IN Mexico, our Monuments shows government' corruption

[Rafael Norma]

@FelipeCalderon, “The Matador” @milenio @nytimes @EPN @BarackObama Fast & Furious @hrw @REFORMACOM

 

[Rafael Norma]

@BarackObama: Happy Halloween for the whole world, including #Mexico our backyard, now on drug war; #Mexico: Remember Fast & Furious: @GOP @TheDemocRATS @TheJusticeDept @StateDept

 

[Rafael Norma]

backyard


By Sergio Aguayo

(October 31, 2012). - In solidarity for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in all countries.


Exploiting Mexican governments fainthearted, a part of the elite and American society still treats us like their backyard.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney discussed a total of four hours on three separate occasions. Not a second devoted to Mexican blodshed. Is Offensive to us that Obama only their third debate said it was "heartbreaking, " when he thought of the 30,000 killed in the conflict in Syria seconded by Mitt Romney, ]calling for "humanitarian disaster" to the dead and 300,000 refugees. What about our 46, 462 executed?, Take the conservative estimate made by @reformacom of 27 October Reform, what about our 230,000 displaced deemed the Norwegian Refugee Council in 2010?, What about our missing, kidnapped or threatened?


Some people said that they evaded the issue of Mexico, because that would force them to take into account the uncontrollable addiction of his population - the Second Amendment to the Constitution that allows them to buy, store and carry weapons of all kinds, the controversial Fast and Furious program, or the wrath of the powerful National Rifle Association.
It is possible that in their disdain they have been influenced by electoral calculations. However, during the past six years American administrations have removed information from its annual reports about the uncomfortable on the situation of human rights in Mexico (since 1976 the law made ​​by @StateDept) and the three reports on the Merida Initiative. It is shocking the absolute silence on the illegal smuggling of U.S. weapons to Mexico. The assault rifles, pistols called "cop-killing" and .50 caliber sniper rifles are not derived from corn, beans and squash in our cornfields: most of them purchased in 8, 479 gun stores along the border area.

They treat us like their backyard due to the submission of the Mexican government. It's true that @FelipeCaldeRON has criticized the smuggling of weapons in his visits to the United States. But he never has invited his fellow citizens to protest, government and society about the criminal indifference of the United $tate$ of Amne$ia’s rulers. A clear example is the sixth report of @FelipeCalderon: he mentions here and there about the weapons, but never charges the U.S. government. His language is elusive and timid despite the illegal smuggling tolerated by Washington and facilitated by our corrupt customs officers.
Calderón inherited shyness. In November 2003, Fox demanded the resignation of Adolfo Aguilar Zinser of Mexico-representative at the United Nations, because in a lecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana this ambassador said the lamented American elites treated #Mexico as "their backyard". Adolfo responded with a letter still valid: "Vincent, offenses are made to us Mexicans, by those who ... abuse of our workers, who look down to our society and relegate us in all diplomatic and political fields" (full text at www. sergioaguayo.org) ..



Nine years later our leaders continue to act as vassals without assuming that their priority should be to meet the humanitarian tragedy that we suffer. Neighbors laws apply only when the complaint is supplemented by verbal action. Why did the government of Mexico hasn’t initiated some lawsuits against gun manufacturers, sellers or governments?, Why there is no information campaign on the U.S. government's responsibility in the terror and blood bath involving as a wide shroud to vast regions of our country?

I clarify that I am not proposing scandal to replace diplomacy. It`s legitimate to claim firmness of our leaders against the apathy of Washington and recognition from the American elite who is careless about what happens in Mexico. For example, on 16 August this year, the California Senate passed a joint resolution, remarkable for the information and called on Washington to adopt a comprehensive policy to halt arms smuggling (available in www.sergioaguayo.org) . Tlatelolco and Los Pinos reacted to the decision with an eloquent silence.
The U.S. government is ignoring our dead, wounded and missing. If neighbors see us as disposable, is because we have a soft government when it comes to defending their own. In the silence and passivity is that they treat us like the backyard when they throw their trash without consequences.
I appreciate the suggestions of four scholars of U.S. policy toward Mexico and Latin America: Roderic Ai Camp, Todd Eisenstadt, Andres Oppenheimer and Robert Shepherd. None of them is responsible for my interpretations and opinions.


