Almost immediately, officials later said, inquiries began streaming into the tiny Haitian embassy located here. More than 2,500 calls, emails, or visits were recorded between Monday and Wednesday alone, said Moise Dorce, the ranking diplomat at the embassy. Those thousands is a remarkable number given that no adoption accord or apparatus exists between the two countries. And given also that so many children in Mexico as it is are homeless or orphaned.

For a bit of comparison, only about 300 such requests were reported in Brazil.

Yolanda Martinez, a 50-year-old housewife, was one of the hopeful visitors to the embassy last Tuesday. She said she had two grown sons, and was moved by the images of suffering in Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake. “I am a housewife, my husband works, so I would like, with all my love and with all my heart, to adopt a girl,” Martinez said expressively, clutching her hands together. “I don’t have daughters.”

Countering the confusion, authorities at the federal family institute, the UNICEF office in Mexico, and the foreign relations ministry all released statements reiterating that no adoptions are in fact taking place between Mexico and Haiti, and that such adoptions would in fact be discouraged, as authorities believe many children in Haiti are only separated from their families, not orphaned. Ebrard simply spoke too soon.

“There are many, many” people still calling, Dorce said, standing inside the busy embassy, where workers and volunteers had to start denying aid donations because they simply can’t handle any more coming in. “One noteworthy case, a woman came asking, ‘Let me see them. I want to see them.’”

Only about 30 Haitians have so far arrived in Mexico since Jan. 12, Dorce said. All had previous ties to Mexico, through families or institutions.

In Ebrard’s comments, according to the official bulletin, he made a worthwhile reference to Mexico’s proud tradition of asylum.  Many Spaniards settled here escaping the Spanish Civil War, so did Jews, Germans and Italians escaping fascism during World War II, and many waves of immigrants escaping war and political persecution in South and Central America later found a home in Mexico City as well.

The mayor’s interior secretary declined a request to elaborate on what was said, but the implication was clear enough. Mexico, forever changed after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, has been deeply moved by the Haiti disaster. Tens of thousands of tons of aid have left Mexican ports for “Puerto Príncipe,” as the Haitian capital is called here.

President Felipe Calderon said in the days following the quake that Mexicans feel the losses as “if they are our own” and that “no one knows better than us” what Haiti is suffering. On a day that I visited the Haitian embassy, a man from a neighboring state showed up with a trunk full of medicines, but was politely told he could not leave them as donations. Another a man who said he was a structural engineer showed up to offer his services, making reference to 1985, but was told he’d have to travel to Haiti on his own if he wanted to help.

One volunteer, Hilda Lizardi, said she had been at the embassy helping out every day for two weeks straight. “It’s surprised me that so many people have given so much. Diapers, medicines. My respects to all the people, for the solidarity,” Lizardi said. “Brigades would come [from the major universities], Boy Scouts, mothers and small children, men in suits.”

The idea that Mexicans of means would adopt Haitian children in the aftermath of the quake, however, did not sit well with her.

“That’s something else,” Lizardi said. “Let me tell you something. Here in Mexico, we have many children who don’t have families, who are orphans. It’s absurd to me that people would like to do social work, for appearances, by adopting a child from another place.”

Photo by DVIDSHUB

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/02/01/thousands-in-mexico-request-to-adopt-a-haitian-child/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/01/21/carlos-slim-master-of-mexicos-digital-future/ http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/01/21/carlos-slim-master-of-mexicos-digital-future/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:29:10 +0000 Daniel Hernandez http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/?p=556

Mexican magnate Carlos Slim has an ambitious new year’s resolution. He wants to fold two of his major telephone companies — Telmex and Telmex Internacional — into his major international cellphone company, America Movil, in order to cut down on costs. The plan is already rankling analysts and regulators whose job is to keep a tycoon of Slim’s caliber somewhat in check. The Mexico City native is known as one of the top-top wealthiest individuals in the world. Right now, his rank at Forbes is third. Often, he is first.

Consolidating those companies won’t be easy for Slim. Already, competitors are gearing up for battle. So Slim, brilliant business strategist that he is, offered the people a festively packaged gift today. Just because.

At a sleek press conference inside his Telmex Institute in Mexico City’s historic downtown, Slim and several of his top corporate deputies announced a $10 billion-peso three-year investment plan to radically update Mexico’s “digital culture.” A separate multi-million-dollar initiative to fund genome research came on Tuesday.

