Friday, December 08, 2006
Here's an additional article on Cuban medical schools
If you have time, read this article in addition to the 7 required. (Scroll down for the list and articles).
Peace, Agustin.
New York Times, December 8, 2006
Havana Journal
Hippocrates Meets Fidel, and Even U.S. Students Enroll
Jose Goitia for The New York Times
Nancy Gonzáles, center, using a cadaver to teach anatomy to Jamar Williams, left, of Brooklyn and others.
By MARC LACEY
Published: December 8, 2006
HAVANA, Dec. 7 - Anatomy is a part of medical education everywhere. Biochemistry, too. But a course in Cuban history?
Enlarge This Image
Jose Goitia for The New York Times
Students from many countries at the Latin American School of Medical Sciences, founded by Fidel Castro, on a campus just outside Havana.
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.
Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an ulcer and treat hypertension but also to expound on the principles put forward by "el comandante."
It was President Castro himself who in the late 1990s came up with the idea for this place, which gives potential doctors from throughout the Americas and Africa not just the A B C's of medicine but also the basic philosophy behind offering good health care to the struggling masses.
The Cuban government offers full scholarships to poor students from abroad, and many, including 90 or so Americans, have jumped at the chance of a free medical education, even with a bit of Communist theory thrown in.
"They are completing the dreams of our comandante," said the dean, Dr. Juan D. Carrizo Estévez. "As he said, they are true missionaries, true apostles of health."
It is a strong personal desire to practice medicine that drives the students here more than any affinity for Mr. Castro. Those from the United States in particular insist that they want to become doctors, not politicians. They recoil at the notion that they are propaganda tools for Cuba, as critics suggest.
"They ask no one to be political - it's your choice," said Jamar Williams, 27, of Brooklyn, a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany. "Many students decide to be political. They go to rallies and read political books. But you can lie low."
Still, the Cuban authorities are eager to show off this school as a sign of the country's compassion and its standing in the world. And some students cannot help responding to the sympathetic portrayal of Mr. Castro, whom the United States government tars as a dictator who suppresses his people.
"In my country many see Fidel Castro as a bad leader," said Rolando Bonilla, 23, a Panamanian who is in his second year of the six-year program. "My view has changed. I now know what he represents for this country. I identify with him."
Fátima Flores, 20, of Mexico sympathized with Mr. Castro's government even before she was accepted for the program. "When we become doctors we can spread his influence," she said. "Medicine is not just something scientific. It's a way of serving the public. Look at Che."
Che Guevara was an Argentine medical doctor before he became a revolutionary who fought alongside Mr. Castro in the rugged reaches of eastern Cuba and then lost his life in Bolivia while further spreading the cause.
Tahirah Benyard, 27, a first-year student from Newark, said it was Cuba's offer to send doctors to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which was rejected by the Bush administration, that prompted her to take a look at medical education in Cuba.
"I saw my people dying," she said. "There was no one willing to help. The government was saying everything is going to be fine."
She said she had been rejected by several American medical schools but could not have afforded their high costs anyway. Like other students from the United States, she was screened for the Cuba program by Pastors for Peace, a New York organization opposed to Washington's trade embargo against the island.
Ms. Benyard hopes that one day she will be able to practice in poor neighborhoods back home. Whether her education, which is decidedly low tech, is up to American standards remains to be seen, although Cedric Edwards, the first American student to graduate, last year, passed his medical boards in the United States.
If she makes it, Ms. Benyard will become one of a small pool of African-American doctors. Only about 6 percent of practicing physicians are members of minority groups, says the Association of American Medical Colleges, which recently began its own program to increase the number of minority medical students.
Even before they were accepted into Cuba's program, most of the Americans here said they had misgivings about the health care system in their own country. There is too much of a focus on the bottom line, they said, and not enough compassion for the poor.
"Democracy is a great principle," said Mr. Williams, who wears long dreadlocks pulled back behind his head. "The idea that people can speak for themselves and govern themselves is a great concept. But people must be educated, and in order to be educated, people need health."
The education the students are receiving here extends outside the classroom.
"I've learned to become a minimalist," Mr. Williams said. "I don't necessarily need my iPod, all my gadgets and gizmos, to survive."
There are also fewer food options. The menu can be described as rice and beans and more rice and beans. Living conditions are more rugged in other respects as well. The electricity goes out frequently. Internet access is limited. Toilet paper and soap are rationed. Sometimes the water taps are dry.
Then there is the issue of personal space.
"Being in a room with 18 girls, it teaches you patience," said Ms. Benyard, who was used to her one-bedroom apartment back home and described her current living conditions as like a military barracks.
Other students cited the American government's embargo as their biggest frustration. The blockade, which is what the Cuban government and many of the American students call it, means no care packages, no visits from Mom and Dad, and the threat that their government might penalize them for coming here.
Last year Washington ordered the students home, but the decision was reversed after protests from the Congressional Black Caucus, which supports the program.
One topic that does not come up in classes is the specific ailment that put Mr. Castro in the hospital, forced him to cede power to his brother Raúl and has kept him out of the public eye since late July. His diagnosis, like so much else in Cuba, is a state secret.
Peace, Agustin.
New York Times, December 8, 2006
Havana Journal
Hippocrates Meets Fidel, and Even U.S. Students Enroll
Jose Goitia for The New York Times
Nancy Gonzáles, center, using a cadaver to teach anatomy to Jamar Williams, left, of Brooklyn and others.
By MARC LACEY
Published: December 8, 2006
HAVANA, Dec. 7 - Anatomy is a part of medical education everywhere. Biochemistry, too. But a course in Cuban history?
Enlarge This Image
Jose Goitia for The New York Times
Students from many countries at the Latin American School of Medical Sciences, founded by Fidel Castro, on a campus just outside Havana.
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.
Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an ulcer and treat hypertension but also to expound on the principles put forward by "el comandante."
It was President Castro himself who in the late 1990s came up with the idea for this place, which gives potential doctors from throughout the Americas and Africa not just the A B C's of medicine but also the basic philosophy behind offering good health care to the struggling masses.
The Cuban government offers full scholarships to poor students from abroad, and many, including 90 or so Americans, have jumped at the chance of a free medical education, even with a bit of Communist theory thrown in.
"They are completing the dreams of our comandante," said the dean, Dr. Juan D. Carrizo Estévez. "As he said, they are true missionaries, true apostles of health."
It is a strong personal desire to practice medicine that drives the students here more than any affinity for Mr. Castro. Those from the United States in particular insist that they want to become doctors, not politicians. They recoil at the notion that they are propaganda tools for Cuba, as critics suggest.
"They ask no one to be political - it's your choice," said Jamar Williams, 27, of Brooklyn, a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany. "Many students decide to be political. They go to rallies and read political books. But you can lie low."
Still, the Cuban authorities are eager to show off this school as a sign of the country's compassion and its standing in the world. And some students cannot help responding to the sympathetic portrayal of Mr. Castro, whom the United States government tars as a dictator who suppresses his people.
"In my country many see Fidel Castro as a bad leader," said Rolando Bonilla, 23, a Panamanian who is in his second year of the six-year program. "My view has changed. I now know what he represents for this country. I identify with him."
Fátima Flores, 20, of Mexico sympathized with Mr. Castro's government even before she was accepted for the program. "When we become doctors we can spread his influence," she said. "Medicine is not just something scientific. It's a way of serving the public. Look at Che."
Che Guevara was an Argentine medical doctor before he became a revolutionary who fought alongside Mr. Castro in the rugged reaches of eastern Cuba and then lost his life in Bolivia while further spreading the cause.
Tahirah Benyard, 27, a first-year student from Newark, said it was Cuba's offer to send doctors to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which was rejected by the Bush administration, that prompted her to take a look at medical education in Cuba.
"I saw my people dying," she said. "There was no one willing to help. The government was saying everything is going to be fine."
She said she had been rejected by several American medical schools but could not have afforded their high costs anyway. Like other students from the United States, she was screened for the Cuba program by Pastors for Peace, a New York organization opposed to Washington's trade embargo against the island.
Ms. Benyard hopes that one day she will be able to practice in poor neighborhoods back home. Whether her education, which is decidedly low tech, is up to American standards remains to be seen, although Cedric Edwards, the first American student to graduate, last year, passed his medical boards in the United States.
If she makes it, Ms. Benyard will become one of a small pool of African-American doctors. Only about 6 percent of practicing physicians are members of minority groups, says the Association of American Medical Colleges, which recently began its own program to increase the number of minority medical students.
Even before they were accepted into Cuba's program, most of the Americans here said they had misgivings about the health care system in their own country. There is too much of a focus on the bottom line, they said, and not enough compassion for the poor.
"Democracy is a great principle," said Mr. Williams, who wears long dreadlocks pulled back behind his head. "The idea that people can speak for themselves and govern themselves is a great concept. But people must be educated, and in order to be educated, people need health."
The education the students are receiving here extends outside the classroom.
"I've learned to become a minimalist," Mr. Williams said. "I don't necessarily need my iPod, all my gadgets and gizmos, to survive."
There are also fewer food options. The menu can be described as rice and beans and more rice and beans. Living conditions are more rugged in other respects as well. The electricity goes out frequently. Internet access is limited. Toilet paper and soap are rationed. Sometimes the water taps are dry.
Then there is the issue of personal space.
"Being in a room with 18 girls, it teaches you patience," said Ms. Benyard, who was used to her one-bedroom apartment back home and described her current living conditions as like a military barracks.
Other students cited the American government's embargo as their biggest frustration. The blockade, which is what the Cuban government and many of the American students call it, means no care packages, no visits from Mom and Dad, and the threat that their government might penalize them for coming here.
Last year Washington ordered the students home, but the decision was reversed after protests from the Congressional Black Caucus, which supports the program.
One topic that does not come up in classes is the specific ailment that put Mr. Castro in the hospital, forced him to cede power to his brother Raúl and has kept him out of the public eye since late July. His diagnosis, like so much else in Cuba, is a state secret.
