Oaxaca street, a set by lesliepule on Flickr.
Photos by a good friend of Oaxaca's street art in May 2008. Some of this graffiti was still visible last summer.
Showing posts with label politics in Oaxaca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics in Oaxaca. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Juelga
The annual Oaxaca teacher's strike has begun. You can read about it in the Latin American Herald Tribune and Noticias. I expect everyone associated with the NEH Oaxaca is keeping an eye on the situation.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Alternative sources of news about Oaxaca
upsidedownworld.org
There are many online alternative sources of news about Latin America, several in English. One that I've been reading is Upside Down World.
I've found many articles that follow-up events in Mexico that have fallen off the radar after their initial coverage in the States. One was an incident I blogged about last Fall, as well as extensive coverage of the struggle of the Triqui in San Juan Copala and subsequent assassinations, the fight to keep corn free of genetic modifications, crimes against the environment perpetrated by foreign mining companies, narcotraficantes and women's issues. A look through the articles that deal with Mexico reveals a lot of turmoil that wasn't immediately evident to me last summer.
I can't vouch for the site and suggest reading it with an open mind. The fact that it's almost completely in English doesn't totally strip it of street cred, but it is a consideration. The writers are mostly Americans with long-term interests in Latin American studies, and the founder is a professor of Latin American politics in Vermont and a writer for publications like The Nation, Utne Reader, and other left-of-center periodicals. The site makes no bones about coming from a leftist perspective, but the writing is free of the overheated sloganeering often found in political discourse, and the arguments are well-laid-out and supported with evidence. Until my Spanish improves, this may be the best I can do.
But judge for yourself. I'd be interested in your insights -- email me if you don't want to publicly post a comment. Any suggestions for further reading would also be appreciated!
There are many online alternative sources of news about Latin America, several in English. One that I've been reading is Upside Down World.
I've found many articles that follow-up events in Mexico that have fallen off the radar after their initial coverage in the States. One was an incident I blogged about last Fall, as well as extensive coverage of the struggle of the Triqui in San Juan Copala and subsequent assassinations, the fight to keep corn free of genetic modifications, crimes against the environment perpetrated by foreign mining companies, narcotraficantes and women's issues. A look through the articles that deal with Mexico reveals a lot of turmoil that wasn't immediately evident to me last summer.
I can't vouch for the site and suggest reading it with an open mind. The fact that it's almost completely in English doesn't totally strip it of street cred, but it is a consideration. The writers are mostly Americans with long-term interests in Latin American studies, and the founder is a professor of Latin American politics in Vermont and a writer for publications like The Nation, Utne Reader, and other left-of-center periodicals. The site makes no bones about coming from a leftist perspective, but the writing is free of the overheated sloganeering often found in political discourse, and the arguments are well-laid-out and supported with evidence. Until my Spanish improves, this may be the best I can do.
But judge for yourself. I'd be interested in your insights -- email me if you don't want to publicly post a comment. Any suggestions for further reading would also be appreciated!
Sunday, May 8, 2011
A possible change of focus
One of the subjects I'm keen to investigate while I'm in Oaxaca is the role of tourism in the survival/destruction of the indigenous culture. I originally planned to do this research for myself and continue with my proposed ideas for more traditional curricula for the NEH project that I'll be working on this summer. However, I'm toying with the idea of carrying over this personal research into my official curriculum unit, narrowing my focus from Social Studies to Cultural Studies. While I think a straight Art History/History/English unit could be useful to other teachers, I think a more critical/political focus could be unique if handled sensitively and with humility. And I don't see why it couldn't be adapted for English Language Learners as well.
I'm sharing here an article that brings up some of the questions I'd like to touch on. The analysis isn't profound or always logical, but the questions the author posits are often swept under the rug, and I think her assertion that even the most "enlightened" and well-meaning visitors to a place like Oaxaca should ask themselves these questions is an important one.
