Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2008 > February
February 2008
Barack tells Mexico: Raids, deportations don’t work
Barack Obama hit the front page of the Mexican papers again this morning, this time in an exclusive interview (snagged after his speech at the Austin Convention Center) with the Mexico City daily Reforma, in which he made comments sure to please Mexicans. In some of his strongest language so far on the immigration issue, Obama told Reforma that raids and deportations aren’t the answer.
“The raids haven’t worked,” Obama said. “It’s clear the contribution these Mexican workers make for our economy and one of my priorities on this issue is to keep the families of immigrants united and not separate them with deportations.”
Mexico by and large couldn’t be happier with the three remaining presidential candidates, widely perceived here to be the most immigrant-friendly of the original slate of candidates.
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Bob Dylan’s curious tour of Mexico City
Dylan was spotted on Tuesday wandering through the Bellas Artes Metro stop, checking out some of the Lucha Libre photography on display on the station’s walls. Apparently, he created just a minor stir, with just a few people recognizing him and taking pictures with their cell phones.
Then Dylan did a little boxing at the Nuevo Jordan gym, impressing trainer Rodolfo “Guerco” Rodriguez, who had no idea the man in the ring was perhaps the most famous singer on the planet. “I said…these old guys are going to give each other heart attacks!” Rodriguez told the El Universal newspaper. “They told me that the oldest guy was Bob Dylan, this guy you’re telling me about…He boxed with all his friends and he did well; you can tell he’s practiced for awhile because he landed some good shots and brought his own professional (equipment). He knows what pugilism is and he enjoys it.”
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A billion reasons to complain
I try not to use this blog to advance personal agendas too much (OK, I may have kvetched here once or twice about my lousy cell phone service), but I have been moved to make a public request to the nation of Mexican: please embrace the word and concept of billion.
I never knew just how handy this little word was until I moved to a country where it doesn’t exist. Here in Mexico, and lots of other places in Latin America, the number 1,000,000,000 isn’t one billion, it’s thousand million. As in, “China has one thousand three million people” and “the universe is 13 thousand million years old.”
The lack of the billion term becomes most glaring in Mexican news stories filled with facts and figures. Yesterday’s La Jornada newspaper tackles the tricky subject of taxes paid by Mexico’s nationalized oil company Pemex. We learn that Pemex sold a record level of oil totalling “42 thousand 886 million dollars.” And the trade imbalance in petroleum “fell from 19 thousand million dollars in 2006 to 17 thousand 200 million dollars in 2007.” Got that?
So why the lack of a billion in the Mexican vernacular?
The wikipedia entry on billon, Spanish for billion, gives a glimpse. Apparently in Spanish, billion actually means 10 to the 12th power, or 1,000,000,000,000 (our trillion), a definition dating back to the 15th century. The entry notes that the discrepancy often leads to translation problems from English to Spanish and vice-versa. One of the worst is the use of the term billonario in Spanish, since no one (not even Carlos Slim) has amassed a fortune of one trillion dollars.
It seems that the correct Spanish term for 1,000,000,000 is not a billion but the rarely glimpsed millardo. This word was introduced by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1995, according to yet another wikipedia entry, to “stop the American word billion from being translated to billon and contaminating the current number system in Latin America.”
Millardo, though, hasn’t caught on in Mexico, and as a result there is no nifty, concise word to describe thousand million. Hopefully, it won’t take a millardo to figure this one out.
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Smokers’ paradise lost
Mexico, especially seen through American eyes, has always been something of a smoker’s paradise. Smokers puff happily as they stroll through the local mall, wait for a plane or digest their dinner along with a coffee. But officials in Mexico are clamping down: The Mexican Senate just passed a landmark federal smoking law this afternoon that prohibits smoking in all public, indoor places (unless owners build a self-enclosed smoking section) and severely cracks down on tobacco advertising. The bill also requires huge warning labels on all packs and prohibits the sale of individual cigarettes.
And as I type, the Mexico City legislature is hammering out a tough new amendment to its own smoking ban, scheduled to go into effect this July. The revised version would outlaw smoking in all enclosed public spaces, regardless of whether bar and restaurant owners build a ventilated smoking section. Violations of the law could land offenders a 36-hour stint in a Mexico City jail, enough to make most people wait to light up until they get outside.