Comments: www.sergioaguayo.org; Twitter: @ sergioaguayo; Facebook: SergioAguayoQuezada
Collaborated: Arriaga Paulina Carrasco and Marcela Correa Valdivia.

Published by @reformacom

 

[Rafael Norma]

#Mexico is standing up

 

[Rafael Norma]

ALÍ BABÁ AND THE 40 THIEFS:

 

[Rafael Norma]

@FelipeCalderon dedicated to serve the United $tates of Amne$ia with all his soul, life and willingness..

 

[Rafael Norma]

Our mayor of Mexico City’s the best one in the whole World. He has achieved all his campaign promises, as EQUITY. Right now 99.9 percent of Mexico City’s inhabitants wastes their 25 percent of their life time, traveling from their home sweet home, to their work.
As the poor people only have an inefficient public transportation system, while the middle clas are in traffic jams wasting also 25 percent of their life time , besides risking both their life being assaulted .

Only those who rule us as @EPN, @GobFed & #GDF, who travel by the one time blue sky ( as now it’s so grey, by air polution) in helicopters and the Olympic Greek Gods, can reach their busy agenda.








@Un_Tal_Cioran: Love to be ignored. Jesus says so. The only way to be happy with oneself and within the whoe worls is precisely that

 

[Rafael Norma]

@FelipeCaldeRON: My last defeat

http://tinyurl.com/am3bwjc

 

[Rafael Norma]

 

[Rafael Norma]

Después del niño ahogado, @FelipeCaldeRON tapa el Pozo

 

[Rafael Norma]

A News, that now isn't a news!

http://tinyurl.com/advuwcd​

@nytimes​

@reformacom​

@hrw​

@CNDH​

En #Mexico, una mortífera advertencia​

GUADALAJARA, Mexico

“Esto es lo que le sucede a todos los que hablan de más, a los que nos acusan. Respetanos y te respetaremos” (para todos los señaladotes con boca grande).”

Ese fue el mensaje pegado a un cadáver de un hombre quien, al terminar su día laborable , se convirtió en una estadística más de @FelipeCalderon y su guerrita, en una muerte más relacionada con el tan Mexicano crimen organizado. Su nombre se olvidará y el día de su asesinato sólo será recordado por su familia.

Este cuerpo fue hallado a aproximadamente a la s 8:00 A.M. del miércoles, por la policía local de Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, en el Estado de Jalisco. En el mismo lugar, 44 días antes, en un callejón que conduce a un motel de paso, se encontró a otro hombre asesinado. La nota sólo ofrece una pista sobre el posible motivo del asesinato de dicho hombre, y bien puede ser tan sólo una estratagema para confundir a los investigadores. El mensaje real que los asesinos querían enviar, y la razón para ello, seguirá siendo un secreto que se llevará a la tumba.

La cara de este hombre estaba cubierta con una venda en los ojos, y sus manos y sus pies descalzos estaban envueltos en cinta adhesiva. Antes de que se cometiera el asesinato, el sujeto fue interrogado y torturado, probablemente, lo que parece ser el procedimiento operativo habitual entre los sicarios; un sinnúmero de videos en Internet dan fe de ello.

Este tipo de asesinatos han llegado a ser considerados actos de terrorismo - por la facilidad con la que los asesinos le quitan la vida a una persona y lo colocan en exposición pública, que provoca el terror entre la población local. Así es como los criminales comunican su mensaje de poder, desafío y control.

En los seis años de la presidencia de @FelipeCaldeRON, más de 60.000 personas han perdido la vida en incidentes relacionados con el crimen organizado. Ese es el número que reconoce el gobierno; pero hay quienes creen que es más cercano a los 90.000.

Las identidades de las personas asesinadas y los posibles motivos de su muerte permanecen como un misterio que el gobierno de #Mexico es incapaz de resolver a través de su Procuraduría de Justicia, la cual para complicar las cosas todavía más, a menudo responde asociando a las víctimas asesinadas con el crimen organizado. Y a pesar de todo ésto, el gobierno está preparando un monumento en memoria de las víctimas de la violencia.

Víctor Hugo Ornelas es un periodista y fotógrafo. Su ensayo ha sido traducido por Cristina Cordero del español al inglés.

