Robert Joe Stout's Blog: Mexico Con Amor

Good Mothers

Almost all of the immigrant Mexican mothers I talked to or interviewed wanted more for their children than they’d received growing up. In most cases that meant earning power but also respectability. A son or daughter who dropped out of school or married badly or joined a gang punctured the parents’ slowly accrued self-esteem and invalidated years of sacrifice. Bitterness, depression often resulted, especially for mothers who’d invested a great deal of emotionality in their children’s futures. Often they sought consolation among other mothers who felt similarly betrayed.

From childhood onward many Mexican women develop a value system oriented towards giving, that what they give is important but that they as persons are not important. A good wife is one who gives unstintingly to her husband. A good mother is one who gives unstintingly to her children. Consequently she accrues an identity based on results of this giving. A son proclaiming “I owe it to my mother” is the finest tribute she can receive. To have children who fail, who become criminals, dropouts, outcasts is to have failed. Only others who also have failed understand.

“It’s not that the ego is lacking or that the ego is weak,” insists Violeta Aquino who works with feminist groups dedicated to self-empowerment and overcoming what she calls the stigmatization of subservience and poverty. So often, she explains,

one has identified so strongly with this concept of giving that it’s inturned but it hasn’t lost power, it hasn’t lost dynamism. When women who feel this failure unite they become formidable social forces, like the mothers from Central America who’ve undergone hardships and persecution while scouring Mexico for disappeared sons and daughters. Similar groups have been instrumental in locating the graves of persons sequestered and assassinated. It takes strong egos, Aquino insists, to not give up, to go on year after year searching, confronting, overcoming.

[From MEXICO VS. TRUMP, due out soon from Sunbury Press.

How Did Governmental Corruption Become So Rampant in Mexico?

As the theory that “to be efficient government should be run like a business” became more popular after World War II, concepts like “trade balance” and stock market values became national concerns. The governments of the United States and leading countries in Europe and Korea and Japan in Asia supported manufacturing and exports, sometimes to the disadvantage of their own citizenry. Countries in Latin America and Asia, including Mexico, imitated them, shucking internal development for raw materials and manufacturing exports.

But it didn’t work the same way. Mexico and other “developing nations” more recently had emerged from autocratic ruler—kings, dictators, emperors. Their bureaucracies were not solidly established like those of the United States, England and France. Police under a king or emperor need not be well-trained. Tax collectors, judges, accountants needed only to serve their rulers’ wishes. Obedience, not efficiency or honesty, becomes a rule of thumb.

When a government becomes a business it takes its governmental functions with it, one of which is law enforcement. In most so-called democracies the President/Prime Minister/CEO’s staff has a variety of separate duties, most of which are designed to increase the corporation’s profits or assist profit-making by establishing well-functioning working conditions. These working conditions include production tools, well-defined processes of production and distribution and safeguarding production methods and those involved in their performance. These create expenditures that per se do not generate profit but do contribute to overall profit-making.

This independently functioning bureaucracy didn’t exist in Mexico. Local and state police were among the lowest paid in the world, making them easy recipients of bribes, particularly from drug cartels. Within the bureaucracy a spoils system existed: department heads hired wives, daughters, cousins, in-laws to posts for they had no experience. The executive branch controlled the judiciary and regulations governing money transfers were ineffectual and in many cases non-existent. Governors like Javier Duarte of Veracruz pocketed billions of pesos and weren’t checked until the 2018 presidential elections loomed and the incumbent party, the PRI, faced losing because of corruption scandals. (I deal with this more explicitly in Mexico vs. Trump due out from Sunbury Press this fall.)

Newly elected President Andrés Manuel López Obrador launched an anti-corruption campaign immediately after taking office in December 2018 but he inherited a system imbedded with the corruption of hundreds of years. Mexico’s police are still among the world’s poorest paid, the laws governing financial transactions among the world’s weakest. Forbes Magazine lists Mexican entrepreneurs among the richest individuals in the world but as a nation Mexico has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor of any country. Despite so-called “democratic elections” Mexico is an oligarchy. The wealthiest 100 families are those who, in reality, rule.

Kill the Teachers!

