral Institute (IEE) issued numbers confirming that 77% of the Oaxaca electorate had stayed home. Two days later the numbers were downsized to 63% - a late flurry of "votes" after the polls were closed to paper over an embarrassing turn-out seems likely.
URO's electoral strategy called for elevated absenteeism, an ambiance in which the PRI thrives. After consolidating the party's "voto duro" or hard vote at a pair of massive PRI rallies masquerading as a folklore festival (the "Guelaguetza"), Ruiz turned his attentions to pumping up the "voto del miedo" or fear vote to scare away all other voters. A guerrilla "bombing" at a local shopping mall hours before the election helped to induce the desired psychosis.
Whether absenteeism hit 77% or a not much more respectable 63%, the August 5th election which was set to explode with a bang went out with a big whimper.
If Ulises, who won the governorship of Oaxaca in 2004 in the shadiest of elections (the vote counting computers crashed thrice on election night) was the big winner August 5th, the unquestioned loser was Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) whose left-center coalition took nine out of 11 federal districts in state in 2006. AMLO visited Oaxaca six times in the run-up to August 5th (not once in the final month) but his PRD party shot itself in the foot by excluding nominees from either the Oaxaca Popular Peoples Assembly (APPO) and dissident teachers, the backbone of the social protest movement that has battled the governor for more than a year.
While the dissidents called for a punishment vote ("voto de castigo") against Ulises's PRI and President Felipe Calderon's right wing PAN, they did not endorse the PRD. Indeed, many activists have grown disaffected with the parties and their candidates and embrace the ethos of the popular movement in Argentina during the 2002 crisis there: "Que Se Vayan Todos" (that all the politicians should be kicked out.)
Ironically, the only bright spot for the PRD and/or the popular movement in the PRI's August 5th landslide is that URO's party won so many districts that it was excluded from occupying any of the seats allocated to the parties by the percentage of the votes obtained and the PRI's top "plurinuminal" candidate, former state prosecutor Lizbeth Cana, a despised villain in last year's protests, was not seated.
Despite AMLO's big vote in the 2006 presidential race, the credibility of the PRD in state and out (the party won only 2% of the vote in Baja California) is bottoming into bankruptcy. One year to the date of the fraud against Lopez Obrador, in an internal balloting for delegates to its upcoming national congress, the PRD committed the same kind of fraud against itself that Calderon's PAN committed against AMLO when the New Left "current" (some call it a "tribe") claimed to have won 80% of the delegates. Opposition "tribes" describe such time-honored chicanery as "La Razarada" (erasing names from the voting lists) and "El Raton Loco" (the crazy mouse), switching voting sites at the last minute, as the fulcrum of the New Lefters' "victory."
Despite AMLO's injunction to the left not to recognize Felipe Calderon as president, the New Left faction (sometimes known as "Los Chuchos" due to the number of politicos named Jesus who hold the juice) seem to have a fondness for negotiating with the PANista president, even visiting with him in the Mexican White House, Los Pinos. New Left control of the PRD is sure to widen the wedge between the party and AMLO who has spent the past 11 months barnstorming Mexico signing up more than a million supporters for his pet project, the National Democratic Convention, which longtime observers prognosticate will soon split with the PRD and become Lopez Obrador's own party.
The debacle in Baja California Norte threw two unlikely contenders into the ring. Jose Guadalupe Osuna, a mild-mannered ex-mayor of Tijuana for Calderon's PAN - 18 years ago Baja California became the first state in which the PRI allowed the opposition to win and the PAN has ruled ever since - and, in the PRI corner, the scion of the once-ruling party's topdog political boss, Carlos Hank Gonzalez whose most celebrated contribution to the PRI's Book of Wisdom is that "a poor politician is a bad politician", a piece of advice taken to heart by his son, Jorge Hank Rhon.
Hank Rhon is the kingpin of Mexico's gaming industry with 102 "Aguas Calientes" off-track betting parlors spread around the country (but mostly clustered on the border to suck in those Yanqui dollars.) From January to June of this year, according to Finance Secretary numbers, Hank's gambling dens raked in eight billion pesos - a big chunk of the windfall was funneled into the gubernatorial campaign of "El Padrino" (a favorite nickname), which the Godfather ran out of his Tijuana dog track.