In Mexico, a Deadly Warning
By VÍCTOR HUGO ORNELAS
Published: November 03, 2012 by The New York Times

Víctor Hugo Ornelas



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GUADALAJARA, Mexico
“THIS is what will happen to everyone who talks, who accuses us. Respect us and we will respect you (big mouths and finger pointers).”
That was the message attached to the lifeless body of a man who, by the end of a workday, had become one more statistic, one more death connected to Mexican organized crime. His name will be forgotten — and the day of his death will be remembered only by his family.
This body was found around 8 a.m. on a Wednesday, by the local police of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. In the same spot, 44 days earlier, in an alley leading to a transient motel, another man was found murdered.
The note offers only a hint of the possible motive for the man’s murder, and it may well have been used as a ruse to confuse investigators. The real message that the assassins wanted to send, and the reason for it, will remain a secret that he takes to his grave.

This man’s face was covered with a blindfold, and his hands and bare feet were wrapped in duct tape. Before the crime was committed, he was probably interrogated and tortured, which seems to be the usual operating procedure among hit men; countless videos on the Internet attest to this.

These kinds of murders have come to be considered acts of terrorism — for the ease with which the murderers take away a person’s life and put it on public display elicits terror among the local population. This is how the criminals communicate their message of power, defiance and control.

In the six years of Felipe Calderón’s presidency, over 60,000 people have lost their lives in incidents connected to organized crime. That is the number acknowledged by the government; there are those who believe it is closer to 90,000.

The identities of the dead and the possible motives for their murders remain a mystery that the Mexican government has been unable to solve through its public prosecutor’s office, which, to complicate things further, has often responded by associating the victims with organized crime. And despite this, the government is preparing a monumental memorial to the victims of violence.


Víctor Hugo Ornelas is a journalist and photographer. This essay was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

...Our Lord​

give us ​

our daily death​

here in Mexico...​

 

[Rafael Norma]

Latinos always loses in the United States of Amnesia
Latinos = born to lose
@GOP = racial discrimination
@TheDemocRATS = massive deportation

 

[Rafael Norma]

WORLD

MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
Statue of Azerbaijan Leader at Issue in Mexico City

Una escultura de Heydar Aliyev, [ un jefe del partido comunista que gobernó Azerbaijan, fue donada a la Ciudad de México, como un regalo. Los críticos del hecho lo han denunciado como fuera de lugar para una ciudad que está orgullosa de su herencia liberal.


