If you’re interested in sober, informed commentary on Mexico President Calderón’s war on organized crime, and the debunking of media narrative myths, you’ll want to read Castañeda’s “What’s Spanish for Quagmire?” published in the Jan/Feb edition of Foreign Policy Magazine.

Jorge G. Castañeda, former Mexican foreign minister [during the Fox administration], is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and global distinguished professor of politics and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University.

Castañeda and Rubén Aguilar has written “El Narco: La Guerra Fallida” which is currently available only in Spanish. The Foreign Policy commentary provides a condensed version in English.

You’ve probably noticed in recent months the proliferation of the media narrative that Mexican organized crime violence has spread across the border into the USA. Uninformed and/or demagogic politicians, as seems to be the style these days, have initiated and proliferated a narrative which lap dog media outlets report uncritically as fact, and whose reports the politicians then utilize to support their erroneous contentions. It’s the standard politician/media circle jerk, if I might utilize such an analogy.

Now comes The Arizona Republic to inform us that the narrative is complete BS, and that “Violence is not up on Arizona border”. Nor is it up in Texas border cities.

A few excerpts.

NOGALES, Ariz. – Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.

“We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico,” Bermudez says emphatically. “You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America.”

——

FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down.

While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.

In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.

——

In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years.

——

Cochise County’s crime rate has been “flat” for at least 10 years, the sheriff added. Even in 2000, when record numbers of undocumented immigrants were detained in the area, just 4 percent of the area’s violent crimes were committed by illegal aliens.

Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said his town suffers from home invasions and kidnappings involving marijuana smugglers who are undoubtedly tied to Mexican organizations. However, he added, most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.

“I think the border-influenced violence is getting worse,” Villasenor said. “But is it a spillover of Mexican cartel members? No, I don’t buy that.”

——

While the nation’s illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent.

More recently, Arizona’s violent-crime rate dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.

——

Aguilar said that Juarez, Mexico, is widely regarded as the “deadliest city in the world” because of an estimated 5,000 murders in recent years. Yet right across the border, El Paso, Texas, is listed among the safest towns in America.

A review of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports suggests that Arizona’s border towns share El Paso’s good fortune. Douglas and Nogales are about the same size as Florence but have significantly lower violent-crime rates. Likewise, Yuma has a population greater than Avondale’s but a lower rate of violent offenses.

In Nogales, Ariz., residents seem bemused and annoyed by their town’s perilous reputation. Yes, they sometimes hear the gunfire across the border. No, they don’t feel safe visiting the sister city across the line. But with cops and federal agents everywhere, they see no danger on their streets.

“There’s no violence here,” said Francisco Hernandez, 31, who works in a sign shop and lives on a ranch along the border. “It doesn’t drain over, like people are saying.”

Leo Federico, 61, a retired teacher, said he has been amazed to hear members of Congress call for National Guard troops in the area.

“That’s politics,” he said, shrugging. “It’s all about votes. . . . We have plenty of law enforcement.”

Almost all the dead are poor people, not drug-enriched grandees. And though we give Mexico half a billion dollars a year to encourage its army to fight drug merchants, this alleged war has a curious feature: Almost no soldiers ever die. For example, in Juarez, over 4,200 citizens have been slain in two years. In the same period, with 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers in town, the military has suffered three dead.

Charles Bowden, High Country News

My neighbor’s eyes are soft and welcoming, easing my tension as I stumble my way through our conversation about desert plants and gardening in my broken Spanish. Danny and I have shared a lot of time together, talking mostly about plants, teaching each other their corresponding Spanish or English names. Danny comes from Mexico City, a tropical region, and he knows a lot about gardening; but within the constraints of a brutal city he has had little opportunity to enjoy his love for nature. He along with his brothers and their families migrated to the border on the wings of hope and opportunity. They built their houses together on dreams of a better life for their families, eleven people living stuffed together in a tiny cinderblock house doing all that they can to help each other succeed. Instead of freedom and a better life they have found themselves surrounded by relentless tension and difficulty. These are outstanding people who have welcomed us, two gringos, into their neighborhood with open arms.

I tell this story as a parallel to the two Americans that died a couple of weeks ago in Juarez. We have seen their stories plastered all over the news, we have shifted in our chairs and taken comfort in our resolve to stay as far away as possible, convinced that we would be the target of the next strategic bullet. But it is families like Danny’s that carry the real weight of the war. It is the poor people of the world, the voiceless and powerless, that always carry the weight and residue of the affluent. Yes, two Americans tragically died that weekend, and so did at least thirty Mexicans, thirty more to add to the nearly 5,000 in the past three years. This is Juarez: Real people. Real families. Real struggles.

