James North, reporting from Mexico:
I´ve only been here three days, but I can see once again why Americans are so ill-informed about the rest of the world.
The news reports here have been filled with coverage of three gigantic demonstrations, attracting several hundred
thousand people, one after another. But only one short paragraph about one made it into the August
31 New York Times. (I don´t even want to think about what the US TV networks reported on instead.)
The first demonstration, Light Up Mexico, filled the main streets in Mexico City
on Saturday evening with between 100,000 and 200,000
middle-class and even affluent people, dressed in white, protesting
against the crime wave that has hit the country over the past few
years. The kind of people that you would never see demonstrating in
America marched with dignity up the Reforma and then east to the
Zocalo, the giant public square. At 8:30 p.m. the bells in the
centuries-old cathedral rang, and the multitude lit candles as a silent
protest.
The New York Times article briefly mentioned the march, but only as
part of a longer piece that left an impression that Mexicans are
just passive victims of crime.
The next day, leftist parties staged a rally against the privatization of Pemex,
the national oil company. The American press has barely covered this
burning issue at all, except to suggest that romantically nationalistic
Mexicans are standing athwart history and sentimentally blocking the
progress that foreign investment could bring to their main industry.
In fact, the anti-privatization forces have conducted serious studies
suggesting changes to modernize the oil industry without
turning key parts of it over to foreigners.
Whether the left is correct or not, the average person at that
demonstration is much better informed about big economic issues that
his or her counterpart in America.
Then, yesterday, there were more big demonstrations nationwide, as the
unpopular rightist president, Felipe Calderon, delivered the Mexican
equivalent of his State of the Union speech to Congress. Thousands of
dissident teachers blocked the tollway down to Acapulco — the local
variant of the New Jersey Turnpike
— for hours. (Many Mexicans still believe that Calderon, a right-wing
pro-American, stole the 2006 election — a fact that got less coverage
than the disputed elections in faraway Ukraine and Georgia, in which pro-U.S. forces were the ones who cried foul.)
Just before I left New York, I watched Barack Obama´s
acceptance speech, and Al Hunt commented to Charlie Rose that Obama was the only candidate who
could fill a stadium of 80,000 people. Well, Mexicans of all social
classes turned out in greater numbers here for 3 days in a row.
You could argue that even though Mexico is our closest third world neighbor
— there are, after all, millions of Mexicans in the U.S. due mainly to
the economic crisis here — Americans don´t have time to follow every
twist in Mexican political life.
But I think back to 1993, when the Clinton administration and its
allies in big business devoted tremendous energy to promoting the NAFTA
"free trade" agreement. Then, the mainstream press treated us to long
analyses of Mexico, and how NAFTA was going to transform it for the
better. Then the agreement was passed, and Mexico fell off the radar
screens.
I´ll leave the last word to the Mexican commentator John Ackerman,
writing about our politics in the opinion magazine, Proceso: "The Democratic Party did not use its National Convention
as an opportunity to design, discuss or announce a plan to govern, but
instead converted it into a media spectacle in which spouses, brothers,
brothers-in-law, children and even grandchildren took center stage.
Analysis of the personal lives of Obama and of Joseph Biden
substituted for hoped-for political analysis. The whole process was
characterized by the easy jokes and the tedious cliches that mark American political culture. . ."