By ELISABETH MALKIN

Published: November 13, 2012





MEXICO CITY - When the mayor inaugurated a pretty little garden fronted by a very large statue at the edge of the central Chapultepec Park last summer, it seemed another step forward in his drive to improve the quality of life in this impossible city.
But a quick check on Google might have spared Mayor Marcelo Ebrard from what happened next.
Speaking off the cuff, the mayor praised the statue's subject - a complete stranger to many Mexico City residents - as "a great political leader, a statesman."
The statue portrays Heydar Aliyev, who ruled Azerbaijan with a stern hand after the breakup of the Soviet Union. A K.G.B. general and Communist Party boss, who died in 2003, Mr. Aliyev made himself the center of a cult of personality, his image gracing villages across the tiny country.
The admiration has spread since his son, Ilham H. Aliyev, became president nine years ago. Statues have gone up in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Georgia, Romania and Serbia in homage to the father of modern Azerbaijan.
The Mexico City version, though, is proving to be an uncomfortable fit.
During Mr. Ebrard's six-year term, this city has aspired to be a progressive New World capital, legalizing abortion and approving same-sex marriage. Often sounding more like the mayor of a Scandinavian capital than of a Latin American megalopolis, Mr. Ebrard has promoted bike-sharing programs and championed urban gardens and buildings constructed with the environment in mind.
"This is a liberal city; this is a city which has nothing to do with anything that could be called a dictatorship," Mr. Ebrard said in an interview. "We believe in democracy and human rights."
But the statue - a gift, along with the garden, from Azerbaijan - has put the mayor in a bind. The United States State Department repeatedly pointed out Azerbaijan's poor human rights record under Mr. Aliyev, which included serious abuses and the suppression of democracy. A few weeks after his bronze figure materialized along Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma, newspaper columnists, radio hosts and human rights activists began to press for its removal.
"In Mexico City, on our main avenue, our Champs Élysées, there are statues of Gandhi, Churchill - and Aliyev," said Denise Dresser, a writer and academic who sits on a citizens' commission that oversees projects for Chapultepec Park, which is Mexico's own Central Park. (Gandhi is actually a few hundred paces inside the park, in a more contemplative spot.)
Officials in Mr. Ebrard's cabinet were tongue-tied. They argued that it was not Mexico's place to pass judgment on other countries' leaders. That unleashed a spate of commentary in which writers threw out the names of undesirable strongmen who might one day find a pedestal on Mexico City streets under such reasoning. (Pinochet! Mubarak!)
Mr. Ebrard looked for a way to stem the damage that is tarnishing the end of his term. The mayor, who has been open about his presidential ambitions in 2018, will hand the city over next month to a successor from his own left-wing party, whose landslide win this summer was widely seen as a vote of approval of Mr. Ebrard's stewardship.
"It's a mistake, and we should have evaluated that this could be problematic," Mr. Ebrard said. "Since they said, 'This is the father of the country, Azerbaijan opened relations with Mexico in 2004, everything's O.K., we are part of the United Nations, we have elections,' we didn't think there would be a problem."
The Azeri ambassador, Ilgar Mukhtarov, argued that he had done nothing wrong and blamed the country's longtime enemy, Armenia, for the uproar. When he proposed a Mexico City-Azerbaijan friendship park two years ago, the city government saw no reason to object, not even to the statue. Indeed, the city government proposed the site.
"Everybody knew about this," Mr. Mukhtarov said. "We signed all the agreements."
Arguing that Azerbaijan is a struggling young democracy, he continued: "Behind all this movement in Mexico is the strong Armenian lobby. They gave the wrong opinion about Heydar Aliyev."
A draft proposal slipped by the citizens' park commission when it was first presented in July 2011. But then members began doing their own research and warned late last year that the statue might cause an uproar. The city, arguing that it had an agreement with Azerbaijan's embassy, forged ahead anyway.
"I think they thought we were making a mountain out of a molehill," Ms. Dresser said. "They were clueless and they were ignorant, and we alerted them to the fact that they were clueless and ignorant."
Indeed, the city government has been happily accepting similar donations from various embassies. The Vietnamese government helped clean up a square in the historic center and burnished it with a statue of Ho Chi Minh, seated in front of a curved wall bearing a quotation.
Oil-rich Azerbaijan has turned adulation into a special kind of kitsch. Last Tuesday in Azerbaijan, for the birthday of Heydar Aliyev, the authorities had more than a million flowers flown in from various countries. They were fashioned into huge and elaborate sculptures, including a mosaic of the face of Mr. Aliyev made of purple, white and gold chrysanthemums. (By Saturday night, dump trucks had backed up to a park to cart away the rotting blossoms.)
In Mexico City, the country has been generous, spending more than $6 million.
Along with the friendship park, complete with the statue framed by a jagged piece of marble that is a map of Azerbaijan, it restored a plaza in the historic center. There it painted the facade of an adjacent church and installed a dancing fountain. But a plaque commemorating the victims of a 1992 massacre in the village of Khojaly during the undeclared war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh brought more trouble.
Nobody in the city government bothered to check the text on the plaque, which calls the massacre a genocide. The small but influential Armenian-Mexican community complained. So did the government of Armenia.
To find a diplomatic solution, Mr. Ebrard has appointed a three-man committee and promised to follow its recommendations, not only about the statue and the plaque but also about how to make decisions a little more transparent.
He has been trying to persuade Mr. Mukhtarov to move the statue to a private space that could become a Mexico-Azerbaijan cultural center. The commission's recommendation and the Azeri response to Mr. Ebrard's proposal are expected in the coming days.
Nobody has asked the people who visit the garden, a tranquil retreat of hydrangea and geranium-choked flower beds wedged between busy streets.


"I really don't know why he is here - maybe because they paid for the park," said Yohan Islas Hernandez, 34, nodding over at the statue. Mr. Islas walks over from his office to eat his packed lunch under a tree every day. "For Mexicans, there really is no problem," he said.
Mr. Mukhtarov warned that removing the statue by force would not be interpreted as a friendly move, and he wondered at all the fuss in Mexico. "I think they have other problems to concentrate their minds on more than a monument," he said. "For us, it is a really big issue."
Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.