Required Reading for last week of class
Please read the following articles posted below (class website). You will be asked about them in your final. Peace.
1. Violence Against Women: Stories You Rarely Hear About
2. Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala
3. Feminism’s New Faces
4. Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
5. Off the fence
6. U.S.-CUBAN RELATIONS
7. Neoliberalist rethink neoliberalism
1. Violence Against Women: Stories You Rarely Hear About
2. Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala
3. Feminism’s New Faces
4. Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
5. Off the fence
6. U.S.-CUBAN RELATIONS
7. Neoliberalist rethink neoliberalism
Violence Against Women: Stories You Rarely Hear About
Violence Against Women: Stories You Rarely Hear About
23 November 2006
UNITED NATIONS, New York—Every day, women all over the world are abducted into forced marriage; subjected to harmful traditional practices; married, while still children, to far older men; and injured through gang rape and rape with foreign objects—usually during conflict. In Guatemala, the death toll of murdered and mutilated women has already reached more than 500 for this year alone and has climbed steadily during the last five years. In 2005, 665 women were found murdered, compared to 494 in 2004. For a small country of 12 millions, these numbers are alarming and by far surpass those of the better-known homicides of young women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Every year, the plight of these women is too often ignored, consigned to the back pages of newspapers or relegated to no more than a passing mention in mainstream broadcast media—if at all.
To kick off the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is highlighting five under-reported stories relating to gender-based violence for 2006.
These stories are as hidden as they are diverse. They include:
The rising tide of ‘bridenapping’—the abduction, rape and forced marriage of young women throughout Central Asia;
Breast-ironing, a traditional practice in a number of West African countries that involves crushing the breasts of young girls in order to deter male attention;
The epidemic of traumatic fistula in Africa, which is caused by gang rape and often the forced insertion of foreign objects into the rape victim. This results in the tearing of the delicate tissues separating the birth canal from the bowel and/or the bladder. Seriously injured and psychologically traumatized, the victim is left incontinent, leaking faeces, urine, or both. Too often, her family and community rejects her, to live out the remainder of her life as a pariah—doubly stigmatized—both by the rape itself and its terrible consequences.
The ongoing femicide of women in the Central American country of Guatemala. Unlike the killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez, on the El Paso/Mexico border, the wholesale murder and mutilation of Guatemala’s women continues to be enacted under a cloak of media silence and official neglect.
Child marriage—the forced marriage of girl children—most often against their will, to (usually) older men. Most of these marriages take place in the world’s poorest nations and mean girls are unable to complete their education; are at greater risk of being exploited, of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and of dying or being injured in childbirth owing to the fact that their bodies are too immature to withstand the rigours of birth.
To learn more about five under reported stories on gender-based violence, please visit www.unfpa.org.
***
The United Nations Population Fund is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.
For more information, please contact:
New York: Patricia Leidl, Tel: 1-212-297-5088, mobile: 1-917-535-9508, leidl@unfpa.org;
Bangkok: William Ryan, Tel: +66 2 288 2446; mobile +66-89-897-6984, ryanw@unfpa.org;
Geneva: Siri Tellier, Tel: +41-22-917-8571, tellier@unfpa.org;
Mexico City: Trygve Olfarnes, Tel: +5255 5250-7977, olfarnes@unfpa.org.
23 November 2006
UNITED NATIONS, New York—Every day, women all over the world are abducted into forced marriage; subjected to harmful traditional practices; married, while still children, to far older men; and injured through gang rape and rape with foreign objects—usually during conflict. In Guatemala, the death toll of murdered and mutilated women has already reached more than 500 for this year alone and has climbed steadily during the last five years. In 2005, 665 women were found murdered, compared to 494 in 2004. For a small country of 12 millions, these numbers are alarming and by far surpass those of the better-known homicides of young women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Every year, the plight of these women is too often ignored, consigned to the back pages of newspapers or relegated to no more than a passing mention in mainstream broadcast media—if at all.
To kick off the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is highlighting five under-reported stories relating to gender-based violence for 2006.
These stories are as hidden as they are diverse. They include:
The rising tide of ‘bridenapping’—the abduction, rape and forced marriage of young women throughout Central Asia;
Breast-ironing, a traditional practice in a number of West African countries that involves crushing the breasts of young girls in order to deter male attention;
The epidemic of traumatic fistula in Africa, which is caused by gang rape and often the forced insertion of foreign objects into the rape victim. This results in the tearing of the delicate tissues separating the birth canal from the bowel and/or the bladder. Seriously injured and psychologically traumatized, the victim is left incontinent, leaking faeces, urine, or both. Too often, her family and community rejects her, to live out the remainder of her life as a pariah—doubly stigmatized—both by the rape itself and its terrible consequences.
The ongoing femicide of women in the Central American country of Guatemala. Unlike the killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez, on the El Paso/Mexico border, the wholesale murder and mutilation of Guatemala’s women continues to be enacted under a cloak of media silence and official neglect.
Child marriage—the forced marriage of girl children—most often against their will, to (usually) older men. Most of these marriages take place in the world’s poorest nations and mean girls are unable to complete their education; are at greater risk of being exploited, of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and of dying or being injured in childbirth owing to the fact that their bodies are too immature to withstand the rigours of birth.
To learn more about five under reported stories on gender-based violence, please visit www.unfpa.org.
***
The United Nations Population Fund is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.
For more information, please contact:
New York: Patricia Leidl, Tel: 1-212-297-5088, mobile: 1-917-535-9508, leidl@unfpa.org;
Bangkok: William Ryan, Tel: +66 2 288 2446; mobile +66-89-897-6984, ryanw@unfpa.org;
Geneva: Siri Tellier, Tel: +41-22-917-8571, tellier@unfpa.org;
Mexico City: Trygve Olfarnes, Tel: +5255 5250-7977, olfarnes@unfpa.org.
Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala
Go to UN article for photos
Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala
Activists call for the international community and national government to halt the ‘femicide’
Maria Elena Peralta visits her murdered sister's crypt.
Photo: Carina Wint
22 November 2006
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala— Above Guatemala City morgue and forensic medical service, clouds of vultures circle and dip. The smell of death and cleaning chemicals hits visitors with the force of a hammer. In Guatemala, a country that is still struggling to emerge from under the shadow of more than three decades of civil war, an estimated two women a day die a violent and often gruesome death. And the number of murdered females is steadily rising: 494 in 2004, 665 last year, and, as of 5 November, 516 and counting. Many of the victims have been mutilated and raped. For a country of 12 million, the numbers are alarming and surpass by far those of the better-known murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Speaking about the dismembered corpses, Doctor Mario Guerra says, “We see those often.” The coroner’s open, red pick-up truck brings in the bodies – many of which have been dumped throughout the city – in ditches, alleyways, parks and the city dump. Some of the corpses remain unidentified. Those are posthumously christened XX (Jane Doe) and buried at Verbena, the public graveyard next door.
Although the level of violence in Guatemala is high for both sexes, and more men than women are killed every year, women’s groups point out that women and girls are often killed because of their gender – raped, dismembered or murdered during domestic disputes or by gangs knows as maras(gangs of criminal youth). “These murders are carried out with such viciousness that it makes them stand out from other crimes,” says Nadine Gasman, UNFPA Representative for Guatemala.
Women’s groups use the Spanish-language term feminicido – female genocide – to describe the growing tide of violence, murder, rape and mutilation of women that is now sweeping across this Central American country.
Some of the murders display a shocking level of violence. The murder of Nancy Peralta, a 30-year-old accounting student who was abducted from the San Carlos University in Guatemala City is a case in point. Nancy was abducted and killed on 1 February 2001. Family members found her three days later at the city morgue where she had been admitted as yet another ‘XX’. Her throat had been slit and 48 stab wounds punctured her torso, legs and arms.
Nearly five years later, her family is still hoping that her killer may be caught and brought to justice. Nancy’s sister, Maria Elena Peralta (34), followed the investigation from its beginning, and has now dedicated her life to helping other victims and their families at the Survivors’ Foundation, a government-funded group that works to protect the legal rights of victims and their families. The Foundation also offers psychological and medical care.
The deterioration of our society is even more worrisome than the deaths. What kind of a future awaits our young people, if they internalize these values?
--Alba Maldonado
Her family’s attempts to find justice for Nancy have been blocked by stonewalling, official indifference and downright disrespect. Maria Elena says her family provided the Public Ministry – the office responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes – with several leads that they believed relevant to her sister’s case. “But instead of investigating the leads, they started investigating us, her own family,” she recalls. Public Ministry officials also claimed that the victim had brought on her own misfortune by being a “gang member and a whore”. Public Ministry officials declined to be interviewed for this article on the grounds that the relevant officials were on vacation.
Back at the city morgue, forensic doctors labour among the dead with little assistance from modern technology. The morgue has access to a laboratory, but no DNA testing facilities exist in Guatemala. Critics charge that forensic investigations are often sloppy, and the official cause of death is frequently inaccurate and misleading. In most cases, the victims’ clothing, which is often the most valuable and only source of evidence, is either burned or handed back to the family. Too often, local authorities attribute the cause of death to gunshot wounds, while evidence of torture goes undocumented. In a number of instances, the police or pathologist have even ascribed the wrong gender to murder victims.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint a single cause for the femicide in Guatemala. Domestic violence, drugs and gangs are only one aspect of a much broader picture. Forensic studies have identified the maras' calling card: dismembered, often female, corpses left at the scene. But while the media has focussed primarily on those killings that bear the maras' unmistakeable signature, activists also point the finger at an undercurrent of corruption and abuse of power among the authorities themselves. All of this, coupled with the low status of women in the Guatemalan society, add up to a lethal mix.
A photograph of one of the Guatemalan women who have gone missing.
