Category: Mexico

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Traveling along the US-Mexico border

In the last year, I’ve become fascinated with the southern border of the U.S. My grandmother crossed the Rio Grande when she was very young, long before a border patrol was established. In those days, it was more considered to be open rather than guarded at all.

A journalist for the Guardian Unlimited recently wrote about his experience of traveling the length of the recent hot topic in Washington, going from west to east. Gary Younge paints a unique perspective about the border and the people who live there, literially on the front lines.

About 10 minutes’ walk from Reyes’s office flows a stretch of the Rio Grande about 15 metres wide. As I drove down to take a look, a car full of people was leaving in the opposite direction. Alone on the bank was a teenage boy with four tyres and a heap of wet clothes. He wasn’t answering any questions, except about fishing, and after a while the car came back empty and picked him up.

At the city of Del Rio, the river starts the first of its elaborate curves before it heads south towards the Chisos Mountains while the main road heads north. A 200-mile detour down back roads hugging the border takes you through towns and hamlets that have occasionally been used for spaghetti western sets. Most look desolate. Then Lajitas, a luxury resort that bills itself as the ultimate hide-out, emerges like a mirage.

At Lajitas the cheapest room in low season goes for $175 a night and the most expensive cottage is $825. For the Texas beau monde there are weekly flights in private jets from Dallas and “Get out of the Dog House” packages for the negligent businessman, which offer prickly pear margaritas and Mexican wedding cookies on your arrival and two 50-minute massages. Behind the hotel complex runs the Rio Grande. On the Mexican side live four extended families; a boat is tied up at the riverside. The nearest official border crossing is in Presidio, 50 miles away. Every day, to avoid the 100-mile round trip, people cross the river by boat in a couple of minutes. You can see their footprints on the Texan side. The afternoon I arrived a man was nipping back to Mexico to repay a debt to a friend. The next day Ms Rodriguez rowed her two children and a rooster over to see their grandmother in Mexico. [guardian]

That’s just a portion of the article, but it’s a good example of the many stories that this issue has. There is also a slideshow with audio commentary by Carlos Cazalis, who photographed the journey along the way.

During my days at KRUI, a group of us made our way to Austin, TX for SXSW. One wrong turn and we were being beckoned by a few hundred day laborers that were standing on a street corner. A couple people freaked out, thinking that we were about to be robbed. I had a quick sense as to what was happening, but there was really no use to explain. One u-turn and we were heading back towards 6th Street, the place where everything seems to be happening in Austin. Clubs, good shows, and great food.

It’s that easy to forget that this problem exists. I’ll be damned if there’s an easy solution though. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev recently compared the building of the 700-mile long fence on the southern U.S. border to that of the Berlin Wall[mywesttexas]. It’s not that far of a stretch, but maybe I’m missing the element that says “cooperative effort for a solution” in the thing that represents “keep out”.

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The Mexican political situation

I witnessed a teacher strike last year in B.C. Maybe they could take a page from this, and let’s just hope ClearChannel doesn’t adopt this tactic in their attempt at owning all the radio stations in the world.

Teachers striking in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca have seized at least eight private radio stations.

They acted after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a government radio station already under their control, injuring one of their colleagues.

The strikers used the stations to tell parents to ignore Monday’s start of the school year and keep children at home. [bbc]

The situation in Mexico is increasingly concerning. When I visited at the age of 17, staying in a hotel just off of the Zocalo[wiki], there was a labor protest outside of the government buildings in the square. It was full of people, loud speakers, and non-stop protest. For the most part, it was peaceful, but it was enough to freak me out a little bit. The country seems to be noticibly different now than those days, and these folks are going further than before to make their voice on the matter heard.

Protests are taking place in Vancouver about the current, political situation in Mexico. I think it confuses a lot of people as to what they are demonstrating for. There is a growing population of Mexicans here, so it makes sense. Around the world, it seems that not a lot of folks are paying a lot of attention to it.

A couple of years ago television, radio and print media in the west just couldn’t get enough of ‘people power’.

In quick succession, from Georgia’s rose revolution in November 2003, via Ukraine’s orange revolution a year later, to the tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the cedar revolution in Lebanon, 24-hour news channels kept us up to date with democracy on a roll.

Triggered by allegations of election fraud, the dominoes toppled. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was happy with the trend: ‘They’re doing it in many different corners of the world, places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon … And so this is a hopeful time.’

But when a million Mexicans try to jump on the people-power bandwagon, crying foul about the July 2 presidential elections, when protesters stage a vigil in the centre of the capital that continues to this day, they meet a deafening silence in the global media. Despite Mexico’s long tradition of electoral fraud and polls suggesting that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) – was ahead, the media accepted the wafer-thin majority gained by the ruling party nominee, Harvard graduate Felipe Calderon.

Although Mexico’s election authorities rejected Lopez Obrador’s demand for all 42m ballots to be recounted, the partial recount of 9% indicated numerous irregularities. But no echo of indignation has wafted to the streets of Mexico City from western capitals. [malaysiasun]

The other thing to consider is that pretty much all of North America is now headed by conservative governments, excluding countries to the south of Mexico on that statement. I don’t have enough details to say that the Mexican elections were tampered with, but the similarities to the 2000 elections in the U.S. is interesting. Nothing in politics is ever innocent.