I have been quiet for a few months while I worked on the census, but a couple of things have happened which have convinced me to break my silence.
The first was an interview I heard on NPR, and the second was the marriage of Chelsea Clinton.
The interview was with Charles Bowden, who was discussing his book, Murder City, Cuidad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. I have since bought his book, which is a horrific account of how the drug cartels, along with the local, state, and federal police, and the Mexican army, have turned Juarez and large parts of Mexico into something rather worse than Somalia.
In his interview, he told of how there are over 150,000 addicts crawling along the dusty streets of this town across the border from El Paso. The cartels and the aforementioned military organizations have undertaken a persistent program of massive murder, torture and rape. Anyone looking into the causes, or the perpetrators of these crimes, is quickly added to the numbers of the dead. No one asks about it. They chronicle the gruesome deaths, they count the number of bullets fired and their calibre, they describe the state of the mangled corpses, but they rarely identify the victim, and they never call out the killers. Maybe they once did. But the few brave reporters who did are long dead, and their survivors have learned not to question.
There are dozens of acknowledged murders committed each month.Dozens more are anonymous, because the bodies are never found or because they are too insignificant to report. The ongoing myth is that these are wars between the various cartels, but the innocent are as numerous as the guilty, women and children are as well represented as the thugs, and the element of random homicide is as prevalent as the purposeful contract killing.
This is like Warsaw in 1939, Nanking in 1937, Berlin in April 1945, or Rwanda in more recent times. The difference is that the U.S. is a willing participant in the lie. We are told that we are working alongside the army to defeat the drug cartels, and that the latter are solely responsible for the mayhem. Based on their numbers alone, the army probably accounts for the most deaths, and certainly has committed the most rapes. We have portrayed them as our partners, and as fighters in a nobel cause.
But that is not the only thing that we have done to put that bleeding country on the cross.
Shortly after he came into office, Bill Clinton brought NAFTA into existence. It introduced agribusiness on a large scale to Mexico. Over a million small family farms were wiped out, unable to compete with the economies of scale. Poor, displaced farmers and their families migrated north, either to try their luck as illegal migrant laborers or as day workers in factories across the border in El Paso, working for pennies. In their desperation, many became in thrall to the burgeoning drug trade, which became more deadly with each passing year.
At the same time that their life was being permanently shattered, Americans found that their own jobs were being effectively outsourced, also permanently, to cheaper overseas vendors. The winners were a small group of investors, wealth managers, and players in the stock market. If all you looked at was the market, you would have to agree that things had never been better. Of course, manufacturing jobs had, by this time, been reduced by 90%, but there were more millionaires than ever before in our history.
Know any of them?
I would like to think that, as the proud father walked his daughter down the aisle, he thought for just a moment about the new millions introduced to poverty, probably to remain there for the rest of their lives, as a result of NAFTA and other business-friendly legislation he oversaw. I wonder if he spared a thought for the dead of Cuidad Juarez.
No comments:
Post a Comment