Charles Bowden, arguably the leading journalist and researcher on this heinous war, says that, “few discussions about the border come from facts. Most discussions of the border come from fears. We seem to prefer slogans and fantasies: free trade, ‘just say no’,'gigantic walls’.”

It is no fantasy that well over 17,000 people in Mexico have died since Felipe Calderon took office just over three years ago, or that in Juarez alone 5,000 people have been intentionally slaughtered. The easy thing to do is shake our heads in amazement and then change the channel. And while we sit comfortably in our easy chairs over 1,000,000 of our poor brothers and sisters in Juarez shut themselves behind their stick and cardboard fences and kneel on their dirt floors praying that the bullets do not pass by too closely to their baby’s head. In a city of 1.4 million, over 100,000 people have lost their jobs at U.S. owned factories. These are jobs that pay just $5-$7 a day, not even coming close to easing the burden of living in a third world country. 27% of the homes in Juarez are now abandoned. Over 10,000 business have closed and some 30-60 thousand people, the few that are able, have taken shelter in El Paso. The mayor of Juarez and the publisher of the local newspaper live in El Paso in fear of their lives. 100-400 thousand have fled Juarez for other parts of Mexico, and yet over 1,000,000 people are too poor to do anything about their situation, and their children, making disastrous choices in a crumbled society, keep dying.

The facts do not stop here. Thanks to folks like Bowden, Diana Washington Valdez and others, the deceptive veil of political ramble is being torn and the hideous truth is being revealed.

17,000 + dead in Mexico and 5,000 in our city. More U.S. guns is not the answer.

We have hesitated in the past to post a bunch of statistics about the War Next Door. We don’t want to give people another reason to run away from the border, or incite a spirit of fear over our lives and work. We believe strongly in layering all that we do and say about Juarez with words of hope, but what Mexico is currently reaping directly and absolutely affects all of our lives, whether we believe it now or realize it later. I write this because the longer we disregard them as they stand in the midst of their pain, the uglier this war will become.

Listen to Charles Bowden’s recent NPR interview here.

The AP report very clearly illustrates why the USA policy of the prohibition of recreational drugs is such a really, really bad idea and the policy’s effects on other nations, and not just on Mexico. There are many Latin American and Caribbean nations rife with organized criminals engaged in supplying the USA demand for such drugs.

Market forces are irresistible. Where a market demand exists that demand will be supplied, whether legally or otherwise. The difference being that supplying the demand for an illegal good is much more lucrative, as its prohibition has radically raised the price beyond its real cost. So much more lucrative, in fact, that folks are willing to risk their freedom and lives to supply the market. So much more lucrative that those engaged in supplying the market are willing to eliminate their competitors with extreme prejudice. So much more lucrative that many Mexican military special forces troops forsook the military life to join the “Zetas”, first as “enforcers” for drug trade criminal organizations; and these days hostilely taking over those criminal organizations by executing their proprietors.

That’s what’s going on in Mexico these days, most prominently in the “frontera”, the Mexican/USA border region.

Prohibition of alcohol, we of the USA should remember, resulted in criminals organizing to make lots of money supplying the market demand for liquor and beer. With so much money at stake some of the organized criminals decided to disorganize and began killing their competitors to garner a larger share of the market, thus greater personal profits.

Again, it’s perfectly legal in the USA for folks to wig out daily on pharmaceutical psychotropic drugs, but one may not smoke pot grown in the back yard to get through the day. Why?

The only explanation I am able to fathom is pharmaceutical industry profits.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers, you see, don’t kill their competitors in pursuance of greater market share. They, being very well organized, have found it much more cost effective to lavish money on legislators and then suggest legislation they’d like to see enacted to increase their market share, often writing the legislation they suggest.

The murder rate in Mexico has actually dropped by 30% from 1997 through last year, the LA Times reports.  However there are localities, such as Juarez in the state of Chihuahua, where the local murder rate is amongst the highest in the world.  “If the state of Chihuahua were a country, today we would have the fourth-highest level of major violence in the world”, observed Chihuahua Sen. Gustavo Madero.

Looked at another way, though, Mexico isn’t as deadly as it used to be.

That’s the point the nation’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, was pushing this week when he cited figures showing that Mexico’s overall homicide rate has fallen since the 1990s.