But neither measure is a done deal quite yet. President Felipe Calderon still has to sign the federal bill into law (which he is expected to do) and several establishments, including the Wal-Mart owned Vips chain of restaurants, have presented legal challenges to the Mexico City version.
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Internal division stalks the Mexican left
Two years later, the Mexican left is consumed by division, an internal fight that threatens to spill out of control and, experts say, weaken the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the PRD, Mexico’s foremost left-leaning party.
How bad have things gotten? This morning we read (subscription required) of death threats received by members of the New Left, a more moderate group of legislators, just days after they were verbally abused at a Lopez Obrador rally against privatizing Pemex. Among those receiving death threats is Lopez Obrador’s former top campaign aide Jesus Ortega, who has broken with his former mentor. “It seems to me that intolerance has no place among those who say they have a democratic stance,” lamented PRD founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas after the rally. Lopez Obrador has condemned the aggressions.
The battle on the left basically breaks down like this: Those who remain steadfastly loyal to Lopez Obrador, who has called on PRD legislators not to engage the government of President Felipe Calderon vs. the New Left, whose members want to take advantage of the PRD’s standing in the Congress (the party has the second most seats behind the conservative PAN) to influence legislation and push the left’s agenda. The result has been a PRD at loggerheads, even seeing its members in Congress voting against each other. That has translated to mostly smooth sailing for Calderon, who entered the presidency facing serious questions about his legitimacy.
The battle for the PRD’s soul continues with internal elections for party president. The race in essence pits Lopez Obrador’s protege and former Mexico City mayor Alejandro Encinas against New Left representative Ortega. Whoever emerges victorious should tell us a lot about the future of the Mexican left.
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Mexico ex-pats favor Obama
The results are in for the first ever “Global Primary” and in Mexico, ex-pats overwhelmingly backed Barack Obama. Obama took 56 percent of the vote compared to 40 percent for Hillary Clinton. That was slightly less than the 65 percent to 32 percent whipping Obama gave Clinton in world-wide voting organized by the Democrats Abroad organization.
There are some six million American ex-pats scattered around the world (more than several U.S. states) and an estimated one million in Mexico alone. They run the gamut from executives in Mexico City high-rises, to retirees living the good life along Lake Chapala to surfer dudes hiding out in Puerto Escondido.
The Democrats Abroad will hold their convention in Vancouver, Canada in April to sort out the group’s 22 delegates, who will be attending the Democratic National Convention. As close as this race has been, a delegate from San Miguel de Allende or Mazatlan could cast the deciding vote.
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Money buys first class border crossing
For its cover story, the magazine uses the story of an anonymous coyote, who claims to be from the state of Sinaloa and plies his trade along the Arizona border. According the man, migrants who can afford $3,000 get the deluxe treatment: The coyote says that his operation rents legal visas from Mexicans for $300 a week and has a stash of the documents at any given time. When migrants pay the $3,000 they go through the visas looking for a photo ID that resembles the would-be border crosser. The match doesn’t have to be exact, our anonymous coyote explains. The human smugglers also have a crew of makeup artists stashed along the border who will change hair color, give colored contacts, pencil in moles or freckles, glue fake beards and dress the migrant as a well-to-do border crosser. The migrant is then taken across the international bridge by car and tells the border guard that he or she is simply headed to the nearest Wal-Mart or shopping mall. “That’s because if you say you’re going farther, they’ll pass the visa through the machine…and they trap you,” the coyote says.
If the migrant can’t afford the $3,000 he or she is taken on a brutal journey through the murderous Arizona desert, a trip that costs $1,500. At $700 is the budget border crossing experience: the mad dash. The coyote explains that for this price, the coyotes will gather a group of migrants together along the border and send them across in a mad dash at the hour of the Border Patrol shift change. Some will undoubtedly get caught, but those that make it across are given a bus ticket to Phoenix. “If they get caught along the way, that’s their problem,” the coyote says. “$700 isn’t enough money to risk anything more.”
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No cheating: Madrazo races in Austin marathon
The Mexican press had some more fun with Madrazo today, pointing out a little gleefully that he came in 360th (to be fair he was 14th in his age group). Here’s how the daily Reforma (subscription required) began its story on the race (which appeared on page 3 of the A section): “Without resorting to short cuts, Roberto Madrazo returned to the world of competitive racing yesterday…”
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“If you want to be next, keep snitching.”