Photo: Carina Wint
It was a police officer who shot and killed Santos Marlen Flores, a 32-year-old mother of three, in her own home outside of Guatemala City. The officer was angry because Marlen’s half brother had fallen in love with his wife. The pair decamped together last June – leaving Marlen to face down the officer’s rage. One day he arrived at the family house demanding to know the couple’s whereabouts, which Marlen did not know. Angry and frustrated, the police officer returned a few days later and shot her four times. After struggling to stay alive for three weeks, Marlen died. In this case, unlike so many others, the justice system seems to be working: the police officer is in custody, awaiting trial.
Not all of the violence meted out to Guatemala’s women ends in death – thanks, in part, to the Survivors’ Foundation. On 4 October, 15-year-old ‘Ana’ was on her way to school when two men grabbed her by the arms. They forced her onto a bus and took her to the infamous Pavón prison, an overcrowded jail that, until recently, had the dubious distinction of being controlled by its 1,500 inmates.*
The two men, who identified her by a photo they were carrying, told her that her uncle, a gang member going by the nickname ‘Smiley’ had sent for her. At about 9 a.m. she was led through the gates of the prison to a section where mareros, or gang members, serve their sentences. The men who had brought her left as soon as they had dropped her off.
Once inside the prison, she was met by Smiley who chatted with her for a while, then started smoking marijuana. More prisoners came to join them, and soon they demanded that Ana remove her clothes. Then they started raping her. When she screamed, they put a rag in her mouth. Six hours later, she had been raped by 21 prisoners.
For Ana, this was the latest chapter in a three-year nightmare of sexual abuse. She had been coerced into having sex several times a week with gang members who lived in her neighbourhood. They told her they would kill her entire family if she said anything: first her mother, then her sisters, then her grandfather. She would be the last one to go, and it was she, they reminded her, who would suffer the most.
Now Ana is living in a safe house run by the Survivors’ Foundation at a secret location in Guatemala. Norma Cruz, Director of the Foundation notes that Ana’s case will receive a great deal of attention when it goes to court, because it potentially implicates high-ranking officials both in the police and prison system. “People in Guatemala receive the wrong messages about violence,” she says. “It is seen as acceptable, and the impunity tells people that they can go ahead and repeat the crimes.”
“The problem is so complex that it is almost impossible to pick a single factor that would help improve the justice system, but if I had to pick one it would be the investigation procedure,” says Mirna Ponce, a member of the Guatemalan Congress, who represents the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front.
Alba Maldonado, head of the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity party, member of Congress, and principal author of a study exploring the killing of women in Guatemala, says the violence is rooted in the country’s 36-year civil war, which ended in a peace agreement in 1996. As with most countries recovering from civil war, the killing goes on long after the fighting has stopped.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand people died during those years, she says. "There was never an investigation which led to the capture and punishment of assassins and torturers. Those people are out on the street, in government positions, and at all levels of power.”
About 97 per cent of murder cases are never solved. UNFPA is now buttressing efforts both within the Guatemalan government and civil society to tackle the situation. These efforts include support to an inter-sectoral commission headed by the Presidential Secretariat for Women, which will, among other thing, propose legal reforms. Support also includes plans to offer legal assistance to families of murder victims through a civil society organization.
“The deterioration of our society is even more worrisome than the deaths. What kind of a future awaits our young people, if they internalize these values?” Maldonado asks.
###
* On October 24, Pavón was raided by 3,000 soldiers and police armed with teargas, armoured cars and assault rifles. Inmates were moved to another prison.
Go to UN article for photos
Murder and Mutilation Stalk the Women of Guatemala
Activists call for the international community and national government to halt the ‘femicide’
Maria Elena Peralta visits her murdered sister's crypt.
Photo: Carina Wint
22 November 2006
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala— Above Guatemala City morgue and forensic medical service, clouds of vultures circle and dip. The smell of death and cleaning chemicals hits visitors with the force of a hammer. In Guatemala, a country that is still struggling to emerge from under the shadow of more than three decades of civil war, an estimated two women a day die a violent and often gruesome death. And the number of murdered females is steadily rising: 494 in 2004, 665 last year, and, as of 5 November, 516 and counting. Many of the victims have been mutilated and raped. For a country of 12 million, the numbers are alarming and surpass by far those of the better-known murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Speaking about the dismembered corpses, Doctor Mario Guerra says, “We see those often.” The coroner’s open, red pick-up truck brings in the bodies – many of which have been dumped throughout the city – in ditches, alleyways, parks and the city dump. Some of the corpses remain unidentified. Those are posthumously christened XX (Jane Doe) and buried at Verbena, the public graveyard next door.
Although the level of violence in Guatemala is high for both sexes, and more men than women are killed every year, women’s groups point out that women and girls are often killed because of their gender – raped, dismembered or murdered during domestic disputes or by gangs knows as maras(gangs of criminal youth). “These murders are carried out with such viciousness that it makes them stand out from other crimes,” says Nadine Gasman, UNFPA Representative for Guatemala.
Women’s groups use the Spanish-language term feminicido – female genocide – to describe the growing tide of violence, murder, rape and mutilation of women that is now sweeping across this Central American country.
Some of the murders display a shocking level of violence. The murder of Nancy Peralta, a 30-year-old accounting student who was abducted from the San Carlos University in Guatemala City is a case in point. Nancy was abducted and killed on 1 February 2001. Family members found her three days later at the city morgue where she had been admitted as yet another ‘XX’. Her throat had been slit and 48 stab wounds punctured her torso, legs and arms.
Nearly five years later, her family is still hoping that her killer may be caught and brought to justice. Nancy’s sister, Maria Elena Peralta (34), followed the investigation from its beginning, and has now dedicated her life to helping other victims and their families at the Survivors’ Foundation, a government-funded group that works to protect the legal rights of victims and their families. The Foundation also offers psychological and medical care.
The deterioration of our society is even more worrisome than the deaths. What kind of a future awaits our young people, if they internalize these values?
--Alba Maldonado
Her family’s attempts to find justice for Nancy have been blocked by stonewalling, official indifference and downright disrespect. Maria Elena says her family provided the Public Ministry – the office responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes – with several leads that they believed relevant to her sister’s case. “But instead of investigating the leads, they started investigating us, her own family,” she recalls. Public Ministry officials also claimed that the victim had brought on her own misfortune by being a “gang member and a whore”. Public Ministry officials declined to be interviewed for this article on the grounds that the relevant officials were on vacation.
Back at the city morgue, forensic doctors labour among the dead with little assistance from modern technology. The morgue has access to a laboratory, but no DNA testing facilities exist in Guatemala. Critics charge that forensic investigations are often sloppy, and the official cause of death is frequently inaccurate and misleading. In most cases, the victims’ clothing, which is often the most valuable and only source of evidence, is either burned or handed back to the family. Too often, local authorities attribute the cause of death to gunshot wounds, while evidence of torture goes undocumented. In a number of instances, the police or pathologist have even ascribed the wrong gender to murder victims.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint a single cause for the femicide in Guatemala. Domestic violence, drugs and gangs are only one aspect of a much broader picture. Forensic studies have identified the maras' calling card: dismembered, often female, corpses left at the scene. But while the media has focussed primarily on those killings that bear the maras' unmistakeable signature, activists also point the finger at an undercurrent of corruption and abuse of power among the authorities themselves. All of this, coupled with the low status of women in the Guatemalan society, add up to a lethal mix.
A photograph of one of the Guatemalan women who have gone missing.
Photo: Carina Wint
It was a police officer who shot and killed Santos Marlen Flores, a 32-year-old mother of three, in her own home outside of Guatemala City. The officer was angry because Marlen’s half brother had fallen in love with his wife. The pair decamped together last June – leaving Marlen to face down the officer’s rage. One day he arrived at the family house demanding to know the couple’s whereabouts, which Marlen did not know. Angry and frustrated, the police officer returned a few days later and shot her four times. After struggling to stay alive for three weeks, Marlen died. In this case, unlike so many others, the justice system seems to be working: the police officer is in custody, awaiting trial.
Not all of the violence meted out to Guatemala’s women ends in death – thanks, in part, to the Survivors’ Foundation. On 4 October, 15-year-old ‘Ana’ was on her way to school when two men grabbed her by the arms. They forced her onto a bus and took her to the infamous Pavón prison, an overcrowded jail that, until recently, had the dubious distinction of being controlled by its 1,500 inmates.*
The two men, who identified her by a photo they were carrying, told her that her uncle, a gang member going by the nickname ‘Smiley’ had sent for her. At about 9 a.m. she was led through the gates of the prison to a section where mareros, or gang members, serve their sentences. The men who had brought her left as soon as they had dropped her off.
Once inside the prison, she was met by Smiley who chatted with her for a while, then started smoking marijuana. More prisoners came to join them, and soon they demanded that Ana remove her clothes. Then they started raping her. When she screamed, they put a rag in her mouth. Six hours later, she had been raped by 21 prisoners.
For Ana, this was the latest chapter in a three-year nightmare of sexual abuse. She had been coerced into having sex several times a week with gang members who lived in her neighbourhood. They told her they would kill her entire family if she said anything: first her mother, then her sisters, then her grandfather. She would be the last one to go, and it was she, they reminded her, who would suffer the most.
Now Ana is living in a safe house run by the Survivors’ Foundation at a secret location in Guatemala. Norma Cruz, Director of the Foundation notes that Ana’s case will receive a great deal of attention when it goes to court, because it potentially implicates high-ranking officials both in the police and prison system. “People in Guatemala receive the wrong messages about violence,” she says. “It is seen as acceptable, and the impunity tells people that they can go ahead and repeat the crimes.”
“The problem is so complex that it is almost impossible to pick a single factor that would help improve the justice system, but if I had to pick one it would be the investigation procedure,” says Mirna Ponce, a member of the Guatemalan Congress, who represents the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front.