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[Rafael Norma]

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@FelipeCalderon: The Dead’s President​

http://tinyurl.com/c5rsloo​

By Jorge Ramos Ávalos

(november 18th., 2012).-I have my doubts that when @FelipeCalderon leaves power, that the people would say he was the president who brought employment to #Mexico, as he promised in his presidencial campaign in 2006 . What people will be saying is that he ‘ll be remembered as the Death’s president, a lot of them.[/COLOR]
[/B]
How many? Impossible to count with absolute accuracy. Based on government figures, the media talked about 65,000 deaths during his administration. But it is more. Proceso magazine published an independent investigation estimated 88,361 dead from December 2006 to March in this year. And the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) counted a total of 95 000 to the fifth of the six years of Calderon.
Whatever wolild be the correct figure, it ‘s unacceptable. You can not call any successful strategy against drug trafficking, in any country in the world, leaving more than 65,000 dead. The dead described a gigantic failure, incompetence and even plain stupidity.

Nobody thought something was wrong when they passed the thousand dead? How about when you went from 10 to 20 thousand murders? President Calderon did not correct the course. By contrast , he followed the wrong strategy and the death toll continued to rise. So they are the dead of Calderon. And so his party, the PAN, lost the presidencial race in the last election. It was of course , a protest vote.

His government insists that many of the dead are criminals. Right. But many are not. If the 65 000 deaths had been mostly drug dealers and criminals, they would not be criminals in Mexico.

Reality is such, that no Mexican family that has not been touched by a murder, a kidnapping, a robbery, or fear. The Mexicans lost their streets and public places. And since they lost the little hope that the police and the authorities could protect them. Impunity reigns. The 98.5 percent of crimes in Mexico go unpunished, according to a study of the Tecnológico de Monterrey. So either victims denounce criminal acts. What for?

Here I am not doubting Calderon’s courage to confront traffickers. Of course it takes a lot of courage to fight the worst Mexican criminals, armed with pistols and rifles made in AMERICA, ready to send out their merchandise at any cost to the insatiable drug market in the United States of Amnesia . What I am questioning here is the intelligence to choose a strategy that generates only Mexican’s dead and has not reduced neither production nor drug trafficking.

This is the war that Calderon started and lost. And it is his responsibility. And it is a war. Just as George W. Bush made a terrible mistake to go to war in Iraq in 2003, when there were no weapons of mass destruction, Calderón also erred seriously by initiating a war against the narcos, unprepared, without an elite group to do so and without a measurable objective . In the end, the death toll in the nine years of war in Iraq (about 109,000, according IraqBodyCount.org) is very similar to that of the six years of Calderon's war on drugs. Both wars. Failures both. And thousands of innocent dead.

The Calderón government never considered that this was a lost war even since before it had begun. In Mexico are drug traffickers because in America there are drug users. Twenty million Americans have used drugs recently, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Colorado and Washington state recently authorized recreational use of marijuana and other 16 already allow medicinal use. Just watch any Hollywood movie to realize that drug use is quite widespread in American society. Stop consumption is not a priority for politicians.

Here's what Calderon did not see or did not want to see. While Mexicans are killing each other in a drug war without a specific goal, Americans are becoming easier drug addicts.
Of course I am not advocating negotiations with the drug cartels. Nor should we let them control our streets, our businesses and our political system. But what Calderon has done so far, has not worked.

A new counternarcotics strategy requires the integration of all the police of the country under one command and the creation of an elite corps, the release of cities, roads and public places in the hands of drug dealers hit drug traffickers where it hurts, is ie, money, confiscating accounts, profit and property, reduce levels of violence and creativity hypervigilance tactics and above all, understand that Mexico is a transit of drugs north. Nothing more, nothing less.

Calderon leaves, but it leaves us with many cemeteries. And a failed drug strategy that cost much remove and replace. But worst of all is that terrible feeling of having been deceived. Calderon was never clear in his 2006 election campaign about his strategy against drug traffickers and now leaves a country bloodshed and demoralized. Had I known, many would not have voted for him.

No, do not remember him as the president of employment. Calderon will always be remembered as the president of the dead.

 

[Rafael Norma]

@RafaelNorma
@FelipeCaldeRON = Napoleón Bonaparte = Pablo Escobar = Obra: 1 gran panteón. http://tinyurl.com/cmlqkbt @EPN @BarackObama @hrw @StateDept @Milenio