Photo: Marco Ugarte/Associated Press
Why are the majority of Mexicans elated
about the re-election of an administration that is deemed a dictatorship in the tradition of Venezuela? Why is the word ‘populist’ (meaning a political leader who supports the average citizen over the elite) persistently tossed around in the media like some sort of condemnation potato? This is because, even though the political history of Mexico is beyond complicated, the reason that the majority of Mexicans are happy is quite simple: the neo-liberal driven shrieks of “Dictatorship! Mexico is the new Venezuela! We’re losing our democracy! Populist! Populist! Populist!” are guided by ideology rather than the lived reality of millions of Mexicans.
On June 2nd, 2024, Mexico elected not only its first woman president, but also a woman president on the left. As an of course that is sometimes overlooked, just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re committed to social justice, in the same way as just because you’re a woman makes you a feminist. Lest we forget the infamous Margaret Thatcher of the 80s and Christy Clark, the Premier of British Columbia in the early 2000s, both servants to corporate interests the same way as their conservative male counterparts. However, Claudia Sheinbaum is the predecessor of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the controversial president who has defended his country from neo-liberal[1] exploitation and turned the focus of the government onto the Mexican people rather than the international corporations and the elite that are always positioned to pillage a country rife with corruption and rich in resources in what he calls "The Fourth Transformation," the previous three being The Mexican War of Independence from Spain, The Reform War and the Mexican Revolution. Obrador, the founder of the Morena[2] party, stands up to the neo-liberal epicentre of the US and all international corporations for the betterment of the lives of the Mexican people at large and Sheinbaum, as the next Morena president, will continue what he has begun. And, yes, the majority of the Mexican people who were neglected during seventy-one years straight run under the hyper-conservative PRI (1929-2000) and then twelve years of the equally elite prioritizing PAN followed by another six of PRI are not only happy about it, they are relieved.
Analyzing the politics of Mexico with its centuries of corruption beginning with the Spanish Conquistadores to the now ravenous resource extraction corporations to the drug cartels to the military to the police would require years of in-depth research and I don’t claim to be doing that here. Such an extensive analysis would warrant a book and not a mere essay. However, guided by the logic that context is crucial in order to arrive at any credible conclusions, I will build as much as possible, context which necessarily extends beyond national borders and beyond the so far only six years of a left-leaning administration that I would define as a combination of socialism and democracy (there was just a free election where no hint of corruption has been found, unlike past PAN and PRI victories) and far from the finger-wagging hysteria of an encroaching, or already realized, communist dictatorship. But for some, like American Republicans, even a smidge left-of-center is verging on an apocalypse.
Mexico’s colonial hierarchy of skin colour is overt
—more so than Canada and the US believe it or not—one anecdotal signifier being in all my nine years living in Mexico City, I have never seen a white-skinned person asking for money on the street or walking around affluent areas desperately flogging chiclets and trinkets so they can eat. Coming from Vancouver, Canada, where the masses of homeless and drug-addicted people on the street are representative of all races, I often joke that we are more egalitarian with our poverty. In Mexico, the majority of disenfranchised people are darker skinned, direct descendants of the colonized Indigenous; whereas the majority of those who oppose Morena, Obrador’s ‘Fifis’ (his nickname for the elite opposition), are predominantly light-skinned Mexicans, decedents of the Spanish conquistadores and, as one of this class told me once: “I’m not like the Mexicans in the Metro.” As a real-life point of reference, they are the Mexicans who take public transit whom Morena prioritizes. They are the Mexicans who have been ignored and exploited by the right-wing parties like PAN or PRI and their neo-liberal policies and service to the US whom the Morena party is committed to. As Obrador has proclaimed on many occasions to the cheering of thousands, “Mexico is not a colony of the US.” Morena helps and stands up for the average Mexican, the majority, and for Mexico as a sovereign state. And, yes, the majority of Mexicans are very happy about the promise of another six years of Morena under Claudia Sheinbaum.