Alba Maldonado, head of the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity party, member of Congress, and principal author of a study exploring the killing of women in Guatemala, says the violence is rooted in the country’s 36-year civil war, which ended in a peace agreement in 1996. As with most countries recovering from civil war, the killing goes on long after the fighting has stopped.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand people died during those years, she says. "There was never an investigation which led to the capture and punishment of assassins and torturers. Those people are out on the street, in government positions, and at all levels of power.”
About 97 per cent of murder cases are never solved. UNFPA is now buttressing efforts both within the Guatemalan government and civil society to tackle the situation. These efforts include support to an inter-sectoral commission headed by the Presidential Secretariat for Women, which will, among other thing, propose legal reforms. Support also includes plans to offer legal assistance to families of murder victims through a civil society organization.
“The deterioration of our society is even more worrisome than the deaths. What kind of a future awaits our young people, if they internalize these values?” Maldonado asks.
###
* On October 24, Pavón was raided by 3,000 soldiers and police armed with teargas, armoured cars and assault rifles. Inmates were moved to another prison.
Go to UN article for photos
Feminism’s New Faces
Feminism’s New Faces
By Joan Dawson
There is a simple expression that says there are two sides to every coin. Well, here is an article that will justify that saying. First, I’ll start with the bad news and then I’ll end on a good note. Bear with me as I go through the bad news. It’s ghastly. Oh, and I should mention, this article is in recognition of Nov. 25; ``International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.’’ That should give you a heads up _ pun intended.
First, the bad news: violence against women is on par with that of the Holocaust. Every year we lose 1.5 to 3 million women to gender-based violence, according to the Economist. Women face: bride burnings, honor killings, stoning, early marriage, sex selective abortions, female infanticide, sexual trafficking, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, incest, rape, sexual harassment, pornography, dismemberment, mutilation and murder. If you’re counting, that’s at least 16 forms of violence, or human rights abuses. Statistically, one in three women will suffer from violence in their lifetime.
In the world, there are several hot spots, in particular, where the life of a woman is given a low value. In Russia, a woman is killed every hour. There are only 10 shelters in the entire country. In Juarez, Mexico, young women, 14 to 22 years old, are raped, mutilated and killed. Their bodies are discarded in the desert. This has been going on since 1993. No one has been legitimately convicted. In Guatemala, 2200 women have been killed in five years. Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize the killings. On the continent of Africa, in countries undergoing conflict, mass rape, often resulting in HIV infection, has been inflicted upon women and young girls. Gang rapes and rape with instruments such as weapons or sharp objects have been widely used. These are just a few of the injustices directed at women in the world today. Often the perpetrators are men; often the injustice is compounded with impunity.
Now, for the good news: Men have been educating themselves and organizing themselves to help in a cause that was once traditionally met with silence, or believed to be an inevitable part of a woman’s life, or (gasp) scorned feminists as male-bashers. Now, people who fight child abuse are not adult-haters. And people who fight poverty are not rich-bashers. So, let’s set the record straight, this is not about hate. This is about raising awareness and working towards the elimination of violence based on one’s gender.
Violence against women, although it’s existed for centuries or longer, was just recognized in the 1990s as a human rights abuse by organizations such as the UN. At the same time, a handful of Canadian men decided to speak out on the issue. These men started the white ribbon campaign. The campaign starts on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and ends December 6, the anniversary of the Montreal massacre where a gunman barged into a Montreal college screaming ``I hate feminists,’’ then targeted and killed 14 women.
In the U.S., there are similar groups: Men Against Sexual Violence, Men as Partners Program, Men Can Stop Rape, and others. As well, authors are taking up the cause. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has recently written two columns about misogyny. And Jack Holland wrote ``Misogyny: The world’s oldest prejudice.’’ Many other articles, books and studies are being done by men today.
In Asia, men are showing signs of doing likewise. Over in Japan, a group of about 20 men in Tokyo formed the National Chauvinistic Husbands Association. Their goal? To become loving husbands! Not to be outdone, Korea has recently published a book called ``Male Feminists.’’ In it, the author explains how feminism is fair and ideal, and how it can be beneficial to men as well as women.
So there you have it, two sides of a coin. In honor of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I applaud the brave men who have taken up this cause. You, like all feminists, face ridicule, silence and rejection. Despite these challenges, you courageously defend your principles of justice. You strive for non-violence and harmony. You are welcome new faces. You are lending credibility to a cause that does not just face women, but also the children and men that love them.
Nov. 25 is followed by 16 Days of Hope to eliminate gender-based violence. Men, you are giving us hope and we thank you for it.
The writer is an editor of ESL books in Mapo-gu, Seoul.
* * *
The Korea Times welcomes our readers' contributions to Letters to the Editor and Thoughts of The Times. The article should be preferably submitted by e-mail to opinion@koreatimes.co.kr and not exceed 900 words. _ ED.
By Joan Dawson
There is a simple expression that says there are two sides to every coin. Well, here is an article that will justify that saying. First, I’ll start with the bad news and then I’ll end on a good note. Bear with me as I go through the bad news. It’s ghastly. Oh, and I should mention, this article is in recognition of Nov. 25; ``International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.’’ That should give you a heads up _ pun intended.
First, the bad news: violence against women is on par with that of the Holocaust. Every year we lose 1.5 to 3 million women to gender-based violence, according to the Economist. Women face: bride burnings, honor killings, stoning, early marriage, sex selective abortions, female infanticide, sexual trafficking, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, incest, rape, sexual harassment, pornography, dismemberment, mutilation and murder. If you’re counting, that’s at least 16 forms of violence, or human rights abuses. Statistically, one in three women will suffer from violence in their lifetime.
In the world, there are several hot spots, in particular, where the life of a woman is given a low value. In Russia, a woman is killed every hour. There are only 10 shelters in the entire country. In Juarez, Mexico, young women, 14 to 22 years old, are raped, mutilated and killed. Their bodies are discarded in the desert. This has been going on since 1993. No one has been legitimately convicted. In Guatemala, 2200 women have been killed in five years. Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize the killings. On the continent of Africa, in countries undergoing conflict, mass rape, often resulting in HIV infection, has been inflicted upon women and young girls. Gang rapes and rape with instruments such as weapons or sharp objects have been widely used. These are just a few of the injustices directed at women in the world today. Often the perpetrators are men; often the injustice is compounded with impunity.
Now, for the good news: Men have been educating themselves and organizing themselves to help in a cause that was once traditionally met with silence, or believed to be an inevitable part of a woman’s life, or (gasp) scorned feminists as male-bashers. Now, people who fight child abuse are not adult-haters. And people who fight poverty are not rich-bashers. So, let’s set the record straight, this is not about hate. This is about raising awareness and working towards the elimination of violence based on one’s gender.
Violence against women, although it’s existed for centuries or longer, was just recognized in the 1990s as a human rights abuse by organizations such as the UN. At the same time, a handful of Canadian men decided to speak out on the issue. These men started the white ribbon campaign. The campaign starts on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and ends December 6, the anniversary of the Montreal massacre where a gunman barged into a Montreal college screaming ``I hate feminists,’’ then targeted and killed 14 women.
In the U.S., there are similar groups: Men Against Sexual Violence, Men as Partners Program, Men Can Stop Rape, and others. As well, authors are taking up the cause. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has recently written two columns about misogyny. And Jack Holland wrote ``Misogyny: The world’s oldest prejudice.’’ Many other articles, books and studies are being done by men today.
In Asia, men are showing signs of doing likewise. Over in Japan, a group of about 20 men in Tokyo formed the National Chauvinistic Husbands Association. Their goal? To become loving husbands! Not to be outdone, Korea has recently published a book called ``Male Feminists.’’ In it, the author explains how feminism is fair and ideal, and how it can be beneficial to men as well as women.
So there you have it, two sides of a coin. In honor of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I applaud the brave men who have taken up this cause. You, like all feminists, face ridicule, silence and rejection. Despite these challenges, you courageously defend your principles of justice. You strive for non-violence and harmony. You are welcome new faces. You are lending credibility to a cause that does not just face women, but also the children and men that love them.
Nov. 25 is followed by 16 Days of Hope to eliminate gender-based violence. Men, you are giving us hope and we thank you for it.
The writer is an editor of ESL books in Mapo-gu, Seoul.
* * *
The Korea Times welcomes our readers' contributions to Letters to the Editor and Thoughts of The Times. The article should be preferably submitted by e-mail to opinion@koreatimes.co.kr and not exceed 900 words. _ ED.
Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
Los Angeles Times
Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
Police jobs go unfilled and a terrorized public demands reform as the death toll grows in a drug smuggling war.
By Sam Enriquez and Richard Marosi
Times Staff Writers
November 23, 2006
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why.
"Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim chief begged.
One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring, and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.
Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police he dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace, leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that has claimed 170 lives since January.
This isn't the only border city where law and order are on the ropes.
In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world's worst and some state police have refused postings after the killings of more than a dozen officers, some at restaurants and on city streets.
Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said after a police commander was ambushed this month. The killing of police officers, he said, "speaks to the impunity of organized crime, that they think they're above the law, or protected."
As Mexico prepares for a peaceful transfer of power Dec. 1 with the inauguration of Felipe Calderon, the president-elect must take stock of the country's 2,000 drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.
"Calderon needs to apply the law or reform the law," said Nuevo Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, the mother of two teenage daughters. "We urgently need help."
The drug problem that spans the United States and Mexico neither starts nor ends in these two border cities. But a healthy chunk of U.S.-bound dope lumbers past each day.
"The number of addicts is growing," said Adan Rosa Ramos, 24, a recovering methamphetamine user who works at a rehabilitation house in Nuevo Laredo. "There's a lot more drugs on the street."
The proximity of these cities to the United States is a blessing and a curse. The Tijuana-San Diego frontier is the busiest border crossing in the world. At Nuevo Laredo, trucks and trains ferry more than 40% of the goods traded between the neighboring countries.
The two cities also account for the most lucrative smuggling routes in the hemisphere. The tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine seized by authorities each year is a fraction of what moves past them in trucks, cars, planes and tunnels.
