Tag Archives: Mexico

Reflections Week 13: The Release of Ovidio Guzmán

Hi all. For this week’s reflections, I will be commenting on the release of Ovidio Guzmán, commonly known as one of El Chapo’s sons. More specifically, I will be comparing two responses to the incident, and give my own personal take on it.

To give more background to the incident, a few weeks ago, the town of Culiacan, in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico, was attacked by cartel members and sympathizers as a direct response to the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán by the government of Mexico. Armed military and police personnel was then sent by the Mexican government, although they were overrun by the cartel forces. In fact, many government agents and officers were killed and taken hostage by the cartels. This gave the possibility to the cartels to threaten the Mexican government with mass slaughter against the town Culiacan, as the civilians were now left stranded without arms or defences. This thus prompted President AMLO to issue the release of Ovidio Guzmán, to prevent further bloodshed.

There have been different responses to this event. One of them, as outlined in Daniel Tenreiro’s article in the conservative magazine National Review, has been to condemn AMLO’s decision, instead calling for a reversal of his “hugs, not bullets” policy, and to instead heighten the militarization of the country by bringing more United States armed forces in. He also calls for a modernization and strengthening process of the local and state police forces, to fight the corruption currently present within them. This, in my view, is a deeply flawed solution to the problem, as it has been tried for more than a decade before, and has continuously made drug cartels stronger, while only serving to heighten the tensions and violence between the two camps. This has also resulted in a “decapitation” policy, based on arresting or killing heads of cartel syndicates in Mexico, which has only served to create more turf wars and increase polarization and the number of warring factions in the country. This has notably shown in the continuous growth in the number of deaths per capita in Mexico, now at 29 per 100,000 people. According to Tenreiro, the AMLO administration is to blame for this, saying the policy has been tried and has not worked, although not even a full year has passed since AMLO took office, while the previous militarization policies have been tried for 13 years, to no avail. This has, nonetheless, been a very popular response among the Mexican people, albeit a highly emotional one.

A second response to the situation has been to endorse AMLO’s response. This is my response, and that which is also voiced by one of my favourite political commentators, Kyle Kulinski, founder of the Justice Democrats currently hosting The Kyle Kulinski Show. Kulinski rightly points out, as does the AMLO administration, that this was done to prevent further slaughter, and perhaps even a genocide against the Culiacan population. There was no choice given to the government, as the lives of the innocent were worth much more than the arrest of one kingpin’s son, regardless of the will of the DEA or the US government. Kulinski also correctly argues that militarization and heightened violence and enforcement is not the appropriate response to the crisis, but rather drug legalization, taxation and regulation. This is based on the true premise that drug cartels currently have a monopoly over the drugs they sell in the black market. Pursuing a legalization, taxation and regulation of drugs policy would thus force the cartels to compete with legitimate business in the marketplace, and would, through time, make them go out of business and lose their profits. Another temporary solution, though not mentioned by Kulinski, might be to offer self-defence training to local populations in regions affected by the drug war, until the policy is fully enacted. The former policy, incredibly enough, as been considered by the AMLO government.

Joseph

Reflections Week 12: Disappearances in Latin America

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Hi all. For this week’s reflections, I will be commenting on a video posted for week 12, entitled “Dictatorship and Resistance”.

In it, Professor Rita de Grandis speaks about the military junta in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, which was supported by the United States through Operation Condor, though the exact extent of the American role remains unknown. During this period of repressive rule, tens of thousands, accused of being left-leaning or Communists/Socialists/Bolshevists, were jailed, tortured or simply vanished from public life without a trace. Most of them were public intellectuals, labour rights activists, and young people associated with anti-establishment or leftist causes. This prompted a public outcry from the “mothers of the disappeared”, standing up to the regime for the rights and humanity of their sons lost in the incident.

This is, as history shows us, far from the first nor the last instance of mothers revolting against their governments for their rights and that of their families. Allusions to the French revolution may be made, as tens of thousands of wives and mothers marched down to Versailles to claim their economic and political rights, mostly related to food and labour rights, although I will mostly talk about the Mexican case. In fact, since the start of the War on Drugs, led by the United States since the Reagan administration, women, and mothers in particular, have taken on a very important role in the public perception of the slaughter associated with the drug cartels.