The Mexico that Obrador inherited after 95 years of right-wing administrations was virtually unfathomable in the extent of its corruption. However, like all governments that set out to clean up the corruption of their predecessors, a government can't fulfill all their election promises in one term. In fact, even in a comparatively moderately corrupt country like Canada, no administration can ever do all they promised and are always criticized for not fulfilling the impossible by the opposition. Perhaps we should change this term to election intentions. Yet, regardless of Obrador’s critics condemning him and Morena for not doing everything they have said they will do (one could add: yet), Obrador has been able to fulfill many of his promises in his six years in office that will be continued and built upon by Sheinbaum.
During AMLO's December 2018 inauguration—a celebration attended by some 150,000 with the same energy as the election of Barak Obama—Obrador vowed to preside over a “radical and profound change” that would bring about a “rebirth of Mexico,” in which “the poor come first.”[3] Right away, his party got to work. Much to the immediate chagrin of the middle and upper middle classes, one of the first things he did was cut the fat, so to speak, of Mexico’s once bloated bureaucracy by implementing harsh austerity measures to bureaucrats and politicians. He cut his own salary in half, symbolically converted Los Pinos (the presidential mansion) into a cultural centre for the people and got rid of the presidential jet.[4] The money saved has been used to finance social programs.
“What social programs?” the Fifi’s snap.
“He just gives the poor people money so that they vote for him.” Such a reductionist statement completely ignores the transformative integrity of social programs like Jóvenes construyendo el futuro ("Youth Build the Future" where the government pays half of the salary for a young person’s first job), bi-monthly cheques given to single working moms, the disabled and seniors (it must be noted that we have done this in Canada for decades as has Western Europe and are lauded for it).[5] In the face of the historical disparity between the haves and have-nots in Mexico, Obrador is going beyond the implementation of the social programs and working towards including social welfare in the constitution so that it cannot be eradicated easily if a right-wing, elite pandering government oppresses the majority of Mexican people again.[6] However, in Fifi minds, adding social justice to the constitution undermines democracy.
Regardless of critics stating that the people only like Obrador because he gives them money, if one extends the Obrador administration beyond the temporal boundary of his 2018 election, these legislations support the country’s most vulnerable people for the long-term and are in sharp contrast with the literal buying of votes with a few pesos and food just before and during an election campaign as has been practiced by PRI.[7] There is no comparison between vote-buying with a pittance that desperate people will accept precisely because they are desperate and implementing a long-term and, fingers-crossed, constitutionally inscribed well-being for the majority of Mexicans.
To continue with the ad nauseam accusation tossed about by the elite
that the poor only vote Morena because they are given hand-outs: yes, the majority of supporters are those who were neglected for centuries and are now being acknowledged and valued through social programs, education and employment opportunities; however, the extent of Morena support spans all classes where 50% of the highest tier of income earners voted for Claudia Sheinbaum. One just has to search a bit deeper than ideologically driven hearsay to find all of the holes in Fifi, elite-buffering, rhetoric.
What follows are the breakdowns of voter percentages by income and occupation:
The first is monthly income (10,000 pesos approximately $750 CDN).
The second is occupation in the order of housewife, pensioner, freelance/independent worker, farmer, professor or teacher, private sector worker, didn't say, student, government worker, independent professional, unemployed, boss or business owner.