The idea, Slim said, is to make Mexico more competitive in the abstract “human capital” sense with other ascendant economies — such as Brazil — whose successes in innovation have so far eluded his own country. Slim said his Telmex will:

A) Increase access to high-speed Internet across Mexico.

B) Open “digital libraries” where customers could check out laptops.

C) Expand Telmex data centers and “digital scholarships.”

D) Open an accredited Information Technology Institute to train 1,000 new professionals to find real-world solutions for the private sector.

E) Expand wireless Internet services to hundreds of schools, hospitals, bus terminals, airports, and restaurant chains.

Details were otherwise vague, and only time will tell how much of the initiative is actually delivered. So upon taking questions, Slim was pressed by Reuters about the America Movil plan. He said consolidation would not result in bundling of fixed and cellphone lines for Mexican consumers, then quipped: “We are in 18 countries and in 17 of them we have no legal problems.” The reference was to Mexican regulators who aggressively pursue his assets — unequally, some analysts say.

In person, even upon a podium, Slim seems like a no-nonsense sort of businessman, astute but not uptight, even-minded but not close-minded. Another analogy came to me as I watched him: “Like the sort of guy you wouldn’t mind having a beer with.”

Then again, they used to say the same thing about George W. Bush.

Attempting to merely fathom the reaches of this man’s wealth is disconcerting, especially in Mexico, where so many millions of people are so poor. Besides his dominance in the telecommunications market across Latin America, Slim has his hands deep in global retail, real estate, banking, air travel, and media.

Freakier still is his attitude on the matter. Slim once bristled at reporters, “I think it’s perverse to believe that there shouldn’t be strong companies in poor countries.” For more on that, last year’s lengthy New Yorker profile on Slim is helpfully summarized here.

On Wednesday, Slim spoke grandly about the “end” of “agricultural economies” and the need for economies of “ideas,” the end of “monolithic power” and the need to embrace a new age of “competition and globalization.” Slim indeed pumps millions every year into infrastructure, development, and philanthropy. But it’s evident that in every move he makes, the goal is not about positive publicity, being a good citizen, or even being a good Mexican.

Step by step, the expansion and care of Carlos Slim’s empire is about little else than … Carlos Slim’s bottom line.

* Image above via Wikipedia.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/01/21/carlos-slim-master-of-mexicos-digital-future/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/01/05/mexicos-narco-war-hits-home-in-california/ http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/2010/01/05/mexicos-narco-war-hits-home-in-california/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:09:43 +0000 Daniel Hernandez http://thefastertimes.com/mexico/?p=535 Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo, a school board member in El Monte, a suburb of Los Angeles, was kidnapped and killed over the holidays while visiting Mexico. Salcedo, 33, is believed to be the first U.S. elected official killed in Mexico’s never-ending narco war.

His death in Gomez Palacio, Durango state, also brings home in painful fashion the horrors of the drug-fueled violence down south to the can-do, immigrant-friendly communities of California; this is the first time a prominent and admired Mexican American who appeared to have no known ties to organized crime is caught up and killed in the conflict.

“Bobby was a great leader, an American citizen, a politician and an educator, and what happened to him deserves attention at the highest levels of government,” his widow Betzy told the L.A. Times during a large vigil Monday night at his high school alma mater.

According to reports, Salcedo and his wife, a native of Gomez Palacio, were out at a bar with friends on Wednesday, December 30. At around 2 a.m. that night, armed men stormed into the place and hauled off six men, Bobby among them. Their dumped bodies were found the next day.

Shocked relatives, colleagues and former classmates in El Monte are calling on U.S. authorities to act on their loss. But the reality is, as the L.A. Times notes, “impunity” still reigns in the Mexican criminal justice system, no matter who the victim is. That’s perhaps the most painful realization here, in the broader picture. There may never be justice for Bobby Salcedo.

Gay and lesbians couples can now legally marry and adopt children in Mexico City, after a historic but not necessarily surprising vote in the legislative assembly. The Distrito Federal’s governing representative body is dominated by the leftist PRD, or Democratic Revolutionary Party, and for weeks word had spread on online networks that the Monday vote was coming.