“The levels of violence that the country is experiencing are very serious,” Medina Mora told a gathering of advertising executives. “But they are much less than we had 15 years ago.”

The drug-related violence has scared away tourists and prompted some commentators to warn that Mexico risks collapse. But Medina Mora said the country registered about 11 homicides per 100,000 residents last year, down from 16 in 1997.

Additional info here.

Steven Roll at Travelojos posted today after a recent visit to Puerto Vallarta.  A legal editor for a Washington, D.C.-area publishing company, Steven enjoys learning about all things Mexican and Latin American, including fascinating sites, interesting cultural aspects, and great food.  Here’s what he had to say:

As the only diners on the roof top terrace of the small hill-top restaurant in Mexico, my family almost had the place to ourselves. The sole exception was the Mexican couple who owned the place and lived there. But after the woman’s second or third trip up the steep stairway from the kitchen to attend to us, I began to feel like she was a Mexican aunt I never knew about.

After we finished our meal and listened to our son and daughter’s banter, the woman gave us a tour of her kitchen and showed us some black and white pictures of what the town looked like in the 1960s.

The $35 tab for our meal and drinks seemed like it was from the 1960s too.  Read More…

Mitch Keenan is the owner and founder of the Yucatan’s oldest real estate company, Mexico International. Before moving here fifteen years ago, Mitch worked for Continental Airlines based out of Denver. As a flight attendant, Mitch traveled throughout South America, Asia, Europe and the United States. In this video, he talks about the relative merits of living in Merida and whether or not he feels safe living here.

The video was produced (by Eclectec SA de CV) to inspire people to attend a series of seminars that Mitch and his colleagues will be giving in cities around the United States over the next nine months. For more information about those seminars, visit the Mexico International website.

And while we’re on the subject of videos and Mexico, here’s one from the Mexico Tourism Board that just came out:

…it pours.

I’m going to draw an analogy between Morton Salt’s good ol’ tagline and the steady stream of just-when-you-think-it-couldn’t-get-any-worse-oh-look-it-just-got-worse headlines coming out of my lovely host country. I think it is an especially fitting analogy as we enter rainy season here in Mexico.

Where to begin…

In case you’ve missed the headlines for the past, um, year, Mexico’s in the throes of a somewhat major drug war. The army patrols streets in border towns. Journalists are murdered. Cartel members shoot at each other in supermarkets and shopping malls. Folks get kidnapped. I can tell you from first-hand experience that in some cities it’s impossible to go out for dinner without getting a gun pointed in your direction. It’s kind of ugly up near the frontera.

There’s also the issue of this pesky recession. Yup, la crisis has officially arrived here in Mexico. The peso is steadily sinking. Prices are steadily rising. A peso here, a peso there. That’s a lot of pesos when you’re only making 100 of them a day, like many folks do here in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. In my case, an hour of peso-salaried work here in Mexico currently converts to approximately enough dollars to buy a one-way bus fare in Chicago. Nice.

You might have also heard about this swine flu. Death tolls change hourly, depending on who you’re asking or what you’re reading, but Oaxaca has the dubious honor of being home to the first documented swine-related death. Mexico City shut down last week. And as of noon today, Huajuapan de León has followed suit. My classes have officially been cancelled through May 6. Students have already vacated campus in search of face masks and vitamin C supplements. From tomorrow, I’ll be on a vacation of sorts, a kind of vacation where you’re not supposed to leave your house or breathe or talk or hug or kiss anyone.

And, just today…more good news. A 6.0 earthquake near Mexico City. We felt it here in Oaxaca. You know, just in case things weren’t interesting enough.

If you relied on headlines alone, you’d think that the situation was pretty darn depressing down here. Pistols, pesos, pigs, and…darnit, I can’t think of an earthquake-related word that begins with “p.”

But, truth is, things ain’t so bad.

Or at least things aren’t as bad as the US media is making them out to be. Not everyone who visits Mexico gets kidnapped by a drug cartel — or the swine flu from riding the Mexico City metro. I promise.

But, in my humble opinion, the glue that’s holding this country together is the people. Mexicans, if nothing else, are survivors. They’re resilient. The past couple of hundred years of Mexican history have seen a disproportionate number of awful events: wars, foreign invasions, natural disasters, financial crashes and political scandals. Folks here are used to these things. The mentality is that if today sucks, mañana will be better.