Hank's only previous political experience is as the current mayor of Tijuana, having won office two years ago with the lowest turnout in that border city's history. The PRIista's triumph was not so much attributed to his pristine resume as it was the fruit of years of PAN bumbling and a flourishing narco-infused crime wave. Then as now, Hank Rhon ran as an unlikely law and order candidate.
It is difficult to portray Jorge Hank as a victim but the PAN pulled out every dirty trick in its repertoire to thwart his gubernatorial ambitions. In May, at a critical juncture two months before the vote, the PAN-controlled state electoral tribunal barred El Padrino from appearing on the ballot - his candidacy was reinstated by the nation's top electoral court a full month later. The PANista Queen Bee, Elba Esther Gordillo, lifetime boss of the nation's education workers union, led a thousand electoral operators ("mapaches" or raccoons) into the state to create the same kind of mischief as they committed against AMLO in July 2006. Like AMLO, PAN hit pieces labeled Hank "a danger to Mexico."
To garnish the flimflamery, on election eve a state judge issued arrest orders for three top Tijuana cops, all Hank appointees, for protecting the narco-cartels who are the power behind the throne in Baja California, further trashing Jorge Hank's already bad name.
Jorge Hank has long been accused of playing footsy with the Arellano Feliz cartel - he was once photographed in a local saloon with its leaders. The former head of security at his dog track is currently serving a life sentence for a hit on a crusading journalist who dared to signify that Jorge Hank could be gay in print - ZETA, of which the late Hector "El Gato" Felix was an editor, ran a weekly full page ad for ten years under the Gato's byline asking "Jorge Hank, why did you kill me?" Despite these anomalies, Hank ran for governor on a law and order ticket.
Jorge Hank Rhon is also Mexico's Numero Uno endangered species dealer with his own private zoo on the grounds of the dog track that spotlights rare tigers, the Godfather's totem animal. Legend has it that Jorge once flew a panda into the country strapped into the co-pilot's seat of his private jet. Back in the '90s, U.S, Fish & Wildlife entrapped Hank Rhon's chief buyer trying to buy a gorilla in Boca Raton, Florida - the gorilla turned out to be an agent in a gorilla suit - and United States Immigration agents once stopped him from driving a Siberian tiger into Mexico. The big cat was perched in the back seat.
Hank's sartorial proclivities are not limited to his celebrated donkey dong vest - he was once busted with several overcoats made from the pelts of the last eight ocelots in Mexico. A liberal soul, Hank Rhon considers women to be "my favorite animal" (sic) and is a notorious breeder with 19 offspring. The candidate claims that drinking tequila in which a lion's penis is embalmed increases his virility.
The Baja California balloting was not sedate. "Zafaranchos" (brawls) broke out during candidate debates at high-class hotels. But election day was a more staid event with somberly dressed voters lining up at the polling booths - state election law bars the wearing of party colors in the "casillas" and donning red, blue, green, and yellow, or any combination thereof could get a voter disqualified.
Although pre-election polls indicated that Kid Hank had come from 18 points down to put him in a virtual dead heat with the PANista Osuna on elation day, by nightfall he was trailing by eight points. Depressed by the lopsided thumping, El Padrino retreated behind the doors of his dog track for two days until PRI chieftain Beatriz Parades coaxed him out long enough to concede defeat. The PRI later said it would challenge the outcome because of the PAN's virulent anti-Hank hit campaign.
Results from state elections since the July 2006 magna-fraud have been mixed. A PRIista running as a PRDista won the Chiapas governorship but a PRIista running as a PRDista lost Lopez Obrador's (a former PRIista himself) state of Tabasco in 2006. In February of this year, the PRD, which governs the state of Zacatecas, lost control of the local legislature to the PRI after the leftists split. On the same day, the PRI squeezed out the PAN in Chihuahua and the PAN returned the favor in next-door Durango. Two months later, the niece of the legendary PRI cacique (political boss) the late Victor Cervera Pacheco won Yucatan back from the PAN, which had run the show for the last six years.