I haven't been able to successfully link to the article, so I have copied and pasted and give the following credit. It is written by a woman named "Leila" and comes from the website of CASA Colectivos de Apoyo, Solidaridad y Accion Casa Collective .
Reflections on Complicity
ISSUE 48 - JUNE 2007 REFLECTIONS NEOLIBERALISM
By Leila It's a party with too much food, an endless beer supply and a whole cast of music snobs (myself included.) In short, a Friday night filled with all of the standard tropes of our extravagant merry-making. As the evening warbles past midnight and the conversation starts repeating, I slip away from the garden barbeque. At some point the beer has gotten warm and the decadence of the food left abandoned on the table has become upsetting to me. Troubled, I retreat to the house and lay down on the couch to sort through my cluttered thoughts. The flat, green lawn shimmers in the moonlight and the white walls and ribbed, bare wood rafters of the quaint house remind me of a ski lodge. In the garden, fresh spring flowers blossom in perfect order around the fence and gate, which is black, tall and resolutely locked. Outside, around the grill, the sound of confused but exuberant chatter and trendy Ipod music drifts back to me. It's not until the next morning that my discomfort crystallizes into clarity. As I'm being driven back into San Cristobal in the backseat of a car with power-locks, automatic windows, and a deluxe CD player, I watch the life of the colonia I've spent the night in glide past me. An indigenous woman at a roadside stand leans through the open window of her plywood and nails hut to hand a bag of peanuts to a small boy. Another woman with long braids, wrapped in the traditional wool skirt and the vibrant shirt of the local indigenous population, arranges mangos on the shelf at her own roadside stand. The world inside and outside of the tall black gates is sharply disparate. Here in the colonias of San Cristobal we're settlers in someone else's home. Our houses, luxurious in their own right and disturbingly more so in contrast to the surroundings, are fortresses of wealth and occupiers of land. The land is not, by cultural heritage, ours and our wealth is nothing but a cruel trick of history. Are we settlers in someone else's home not only in the colonias, but everywhere in San Cristobal? Do there have to be plywood shacks and indigenous families living across the street to acknowledge the extremity of economic privilege? And of economic marginalization? What does our affluence mean and what are its consequences? What are the ramifications of these side by side worlds? *** San Cristobal is a town of shocking contrasts that leaves me feeling absent, pensive and troubled. In Café Revolutión, a favourite with the international crowd and urban Mexicans alike, groups get rowdy over 25 peso beers while listening to reggae music. On the walls pictures of the icons and heroes of the dispossessed are twisted into novelty items for the diversion of the affluent. Marcos' face hangs over the revelry; Che's. At Café Revolución you can order a coca-cola, the drink responsible for water deprivation throughout Chiapas. Outside the doors, 8 year-old children sell ceramic "animalitos" and woven bracelets, beg pesos, while indigenous women sell underpriced artisanry until late into the night. For the 25 pesos that bought a beer 3 kilos of tortilla could have been purchased. That's enough tortillas to feed a family. Evidence of these deep inequalities is everywhere. The thing is, whether I am at a chilango (Mexico City folk) garden party surrounded by a wealth I'm unaccustomed to or in my own (modest by comparison) dusty house; whether I'm spending the afternoon with Americans or Europeans talking about pleasantries and minutia, or having an equally evasive conversation with urban Mexicans, something essential is being avoided. None of us are talking about what's all around us. None of us are acknowledging our own ease of life and its morally problematic positioning. We're not talking in personal terms about the reality of poverty that flanks us on all sides; sometimes I'm not even sure we're letting it trouble us. We recognize it systemically, intellectually, and beyond this we excuse ourselves. The violent realities of Chiapas are not a secret. Even the World Bank acknowledges that half of the population of Mexico lives in poverty and one fifth in extreme poverty (as of 2002). Less conservative sources report poverty and extreme poverty rates to be even higher. An article published by another mainstream source, the BBC, noted the extremity of wealth differential in Mexico by likening parts of the country to Germany and other parts to the most disadvantaged areas of Africa. We, as politicals, recognize that this poverty and inequality exist, analyze economic systems, denounce them, and call ourselves anti-capitalists. Unfortunately, it seems that we don't push ourselves beyond this systemic comprehension or personalize our understanding. When we blame an economic structure without reflecting upon our own position within that structure we falsely outsource the culprit. It's the corporation (Coca-Cola), we say; the system (Neoliberalism); the government (corrupt); or the rich (or at least the richer-than-us.) The problem is everywhere, but it is never acknowledged to be, also, within us. We are here in solidarity, we are different, we renounce our privileges (although they brought us here and we continue to enjoy them) and we are in league with the oppressed, the dispossessed, the poor and indigenous. We, after all, are the "good-guys." (And who would those be in a multi-dimensional world?) Political personalities flock to this town, inspired by the Zapatista resistance. San Cristobal is a lacquered tourist town with its prodigious yellow cathedral in the centre and its picturesque indigenous in bright and exotic garb, the image of whom is sold at wholesale to those with an "appreciation for culture" and an interest in "ethnic groups." These tourist fables, this marketing of culture and people, apply no less to the political than to the average consumer. It's just that for the political, for the revolution lovers among us, there's the added novelty of the iconic face of Marcos, shocking poverty, centuries of colonialism and the eternally trendy Marxist-Leninist paradigm with which to be alternately horrified and enamoured. The revolutionary tourist, who comes on extended stay for 3 months to 1 year or longer, is no less a consumer of culture, a tokenizer of the indigenous, than is the traditional tourist. It's still all exoticism and image; a superficial, power-laden, exploitive relationship. As John Hutnyk writes, academic director of the Cultural Studies program as Goldsmiths College, University of London, tourism is "a huge global industry [that] spans the world, and makes objects of people, places, meanings and experience. As pleasure- and treasure-hunt, tourism commodifies." He further says that, "politics, commodification, inequality and exploitation…are the very basis of the possibility of 'third-world' tourism in the first place." Our politically motivated presence in Chiapas is no more than a well-intentioned treasure hunt for new insights and contact with what has been created as the object of revolution. As politicals, we are not beyond and superior to tourist dynamics. Our very ability to be present in San Cristobal is still deeply embedded within the paradigm of unequal power. At the same time that we are caught up in highly intellectualized egalitarian discourse, analysing the way in which systems and governments exploit and dehumanize, we ourselves are engaged in these same oppressive processes. We, the politicals, are by no means free of guilt in any arena. We cannot stand outside of the systems of the current world: the structure of nation states and power, the colonialism and economic despotism that is enacted upon the disadvantaged, the random cruelty of history. We are raised, from childhood, into world views and world positions that ground themselves in patriarchy, racism and capitalism. Our thinking and our actions are not free of these bigotries. Our lives are not free of the privileges that come from the systems we decry. We ourselves are not innocent in our solidarity. We ourselves are sometimes the "bad guys," perpetuating that we struggle against. Political consciousness does not personally exempt us from atrocity. Spending all of our days investigating and writing denouncements about the way in which other people are enacting exploitation does not relieve us of the exploitation that we ourselves engage in. Perhaps when at extravagant garden parties, gorging ourselves on expensive foods and drinks we should feel a twinge uncomfortable. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves: Who are the people outside of the gates of our party and did they have enough to eat? How did we end up inside the tall black walls and who is locked out by them? In other words, I feel that we as politicals, in Chiapas and beyond, are in need of some reflection about the ways in which our experience of privilege is actively recreating unequal social practices and reproducing systems of exploitation, be it through food, parties, alternative tourism, or any other mechanism. The systems are much bigger than us, but we must attack them from both within ourselves (resist personally) as well as from without (manifest resistance socially and structurally) if we're going to create real change. I am not arguing that we, the political tourists, necessarily need to leave Chiapas. Anywhere in the world there is inequality and anywhere in the world there will be complicated problematics about our positioning. Neither am I arguing for ideological purism or the stripping down of life; that we must be politically austere and surrender all indulgences. The process of revolution should be a joyous, people-based experience. Instead, what I am advocating is an increased sensitivity to our personal complicities and a dismantling of extremist, blaming discourses that perpetually outsource responsibility. As Emma Goldman says, "…it requires less mental energy to condemn than to think." So let's start thinking again, this time about our own roles in the systems we despise. Let's begin to manifest our personal resistance; to not only hold others responsible, but also ourselves.