To list a few other terrible things Obrador has done:
he has doubled the minimum wage and stimulated employment. Unemployment is currently at record lows. And curse him, he is planning to extend democracy into the country’s judiciary and judges will now be elected by popular vote rather than by appointment and nepotism.[8] I ask, often flabbergasted by the ideologically driven blindness of the Fifi elite (or the wannabes as they are also referred to): what’s wrong with helping the country’s previously ignored poor so that they now have enough food? What’s wrong with working towards giving everyone equal opportunities? What could possibly be wrong with doubling the minimum wage and unemployment being at record lows? Are these not all logical advances for civilization, let alone humanity? Hysterical proclamations against what are legislations of social democracy rather than a country spiralling, unheeded, towards communism where, one thoroughly pissed off Fifi proclaimed on Facebook that “for a handout, a water tank or a sheet roof [the poor] will buy slavery”[ix] would be nothing short of bizarre if they weren’t so ideologically predictable. It sounds more like PRI or PAN administrations; but with them, the roof and water were never and would never be included. In Canadian Indigenous Elder Bill Jones’ words from our in-process book about systemic oppression, the capitalist/colonial elite will always “buffer their own selfishness” by twisting positives into travesties or, better yet, exclaiming that nothing good has been done at all.
As a Canadian and a revolutionary who moved to Mexico in 2015,
I am particularly impressed by the fact that, as soon as he took office, Obrador began to reform mining regulations particularly in regards to foreign corporations—of which 70% are based in Canada.[10] During the neo-liberal administrations that came before, environmental harm and taxation were overlooked. As one of many examples of the neglect and abuse of the Mexican people by PRI and PAN, in states like Zacatecas, the soil and water have been poisoned by mercury which is used to extract the silver and gold from the rock, which obviously poisons residents and results in such atrocities as renal damage in children. Since 2018, not only has Obrador been cracking down on the taxation of corporations and even gone so far as to add the modifications of the tax waivers and exemptions for international mining corporations to the constitution, he has been forcing the mining companies to clean up their mess.[11] However, ending the poisoning of the drinking water and, among other things, saving children from renal damage[12] is not acknowledged by Morena’s opponents as a good thing, or at all.
Then there are the cartels. Yes,
the cartel problem that the Morena government is blamed for not being able to solve in six years. How does a government, or how would any government for that fact, miraculously erase a mire that is a product of decades of internal corruption and, perhaps more importantly, intrinsically connected to another culture? One of the many things I love about Obrador is that he tells the truth about why there are cartels in the first place—which is why there is a staggering homicide rate in Mexico that has been at similar levels since cartels have existed. Not only does he tell the truth, he tells it directly to the source: an individualist, greed-based, bereft of empathy, ruthlessly capitalist culture. Can you guess? Yes, the home of the brave land of the free, greatest capitalist democracy on earth: the USA. At a conference in Puebla in 2017, I had the joy of hearing Noam Chomsky say: “Mexico’s main problem is being next to the US.” And one of the main problems in Mexico’s main problem is the fact that we (I include myself here being of the Canadian culture which, especially in this respect, is pretty much the same as the US) are infested with dysfunctional families precisely because, as Obrador said in an interview with 60 Minutes in March 2024: we lack traditions—except accruing personal wealth and consumerism, of course—and familial intimacy. To cite Elder Bill Jones again: “it is a common practice for North Americans to drive by urban homeless encampments denying the fact that they have relatives there.” As Obrador expressed to American president, Joe Biden, in the most straightforward fashion: “You don’t hug your kids enough.” He was then ignorantly ridiculed (by the Fifis and the so-called first world) for this statement, ignorant because, if one really thinks about it, if one thinks beyond the hysterical desire to poke holes with any poker possible, this is fundamentally true. When asked by the 60 Minutes interviewer:
“Aren’t there drug addicts in Mexico?”
“Poco,” Obrador replied. And from my nine years in the country, this is absolutely true. Poco. Only a few in comparison to hundreds of thousands of drug-addicted people on the streets of the US and Canada, estranged from their families and, yes, most likely never having been hugged enough.