The dreaded narco-messages have returned. Over the last two days, six bodies have popped up in Tijuana with messages attached to them warning residents not to cooperate with officials. Last month, the Mexican military opened up an anonymous tip line for residents to share their knowledge of drug trafficking operations. Officials later opened up two email tip lines and have reportedly been flooded with calls and emails. The message on the latest body, that of a young man with mutilated fingers, carried this ominous warning: “If you want to be next, keep snitching.”
This isn’t the first time the drug cartels have used their executions to send messages. Last year saw a spate of bodies dumped with menacing messages, mostly to specific law enforcement officials, who were accused of providing protection to rival drug gangs. And in Sinaloa, dead dogs were thrown in front of a military base with warnings against a military commander who was thought to be crusading against El Chapo Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel.
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Sleeping through the earthquake
Somehow, I slept through a 6.4-scale earthquake this morning. The tremor made plenty of people nervous, but luckily did no damage here in Mexico City. The quake was epicentered near the Oaxacan coast and reportedly did some minor damage there (no reports of deaths).
Earthquakes always get people here thinking back to the disaster of 1985, when a quake flattened big parts of this city, killing 9,000. Here’s how some residents reacted to this morning’s rumble on an El Universal online chat: “Because of 1985, earthquakes make me PANIC!” wrote one resident. “Luckily nothing happened, but now I have a tremendous psychosis!” “It was scary, because when it began shaking I jumped out of bed and yelled at my husband, who of course was in a deep sleep, which scared me more,” wrote another. “It felt like it lasted 8 minutes, but it was light.”
I’m not sure how Nancy and I slept through such a thing. My theory (and I’m sticking to it) is that we live in Coyoacan, which sits on solid land, unlike the rest of Mexico City which is built over the old lake bed of Tenochtitlan (and thus more susceptible to scary shaking). That doesn’t explain how a considerably milder earthquake last year jolted us awake and had us huddling in the bed, listening to the radio for comfort.
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Driving in the DF: Mad Max would be proud
I finally earned my Mexico City stripes last week: I drove the Federal District’s streets for the first time, and at rush hour no less. In the nearly two years Nancy and I have lived here we’ve simply never had the need to drive. Taxis, buses and the city’s usually-efficient subway system make navigating the city a virtual breeze. We don’t see much of a need to add yet another car to the city’s six million vehicles and its mind numbing traffic jams.
And as anyone who has visited the megalopolis can attest, driving here is not for the weak of heart. I’m from Boston, a city notorious for bad drivers (we would say “aggressive”) and I have never encountered anything like this. Mexico City drivers make New Yorkers look like little old ladies.
Drivers regularly clump into four lanes when there should only be three, think nothing of turning left from the right lane across multiple lanes of traffic and nose their front bumpers into the exhaust pipes of the guy in front of them. Anyone who can’t keep up is hounded into submission with constant horns and withering glares. Rotaries resemble a death cage match out of Beyond Thunderdome. The rules are simple: if you can get away with it, it’s OK.
So it was with a mixture of excitement and dread that I rented a car to drive to nearby Queretaro for a story there. We began the journey at 4 p.m., the beginning of Mexico City’s maniacal rush hour.
We took Reforma, Mexico City’s version of Congress Avenue, and lurched our way through near-gridlock. Once I got over the amazement that I was actually driving in this madhouse, I got to the business at hand: maneuvering past Mexico City’s peseros, city buses driven by raging lunatics who think nothing of bullying into your lane if they think they can save a couple seconds off their route.
All was going as well as could be until I arrived at our turn off for the Periferico, a traffic-choked loop that circles the city. Once on the Periferico we were presented with another challenge: getting gas. The diabolical fiends at the rental agency had given me a Jeep with less than a quarter tank and I began having nauseating visions of running out of gas as we idled in the full blown rush hour traffic. I had to exit onto the equally crowded access road to reach a Pemex, Mexico’s nationalized gas station chain.