Here's the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of economic development in Nuevo Laredo: "The U.S. checks maybe 10% of the trucks that pass. Any more than that and it slows commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances."
Battle for control of the Nuevo Laredo corridor pits the Pacific Coast Sinaloa cartel against the Gulf cartel, whose top gunmen defected from an elite Mexican army task force. The conflict has spread to the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, where nearly 600 people were believed killed in drug-related homicides this year.
In Tijuana, the August arrest of alleged drug cartel leader Francisco Javier Arellano Felix escalated a battle among rivals believed responsible this year for many of the 318 killings in that city.
With government all but ceding control of the border, civil society has fallen into disarray or been cowed into silence. Newspapers in Nuevo Laredo have stopped reporting drug killings under pressure from advertisers, government and drug dealers.
Residents learned a lesson from Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez, who was gunned down in June 2005 within hours of taking office. He'd pledged to stand up to drug traffickers, who presumably responded in kind.
Dominguez's replacement quit and the interim chief closed his office door during a recent interview and said he wouldn't speak a word about the drug business and didn't want to be identified.
His name isn't important, and apparently neither is his job. Most of the force of almost 800 police officers was fired last year for corruption. About 300 recruits are working, but they spend their days mostly staying out of sight and out of trouble.
Even with out-of-town recruiting trips, there are no takers for 300 police jobs, including the chief's slot. Starting salaries of $600 a month apparently aren't worth it.
"Last year was bad," said the La Paz funeral home's assistant director, Alvaro Ordañez Sanchez. "A lot of cops."
Tallying the 170 people shot, burned and garroted so far in the drug war, Ordañez estimated the toll in Nuevo Laredo would approach 200 this year. That would make up about 10% of the drug-related homicides in Mexico, even though Nuevo Laredo, a city of 380,000, accounts for less than 0.4% of the nation's population.
Ordañez, whose firm also performs autopsies for the city, seems to be the only one willing to talk about the drug violence.
Elizabeth Hernandez, a state prosecutor responsible for deciding whether a homicide in Nuevo Laredo should be investigated by state or federal authorities, said she didn't know how many people had been killed.
"I've only been on the job nine months," said Hernandez, who suggested a visit to the federal prosecutor's office.
Assistant federal prosecutor Jose Enrique Corona rolled his eyes an hour later. "Of course she knows," he said.
When asked whether his office was investigating the slaying of Dominguez, the 56-year-old father who served only six hours as chief, Corona said the case was being handled by federal investigators in Mexico City. Prosecutors in Mexico City said it wasn't theirs. The truth is, few killings are investigated and almost none are solved.
"This is a city of lies," said one of the local reporters whose daily newspaper no longer covers drug killings. He was afraid to be named. "Last year we reported on all the killings, and business and government officials blamed us for disrupting commerce. Now police say nothing happens here. What a paradise."
Residents take pains to dodge the menace of drug trafficking. Some deny it exists. Look at the peaceful plazas, say boosters, and the thousands of trucks that ferry commercial goods daily to and from the United States.
"If you behave on the streets, you won't get into trouble," Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez Flores told potential investors during a business forum in Nuevo Laredo, which is linked by bridges with Laredo, Texas. An unofficial tally by the newspaper Milenio found 145 police officers were slain this year, a dozen of whom were from Tamaulipas.
When the Tijuana mayor favorably compared his city's crime rate with that of San Diego, some residents were stunned.
"Apparently, he's living somewhere else," said Genaro de la Torre, leader of a citizens safety group that helped organize a recent anti-violence march. "He needs to suffer what the people have suffered to realize what is really going on."
President-elect Calderon has proposed better police training, consolidation of federal law enforcement units into a single agency and creation of a national crime database.
"During the last few years, and really the last months, violence and organized crime have grown in an alarming way," Calderon told a business group last week. "We can't accept that as the image of Mexico. We can't have a daily image of executions and other bloody acts that go unpunished."
The Lopez family, which used to run a money exchange house on Nuevo Laredo's central plaza, is still waiting for justice. Thugs kidnapped one brother last month and returned the next morning for a second brother.
"He grabbed onto the pole of a payphone and wouldn't let go, so they shot him in the leg," said a reporter who interviewed witnesses. "He still wouldn't let go, so they shot him in the arm and took him. People said they called police, but nobody came."
*
sam.enriquez@latimes.com
richard.marosi@latimes.com
Enriquez reported from Nuevo Laredo and Marosi from Tijuana. Carlos Martínez and Cecilia Sánchez of The Times' Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.
Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
Police jobs go unfilled and a terrorized public demands reform as the death toll grows in a drug smuggling war.
By Sam Enriquez and Richard Marosi
Times Staff Writers
November 23, 2006
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why.
"Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim chief begged.
One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring, and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.
Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police he dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace, leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that has claimed 170 lives since January.
This isn't the only border city where law and order are on the ropes.
In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world's worst and some state police have refused postings after the killings of more than a dozen officers, some at restaurants and on city streets.
Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said after a police commander was ambushed this month. The killing of police officers, he said, "speaks to the impunity of organized crime, that they think they're above the law, or protected."
As Mexico prepares for a peaceful transfer of power Dec. 1 with the inauguration of Felipe Calderon, the president-elect must take stock of the country's 2,000 drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.
"Calderon needs to apply the law or reform the law," said Nuevo Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, the mother of two teenage daughters. "We urgently need help."
The drug problem that spans the United States and Mexico neither starts nor ends in these two border cities. But a healthy chunk of U.S.-bound dope lumbers past each day.
"The number of addicts is growing," said Adan Rosa Ramos, 24, a recovering methamphetamine user who works at a rehabilitation house in Nuevo Laredo. "There's a lot more drugs on the street."
The proximity of these cities to the United States is a blessing and a curse. The Tijuana-San Diego frontier is the busiest border crossing in the world. At Nuevo Laredo, trucks and trains ferry more than 40% of the goods traded between the neighboring countries.
The two cities also account for the most lucrative smuggling routes in the hemisphere. The tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine seized by authorities each year is a fraction of what moves past them in trucks, cars, planes and tunnels.
Here's the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of economic development in Nuevo Laredo: "The U.S. checks maybe 10% of the trucks that pass. Any more than that and it slows commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances."
Battle for control of the Nuevo Laredo corridor pits the Pacific Coast Sinaloa cartel against the Gulf cartel, whose top gunmen defected from an elite Mexican army task force. The conflict has spread to the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, where nearly 600 people were believed killed in drug-related homicides this year.
In Tijuana, the August arrest of alleged drug cartel leader Francisco Javier Arellano Felix escalated a battle among rivals believed responsible this year for many of the 318 killings in that city.
With government all but ceding control of the border, civil society has fallen into disarray or been cowed into silence. Newspapers in Nuevo Laredo have stopped reporting drug killings under pressure from advertisers, government and drug dealers.
Residents learned a lesson from Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez, who was gunned down in June 2005 within hours of taking office. He'd pledged to stand up to drug traffickers, who presumably responded in kind.
Dominguez's replacement quit and the interim chief closed his office door during a recent interview and said he wouldn't speak a word about the drug business and didn't want to be identified.
His name isn't important, and apparently neither is his job. Most of the force of almost 800 police officers was fired last year for corruption. About 300 recruits are working, but they spend their days mostly staying out of sight and out of trouble.
Even with out-of-town recruiting trips, there are no takers for 300 police jobs, including the chief's slot. Starting salaries of $600 a month apparently aren't worth it.
"Last year was bad," said the La Paz funeral home's assistant director, Alvaro Ordañez Sanchez. "A lot of cops."
Tallying the 170 people shot, burned and garroted so far in the drug war, Ordañez estimated the toll in Nuevo Laredo would approach 200 this year. That would make up about 10% of the drug-related homicides in Mexico, even though Nuevo Laredo, a city of 380,000, accounts for less than 0.4% of the nation's population.
Ordañez, whose firm also performs autopsies for the city, seems to be the only one willing to talk about the drug violence.
Elizabeth Hernandez, a state prosecutor responsible for deciding whether a homicide in Nuevo Laredo should be investigated by state or federal authorities, said she didn't know how many people had been killed.
"I've only been on the job nine months," said Hernandez, who suggested a visit to the federal prosecutor's office.
Assistant federal prosecutor Jose Enrique Corona rolled his eyes an hour later. "Of course she knows," he said.
When asked whether his office was investigating the slaying of Dominguez, the 56-year-old father who served only six hours as chief, Corona said the case was being handled by federal investigators in Mexico City. Prosecutors in Mexico City said it wasn't theirs. The truth is, few killings are investigated and almost none are solved.
"This is a city of lies," said one of the local reporters whose daily newspaper no longer covers drug killings. He was afraid to be named. "Last year we reported on all the killings, and business and government officials blamed us for disrupting commerce. Now police say nothing happens here. What a paradise."
Residents take pains to dodge the menace of drug trafficking. Some deny it exists. Look at the peaceful plazas, say boosters, and the thousands of trucks that ferry commercial goods daily to and from the United States.
"If you behave on the streets, you won't get into trouble," Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernandez Flores told potential investors during a business forum in Nuevo Laredo, which is linked by bridges with Laredo, Texas. An unofficial tally by the newspaper Milenio found 145 police officers were slain this year, a dozen of whom were from Tamaulipas.
When the Tijuana mayor favorably compared his city's crime rate with that of San Diego, some residents were stunned.
"Apparently, he's living somewhere else," said Genaro de la Torre, leader of a citizens safety group that helped organize a recent anti-violence march. "He needs to suffer what the people have suffered to realize what is really going on."
President-elect Calderon has proposed better police training, consolidation of federal law enforcement units into a single agency and creation of a national crime database.
"During the last few years, and really the last months, violence and organized crime have grown in an alarming way," Calderon told a business group last week. "We can't accept that as the image of Mexico. We can't have a daily image of executions and other bloody acts that go unpunished."