One of the tens of thousands of homeless youth in Canada. Vancouver BC, Canada. Phot0: Dillon Hogan/CBC
Then there are the atrocities of the assassinations
of political candidates and Mexican journalists. Again, in a nation plagued by organized crime, this is nothing new and, again, is predominantly a product of cartel violence along with military and governmental collusion that could very well have lessened but has definitely not increased if one places Morena’s first six years in the context of the last one hundred. Beneath the opposition's hysterical generalizations, it is significant that all assassinations of political candidates during the 2024 election were municipal[13] and were—if one puts 2 + 2 together—caused by cartels fighting to maintain the control of their direct territory. It should go without saying that ending or even controlling cartel dominance of the countryside in Mexico is far from as easy; there is no such thing as presto, Wah-La! Mexico is cleaned up of all organized crime. As one of many examples, half of the state of Michoacan is pretty much synonymous with the wild west. It’s ruled by the cartels. I have been told that Michoacan’s beaches are amazing because they are virgin and empty. There is no instantaneous remedy, especially with the drug-addicted market to the north and especially when one cares to notice or recall the fact that it wasn’t any better pre-Obrador.
List of Journalist Assassinations spanning 2004-2022
To continue building context beyond a six-year administration,
Obrador’s critics make it sound like the murders of journalists in Mexico is something new. If an administration that just so happens to be committed to the people over prioritizing the individual gains of the elite is accused of being responsible for this, all one has to do is Google search ‘murders of journalists in Mexico’ and they will come upon the above: a list of murders spanning decades. And, if one also takes into account the fact that PRI and PAN were in power for 95 years and Morena only 6, we can do the ideological beholden arithmetic. Again, another empty accusation.
However, if we want to get into the nitty-gritty
of a murder rate that is virtually impossible to solve unless the market for drugs to the north somehow disappears (which would require a cultural overhaul of family unity and empathy in countries like Canada and the US),[14] the 2023 homicide rate is below the murder rate of Piña Neto’s final year in 2017 and has been decreasing since 2022. Dig a bit beneath Fifi hysteria and holes are readily found in their attempts to poke more into everything about an administration with the best intentions miraculously managing to stay afloat in a toxic swamp of individualism and greed both within and beyond their national borders. However, like with the election of Obrador in 2018, with the election of Claudia Sheinbaum and the re-election of Morena, a spinnaker has once again been raised.
Along with the mockery and memes
made of Obrador’s absolutely true statement that American (and Canadian) families don’t hug their kids enough—which results in the plague of dysfunctional families and an individualist culture bereft of empathy, which results in the epidemic of drug-addicted people in the so-called first world, which results in the astronomical murder-rate of Mexicans—there is Obrador’s Hugs Not Bullets. This strategy was begun at the beginning of his administration to address the source of cartel violence rather than continue the ineffectual war against the result; born of the vicious cycle of deprivation and violence, cartels are monsters that will always grow another head. Obrador addresses the poverty and lack of opportunities in Mexico’s poorest communities. Direct confrontation with the cartels is avoided and, instead, training and scholarship programs for vulnerable youth are funded: the young men who are targeted as foot soldiers by the cartels. That is, Hugs Not Bullets gets to the root causes of organized crime, in the same way Canada and the US should focus on the root causes of the epidemic of familial estrangement and the subsequent epidemic of drug addiction and overdoses. Hugs Not Bullets is big-picture thinking for the long-term. The US and Canada need to learn from it rather than condemn it.
Hugs Not Bullets is a national version of a grassroots organization I visited in 2017 in the barrios of Monterrey, Nacidos Para Triunfar (NTP). Founded by Juan Pablo García Aguiñaga, NTP is a non-profit organization of young men who have been liberated from the impoverished barrios and the cartels. Like Hugs Not Bullets, NTP offers youth education and job opportunities in order to escape the temptation—or necessity—of joining a cartel because they have no other choices. Nacidos Para Triunfar has been very successful.
Nacidos Para Triunfar Mural, Monterrey Mexico. Photo: Karen Moe.
