This new century began with Mexicans’ average consumption of books scored at less than one a year. Mexico subsequently was tagged by some as “the country that stopped reading.” Yet today books offering impolitely well-documented assessments of the rulers of the Republic are breaking records, popping into being like popcorn. But truth’s a risky business. Today’s rulers tolerate truth no happier than their New Spain forebearers in Father Miguel Hidalgo’s time. Take for instance Anabel Hernandez’s investigation of government officials’ allegedly profitable relations with the nation’s raft of drug gangs. Her book, published in English this month, is titled “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers.”
The extraordinary thing is that “Narcoland” has already sold more than 100,000 Spanish-language copies in a country that traditionally prides itself on noticing its genius-level authors and artists only after they’ve been enthusiastically embraced and lavishly hailed by foreigners. Examples: Octavio Paz’s “Labyrinth of Solitude,” Carlos Fuentes’ “the Death of Artemio Cruz,” Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo.” But Hernandez not only describes what is widely seen as the pathologically twisted psyches of the jefes and soldiers of drug gangs – their butchery, their joy in ghastly torture – but much more. Her estimate of this overflowing pathology stains the political officials and elitist businessmen – and their bankers – who enable these atrocities. Her research is authentic enough to earn her and her two children reluctant, and somewhat spotty, police protection, even when palpable death threats were made public and officials couldn’t ignore them. Her small children are now used to coming home with their mother to find a box of headless small animals at the doorstep.
Hernandez’s father was kidnapped and killed December 12, 2000, evidently in retaliation for her investigations. Police told the family that they would investigate the kidnapping only if they were paid. The family, familiar with the habit of cops taking the money and doing nothing, declined. Hernandez has worked on three of Mexico City’s leading dailies: Milenio, El Universal and Reforma. In 2012 she won the highly regarded Golden Pen of Freedom by the World Association of Newspapers. She has just had a respite from being a target of what she calls the government’s criminalization of “journalists in general, as well as anyone who tries to defend them.” She was speaking to London’s Frontline Club, September 11, and to the Bristol Festival of Ideas September 13. They both were oversubscribed. She took on Mexican cartelistas, and the collusion of politicians, public servants and high-level businessmen and of British interests, international bankers with cartels. She has repeatedly denounced England’s largest bank, HSBC, and the U.S. bank Wachovia. Wachovia, which was subsequently bought by Wells Fargo, was caught handling some 378 billion dollars of illegal money – equal to one-third of Mexico’s gross domestic product at the time. Several Bank of America branches also laundered large quantities of drug money, USA Today reported. But no bank official went to prison and the banks paid only a paltry “fine” that attorneys called “a rap on the knuckles.” No bank was accused of wrongdoing, corroborating Hernandez’s accusations regarding corruption on all sides of the border. She calls the “war on drugs” a big, nationwide, top-to-bottom lie. And her well-documented experiences at the hands of Mexico’s political and law enforcement systems, as well as the very dangerous cartel threats, emanate the sensation that the whole thing is one big lie. The “whole thing” implying that many Mexicans feel that one can seldom be sure to whom one is speaking when engaging members of “official agencies,” either federal, state or municipal. Where is the truth there? Is there a truth?Hernandez’s book is hitting the English-language market just as President Enrique Peña Nieto’s dreams of a transformed Mexico are hitting a wall. He had every reason to believe in what one local journalist called “governing with iron whimsy.” After all, even the gringo media said it was so. Unfortunately, much of that media, rife with experienced “Mexican hands” both male and female, seemed to many Mexicans to be writing about some other election in some other land. Actually, they, like Hernandez, knew that Peña Nieto and his discredited party that had ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive brutal, corrupt, oligarchical years, had rolled out its usual clumsy slight of hand, openly buying votes during the 2012 “campaign” for the presidency, and then denying it. This moment in Mexico’s constantly amazing history was to be “the” moment when the Republic would rebound, and therefore Pena Nieto’s moment. His spear-carriers, and backers and the plump, bused-in, giggling ladies at pueblo campaign stops, enchanted by his shellacked pompadour, all told him so.
Drug gang murders continue at rate a bit above the government’s calculations. The government dropped gross domestic product predictions first in May, then to 1.8 percent August 8. And now many sources are saying September’s double whammy tropical storms, Ingrid and Manuel, were so destructive the damage will further wound fiscal dreams.
Alejandro Villagomez, of Mexico City’s Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, CIDE, warns that Mexico “remains impeded by long embedded structural issues: Low wages that block internal consumption, muscular levels in the informal economy and weak market competition in key sectors, all of which slow down expected, and needed, growth.
Earlier this month, John M. Ackerman, editor of the Mexican Law Review and professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the Autonomous University of Mexico, told a U.S. reporter bluntly that “Mexico was not a democracy.” Peña Nieto has tried to muffle the press, to mask the fact that, “Our elections are rigged. The last two presidential elections have been very unclear on who the real winner was.” The political class has imposed its candidates on the nation, he argued. This has left society “disenchanted.”
All this was coupled with Peña Nieto’s proposed energy industry overhaul, unveiled this month, and intended to be the peak of an ambitious year of change. But that measure was met with undisguised hostility from the left (unsurprisingly), ”frustration” from the right and (surprisingly) a shrug of the shoulders by those investors it was designed to inspire.
Nonetheless, Peña Nieto told a crowd bused to an assembly just outside Monterrey, “We’re determined and firm that education reforms materialize that guarantee quality education for all Mexicans.” Meanwhile, thousands of teachers opposed to his reforms, driven by police from the Zocalo, the capital’s central square, were camped in other parts of the city and continued to protest, as other teachers were striking in their home towns. For the moment the “great transformation” appeared stalled by people discomfited and distrusting of their rulers.