The Lopez family, which used to run a money exchange house on Nuevo Laredo's central plaza, is still waiting for justice. Thugs kidnapped one brother last month and returned the next morning for a second brother.
"He grabbed onto the pole of a payphone and wouldn't let go, so they shot him in the leg," said a reporter who interviewed witnesses. "He still wouldn't let go, so they shot him in the arm and took him. People said they called police, but nobody came."
*
sam.enriquez@latimes.com
richard.marosi@latimes.com
Enriquez reported from Nuevo Laredo and Marosi from Tijuana. Carlos Martínez and Cecilia Sánchez of The Times' Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.
Off the fence
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-richardson08dec08,0,3085167.story?coll=la-news-comment
EDITORIALS
Off the fence
Walls won't work, New Mexico's governor reminds us. Immigration reform must be comprehensive.
December 8, 2006
NEW MEXICO Gov. Bill Richardson, the California-born son of a Mexican mother, traveled to Washington on Thursday to declare his interest in two of the most elusive goals in American politics: comprehensive immigration reform and the presidency. The second may be more realistic than the first.
"I come here as a border state governor and a Hispanic American who knows that our nation can no longer afford to ignore the issue of illegal immigration," Richardson told a Georgetown University audience. "We need to stop exploiting the immigration problem and start solving it. We need to pass realistic laws and then enforce them rigorously."
Richardson's thoughtful speech was both a rebuke to Republican immigrant bashers and a challenge to Capitol Hill Democrats. But few will likely read beyond this line: "Securing the border must come first - but we must understand that building a fence will not in any way accomplish that objective."
That language may be on the absolutist side, but the New Mexico governor is absolutely right to point out that a multibillion-dollar border wall, on its own, is no "reform" at all. It would merely shift the strain on the system elsewhere and fail to address the 45% of illegal immigrants who enter legally but overstay their visas.
For this, Richardson was given the usual treatment - surrealistic bashing from CNN's millionaire working-class hero, Lou Dobbs. Dobbs' website asked readers: "Do you believe, as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson suggests, that efforts to secure our borders and ports are nothing more than demagoguery?"
In fact, Richardson has unusual credibility on the issue.
It wasn't long ago that restrictionists were singing his praises for declaring a state of emergency along the border and calling in his state's National Guard to patrol it. He would double the number of Border Patrol agents, mandate a tamper-proof employment card and make any "path to citizenship" expensive in time, money and effort. Yet Richardson would also more than double the number of annual work and family visas, and he has introduced driver's licenses for illegals in New Mexico.
Certainly the governor isn't right about every one of his proposals, and how his speech will affect his presidential aspirations remains to be seen. But he couldn't be more timely in reminding his party that comprehensive immigration reform is no less urgent now that Democrats control Congress.
EDITORIALS
Off the fence
Walls won't work, New Mexico's governor reminds us. Immigration reform must be comprehensive.
December 8, 2006
NEW MEXICO Gov. Bill Richardson, the California-born son of a Mexican mother, traveled to Washington on Thursday to declare his interest in two of the most elusive goals in American politics: comprehensive immigration reform and the presidency. The second may be more realistic than the first.
"I come here as a border state governor and a Hispanic American who knows that our nation can no longer afford to ignore the issue of illegal immigration," Richardson told a Georgetown University audience. "We need to stop exploiting the immigration problem and start solving it. We need to pass realistic laws and then enforce them rigorously."
Richardson's thoughtful speech was both a rebuke to Republican immigrant bashers and a challenge to Capitol Hill Democrats. But few will likely read beyond this line: "Securing the border must come first - but we must understand that building a fence will not in any way accomplish that objective."
That language may be on the absolutist side, but the New Mexico governor is absolutely right to point out that a multibillion-dollar border wall, on its own, is no "reform" at all. It would merely shift the strain on the system elsewhere and fail to address the 45% of illegal immigrants who enter legally but overstay their visas.
For this, Richardson was given the usual treatment - surrealistic bashing from CNN's millionaire working-class hero, Lou Dobbs. Dobbs' website asked readers: "Do you believe, as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson suggests, that efforts to secure our borders and ports are nothing more than demagoguery?"
In fact, Richardson has unusual credibility on the issue.
It wasn't long ago that restrictionists were singing his praises for declaring a state of emergency along the border and calling in his state's National Guard to patrol it. He would double the number of Border Patrol agents, mandate a tamper-proof employment card and make any "path to citizenship" expensive in time, money and effort. Yet Richardson would also more than double the number of annual work and family visas, and he has introduced driver's licenses for illegals in New Mexico.
Certainly the governor isn't right about every one of his proposals, and how his speech will affect his presidential aspirations remains to be seen. But he couldn't be more timely in reminding his party that comprehensive immigration reform is no less urgent now that Democrats control Congress.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
U.S.-CUBAN RELATIONS
Miami Herald
Posted on Mon, Dec. 04, 2006
U.S.-CUBAN RELATIONS
Exile groups join in urging an easing of Cuba restrictions
Moderate Cuban exile groups urged the Bush administration to ease travel restrictions and limits on humanitarian aid to Cuba.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
ocorral@MiamiHerald.com
An umbrella group of influential Cuban exile organizations has joined the growing chorus of Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits calling for the United States to ease restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba.
About two dozen exile organizations, speaking in unison under the umbrella group Consenso Cubano, or Cuban Consensus, will release a report today calling for the Bush administration to ease travel restrictions. The groups say U.S. policies that restrict Cubans from visiting family members and that limit remittances and other humanitarian aid ``violate fundamental rights of Cubans, damage the Cuban family, and constitute ethical contradictions.''
The announcement underscores a growing rift between hard-line exile leaders who want to preserve the sanctions, and more moderate Cuban Americans in Miami and dissidents in Cuba who feel that increasing interaction can help promote a peaceful transition to democracy.
The disconnection has manifested itself at a time that an ailing Fidel Castro is no longer in power in Cuba, having temporarily transferred authority to his brother Raúl. And last month, Democrats took control of the U.S. House and Senate, which could trigger a reexamination of U.S.-Cuba policy.
Just last week, U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Díaz-Balart appeared on a popular Spanish-language television talk show, A Mano Limpia, in which they defended U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The station conducted a viewer poll during the program, and it showed that most callers favored the easing of travel and remittance restrictions.
`ON THE BRINK'
''We are on the brink of potentially monumental changes in Cuba relating to Fidel Castro's demise,'' said state Rep. David Rivera, who spearheaded a call three years ago for the Bush administration to tighten the U.S. embargo.
``Now is not the time to be considering any relaxing of sanctions on the Castro dictatorship. That is not an option for the administration or the majority of Cuban Americans.''
Consenso Cubano, which includes mostly moderate exile groups such as the Cuba Study Group, Democracy Movement and the Cuban American National Foundation, plans to hold a news conference today.
Consenso groups are also asking the Cuban government to lift restrictions on family travel.
''The measures which limit or deny Cubans their fundamental rights to travel freely to and from Cuba for humanitarian or family reasons . . . and their ability to freely send and receive personal and family aid, violates the fundamental rights of Cubans,'' said Consenso's ``humanitarian agenda.''
Oscar Visiedo, executive director of the Instituto de Estudios Cubanos, or Institute of Cuban Studies (not to be confused with the Cuba Study Group), said current restrictions on family travel and humanitarian assistance seem to be impeding a democratic transition on the island.
''My personal opinion is that we've seen that current policy isn't working,'' Visiedo said.
The announcement comes just a few days after top dissidents in Cuba signed a letter saying that easing remittance and travel restrictions to Cuba would help them in their struggle for freedom and democracy from within Cuba.
The dissidents said restrictions on family travel and on sending humanitarian aid ``in no way help the struggle for democracy we wage inside our country.''
SHARED VIEWS?
Marcelino Miyares, president of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Cuba, or Christian Democratic Party of Cuba, one of the Consenso organizations, said the dissidents' position shows that pro-democracy Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits are coming closer together in their policy thinking.
''They are thinking the same thing in Cuba as we are here,'' Miyares said.
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
Posted on Mon, Dec. 04, 2006
U.S.-CUBAN RELATIONS
Exile groups join in urging an easing of Cuba restrictions
Moderate Cuban exile groups urged the Bush administration to ease travel restrictions and limits on humanitarian aid to Cuba.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
ocorral@MiamiHerald.com
An umbrella group of influential Cuban exile organizations has joined the growing chorus of Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits calling for the United States to ease restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba.
About two dozen exile organizations, speaking in unison under the umbrella group Consenso Cubano, or Cuban Consensus, will release a report today calling for the Bush administration to ease travel restrictions. The groups say U.S. policies that restrict Cubans from visiting family members and that limit remittances and other humanitarian aid ``violate fundamental rights of Cubans, damage the Cuban family, and constitute ethical contradictions.''
The announcement underscores a growing rift between hard-line exile leaders who want to preserve the sanctions, and more moderate Cuban Americans in Miami and dissidents in Cuba who feel that increasing interaction can help promote a peaceful transition to democracy.
The disconnection has manifested itself at a time that an ailing Fidel Castro is no longer in power in Cuba, having temporarily transferred authority to his brother Raúl. And last month, Democrats took control of the U.S. House and Senate, which could trigger a reexamination of U.S.-Cuba policy.
Just last week, U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Díaz-Balart appeared on a popular Spanish-language television talk show, A Mano Limpia, in which they defended U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The station conducted a viewer poll during the program, and it showed that most callers favored the easing of travel and remittance restrictions.
`ON THE BRINK'
''We are on the brink of potentially monumental changes in Cuba relating to Fidel Castro's demise,'' said state Rep. David Rivera, who spearheaded a call three years ago for the Bush administration to tighten the U.S. embargo.
``Now is not the time to be considering any relaxing of sanctions on the Castro dictatorship. That is not an option for the administration or the majority of Cuban Americans.''
Consenso Cubano, which includes mostly moderate exile groups such as the Cuba Study Group, Democracy Movement and the Cuban American National Foundation, plans to hold a news conference today.