It came down beautifully, 39-20, to change the Federal District’s legal code to define a marriage as a union between two willing adults, in effect fortifying a 2006 law already allowing same-sex unions. A separate vote also gave same-sex marriages the right to adopt children.

What does this mean for you? If you’re not in a committed same-sex relationship within the borders of the Mexican capital, you’re probably thinking, ‘Not a whole lot.’ But as Time points out, gay-rights advocates across Catholic-heavy Latin America are hoping that the Mexico City vote could create a ripple-effect in other regions:

On Wednesday, 10 same-sex couples filed legal motions in a court in Rosario, Argentina, demanding their right to marry. In neighboring Chile, a column in the newspaper Paradiario was headlined, “Gay Marriage Approved in Mexico. In Chile When?” In the swampy Mexican state of Tabasco, 20 gay couples sent a motion to the state legislature asking to allow them to tie the knot.

Now what are the chances that a ripple-effect could skip over the Rio Grande and influence rulings on the American side? The vote certainly got pinged plenty in the U.S. as an example of what is possible. Yet it is worth re-stating an obvious point about the culture of Mexico City that undoubtedly influenced Monday’s vote.

D.F. is exceedingly gay-friendly, not just for a city in Latin America but for a city anywhere in the world. Despite that pesky Mexican macho stereotype (or perhaps because of it?), gay identity in Mexico City is little more than another texture on the patchwork of the cosmopolitan fabric. Which is why the vote didn’t feel like a major watershed moment on the streets of the bustling city.

Except for the Church, which found itself having to backtrack on a bishop’s initial comments that the gay marriage vote was a “stupidity.” Global Voices gathers up other reactions here, highlighting Twitter users who fear the vote could create some sort of anti-gay backlash in Mexico.

That doesn’t seem any more likely now than before. If anything, the new law in Mexico City offers gay marriage advocates around the world another victory to enlist in the long battle for equality.

* Above, gay marriage supporters celebrating outside the legislative assembly, via AFP.

The Jumex Collection — considered one of the largest and most prestigious private collections of contemporary art in the world — unveiled plans recently for a permanent museum in Mexico City, designed by David Chipperfield Architects. The plans are welcome news for an arts community accustomed to trek more than an hour in traffic to the city’s tough northern outskirts, where collector and juice magnate Eugenio Lopez has kept a temporary exhibition space on the grounds of his juice-making plant in the suburb of Ecatepec, site of his legendary and lavish opening parties.

The new museum will be smack in the middle of the upscale Polanco district, but, regrettably, across the street from the dazzling new home for the Soumaya museum, owned by another Mexican magnate you might have heard about — Carlos Slim.

Jumex Collection representatives did not specify an expected date of completion for the new museum, which in Mexican conceptions of time could mean years past whatever is said up-front. For more, see my post at Intersections.

Mexico City’s new Gold Line doesn’t open for at least another year, but it already appears on maps posted in stations inside the system, with the tag, “Under Construction.” The new line, officially Line 12, will finally offer lateral connections on the south side of the city’s dense middle (see the gold dotted line at UrbanRail), and will offer service all the way to the center of Tlahuac, a relatively rural borough in the southeast.

Residents who are being displaced by the new line have offered resistance during the construction process. And the capital government confirmed it was seeking private investment to help complete the project in time for the bicenntenial. Yet it looks like it’s really happening. Line 12 redraws the map of the system and by extension will redraw the map of the city.

This is the first new Mexico City metro line built since Line B connected the center into the suburb of Ecatepec in 1999. Above, a map at the current Line 12 site depicting the growth of estimated passenger volumes, densest in the middle-class Coyoacan and Narvarte region. Metro analysts predict the new line will start out carrying 367,000 passengers on weekdays, which will automatically make it the fourth busiest line in the system.

The electrical workers are refusing to back down. A month after President Felipe Calderon sent federal police to storm a major energy utility and declare it liquidated, its dismantled union took to the streets again on Wednesday and choked Mexico City with blockades and marches.

Violent confrontations were reported between police and demonstrators on the major roads to Cuernavaca and Puebla. In the city center, tens of thousands of fired employees and supporters of Luz y Fuerza del Centro, or Central Light & Power, demonstrated on the one-month anniversary of the company’s unprecedented liquidation, but there wasn’t much of a pressing reason otherwise to go out and test the patience of weary Mexican commuters. Workers say they want their jobs back, and that they’re mad as hell. Calderon and his labor secretary say that the liquidation will not be reversed.

