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Destroy enough of the domestic economy, deny the people access to basic welfare and state services and you get the drug fuelled cartel driven country wide chaos that is engulfing Mexico. People in Mexico are dying in violent drug related deaths every day but the Mexican media is not covering these stories. The coverage is not there because they tend to start loosing reporters when they focus too much on the drug cartels dangerous activities.
“Violence linked to Mexico’s drug war has claimed more than 36,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon declared all-out war on cartels in December 2006.”
The War on Cartels smacks of the same bankrupts ideas that the War on Drugs featured. Going after supply rather than demand for narcotics is a recipe for disaster. The disaster is largely unreported except for in blogs that have sprung up to fill some of the gaps in the Mexican mainstream media’s coverage.
“The images are gruesome and unedited: a dead man in a sports jersey with his face covered in dried red blood and grey sand; a woman hanging from a rope above a busy urban over-pass and naked bodies lined up on the ground displaying clear, uncensored, signs of torture.
You have reached Mexico’s narco blog: Click to continue.
“The narco blog uses much of the information citizens upload to other social networking sites,” says Pedro Perez, president of the democratic union of journalists in Tamaulipas, one of the states on the US-Mexico border hit hardest by drug violence. “Organised crime gangs don’t use it [social media] to inform, they use it for issuing threats.”
Anonymous blogging seems to be the only way that the chaos in Mexico is being covered.
“While much of Mexico’s mainstream media, especially television stations and local newspapers, has shied away from covering killings and naming the cartels involved, the narco blog and its anonymous curator, publish graphic details of spiraling violence.”
“Individuals journalists are doing the best they can, but in general I don’t think the media has done a fair job in covering drug violence,” says Lucila Vargas, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina who studies Mexico’s media landscape. “The media in Mexico are commercial enterprises and their first concern is with the bottom line,” she told Al Jazeera.
Like most large scale industries in Mexico, the media – particularly television stations – are highly concentrated in a few hands. Mexicans are more likely to own a television set than to have access to running water but two TV stations – Televisa and TV Azteca – control 94 per cent of television entertainment content, according to the Mexican Right to Information Association.”
Ah, the wonders of corporate media concentration. None of the news, none of the time.
“Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists: Between 2005 and 2010 at least 66 reporters were killed, with 12 more disappeared, according to a report by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). There have only been convictions in 10 per cent of the cases.
Violence, fear and impunity don’t just hurt reporters and their families, they decimates the quality of coverage.
“Local journalists have made a pact to just cover official acts like government activities, local policemen and local activities, things that are not dangerous,” says Perez, who has been threatened by cartels while working with journalists in one of the most violent border-states. “We would like to be heroes, but we are being shot at by criminals.”
A 2010 analysis of drug war coverage from the Fundacion MEPI, and investigate journalism center, found that regional newspapers in Mexico are failing to report most execution style killings linked to cartels. Journalists interviewed for the study said threats, bribes and other forms of pressure influenced their decisions not to cover killings or name the suspected cartels involved.
“Organised crime members have tried to bribe or influence traditional media [and] that is the importance of social media,” says Raul Trejo Delabre, an independent media analyst in Mexico City.”
With large scale media rendered ineffective the small scale citizen level journalism is doing what it can to pick up the slack and report the horror that is going on Mexico.
Mexico provides a grim case study of what can happen when the state has been rendered deficient almost to the point or being irrelevant in carrying out the basic functions necessary for its citizenry.
Meandering though the Canadian progressive blogosphere I was struck by the amount of gloom and general disgust with our current electoral system. This response from a commenter Thinking Man Neil on Dawg’s Blawg that I’m cut and pasting summarizes things quite nicely.
A resounding hurrah for the return to Feudalism.
“A very dark day for Canada. Stephen Harper’s antipathy for democracy is legendary: shutting down Parliament twice to avoid public accountability, being found in contempt of Parliament twice for refusing to release information to the House of Commons, covering the lies and scandals of his MP’s, staff, and advisers, giving his MP’s instructions to disrupt parliamentary committees to render them unworkable, violating campaign laws, eliminating funding for a program that allows ordinary Canadians to challenge unjust laws, legislation, and government policies at the Supreme Court level (now only the wealthy and corporations get heard) and equating dissent of his policies with a lack of patriotism and treason. Those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head.
Sixty years of social progress was lost last night. Harper wants to re-instate the death penalty, scrap universal health care for a for-profit system, eliminate public funding for political parties, curtail women’s rights to abortion, enact draconian “law and order” crime bills and engage in internet surveillance of the populace, give corporations and the wealthy while increasing military spending dramatically and pouring countless, precious Canadian kids into pointless meatgrinder wars just so he can thump his flabby, neocon chest.