Exiting, I came face to face with perhaps Mexico’s greatest road system perversion: the lack of merge lanes. To get off the highway I had to navigate the Jeep into oncoming traffic that had no intention of slowing, let alone stopping. Luckily, I remembered one of Mexico City’s driving maxims - might makes right - and simply barreled my way in front of a much smaller sedan. The driver appeared to let loose a stream of curses and I knew I had arrived.
Mexican credit card rates: cover your eyes
Heaven help Mexican credit card holders who don’t pay off their bills in time. Even as interest rates plummet in the United States, interest rates on Mexican credit cards are enough to make any American gasp: the average interest rate right now stands at 34.27 percent, according to this morning’s Reforma newspaper. Several popular banks offer credit cards with an interest of more than 40 percent. The American Express Blue Card has annual interest rate of 37 percent here, according to the Reforma survey. Since April, interest rates have skyrocketed on some cards, as much as 15 percentage points.
Mexican banks say that worry about a slowing economy (growth rates here were recently downgraded to just 2.8 percent for 2008), lower employment numbers (Mexico’s biggest bugaboo) and high rates of loan defaults have caused the interest rates to surge.
Making things worse, the Mexican government says some banks are activating credit cards for consumers who never asked for them. “Clients frequently become registered in the credit bureau with debt from credit cards they’ve never had in their hands,” the Mexican government’s financial services watchdog Condusef told Reuters recently. “They’ve never received an account statement, but when they revise their status in the credit bureau, it says they owe $20 or $40 for commissions on credit cards they never asked for.”
Consumer credit and credit cards are a booming business in Mexico, growing an estimated 20 percent in 2007. But interest rates have never been kind to Mexican consumers and the Condusef has blasted banks in Mexico for charging exorbitant rates and fees. Most of Mexico’s banks are owned by financial institutions in Europe, which charge much higher interest rates in Mexico than they do in their home countries.
Mexican media: advantage Hillary
Mexican papers, most of them at least, are giving the victory to Hillary Clinton in last night’s Super Tuesday elections, which were followed rather breathlessly south of the border. The front page of the influential daily El Universal features a huge photo of a pumped up Clinton addressing the crowd with the headline, “They voted for experience.”
La Cronica also featured a jazzed Clinton, juxtaposed with a somber photo of Barack Obama looking like his pet dog had just died. The headline was a little more restrained: “Hillary triumphs, but doesn’t deliver the knockout blow.” Both the Excelsior and Reforma newspapers featured large photos of the celebrating Clinton rally, without any visuals of the Obama fever in Chicago.
Only the left-leaning daily La Jornada newspaper took a different approach, casting last night’s primaries and caucuses in terms of Obama’s sudden surge. La Jornada was the only major metro to feature a smiling Obama on the front page and ran this headline, sure to warm the hearts of Obama’s many Mexican supporters: “Obama frustrates Hillary’s Super Tuesday hopes.”
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In Mexico, it’s Super Martes!
Clinton did some Latin American outreach today, publishing an essay in Spanish that ran in the top Mexico City daily El Universal, in which she pledged greater cooperation with Mexico and the region. “Helping Latin America prosper will reduce pressure on our borders, but that alone is not enough,” she wrote to her neighbors to the south. ” Securing our border must be part of any integral reform of the immigration system.”
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Trouble in paradise: Cancun gets its very own election controversy
Cancun makes up one of the ritziest, and wealthiest, municipalities in all of Mexico, and as such is a coveted prize for Mexico’s political parties. Yesterday’s city elections didn’t produce a clear winner so much as a potentially nasty fight between the PRI, which continues to defy oddsmakers who predicted its disappearance after the 2006 presidential elections, and the left-leaning PRD. The PRI claimed victory in Cancun long before the first official early returns came in, causing the PRD to claim its own victory in the city. The PRD denounced all manner of dirty trickery on the part of the PRI, including using public buses and taxis to ferry its voters to the polls. “There is a desperation to conserve the hegemony of a retrograde government, and that is very sad,” said PRD candidate Greg Sanchez Martinez.
The PRI has rebounded strongly since the disastrous 2006 election, in which its presidential candidate came in a distant third. PRI governors run 18 of Mexico’s 32 states, not a bad showing for a party many thought was headed for extinction.
By this morning, the PRD candidate had a 2,500 vote lead in Cancun, with the specter of a legal fight over the results looming.