When Mexican-born U.S. citizen Yanira Maldonado, 42, was released May 30 after “only” a stretched week in Sonora’s women’s prison, everyone following what was dubbed Mexico’s “shakedown justice” was relieved.
This undoubtedly included President Enrique Peña Nieto. The president has recently clamped down on media outlets in Mexico, admonishing them not to deal in the number of casualties, carved up bodies, civilian deaths caused by Mexico’s law enforcement system, and associated official corruption. In other words, no drug gang tales no matter how appalling. That would reflect poorly on Mexico’s already well-known image – and coincidently on government’s slippery grasp of Mexican culture, though that wasn’t directly mentioned.
But Maldonado‘s experience couldn’t be hidden. It seemed that every media outlet and blogger worldwide aggressively followed the story throughout the drama’s increasingly odd life. Nieto’s “anti-democratic gagging of the media,” as some called it, hasn’t been able to stifle the Niagra of far-flung stories here, and especially abroad. Locally, both the incident at a military checkpoint in the Sonoran town of Querobabi, and Yanira’s jailing in the Nogales women’s prison, was seen by many Mexicans as typical: at once dauntingly touchy and chocked full of looniness.
Many Mexicans of “mature age” were both genuinely happy with the final result, and that Yanira’s release allowed them to bask in the Mexican penchant for heady verbal acrobatics concerning what not a few called, “una drama muy cantinflesca." They used the adjective spawned by the uncontainable popularity of Mexico’s most famous comedian, Mario Moreno, whose invented comic character, Cantinflas, was a peladito (literally, “a small hairless person,” indicating “a poor little guy”).Moreno’s genius was to gleefully examine the nation’s scrambled verbal officialese – and well-known counterintuitive habits. He especially played upon how Mexico’s different classes used Spanish, often inventively, often weirdly. And speaking a spiced form of this in the mid-1930s, allowed him to take on, carefully, both the upper classes and the bureaucratic and political classes ... and their often clumsy attempts to be verbally cunning.
Certainly it’s clear that Peña Nieto’s reasoning, as many said, has been a try at creating a glossy image of an economically booming Mexico, boosting the nation’s tourism industry through the silencing of all Elmore Leonard-style drug war reporting. But, to many Mexicans’ delight, the shakedown of Yanira and husband Gary deep-sixed that fantasy. The culturally-marring “in Mexico you’re guilty until proven innocent” adagio was compounded by the fact that soldiers at Querobabi first nabbed Gary for the 12.5 pounds of weed professionally wrapped and fixed beneath Yanira’s seat with artfully engineered metal hooks. Something that would have taken both time and skill to put in place. But when Yanira begged the soldiers to let her accompany her husband, serving as his translator, the “authorities” abruptly changed their minds and released him and arrested her instead. Logic was springing a swift, serious leak.
A soldier participating in the search-and-detention op told Gary Maldonado that his wife could go free for 5,000 dollars. Later, evidently, a plainclothesman repeated this, adding that it didn’t matter whether Yanira was guilty or not.
Once Yanira finally got sprung, everybody was cheering. And, evidently overtaken by this heady, unexpected moment, Guillermo Padres Elias, governor of the state of Sonora where Yanira was jailed, was propelled to speak up. The governor was vociferous in describing his pleasure with the outcome of the incident. A bit too vociferous, it seems. He beamingly declared, “In a few words I could say we’re very sorry she was in the wrong place at the wrong moment. But we’re very glad she’s OK ...” If you’re being set up, quite possibly so authorities can squeeze you for 5,000 bucks – as many Mexican crime analysts apparently believe – that has nothing to do with being in the “wrong place at the wrong moment.” It’s being a victim of a predatory, carefully planned – and criminal – scam. One that the governor evidently forgot to notice.
By this Wednesday the fallout from the incident was still piling up, as reporters, columnists, experienced analysts and bloggers took the Mexican justice system to task, often with stories from women who had been falsely imprisoned and abused for long periods of time. Also taking advantage of this momentary freedom of expression, many people were asking the presidentially censored question: What was happening with the soldiers the president had sent to the state of Michoacan to tamp down drug-gang “problems.” By Thursday morning there were smatterings of an answer: More killings, but not a lot of detailed info.
At the same time Peña Nieto’s dream of a robust economic image was being roughed up by newspapers, and economic-themed television and internet sites, headlining their stories as the Chicago Tribune did: “Mexico’s peso poised at precipice, may face a steeper fall.” That of course is good news for expats and foreign tourists, certainly in the short term as they can buy more pesos per dollar. It also means a coming boost in inflation, but in general they will profit, as the Peña Nieto administration scrambles to set things aright. It also means that his censorship of free speech – the media – has been, in great part, out-maneuvered by the justice system that he has taken ownership of with aggressive speechifying, if not with aggressive action.
All this prompted one long-time Mexican friend to liken this sixth month of the return to power by Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to an administration cantinflesco. The PRI before 2000 had ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years marked by brutal authoritarianism and full-tilt corruption. Censorship of the press prevailed during most of that reign. Peña Nieto vowed during his campaign and since his election that he was leading in a new, somehow rehabilitated PRI in a return to power.
And early this week he had the opportunity to use the three-day visit by China’s president, Xi Jinping, to move Mexican and world attention away from the Maldonado incident, and scanty new “leaks” about the fighting in Michoacan. Xi’s visit, he said, was to explore agreement aimed at balancing trade between the two nations. China was opening more opportunities for Mexican products, beginning with pork and tequila. Mexico is eager to broaden its trade with China’s tightly controlled import market, in order to balance the massive trade deficit.
This country has Latin America’s worst trade imbalance with China. In 2012 Mexico sold just over 5.7 billion dollars of goods to China, while importing 57 billion in Chinese products, it’s been reported. Peña Nieto also sought to increase Chinese investment here, as well as seeking greater access to Chinese openings for manufactured goods, energy and minerals. But Mexican manufacturers were not optimistic about prying open the Chinese market. An official of Mexico’s manufacturing group Canacintra, Julio Rodriguez, told the Wall Street Journal that industrialists here expect little from the visit. He pointed out that Chinese industrialists get export credits, have strong government support and enjoy the benefits of other unfair practices. “We want reciprocity ... a level playing field.”