However, is Hugs Not Bullets working? It’s hard to say. 100%. It has only been up and running for six years. Such social experiments take years, even decades, to have a discernable effect on a national scale, especially when measured against the numbers of foot soldiers needed by clandestine and hungry organizations like drug cartels. One thing is certain: according to UNAM professor and author Arturo Ramírez, “[Hugs Not Bullets] has changed the war narrative to one focused on the causes, [but] it still needs to penetrate the affected masses more deeply.”[15]
Like ending renal damage in children,
it should go without saying that funding programs for disenfranchised youth can never be a bad thing and that, like with the efforts of Nacidos Para Triunfar, some of the young people who have been enrolled in Hugs Not Bullets programs over the first six years have undoubtedly benefited. From 2011 to 2017, there were 250 graduates from Nacidos Para Triunfar’s “formative education program.”[16] As AMLO has stated and as Juan Pablo García Aguiñaga knows first-hand, over time, getting to the source, the poverty, the lack of opportunities, works.
The bodies of 13 men who had their hands tied before being shot found in a field in Sinaloa, Mexico 2008
Can the decline of the murder rate in Mexico over the last two years of AMLO’s administration be directly attributed to Bullets Not Guns? Again, hard to say 100% one way or the other, yet. It could be. If fewer youth in the barrios are being recruited by the cartels that would equal fewer cartel, turf warfare murder victims. If youth have other opportunities than aspiring to be a drug lord, maybe there will be fewer cartels and the Canadian and American drug market will have to feed itself. As Obrador stated in the 60-Minute interview after Mexico was blamed (again) for the fentanyl epidemic in the US: there are plenty of fentanyl labs in the US (and I would add Canada). All one needs to do is order the ingredients from China and they can set up a lab.[17] With Hugs Not Bullets, Obrador has dared a different tactic and it will take much longer than his administration to see definitive results. However, what is undeniable is that the cartels will always troll the barrios for foot soldiers and there will always be murders of the Mexican people as long as there is a ravenous drug market to the north and as long as there are no other opportunities for disenfranchised, young Mexican men. The US and Canada need to get to the source as well and the US needs to stop blaming Mexico for the deaths of its young people that their culture is primarily responsible for.
Photo: Daniel Aguilar/Reuters 2007
As always, the US wants to muscle in
and the best excuse for this is to state that Obrador is “friends” with the cartels because he is avoiding direct confrontation with them. In an article from The Texas Policy Foundation, Mexico’s ‘autocrat’[18] president is blamed for killing Americans “in their own homes and communities” and that, therefore, the American military has the right to invade Mexico and put a stop to this themselves because Obrador the autocrat sides with the cartels/terrorists. AMLO responds in his refreshingly irreverent fashion:
“There is talk in the United States … of intervening and confronting organized crime, drug traffickers, treating them as terrorists and that for this reason they will come to ‘help’ us, to ‘support’ us to confront organized crime… we do not accept any intervention… if they did, it will not be only the sailors and soldiers who will defend Mexico, all Mexicans will defend Mexico.”[19]
This statement does not mean that AMLO 'sides with the cartels.’ If one explicates it, we will see that what he is saying is that the US has no invitation to invade his country. It means that he fully rejects America’s typically patronizing attitude that Mexico needs their ‘help’ and ‘support’ and that Mexican cartels are ‘terrorists’—this term becoming most active in the American consciousness and vernacular after 9/11. The cartels are not flying planes into the World Trade Centre; rather, they are opportunistically feeding an internal illness of American culture because this has been the main opportunity for impoverished youth in Mexico and, yes, it is extremely profitable. What this statement really means is that Mexico will not stand for a US invasion of their sovereign state and that Mexico, unlike the neo-liberal administrations that ruled the country for almost a century before him, is not a colony of the US. This means that Mexico will deal with internal issues as they see fit and that is what they are doing.