Who is right? The government maintains the utility was inefficient, wasteful, and provided a poor service. They also argue its union — the oldest in the country — enjoyed too many benefits. The Wall Street Journal stands behind that position.

Labor groups and the institutional left say the federal government is once again stoking the flames of popular revolt by putting 44,000 people out of work at a time when the Mexican economy is in trouble. And, they say, Calderon is setting the utility up for privatization. The Bay Guardian is in that corner.

And here, the L.A. Times takes the middle:

Many suspect that breaking this union was a precursor to privatizing electricity in the hands of foreigners or friends of Calderon, as was the case previously with banks and television. It would be a terrible mistake for the government to perpetuate a system of crony capitalism that has cost the state legitimacy and created monopolies impeding economic growth. Instead, many Mexicans are asking whether Calderon will go after corruption in other unions, notably ones that have backed him. Doing so would go a long way toward convincing his countrymen that the dissolution of the electricity company was more about pesos than politics.

Yesterday, as the massive march arrived downtown, I approached a woman who stood on the sidewalk and asked for her thoughts on the ongoing protests. Maria Rodriguez, 46, said she was not a member of the union nor had relatives or friends there. Dressed in a modest coat and scarf, she was an office worker passing through:

Q: They say the union had too many privileges.

A: It was the leaders, but not the workers … like in any other business.

Q: Will the service get better you think, now that it’s in federal hands?

A: No. What I think is that they want to privatize it. Like they did with Telephones of Mexico [Telmex]. Eliminate the union and then, little by little, give it to private companies. And then the same thing will happen as it happened with our phones: our rates went up, whatever benefits those who have the capital. That’s what I think, but I could be wrong.

Rodriguez added, looking towards the marchers passing us, that no one in the crowds appeared rich or over-privileged to her. “That’s what I say,” Rodriguez affirmed. “If their union managed to get them all those benefits, well good for them. We should all have better privileges. And they’re not even privileges, really! Privileges are what the rich have.”

Saturday is the last day for the fired workers to collect their federal severance pay, worth about 33 months of their salaries. So far, more than half of the workers have done so.

Day of the Dead is increasingly becoming a United States holiday, with people of all backgrounds in Mexicanizing U.S. cities adopting the parties and customs of Mesoamerica’s cousin to Halloween. Just check out the annual scene at Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles. There are political touchstones to the holiday as well; In El Paso they are observing Día de los Muertos with a vigil for migrants who have died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Here in Mexico, the regalia associated with November 1 and 2 — candied skulls, brilliant orange marigolds, pan de muerto — are seen practically on every block right now. Although, in true binational post-NAFTA fashion, Day of the Dead in Mexico is also lately having to compete with jack-o-lanterns and witches on broomsticks.

Cemeteries across Mexico light up at night for Day of the Dead, the traditional image travelers through Mexico associate with the holiday. But there is also a rising trend of organizations and institutions putting together altar competitions among their members and employees, in the spirit of “preserving traditions.” Today I got a chance to check one out, at the Mexico City metro workers union.

More than 20 different sections of the union were represented by altars, in turn representing the altar customs of a specific town or region somewhere in Mexico. The panel of judges was composed of specialists from the national anthropology and history institute. A top cash prize of $15,000 pesos — or about $1,200 dollars — was at stake.

The ofrendas were set up at a union office building above Juanacatlan station. Each section made their altar a meal-plate in addition to an homage to their dead: tamales, mole, and other dishes were offered, served, and eaten off their spreads of cempasúchitl petals, candles, and photographs.

There was also mezcal for the departed and for those in life wanting a warm sipping spirit.

Listening to the groups describe to the judges the symbolic gestures at work on their altars, I was reminded that the ofrendas of Día de los Muertos are incredibly complex mediations between the world of the living and the greater unknown. They fuse pre-Hispanic traditions with Spanish Catholic practices, and use the power of the dearly departed to convey the Mexican belief that only by keeping death close can we live life to the fullest.

One altar today made good use of the context. It depicted the surface sign for Pino Suarez station, complete with the small wind-god pyramid below that was discovered during the station’s construction. The offering was dedicated to “compañeros who have died while on their duties and to commuters struck by trains.” Strong imagery — metro tracks are good quick means of suicide.

