Among the gushers of government hyped news this week were reiterations that the January 31 explosion at the Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) tower complex was a gas explosion. The government of Mexico’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto identified the gas as methane.
But that quick announcement spawned a cascade of doubts, and not a little sharp reasoning among both experts and the citizenry.
National Autonomous University of Mexico security, engineering and civil protection experts questioned the government’s “thesis” that the explosion at Building B-2 of the Pemex Tower complex was due to an accumulation of methane gas.
“Just knowing the properties of the gas in question rules out methane as the cause,” Guillermo Garduño, a security expert, told reporters. “We can say without major contradiction that there (quite possibly) was a gas, but that gas (methane), no.”
Methane, chemistry texts tell us, occurs naturally as a result of a process of decomposition of organic matter, which is colorless and odorless. When it is used commercially a substance with an easily detectable odor is added to it to warn of any leaking. Methane is also explosive and highly flammable. Its flammability is often the major identifier in accidental explosions. “There was no flamazo,” at Building B-2. Witnesses confirm this, reporting that there there was an “earthquake-like” eruption that “produced smoke but no fire.” If methane gas had caused that explosion, Garduño told the media, “... there would have been a monumental fire, the smoke produced would have been enormous and the victims would have been burned. But none of the injuries were burns.” He added that the official versions “.... end up being an insult to the intelligence of anyone,” and that “more than answers, the report is leaving many, many questions.”
David Shields, an experienced veteran Mexico City energy analyst said, “There was no methane supply in that building. So where does the methane come from? My personal reading of all the hypotheses related to gases is very weak ...” He added, “What I am unhappy about is that they very lightly dismissed the possibility of an intentional explosion – a bomb.”Some people suggest it might have been “guerrillas,” but the only guerrillas active today are drug gangs. But primarily, despite the recent mainstream media cheering for Peña Nieto, there is doubt among almost all the Mexicans one knows well enough to get candid response to often “sensitive” questions.
The ruling by the Mexico City’s sixth federal court judge Monday, March 4, denying of bail for former teachers union boss, Elba Esther Gordillo – accused of allegedly embezzling about 200 million dollars in union funds – rekindled apprehension regarding the new government’s inclination for retribution against those who openly oppose the administration’s wishes. Influential and/or very wealthy people sometimes (not often enough, though) get busted for behaving with assumed immunity.
Veteran media reporters, of course, remain committed doubters, though many have been officially soto voce. This comes from not knowing just how retribution-inclined Peña Nieto is going to be regarding a questioning, skeptical media.
The first ideas that popped into some minds was that this explosion that killed 37 people was 1) a warning to Peña Nieto from the drug cartels; or 2) a way of destroying evidence of corruption within the company. One of the reasons Mexicans are so readily plot-minded is because the Mexico’s history is so sumptuously populated with very real amazing, often mind-bendingly bold plots. Reality for more “common” Mexicans and what the government says has remained a sort of cultural jinks that not only marks political and justice systems, but the education system, the behavior of “official agencies,” including the Comision Federal de Eletricidad and Immigration.
And presently, as the foreign press, applauding Mexico’s new government, has been overloading media outlets with Alice’s adventures, many citizens here find what they see as familiar extranjero guilelessness bitingly amusing. A slew of newspaper and magazine articles, columns, and “opinion” pieces feed the irony. A week ago Foreign Affairs magazine hyped its story on “Mexican Makes It,” and February 23 the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman conjured up ”How Mexico Got Back in the Game,” amazingly by-lined Monterrey. Then came “Mexico, the New China, by former Wired manager Chris Anderson, who’s apparently no long wired in. Also on display: “The Rise of Mexico,” by Andres Oppenheimer, the Financial Times‘ “Mexico: The Aztec Tiger,” and so on. Not long before that, most the the foreign media was yammering away about drug cartel slaughter and fumblingly trying to count corpses. Unfortunately they used “the official” body count of “an estimated 60,000 victims.” That was while others were talking about 70,000, or more accurately 90,000-100,000 dead.
Most Mexicans avoided the embrace of this abrupt and carelessly informed foreign embrace. Many were openly scornful, others simply politely grinned. Unfortunately, even well-intentioned and labor-intensive local polls were coming up with numbers most candid Mexicans found ... well, “curious” is the politest way to put it. Both pollsters and journalists felt they should be applauded for being so positive, after all they had long been criticized for being negative, especially about the economy and cartel behavior.
Most Mexican journalists remain steadfastly skeptical, if not downright doubtful about Mexico’s overall future. Amused by the Financial Times headline regarding the Aztec Tiger, columnist Sergio Sarimiento — usually a good reporter and a thoughtful opinion-maker for the Mexico city daily Reforma — noted that “... when it comes to metaphors, we have to remember that the tiger is an animal doesn’t exist in our country.”
And Carlos Slim was declared by Forbes the world’s richest man, while 15 other billionaires were listed by the magazine in its annual survey of Mexicans that have too much money, especially in light of the fact that half of Mexico’s population live in poverty. But even despite this ugly circumstance, most polls show that citizens are more deeply concerned about the crime and safety than about the economy.
But certainly they are more concerned about both crime and the economy than their wealthy new president’s deep concern about not having enough tax revenue — so concerned that he is pushing through congress a brand new tax on food and medicines, a move that will crucify the poor to say nothing about what it will do to the extremely poor.
As Peña Nieto’s promised crime/justice system reform moves at an unseen, but apparently snail’s pace, an ex-official in the administration of former president Felipe Calderon disputed any idea that there’s a list of 27,000 missing people. Such a list has been announced by Peña Nieto’s government. But Jose Vega, Calderon’s coordinator of the National Security System, the entity responsible for gathering and analyzing security data, has said that the only registry on “disappeared” people contains just 5,318 names.
State authorities are supposed to investigate missing persons reports and keep records on such victims under their protection. If anyone believes that has been accomplished under the just-ended state government of the unpopular Emilio Gonzalez, say several Jalisco lawyers, then they have their heads where the sun doesn’t shine – meaning, in polite company, that they are acting like ostriches.
This disappeared tragedy is made worse by increasing evidence that Mexican soldiers and police are responsible for possibly up to one half of the true total — a number that now may never be known. One investigation by Human Rights Watch researchers revealed that in the cases of 249 missing persons in Mexico, evidence was found that soldiers or police “participated” in 149 of the disappearances. They were mainly men. Fathers, husbands, uncles and brothers who went out to get groceries and never came back. Or they were dragged from their homes by uniformed men in the middle of the night. Many were last seen being stuffed into military trucks and police vehicles. Reports of “extrajudicial killings and other grave rights violations have “dogged Mexican security forces for years. But the report released February 20 was one of the most important attempts to identify patterns of abuse during the anti-drug campaign to clarify the degree to which Mexican authorities fail to investigate disappearances or are responsible for them.
The thousands of Mexican families that have lost kinfolk at the hands of the supposedly “wrong side” in the war against drugs clearly need presidential intercession in the brutal and shameful acts by people they will now be funding by being forced to pay taxes on their food and medicine. Peña Nieto has a full plate, and this is one of them: he should do something soon to alleviate this view of his recent moves with a biddable congress.