Stephen Harper and Preston Manning — his former boss in the Reform Party — set out 25 years ago to polarize Canadian politics and destroy the centrist Liberal Party; they achieved that goal last night. Jack Layton’s 102-seat opposition NDP have been neutered even before they get through the door of the House of Commons by Harper’s overwhelming 167-seat majority. Fundamentalist evangelical Christians and Christian Dominionists and Reconstructionists who are strong Harper supporters and have been gaining considerable access and influence in the PMO and Privy Council will demand the advancement of a very socially conservative agenda, expecting the elimination of abortion rights, elimination of same-sex marriage rights and possible criminalization of gays, lesbians, and transgendereds, censorship control over media and culture and the possible re-instatement of anti-blasphemy laws, the teaching of creationism in science classes, elimination of funding for stem cell research, and the re-establishment of the preeminence of religion in society. Corporate interests will get massive tax cuts, an across the board roll back of environmental and consumer protection laws, reduced competition and acquisition regulations, elimination of worker’s rights to organize unions and collective bargaining, privatization of private and public pension plans, and increased foreign takeovers of Canadian natural resources including freshwater. And there won’t be thing one that the NDP opposition will be able to do to stop it.
Harper has worked tirelessly and ruthlessly for many years for this; he won’t allow it to be overturned by an “unwanted election” in four years. He has a tough, disciplined group of MP’s that he micro-manages with an iron fist, and his goal is to keep that in perpetuity in the form of a one-party system. His plans to eliminate the per-vote and election reimbursement public subsidies that will drastically reduce funds available for election campaigns for some parties while his party will reap enormous corporate donations. What we’ll be left with in the end is a situation akin to Saddam-era Iraq: token elections and token opposition with only one possible outcome.
My Canada, the Canada of tolerance, openness, freedom, and respect of and love for democracy, died last night. It’s been handed over to a group that values bigotry, misogyny, power, fear and ignorance over the better aspirations of our species.
I’m hoping it is not all as bad as Neil prognosticates. The idea though that we have to count on Harper to moderate his policies in order to be reelected in four years seems to be a very weak check on the sort of destructive policies he champions. It is May 3, 2011 – We’ll revisit this post and see where we are in a couple of months.
It is nice when you can find some who speaks so clearly on a topic. I recommend you read the entire article by Greta Christina, but these are her concluding words. Her post is a response to William Lane Craig an educated religious apologist who in his writing and debates defends the christian religion against rationality and reality.
“It’s funny. One of the most common pieces of bigotry aimed at atheism is that it doesn’t provide any basis for morality. It’s widely assumed that without religion — without moral teachings from religious traditions, and without fear of eternal punishment and desire for eternal reward — people would behave entirely selfishly, with no concern for others. And atheists are commonly accused of moral relativism: of thinking that there are no fundamental moral principles, and that all morality can be adapted to suit the needs of the moment.
But it isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, genocide seems wrong… but under some circumstances, it actually makes a certain amount of sense.” It isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, infanticide seems wrong… but looked at in a certain light, it really isn’t all that bad.” It isn’t atheists who are prioritizing an attachment to an ancient ideology over the clearest moral principles one can imagine: the principle that entire races ought not to be systematically exterminated, and the principle that children ought not to be slaughtered.
Human beings have intrinsic compassion. We have a sense of justice. We have feelings of revulsion and rage when we see others harmed. We have a desire to help create a livable world. We have a willingness to make personal sacrifices — sometimes great sacrifices — to help others in need. And contrary to what Craig and many other Christians think, these moral emotions don’t derive from the Bible, and don’t require belief in God. They’re taught by virtually every religion and every society, and atheists feel them every bit as much as believers. Humans are a social species, and these emotions and principles evolved because they help members of a social species survive and reproduce. (Other social species seem to have some or all of these moral emotions as well.)
But our compassion and justice, our altruism and moral revulsion, can be twisted. They can be stunted. They can be denied, ignored, shoved to the back burner, rationalized away. They can be contorted to the point where we’re saying that black is white, war is peace, and the most blatant evil is actually goodness if you squint your eyes just right. They can be contorted to the point where we’re saying that genocide is okay because everyone gets what they deserve in the afterlife, and that infanticide is morally necessary to teach a lesson about the evils of murdering children.
And religion is Exhibit A in how this can happen.”
Do the minimum for your county. It is good for you. :)
Is it a Noam Chomsky Week? Maybe. Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. One lecture, delivered at Harvard University on April 13rd, 1996 in 5 parts. Enjoy. Transcript here.
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