It happened abruptly, in southern Mexico:

It was five o’clock in the morning. Some people started shouting — they’d gotten warning calls on their cell phones. ‘Get up! Get up! The police are coming!’ I saw flashlights snap on. Then we heard the helicopters. They came in so low their big rotors sent things flying through the air. Then the whistling sounds as they fired tear gas. ‘What are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ teachers were shouting. We were coughing and choking, we were blinded, we tried to get our things together, people were shouting for their children…

Then the police came. It seemed like there were thousands of them. They were swinging their clubs, smashing everything. One of them in front of me grabbed a little girl and hurled her against a bench. Everyone was screaming. It was terrible. ‘Stop! What are you doing!’ I confronted several police. I thought because I was a woman they wouldn’t hurt me. But one of them jammed his club into my stomach so hard I fell over. Another police kicked me, hard.

I scrambled away–the tear gas was so thick I couldn’t see where I was going. I wanted to fight back but I had nothing to fight with. Somehow, I stumbled down a side street. I tried to call my husband on my cell phone but when he answered all I could do was cry…” – María Elena, primary school teacher from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Kill the Teachers by Robert Joe Stout tells the rest of story. https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Teachers-Mexicos-Bloody-Repression-ebook/dp/B07C883C1S

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Memorial Service

Memorial Service

In Mexico Human Rights Advocates Are Assassinated

Robert Joe Stout

1. Decision: simple and not Catholic-Evangelical-Zapoteca. No crosses, no artifacts. Food? Yes, well, Bety would approve. Mescal? Why not? It’s Oaxaca. It’s on all the altars of Day of the Dead. If she were here she’d approve. That’s the way she was. Bursting with life. Bursting with goodness.

Private ceremony? No, but not publicized. Not official. For those of us whose lives she affected—not her family or those with whom she was most intimately involved but admirers, believers, workers towards the same goals. Invite who we want but not advertise.

2. Guidelines: we all know how she died. There were bullet holes in the van. The stranger—the Finn with the difficult name to pronounce—dead beside her. An ambush. They were on a mission of mercy, taking food, blankets to the people in the blockaded village. They were told not to go but they went anyway—the people in the village were desperate, starving, unable to leave. It was on the news, on television, we know how it happened but we don’t want to go there. We want to keep politics out of it. Leave hate out of it, accusations. This is about her, how we feel about her, how much she meant to us.

Memories keep her alive. Photographs. Things she said. Without superlatives, without propaganda. As though she were here among us, laughing, joking, criticizing. Sharing as she always shared with others.

3. Location: the hills beyond Fortín overlooking the city. Pinos. Ahuehuetes. An altar? No, just the trees, the rocky outcroppings, the birds. We need to be close to the earth. If it rains, all the better. We are Oaxacans—People of the Rain. We want it to be a place where Bety would feel comfortable, close to the earth, close to natural things.

A difficult climb? There is a road that winds close to the crest. From there it is not a difficult walk. If some cannot make it, if it is beyond their capabilities, there will be other ceremonies for them. In El Centro. In churches. Remember, this is for us. A way to bind us together, a commitment, a fortifying of resolve.

4. Program: no orden del día. Each one of us can speak, say what he or she wants. We can set a time to share the food we are bringing. There will be guitars, Perhaps an accordion. It would be pleasant to sing together, songs from the Isthmus, Oaxacan songs. Son de la barricada? It is a protest song, not traditional, from only five years before. Yes, I can picture Bety singing it, pumping her fist to the rhythm, but that takes us to a different place. Condemnations. Anger.

Of course we feel anger. Anger because the government is doing nothing. Because Bety and the Finn are dead and the criminals are free. But that is different politial assassinations

from what we feel about Bety. Yes, Bety was outraged by injustice, always in the front at protests, urging those she cared about to follow her, not give in. We’re not giving in. To have a memorial service is not giving in. It’s remembering. Honoring.

5. Restrictions: no restrictions, just agreements. Some of us were in the caravan—nearly twenty cars and trucks, a long drive beginning just at dawn. Warned of danger, yes, but there should have been police. The aggressors had killed and raped, then blocked the roads. Why? What was so important about Copala? A community, indigena, high in the mountains. There was money involved—the aggressors had money, military weapons, but they were indigenas too, people of the same race. The government was involved, but why? Drugs? Minerals? Lumber? Simply because the people there wanted to be autonomous, make their own decisions? We don’t have answers. We just know that Bety and the Finn are dead. And the investigations—if there are investigations—are going nowhere.

So it’s right that we’re angry. It’s not to take away anger that we want to honor Bety. It’s to unite with her. Support what she was doing. By honoring her, as a group, together, we strengthen ourselves.

6. Exclusions: it’s not just about her. The Finn from a country so different, so far away, came here to observe, participate, take something back to his people, we’re not excluding him, it’s just that we didn’t know him well. And yes, the outcasts, the refugees, the people from Copala, losing their home, their lands, afraid to go back, afraid that they like Bety will be killed. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands—millions even—in Mexico who have disappeared, been killed, forced to flee from their homes. We cannot name them all. By honoring Bety we honor them.