Consenso groups are also asking the Cuban government to lift restrictions on family travel.
''The measures which limit or deny Cubans their fundamental rights to travel freely to and from Cuba for humanitarian or family reasons . . . and their ability to freely send and receive personal and family aid, violates the fundamental rights of Cubans,'' said Consenso's ``humanitarian agenda.''
Oscar Visiedo, executive director of the Instituto de Estudios Cubanos, or Institute of Cuban Studies (not to be confused with the Cuba Study Group), said current restrictions on family travel and humanitarian assistance seem to be impeding a democratic transition on the island.
''My personal opinion is that we've seen that current policy isn't working,'' Visiedo said.
The announcement comes just a few days after top dissidents in Cuba signed a letter saying that easing remittance and travel restrictions to Cuba would help them in their struggle for freedom and democracy from within Cuba.
The dissidents said restrictions on family travel and on sending humanitarian aid ``in no way help the struggle for democracy we wage inside our country.''
SHARED VIEWS?
Marcelino Miyares, president of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano de Cuba, or Christian Democratic Party of Cuba, one of the Consenso organizations, said the dissidents' position shows that pro-democracy Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits are coming closer together in their policy thinking.
''They are thinking the same thing in Cuba as we are here,'' Miyares said.
© 2006 MiamiHerald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
Neoliberalist rethink neoliberalism
Here's an article by an advocate on free trade rethinking NAFTA.
Afta Thoughts on NAFTA
Bradford DeLong
The Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century created a Mexico where peasants had nearly inalienable control over their land; where large-scale industry was heavily regulated; and where the country was ruled by a single, corrupt, patronage-based party - the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). By the late 1980s, it was clear that this was not a very successful politico-economic framework with which to support Mexican economic development. Urban and industrial productivity remained far below world standards with little sign of catch-up or convergence. Rural agriculture remained backward. Successful development fueled by the transfer of labor from the countryside to the cities had come to an end in the late-1970s with the general slowdown of growth in the industrial core, even though oil-rich Mexico benefited enormously from the OPEC-driven tripling of world oil prices in that decade.
After stealing the presidency of Mexico from the true choice of the voters - Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas - Carlos Salinas de Gortari decided at the start of the 1990s to pursue policies of "neoliberal reform." He worked to open up the economy to trade; encourage rather than punish foreign investment; dismantle regulations and special privileges; and generally to rely on the market in the hope that any market failures that emerged to slow development would be less destructive and dangerous than the government failures - stagnation, corruption, entrenched interests - that many agreed were blocking Mexican prosperity.
So, in the early 1990s, Salinas de Gortari sought and won a free trade agreement with the United States (and Canada): NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA guaranteed Mexican producers tariff- and quota-free access to the U.S. market, the largest consumer market in the world. Once the United States was committed to allowing quota- and tariff-free imports from Mexico, the future twists and turns of U.S. politics would be unlikely to disrupt U.S.-Mexican trade. Industrialists could build their factories in Mexico to serve the American market without fearing the consequences of a political retreat from free trade by the United States.
More important, perhaps, NAFTA committed Mexico to following the rules of the international capitalist game in its domestic economic policies. Overregulation, nationalization, confiscation - all the ways that governments can take wealth, especially wealth invested by foreigners, and redistribute it - were to be ruled out, or at least made more difficult, as a result of NAFTA.
The hope was that this two-fold binding of national governments - the U.S. government committing not to let a wave of protectionism affect imports from Mexico and the Mexican government committing not to let a wave of populism affect the wealth that foreign investors would place in Mexico - would set off a giant investment and export-industrialization boom in Mexico and so perhaps cut a generation off the time it would take for full Mexican economic development.
Indeed, six years ago I was ready to conclude that NAFTA had been a major success. It looked as if NAFTA had been the most, or at least a very promising, road for Mexico. Given that the United States has both a neighborly duty and a selfish interest to do whatever it can to raise the chances for Mexico to become democratic and prosperous, it appeared that the pushing-forward of NAFTA by the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations had been one of the lamentably few good calls by the U.S. government in its management of relations with Mexico.
Six years ago I would have said that NAFTA was a success because I would have looked at Mexico's exports and seen that they had boomed. Indeed, they have continued to boom. Mexico's exports have gone from 10 percent of GDP in 1990 to 17 percent in 1999 to 28 percent today. In 2007, Mexico's real exports - overwhelmingly to the United States - will be fully five times as great as they were at the beginning of the 1990s. Here, in the rapid development of export industries and the dramatic rise in export volumes, it is clear that NAFTA has made a big difference.
Without the dual guarantees of free imports into the United States and respect for foreigners' property in Mexico, fewer investments would have been made in Mexico in capacity to satisfy American demand. And to those of us advocating NAFTA in the early 1990s, such an expansion of exports as we have in fact seen would have been confidently predicted to generate enormous dividends for Mexico as a whole. Increasing trade between the United States and Mexico moves both countries toward a greater degree of specialization and a finer division of labor. Mexico and the United States can both raise productivity in important sectors like autos, where labor-intensive portions are increasingly accomplished in Mexico, and textiles, where high-tech spinning and weaving is increasingly done in the United States, while Mexico carries out lower-tech cutting and sewing.
Such efficiency gains from increasing the extent of the market and promoting specialization should have produced rapid growth in Mexican productivity. Likewise, greater efficiency should have been reinforced by a boom in capital formation, which should have accompanied the guarantee that no future wave of protectionism in the United States would close factories in Mexico. This is the gospel of free trade and the division of labor that we economists have preached since Adam Smith. And we have powerful evidence around the world and across the past three centuries that this gospel is a true one.
The key words here are "should have."
Today's roughly 100 million Mexicans have real incomes, at purchasing power parity, of roughly $10,000 per year, a quarter of the current U.S. level. They are investing perhaps a fifth of GDP in gross fixed capital formation - a healthy amount - and have greatly expanded their integration into the world economy, especially that of North America, since NAFTA.
Real GDP has grown at an average rate of 3.6 percent per year since the coming of NAFTA. But this rate of growth, when coupled with Mexico's 2.2 percent per year rate of population increase, means that Mexicans' mean market income from production in Mexico is barely 15 percent above that of pre-NAFTA days. That means that the gap between their mean income and that of the United States has widened. And there is worse news: Because of rising inequality the gap between mean and median incomes has risen. The overwhelming majority of Mexicans are no more productive in a domestic market income sense than their counterparts of 15 years ago, although some segments of the population have benefited. Exporters (but not necessarily workers in export industries) have gotten rich. The north of Mexico has done relatively well. And Mexican families with members in the United States are living better because of a greatly increased flow of remittances.
Intellectually, this is a great puzzle for us economists. We believe in market forces. We believe in the benefits of trade, specialization and the international division of labor. We see the enormous increase in Mexican exports to the United States over the past decade. We see great strengths in the Mexican economy: macroeconomic stability, balanced budgets and low inflation, low country risk, a flexible labor force, a strengthened and solvent banking system, successfully reformed poverty-reduction programs, high earnings from oil and so on.
Yet success at what neoliberal policymakers like me thought would be the key links for Mexican development has had disappointing results. Success at creating a stable, property-respecting domestic environment has not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neoliberals like me would have confidently predicted when NAFTA was ratified. Had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply fivefold in the next 12 years we would have had no doubts that NAFTA was going to be, and would be perceived as, an extraordinary success. We would have been convinced that Salinas de Gortari was right to focus his energies on free trade and NAFTA rather than on, say, education and infrastructure.
To be sure, economic deficiencies still abound in Mexico. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), these include a very low average number of years of schooling, with young workers having almost no more formal education than their older counterparts; little on-the-job training; heavy bureaucratic burdens on firms; corrupt judges and police; high crime rates; and a large, low-productivity informal sector that narrows the tax base and raises tax rates on the rest of the economy. But these deficiencies should not be enough to neutralize Mexico's powerful geographic advantages and the potent benefits of neoliberal policies, should they?
Apparently they are. The demographic burden of a rapidly growing labor force appears to be greatly increased when that labor force is not very literate, especially when crime, official corruption and inadequate infrastructure also take their toll. Reinforcing these deficiencies is an important additional factor: the rise of China. The extraordinary expansion of exports from China over the past decade has meant that it has been the worst time since the 1930s to follow a strategy of export-led industrialization (unless, of course, you are China). Mexico has succeeded at exporting to the United States. But because of the rising economic weight of China, it has not succeeded in exporting at prices that generate enough surplus to boost Mexican development.
In addition, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that attempts by businesses to locate production for the U.S. market in Mexico are running into labor shortages. It is not that labor in Mexico is scarce, and it is not at all expensive. But labor with the skills needed to operate machines that could otherwise be located in Kuala Lumpur or Lisbon or, indeed, Cleveland, does seem to be hard to find. The logic of comparative advantage and the division of labor requires that the productive resources to divide the labor be present. The low level - and near stagnation over time - of education in Mexico may be a critical deficiency.
And there is the problem of Iowa: a gigantic and heavily subsidized corn and pork producing machine. The way NAFTA has worked out, the biggest single change in cross-border shipments has been that Iowa's agricultural produce is now sold in Mexico City. The impact on standards of living for Mexico's near-subsistence, rural farmers is frightening to contemplate. Imports from Iowa have been an extraordinary boon to Mexico's urban poor and urban working class. But have they been a good thing for the country as a whole?
We neoliberals point out that NAFTA did not cause poor infrastructure, high crime and official corruption. We thus implicitly suggest that Mexicans would be far worse off today without NAFTA and its effects weighing in on the positive side of the scale. We neoliberals point out that we could not have predicted the rapid rise of China: from the perspective of 1991, China's future looked likely to be riddled with political turmoil, repression and perhaps economic stagnation as the Communist Party feared too-rapid change, rather than the greatest economic miracle we have ever seen.