But the big winner in each and every one of these electoral farces has been rampant and widespread absenteeism as the credibility of the political parties and the electoral authorities hit rock bottom, confirming what July 2006 proved - the Mexican electoral system is irreparably broken.
John Ross is in Mexico City, plotting a new novella. If you have further information contact johnross@igc.org
Wars cannot be won. They can only be lost in terms of humanity.
If people have the vote, they’ll challenge the people with wealth. Tony Benn
Our lives are worth more than their profits. Olivier Besancenot
My Kingdom for a Horseless Carriage
The Biofuels Trap
By ROBIN MITTENTHAL
We must move our nation beyond fossil fuels. But let's not be suckered
by the promoters of biofuel alternatives like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel.
Large companies that stand to reap billions in subsidies and tax breaks from these energy "sources" are selling them as the way to a healthy planet and energy independence for the United States. For two reasons, don't believe it.
First, consider "energy return on energy invested," or EROEI. This is how much energy we "earn" for every unit of energy we "spend" to get it.
Gasoline's EROEI ranges between 6-to-1 and 10-to-1, says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. In other words, we get anywhere from six to 10 gallons of gasoline for every gallon we use to find oil, pump it out of the ground and refine it. But the EROEI of corn-based ethanol, the most common U.S. biofuel, is a mere 1.34-to-1, the Agriculture Department says. So even though an acre of corn can make 360 gallons of ethanol, only 90 gallons of that is "new" fuel.
Expand this to a larger geographic scale. Researchers at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics calculate that planting the entire state of Iowa to corn and using it for ethanol would give us enough new fuel for about five days' worth of U.S. gasoline use. For policy-makers, this should be a red flag signaling that even enormous increases in ethanol production would do basically nothing to improve America's energy independence.
Second, consider the environmental effects of biofuels.
The corn used to make the ethanol at your local gas pump exacts a heavy price from our land and water. The fertilizer required for high corn yields starts as a resource, but once it leaves farm fields -- and most does -- it essentially becomes poison, polluting our lakes and rivers, harming drinking water, and creating a huge lifeless zone at its final destination, the Gulf of Mexico. Corn production also uses actual poisons in the form of pesticides, and these too can end up in our water and even our food.
And corn plants have wimpy roots that do a poor job of preventing erosion. Millions of tons of superb, irreplaceable Midwestern soils are lost from fields every year because of corn.
And other biofuels? Soybean-based biodiesel has an EROEI of about 1.9 to 1, according to University of Minnesota professor David Tilman and his colleagues. That's better than corn ethanol, but still a poor return, and soybeans carry much of corn's environmental baggage.
An unproven form of biofuel production would wring several forms of energy, including ethanol, from grass, tree pulp and other plant material we can't eat. No one yet makes fuel this way with an acceptable EROEI. Efficiency might improve over time, but the environmental goodness of the resulting fuel will depend on the kinds of plants used.
Tilman favors growing diverse mixtures of long-lived, deep-rooted native plants on damaged, unproductive farmland. These prairie-like mixtures would mean much less erosion than corn and soybeans. They could also pull more of the nutrients they need from air and soil than do common crops.
Unclear, though, is whether they could meet a significant fraction of our energy needs. The Agriculture Department's Michael Russelle and other researchers suggest that Tilman overestimates the EROEI of these mixtures and the amount of damaged land available. They also say it's difficult to establish and maintain these mixtures. Tilman disputes these arguments, but it's very much an unsettled question.
So where do we turn? Wind and solar energy will get us part of the way. These technologies have EROEIs of up to 20-to-1 and fewer unpleasant environmental side effects than biofuels. But a big answer is conservation: We need to use much less energy in the first place by living in smaller homes, buying smaller cars, driving less, trimming our general consumption, and being obsessive about energy efficiency.
We must move beyond fossil fuels. But biofuels are not the answer. Let's pursue real solutions that are easy on our planet.
Robin Mittenthal has worked on farms, taught high school biology and now pursues a doctorate in entomology at the University of Wisconsin. He wrote this comment for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.
Maybe China's dollar leverage is all that is preventing an attack on Iran, one of China's most important energy suppliers.
Our lives are worth more than their profits. Olivier Besancenot