Life goes on here in Mexico. Cartel violence, economic woes, world health emergencies and natural disasters will not affect Mexico’s core, the things that make Mexico an amazing place to live, the things that keep me here this country, even through its rough patch. Crisis will not stop people from greeting strangers in the street with a heartfelt “buenas tardes” (even if it is muffled by a sanitary mask). Crisis will not stop people from making time for friends and family (even if the government has discouraged handshakes and kisses). Crisis will not stop people from having a laugh over a beer (even if the bars are closed).

Crisis will not stop people from smiling.

This afternoon, I happened to be up near the front gate of our university as scores of blue face mask-clad students filed off campus. Some looked a bit worried, some were laughing with friends (no classes for a week and a half is a pretty sweet deal to any 19-year-old, even if a world health crisis is the reason behind it). But I caught a glimpse of one student, walking alone.

He’d drawn a big, goofy smile on his mask, just where his mouth would’ve been below.

It will get better mañana. I promise.

I cannot watch the news. It only takes minimal exposure before I want to curl up in a ball on the floor. For instance, I keep hearing that Mexico is on the Verge of Collapse, and also that it is a Failed State. This is scary stuff. I’m not sure what happens when a country that has survived for a thousand years collapses. What is left behind?

I admit that it makes me anxious, and more so since I recently watched a harrowing  special about the Dust Bowl on the History Channel. Was I to understand that having the earth denuded of it’s topsoil, drought,  livestock keeling over dead, a historic depression, 25% unemployment, and plagues of freaking millipedes had not put America on the Verge-of-Collapse, but Mexico is permanently perched there? This means that somehow the country that I’ve chosen to live in has to be a third world hell worse off than Dust Bowl Oklahoma. My anxiety has turned to skepticism.

It turns out that The Fund for Peace has a grading system called the Index of Failed States. When a state is failing,  it doesn’t mean that there will be some kind of supernova as it collapses in on itself, as I vaguely thought. It’s less like a star burning out and more like failing math in your sophomore year. Instead of A-F, it goes from Green (sustainable) to Red (Alert). In between are Cream (Moderate) and Yellow (Warning), and believe me, the whole world lives somewhere in the cream and yellow zone, including America and Mexico.  It’s clear that you can’t be rock and roll and be in the Green…only countries like Luxembourg and Sweden are green. And Canada.

It didn’t require much of a time investment before I began to feel like I’d been had by the the Talking Heads and their catastrophe rhetoric. Again. If you don’t straighten up, says the Fund for Peace, you’re going to fail. Just like my parents used to say! But in the hands of newcasters with hour after hour to fill, it becomes something very different.

Believe me when I tell you that I’m content to leave politics to the people that give a damn. If it doesn’t involve rhinestone appliques or reality television, I’m not interested. When I am forced to listen to the news, I usually feel only a vague sense of horror, like a teenager hopelessly eavesdropping while grown-ups ruin her life. So I didn’t set out to become an expert on this kind of stuff, and in fact, I haven’t.

But I can report that the Verge of Collapse turns out to be a very wide place, a regular esplanade, if you will. I have learned that the standards for being a Failed State are low, and almost any accounting error or severe storm will qualify you. A government only has to come up short in one of many varied criteria, and economy is one of those, so to my surprise, the USA is in fact sharing the Verge of Collapse with her neighbor to the South!  Also crowded onto the Verge are Argentina, Venezuela and Israel, and of course, Russia and China.

Thanks to the Internet, God bless it, even if the Fund for Peace  gives you a passing grade, it’s pretty easy to find someone who thinks you’re a Failed State. As an example, I thought that England would be safe, serenely hunkered down somewhere with a gin rickey watching the sun set on those of us who were roosted on The VOC, but nope, Britain is in danger of bankruptcy, which certainly gets you an F. New England, too, because the Atlantic Codfish is, you guessed it, on the Verge of Collapse.

The exception is Canada. I mentioned my findings to the ladies who lunch, noting that Canada seemed to be safe from the VOC. “Oh, we’ve been bankrupt for years.” our Canadian bff drawled. “The healthcare system, you know.”  I can’t find anything to substantiate her position though, and she’s the same woman that thinks W was an excellent king.

I’m pleased to report that Mexico can be a Failed State and on the Verge of Collapse and still be a damn fine place to live. Drug wars are bad and so is flu, but this sunny nation has never been free of violence or illness or poverty or even millipedes, and people have always fallen in love and settled in Mexico in spite of it. I don’t know what drives the relentless barrage of media that addresses only one aspect of this country of contrasts. It seems like bullying, petty and mean. The fact is, bad in Mexico exists, and it can be pretty bad… but, what the hell,  Mexico’s good is so much better.