That neoliberal story may be true, but, then again, it may not. Having witnessed Mexico's slow growth over the past 15 years, we can no longer repeat the old mantra that the neoliberal road of NAFTA and associated reforms is clearly and obviously the right one. Would some other, alternative, non-neoliberal development strategy have been better for Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Would it have been better to have urged President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to focus his efforts on investments in education and infrastructure and on trying to clean up corruption rather than on free trade? Perhaps.
The stakes are high. Our current systems of politics and economics, around the world, are legitimized not because they are just or optimal but because they deliver a modicum of peace coupled with rapid economic growth and increases in living standards. Mexico's development problems are not large when compared to those of many other countries. We as a species ought to be able to help Mexico to do much better than it has in the years since 1990.
Brad DeLong is Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies major, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Afta Thoughts on NAFTA
Bradford DeLong
The Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century created a Mexico where peasants had nearly inalienable control over their land; where large-scale industry was heavily regulated; and where the country was ruled by a single, corrupt, patronage-based party - the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). By the late 1980s, it was clear that this was not a very successful politico-economic framework with which to support Mexican economic development. Urban and industrial productivity remained far below world standards with little sign of catch-up or convergence. Rural agriculture remained backward. Successful development fueled by the transfer of labor from the countryside to the cities had come to an end in the late-1970s with the general slowdown of growth in the industrial core, even though oil-rich Mexico benefited enormously from the OPEC-driven tripling of world oil prices in that decade.
After stealing the presidency of Mexico from the true choice of the voters - Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas - Carlos Salinas de Gortari decided at the start of the 1990s to pursue policies of "neoliberal reform." He worked to open up the economy to trade; encourage rather than punish foreign investment; dismantle regulations and special privileges; and generally to rely on the market in the hope that any market failures that emerged to slow development would be less destructive and dangerous than the government failures - stagnation, corruption, entrenched interests - that many agreed were blocking Mexican prosperity.
So, in the early 1990s, Salinas de Gortari sought and won a free trade agreement with the United States (and Canada): NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA guaranteed Mexican producers tariff- and quota-free access to the U.S. market, the largest consumer market in the world. Once the United States was committed to allowing quota- and tariff-free imports from Mexico, the future twists and turns of U.S. politics would be unlikely to disrupt U.S.-Mexican trade. Industrialists could build their factories in Mexico to serve the American market without fearing the consequences of a political retreat from free trade by the United States.
More important, perhaps, NAFTA committed Mexico to following the rules of the international capitalist game in its domestic economic policies. Overregulation, nationalization, confiscation - all the ways that governments can take wealth, especially wealth invested by foreigners, and redistribute it - were to be ruled out, or at least made more difficult, as a result of NAFTA.
The hope was that this two-fold binding of national governments - the U.S. government committing not to let a wave of protectionism affect imports from Mexico and the Mexican government committing not to let a wave of populism affect the wealth that foreign investors would place in Mexico - would set off a giant investment and export-industrialization boom in Mexico and so perhaps cut a generation off the time it would take for full Mexican economic development.
Indeed, six years ago I was ready to conclude that NAFTA had been a major success. It looked as if NAFTA had been the most, or at least a very promising, road for Mexico. Given that the United States has both a neighborly duty and a selfish interest to do whatever it can to raise the chances for Mexico to become democratic and prosperous, it appeared that the pushing-forward of NAFTA by the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations had been one of the lamentably few good calls by the U.S. government in its management of relations with Mexico.
Six years ago I would have said that NAFTA was a success because I would have looked at Mexico's exports and seen that they had boomed. Indeed, they have continued to boom. Mexico's exports have gone from 10 percent of GDP in 1990 to 17 percent in 1999 to 28 percent today. In 2007, Mexico's real exports - overwhelmingly to the United States - will be fully five times as great as they were at the beginning of the 1990s. Here, in the rapid development of export industries and the dramatic rise in export volumes, it is clear that NAFTA has made a big difference.
Without the dual guarantees of free imports into the United States and respect for foreigners' property in Mexico, fewer investments would have been made in Mexico in capacity to satisfy American demand. And to those of us advocating NAFTA in the early 1990s, such an expansion of exports as we have in fact seen would have been confidently predicted to generate enormous dividends for Mexico as a whole. Increasing trade between the United States and Mexico moves both countries toward a greater degree of specialization and a finer division of labor. Mexico and the United States can both raise productivity in important sectors like autos, where labor-intensive portions are increasingly accomplished in Mexico, and textiles, where high-tech spinning and weaving is increasingly done in the United States, while Mexico carries out lower-tech cutting and sewing.
Such efficiency gains from increasing the extent of the market and promoting specialization should have produced rapid growth in Mexican productivity. Likewise, greater efficiency should have been reinforced by a boom in capital formation, which should have accompanied the guarantee that no future wave of protectionism in the United States would close factories in Mexico. This is the gospel of free trade and the division of labor that we economists have preached since Adam Smith. And we have powerful evidence around the world and across the past three centuries that this gospel is a true one.
The key words here are "should have."
Today's roughly 100 million Mexicans have real incomes, at purchasing power parity, of roughly $10,000 per year, a quarter of the current U.S. level. They are investing perhaps a fifth of GDP in gross fixed capital formation - a healthy amount - and have greatly expanded their integration into the world economy, especially that of North America, since NAFTA.
Real GDP has grown at an average rate of 3.6 percent per year since the coming of NAFTA. But this rate of growth, when coupled with Mexico's 2.2 percent per year rate of population increase, means that Mexicans' mean market income from production in Mexico is barely 15 percent above that of pre-NAFTA days. That means that the gap between their mean income and that of the United States has widened. And there is worse news: Because of rising inequality the gap between mean and median incomes has risen. The overwhelming majority of Mexicans are no more productive in a domestic market income sense than their counterparts of 15 years ago, although some segments of the population have benefited. Exporters (but not necessarily workers in export industries) have gotten rich. The north of Mexico has done relatively well. And Mexican families with members in the United States are living better because of a greatly increased flow of remittances.
Intellectually, this is a great puzzle for us economists. We believe in market forces. We believe in the benefits of trade, specialization and the international division of labor. We see the enormous increase in Mexican exports to the United States over the past decade. We see great strengths in the Mexican economy: macroeconomic stability, balanced budgets and low inflation, low country risk, a flexible labor force, a strengthened and solvent banking system, successfully reformed poverty-reduction programs, high earnings from oil and so on.
Yet success at what neoliberal policymakers like me thought would be the key links for Mexican development has had disappointing results. Success at creating a stable, property-respecting domestic environment has not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neoliberals like me would have confidently predicted when NAFTA was ratified. Had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply fivefold in the next 12 years we would have had no doubts that NAFTA was going to be, and would be perceived as, an extraordinary success. We would have been convinced that Salinas de Gortari was right to focus his energies on free trade and NAFTA rather than on, say, education and infrastructure.
To be sure, economic deficiencies still abound in Mexico. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), these include a very low average number of years of schooling, with young workers having almost no more formal education than their older counterparts; little on-the-job training; heavy bureaucratic burdens on firms; corrupt judges and police; high crime rates; and a large, low-productivity informal sector that narrows the tax base and raises tax rates on the rest of the economy. But these deficiencies should not be enough to neutralize Mexico's powerful geographic advantages and the potent benefits of neoliberal policies, should they?
Apparently they are. The demographic burden of a rapidly growing labor force appears to be greatly increased when that labor force is not very literate, especially when crime, official corruption and inadequate infrastructure also take their toll. Reinforcing these deficiencies is an important additional factor: the rise of China. The extraordinary expansion of exports from China over the past decade has meant that it has been the worst time since the 1930s to follow a strategy of export-led industrialization (unless, of course, you are China). Mexico has succeeded at exporting to the United States. But because of the rising economic weight of China, it has not succeeded in exporting at prices that generate enough surplus to boost Mexican development.
In addition, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that attempts by businesses to locate production for the U.S. market in Mexico are running into labor shortages. It is not that labor in Mexico is scarce, and it is not at all expensive. But labor with the skills needed to operate machines that could otherwise be located in Kuala Lumpur or Lisbon or, indeed, Cleveland, does seem to be hard to find. The logic of comparative advantage and the division of labor requires that the productive resources to divide the labor be present. The low level - and near stagnation over time - of education in Mexico may be a critical deficiency.
And there is the problem of Iowa: a gigantic and heavily subsidized corn and pork producing machine. The way NAFTA has worked out, the biggest single change in cross-border shipments has been that Iowa's agricultural produce is now sold in Mexico City. The impact on standards of living for Mexico's near-subsistence, rural farmers is frightening to contemplate. Imports from Iowa have been an extraordinary boon to Mexico's urban poor and urban working class. But have they been a good thing for the country as a whole?
We neoliberals point out that NAFTA did not cause poor infrastructure, high crime and official corruption. We thus implicitly suggest that Mexicans would be far worse off today without NAFTA and its effects weighing in on the positive side of the scale. We neoliberals point out that we could not have predicted the rapid rise of China: from the perspective of 1991, China's future looked likely to be riddled with political turmoil, repression and perhaps economic stagnation as the Communist Party feared too-rapid change, rather than the greatest economic miracle we have ever seen.
That neoliberal story may be true, but, then again, it may not. Having witnessed Mexico's slow growth over the past 15 years, we can no longer repeat the old mantra that the neoliberal road of NAFTA and associated reforms is clearly and obviously the right one. Would some other, alternative, non-neoliberal development strategy have been better for Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Would it have been better to have urged President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to focus his efforts on investments in education and infrastructure and on trying to clean up corruption rather than on free trade? Perhaps.
The stakes are high. Our current systems of politics and economics, around the world, are legitimized not because they are just or optimal but because they deliver a modicum of peace coupled with rapid economic growth and increases in living standards. Mexico's development problems are not large when compared to those of many other countries. We as a species ought to be able to help Mexico to do much better than it has in the years since 1990.
Brad DeLong is Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies major, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