Like the embargo against Cuba (which actually was a communist state), an arrogant nation like the US does not like it when it is disobeyed. And as the biggest capitalist nation in the world, the US will do anything to demonize any semblance of socialism, especially in a country—like Cuba pre-revolution under Fulgencio Batista when Cuba was literally America's whore—they have economically exploited for decades, if not centuries and, even more offensive, is at their back door and thriving without their self-serving ‘help.’
And then there are the capitalist
(both nationally and internationally) claims that Mexico has suddenly become a militarized state—implying that there haven’t been men with big guns on the street or driving around in the backs of military trucks before 2018. Because of the complexity of a nation plagued with such an extensive and entrenched network of organized crime and the fact that I didn’t grow up or attend university in Mexico, I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the history of the relationships between the police, the military, the government and the cartels. Therefore, I consulted with Arturo Ramírez to gain some context beyond the hysteria of uninformed generalizations.
Ramírez reaches back to the 2006-2012 presidency of Felipe Calderón (PAN)
who implemented “The War on Drugs”—the term tellingly mimetic to the American “War in Drugs” and undoubtedly what the US government would like to be reinforced: short-term thinking, ego-maniacal, war. Ramírez explains how, because Calderón needed to bolster his credibility after a controversial and corrupt election where AMLO and Morena were the legitimate winners, he took the army to the streets and, along with the already existing Federal Police, there ended up being two heavily armed police forces fighting with the cartels. This war lasted for six years, and cartel strength increased because, as Ramírez explains:
"President Calderón’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna, was a negotiator between drug trafficking groups and the leaders of economic and political power. García Luna is now imprisoned in the US for this, and President Calderón is exiled from the country due to strong suspicions of having collaborated with the cartels."
Nothing changed under the Peña Nieto government (2012-2018) as there was an impasse between the military and the government and Calderón’s War on Drugs continued unabated. However, with the election of AMLO in 2018, the Hugs Not Bullets program was begun to lessen the cartel stranglehold and stop the “frontal war” and, instead, target what lies beneath what was then a twelve-year internal conflict that can be considered a governmentally legislated civil war. Ramírez continues the contextualization:
"AMLO inherited the army in the streets and returning it to the barracks will have to be a phased action of political pacts. One of them was applied by giving the military a more constructive, not destructive, function: they have built the Tulum airport, the Mayan train, hundreds of health units, schools, strategic structures on roads, and electricity generation. In addition, AMLO built a new police force: the National Guard, military-style but with a civilian in command."
Accusations of AMLO’s all-out militarization are, in Ramírez’s words, “conjectures that the CIA has created because AMLO has limited its action and influence in Mexico.” As such, these accusations can be summed up thusly: everything Morena has done under Obrador and will continue to do under Sheinbaum’s lead will be demonized by the opposition both nationally and internationally even if it is about working to take an unbridled military off the street and using the manpower to build national infrastructure, stopping what may as well have been a legislated civil war and giving kids with no other option but to be recruited by the cartels other options. And, indeed, with the US threatening to invade Mexico and arrogantly interfere with a sovereign state’s internal affairs, the need for a national guard does not go unwarranted.
These are all, undeniably, good things.
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To be continued ... Stay tuned for Part Two and the contextualized controversies of Tren Maya (the Mayan Train), other infrastructure that no one talks about, Feminism, Venezuela and Fifis eat ice cream.
Claudia Sheinbaum and Andrés Manuel López Obrador June 2024.
Notes:
[1] Neoliberalism: a political approach that favours free-market capitalism, deregulation (think capitalists rule and zero social programs), and reduction in government spending (think no social net or social programs). An eye for an eye/ dog eat dog ideology of individualism, self-importance, greed without empathy that has normalized itself, is aspired to and is also economically and ideologically imperial (think: corporate colonialism). My definition: capitalism on crack.
[2] Morena means dark-skinned woman.