As President Calderon heightened tensions between the American and Mexican military apparatus and the drug cartels by increasing the level of militarism and police enforcement in the country, hundreds of thousands have died at the hands of the Mexican Drug War. This has primarily affected civilians and families, who are caught in the middle of the trade and of the violence. Mothers and family members of the victims, which have been primarily consisting of military-aged men and boys, have taken to the streets in great numbers, month after month, to protest the inaction of their government and the ineffectiveness of the policies enacted. A great portion of them, enraged by the great injustice and trauma caused by this catastrophe, are protesting in search of their husbands and sons, as many of them have disappeared as a result to kidnappings and mass burials, in part enabled or even done through the Mexican government and the military. Therefore, the disappearances in Argentina during the Dirty War, and the public reaction to them, bear great resemblance to that of the Mexican Drug War.

Joseph

Reflections Week 8: The Mexican Revolution

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Hello, all. Since there is no online lecture linked to this week’s material and classes, I will be commenting on an interview assigned to us, entitled “The Mexican Revolution”.

To start, I will comment on the claim “Revolution is a claim of ownership on history”. This is an interesting claim, but only partially true. Revolutions usually mean a social, economic or political break from the current course of history, which can be either violent or non-violent. Revolutions and revolutionary factions do not claim to own a certain part of history or try to change it, but rather want to change its current predicted trajectory. However, there have been revolutionary factions and movements which have seeked to re-write history in their image and dismiss the past histories written, such as was the case with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its continuation to this day, as well as with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which tried to own history to rewrite it as well as change its trajectory.

Further, It is interesting to see how some of these historical dynamics from the Mexican Revolution still persist to this day. In fact, when mentioning Emiliano Zapato and his Zapatista revolutionaries, I was reminded of the trips I made last year to Chiapas, in Southern Mexico. An important chunk of the Chiapaneco territory is still claimed by Zapatista factions, after many violent clashes with the Mexican and state government. Also interesting to note is the fact that many people in the state see the Zapatistas and other Indigenous factions as the legitimate governors of the state, whereas they see the Mexican federal government as an illegitimate aggressor cracking down on their rights and sovereignty. This bears quite a lot of resemblance to the Quebec sovereigntist/independentist movement, which claims that the provincial government is the legitimate sovereign in the province, while the federal government is aggressing Quebecois peoples and ruling over them in an unconstitutional, undemocratic, or even fascist manner. They also claim that since the Quebecois peoples (the French and French Canadians, as well as the American Indian Peoples (Peuples Amérindiens du Québec) settled on Quebec land before the British and English Canadians did, they hold sovereignty over such land. The broader story of both of these sovereigntist revolutionary movements, as well as many other ones, is about local peoples trying to decentralize power and bring it into their hands in order to be able to decide their own history.

Joseph

Reflections Week 6: Ethnic Ancestry as Biological

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Hi all. For this week’s post, I will be reflecting upon this week’s video lecture, entitled “Citizenship and Rights in the New Republics. More precisely, I will be discussing race and its importance in discourse.

Stated in the lecture is that “race is a social construct, rather than a biological fact”. This is not true, as there are notable physical and genetic differences between racial (or rather ethnic ancestry) groups, which are common to people of a common ethnic ancestry group. Skin colour, types of hair and facial characteristics are only parts of it. To deny this would be to deny decades of scientific research that has been documenting this topic thoroughly. Although there is genetic variation between members of the same race, there are still trends and commonalities between such members. Nonetheless, this does not make race more or less important as a political or moral argument, and also does not take away stress from the fact that we should base our discourse and reflections on one’s personality and psychological characteristics, rather than the biology they are assigned or born with. Additionally, this is not to say that these ethnic ancestry differences are to be part of a broader moral argument, such as “Africans are X, and thus are better at Y than Caucasians”, which is highly reprehensible and factually incorrect. To read more about this topic, I highly recommend Vivian Chou’s article posted on Harvard’s SITN website.

Additionally, it is true that these racial differences have been highlighted and even heightened, which has caused historical divisions that have led to many conflicts and brutal wars. The Casta paintings namely commit this fallacy by highlighting racial difference in order to justify different racial treatments and racial superiority. In Latin America, even today, there is still a tremendous divide between peoples of European vs. Indigenous ancestry. In Mexico, notably, there have been studies done about how Mexicans of European, Indigenous or even Latin American ancestry have experienced different social, political and economic treatments. Most individuals in positions of power are still of European or Latin American descent, and only recently was the National Indigenous Congress (similar to the Congressional Black Caucus in the United States) created and had elected political representatives. This is also a problem throughout the rest of the world, including the West, which is not deprived of this. The economic/financial wage gap between ethnic groups is still something that is grappled with in Canada and the United States to this day.

Joseph