Have a happy Día de los Muertos, U.S.A. Make it yours. After all, the Mesoamericans among you are not just absorbing ‘American’ culture, they’re slowly redefining it, and always welcoming new  participants.

Not being the sort of thing the Mexican government likes leaving unsolved, on October 1, federal agents in the capital arrested a university student named Ramses Villarreal in connection with the attacks. Villarreal, 27, was identified by video footage taken at one of the scenes, authorities said. The suspect had been expelled from UNAM after the student strike of 1999 and was now studying sociology at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Xochimilco, where the man  known today as Subcomandante Marcos was once a teacher. Villarreal had also been active with the APPO in Oaxaca. Nonetheless, his wife insisted he was innocent.

Then, as often happens in Mexico, the story took an intriguing twist. Ramses was freed. This rarely happens with suspected criminals in Mexico, but sure enough, once a judge said Villarreal should be let go, federal agents conspicuously declined to seek an injunction against the decision to keep the student behind bars.

Villarreal clearly saw an opening here. “They gave me my liberty in exchange for implicating others,” he told Excelsior. The young activist then went on to accuse the PGR agency of torture. He said agents threatened to kill him, beat him for hours, and nearly suffocated him with bags over his head. Now he’s suing.

But if Ramses didn’t do it … or something like that … who did? If your head isn’t spinning right now and you want more details, go to Kristin Bricker at Narcosphere and John Ross at Counterpunch. They go into the context, the particulars, and the pertinent histories. From Ross:

It hardly seems a coincidence that modern-day anarchists struck in September, ‘the patriotic month’ when Mexicans celebrate the declaration of their independence from Spain in 1810, the bicentennial of which, along with the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, is on deck in 2010. President Felipe Calderon has budgeted billions of pesos to mark the twin centennials even as Mexico is mired in a bottomless recession that has driven millions of workers into the streets. Ironically, the Calderon government has reportedly contracted a Hollywood production outfit with the very anarchist brand-name ‘Autonomy’ for $60,000,000 USD to mount centennial ’spectaculars’ - in 2008, ‘Autonomy’ staged the spectacular pageant that opened the Beijing Olympics.

Heavy stuff.

The 1989 independent Mexican film ‘Rojo amanecer,’ or Red Dawn (IMDb, Wiki), is a fictional retelling of the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, which I recently recalled in this post. The film, directed by Jorge Fons, is not easy to get outside of Mexico, so I felt I needed to see it while here, particularly around the massacre’s anniversary.

Rojo amanecer centers on 24 hours in the lives of a middle-class family who live in the Chihuahua Building at Tlatelolco, a modern apartment tower that overlooks the plaza in Mexico City where the killings happened. In the above clip, the house-wife, retired military grandfather, and young son are going about their afternoon, listening to the students’ meeting happen below. Then the boy notices flares dropping from helicopters, signal for the gunfire to begin. His mother and grandfather realize soldiers and paramilitaries are killing unarmed demonstrators, and in a panic, they seek cover in a bedroom. The fear is potent; two older sons in the family, members of the student movement that swept Mexico that year, are downstairs on the plaza.

The film takes place entirely inside the home and concentrates heavily on the characters inside, particularly on the generational split between the grandfather and father, a government bureaucrat, and the university-age sons. The chaos, turmoil and terror of the period feel like something abstract, beyond the reaches of the family’s domestic reality. This quickly changes.

When it was released, Rojo amanecer is said to have faced aggressive censorship attempts from the PRI regime — the same cadre of figures who were in power in 1968 — yet it went on to win several Ariels, Mexico’s Oscars. Based on what I know and have read, references made in Rojo amanecer to actual events are detailed and historically accurate.

The film’s spectacularly bloody climax leaves the viewer with the sensation of being cheated, or brutalized. This effect I think has a broader purpose than to merely cut the story short. It is a metaphor for the senselessness and extreme violence of the state terror inflicted on still-unnumbered dissidents and innocents throughout the regime’s response to the 1968 movement and its subsequent Dirty War. It is a history that Mexico – and the world at large – has yet to fully confront.

Rare dramatizations like Rojo amanecer compel us to never forget in the meantime.