[6] https://aristeguinoticias.com/0811/mexico/quiere-amlo-que-pension-por-vejez-y-becas-para-estudiar-esten-en-la-constitucion/
[8] https://www.fxstreet.com/news/mexican-peso-bottoms-out-as-obrador-says-peso-is-backed-by-strong-economy-202406130940
[10] Not only are 70% of mining corporations based in Canada, but many are also refusing to pay their taxes to the Mexican government and forbidding Mexican workers from unionizing. Some Canadian mining corporations are even going as far as to sue Mexico for taxing them. AMLO is fighting back. See some of the many articles here: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/canada-mining-industry-justin-trudeau; https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-mexican-president-pressures-canadian-miner-in-simmering-tax-dispute/; https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/featured-article/mining-operations-in-mexico/; https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2020/06/amlo-urges-canadian-mining-companies-to-pay-taxes/; https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/amlo-asks-canada-to-persuade-mining-companies-to-pay-taxes/; https://canadians.org/analysis/canadian-mining-company-sue-mexico-isds/
[11] An April 2023 report by Covington & Burling LLP lists some of the reforms to the Mexican Mining Law and the National Water Law:
· [mining] applicants must meet additional requirements, including completion of a social impact study, public consultations with the affected communities, and establishment of a restoration, closure, and post-closure program, as well as a waste management program.
Mining concessions in protected natural areas, protected water basins, or federal maritime terrestrial zones would no longer be authorized.
Mining concessions would be made conditional on water availability and the prior award of water concessions. This provision seems likely to impact mining projects in northern Mexico, where water scarcity has been a prevalent issue and a major focus of López Obrador’s government.
Mining concessions could be revoked due to imminent ecological risks or irreversible ecological damage or due to the lack of ecological risk or damage reports, environmental permits, water concession titles, waste management programs, or closure programs.
It would be a crime to undermine the physical safety of workers by failing to comply with the provisions of the Mining Law and its regulations. This provision seems aimed at further empowering the top unions in the mining sector and giving them additional leverage over mining companies. ov.com/en/news-and-insights/insights/2023/04/mexico-proposed-changes-to-mining-environmental-and-administrative-laws-would-impact-private-investment-in-key-regulated-sectors#layout=card&numberOfResults=12
[12] See my article written about Mexican Art Biennial in Zacatecas for an analysis of Mexican artists’ responses to international mining corporation behaviour and environmental impunity. https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/mexico-s-xlll-femsa-biennial/4092
[13] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexican-candidate-assassinations-hit-grim-record-ahead-sundays-election-2024-06-01/; https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-05-29/mexico-election-violence-cartel-killings-candidates
[14] Much of the violence in Mexico is attributed to disputes between drug cartels, which are also involved in kidnapping, extortion and other forms of contraband. https://apnews.com/article/mexico-homicides-rate-violence-d0a9a83c3124b1f3ce0e8af6c9b8aa9f
[15] Thank you to Arturo for the information he has given me to help fill in some of the inevitable holes when digging into the political history of corruption.
[16] https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/justice-begins-with-the-one-beside-you-the-quiet-revolution-of-nacidos-para-triunfar
[18] If one looks up the definition of ‘autocrat,’ they will see that, with the social programs he has implemented for the betterment of the lives of the majority of the Mexican people and his and his party’s popularity, the use of this term is fully guided by the American ideology reminiscent of the Cold War.
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About the Writer:
Karen Moe is an author, art critic, visual and performance artist, and feminist activist. Her work focuses on systemic violence in patriarchy: be it gender, race, class, the environment or speciesism. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish, she has exhibited and performed across Canada, the US and Mexico and has spoken on sexual violence internationally. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor Vigilance Press (2022) which received Runner Up at the San Francisco Book Festival. During her North American Tour, she was presented with the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” by the DA of Ventura County for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist. Karen speaks internationally on sexual violence sharing her lived experiences of "trauma & triumph." Victim has recently been translated into Spanish. Karen lives in Mexico City and Vancouver Island, Canada.
IG: @karenmoeart
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