Remember this is for us. By sharing we come to grips with what we feel, we open those knotted up places inside us, loosen the hurt, absorb it into something positive.

7. Security: watchfulness would be a better way to express it. We are not militants, we don’t have high community profiles. This is not like a street demonstration, a blockading of thoroughfares, offices. There could be infiltrators but some among us would recognize them. Perhaps someone from the media but there only as a friend, someone who admired her. What could infiltrators or the media report? That we talked, sang, shed tears?

8. Duration: a few hours at the most. We’ll want to leave well before nightfall. Some will have more to say than others, some will want to be busy with the food, the music. Remembering her—honoring her—will bring out sadness but we don’t want to be morbid. Or vengeful. We need to recognize who we are. We are not protagonists, leaders; our participation is not like hers a full commitment. We can demand, condemn but after a while our voices fade. This has happened to every movement, every striving for justice here in Oaxaca. In Mexico. The Betys are little sparks that for a moment shine brightly, show us possibilities, make us aware of realities. Though we cannot do what she did—what she dared to do—we can absorb some of that sparking, hold it inside us, from it give what we can.

9. Termination: a song goodbye perhaps. A realization of our own weakness, our need to evade falling beneath the shadows of forgetfulness, of guilt. Of acceptance that in reality is cowardice, cowardice twined with inability. Cowardice that leads to amputating part of who we are, submerging it into a gray of unused life. Burying the spark. And sidling away weaker for what we did not—could not—do.

Shared weakness. That is what society is all about. That’s what makes populations easy to control.

10. Praxis: to remember Bety. To realize that her essential being—who she was and is—still lives.

And that we are almost dead.

Featured in the 2018 Clockhouse anthology published by the Goddard College Clockhouse Writers’ Conference

Awesome Book

Here’s what an Amazon reviewer says about Kill the Teachers

As more people come up through the southern border, no matter what side of politics you are on you should not be ignorant to the facts presented in the book. There is a reason people are starving in Mexico where the president of Mexico is healthy, fat and happy. There is a reason and we are not helping those who cannot come to the U.S. by looking the other way as some sneak through the border. It is not compassionate to allow Mexicans to come to the U.S. to be our slaves here with low wages or barely able to survive Medicaid/welfare while they send earned income back to Mexico and build up this corrupt government’s coffers. Though our own government is almost as corrupt, maybe as corrupt, it is with gratitude that I see someone telling this story. If only people would listen.

Awesome book

Kill the Teachers by Robert Joe Stout

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Hideous Costume

With Day of the Dead approaching I search out the hideous costume I’ve used for years. It consists of:

* my face, which frightens children, cats, street vendors, young women and tourists from everywhere except Texas. (Nothing seems to frighten tourists from Texas);

* a black sweatshirt;

* a slightly too large old pair of jeans.

* a beat-up backpack tht could contain anything from dead rat skins, a broken umbrella, a torn-at-the-corners volume of outdated poetry and/or a still warm tlayuda.

With this disguise I can participate in calendas, street dances, sacariest apparition contests and mescal tastings

…as long as no one recognizes that it’s the same way I look every other day of the year.

Dangerous Weapons

The police stripped Villegas and his companions of their cell phones, cameras and other possessions and accused them of conveying “dangerous weapons” — bags filled with children’s marbles and slingshots — that they found in the baggage compartment of one of the buses. When one of the APPO supporters, a distinguished looking middle-aged psychologist, protested, half a dozen armed PFP grabbed him and threw him face forward onto the asphalt. They herded him and others whose IDs indicated that they belonged to the teachers union into a nearby cornfield, tied their hands behind their backs and kicked and stomped on them with their heavy boots.

“Who’s paying you?” they demanded. “Give us their names or you’ll never get out of here alive!”

From KILL THE TEACHERS, now available as an ebook from Amazon

Police Attack

“It was five o’clock in the morning [June 14]. Some people started shouting — they’d gotten warning calls on their cell phones. ‘Get up! Get up! The police are coming!’ I saw flashlights snap on. Then we heard the helicopters. They came in so low their big rotors sent things flying through the air. Then the whistling sounds as they fired tear gas. ‘What are they doing? Why are they doing this?’ teachers were shouting. We were coughing and choking, we were blinded, we tried to get our things together, people were shouting for their children…”

From KILL THE TEACHERS, now available on Kindle