I'm sharing here an article that brings up some of the questions I'd like to touch on. The analysis isn't profound or always logical, but the questions the author posits are often swept under the rug, and I think her assertion that even the most "enlightened" and well-meaning visitors to a place like Oaxaca should ask themselves these questions is an important one.
I haven't been able to successfully link to the article, so I have copied and pasted and give the following credit. It is written by a woman named "Leila" and comes from the website of CASA Colectivos de Apoyo, Solidaridad y Accion Casa Collective .
Reflections on Complicity
ISSUE 48 - JUNE 2007 REFLECTIONS NEOLIBERALISM
By Leila It's a party with too much food, an endless beer supply and a whole cast of music snobs (myself included.) In short, a Friday night filled with all of the standard tropes of our extravagant merry-making. As the evening warbles past midnight and the conversation starts repeating, I slip away from the garden barbeque. At some point the beer has gotten warm and the decadence of the food left abandoned on the table has become upsetting to me. Troubled, I retreat to the house and lay down on the couch to sort through my cluttered thoughts. The flat, green lawn shimmers in the moonlight and the white walls and ribbed, bare wood rafters of the quaint house remind me of a ski lodge. In the garden, fresh spring flowers blossom in perfect order around the fence and gate, which is black, tall and resolutely locked. Outside, around the grill, the sound of confused but exuberant chatter and trendy Ipod music drifts back to me. It's not until the next morning that my discomfort crystallizes into clarity. As I'm being driven back into San Cristobal in the backseat of a car with power-locks, automatic windows, and a deluxe CD player, I watch the life of the colonia I've spent the night in glide past me. An indigenous woman at a roadside stand leans through the open window of her plywood and nails hut to hand a bag of peanuts to a small boy. Another woman with long braids, wrapped in the traditional wool skirt and the vibrant shirt of the local indigenous population, arranges mangos on the shelf at her own roadside stand. The world inside and outside of the tall black gates is sharply disparate. Here in the colonias of San Cristobal we're settlers in someone else's home. Our houses, luxurious in their own right and disturbingly more so in contrast to the surroundings, are fortresses of wealth and occupiers of land. The land is not, by cultural heritage, ours and our wealth is nothing but a cruel trick of history. Are we settlers in someone else's home not only in the colonias, but everywhere in San Cristobal? Do there have to be plywood shacks and indigenous families living across the street to acknowledge the extremity of economic privilege? And of economic marginalization? What does our affluence mean and what are its consequences? What are the ramifications of these side by side worlds? *** San Cristobal is a town of shocking contrasts that leaves me feeling absent, pensive and troubled. In Café Revolutión, a favourite with the international crowd and urban Mexicans alike, groups get rowdy over 25 peso beers while listening to reggae music. On the walls pictures of the icons and heroes of the dispossessed are twisted into novelty items for the diversion of the affluent. Marcos' face hangs over the revelry; Che's. At Café Revolución you can order a coca-cola, the drink responsible for water deprivation throughout Chiapas. Outside the doors, 8 year-old children sell ceramic "animalitos" and woven bracelets, beg pesos, while indigenous women sell underpriced artisanry until late into the night. For the 25 pesos that bought a beer 3 kilos of tortilla could have been purchased. That's enough tortillas to feed a family. Evidence of these deep inequalities is everywhere. The thing is, whether I am at a chilango (Mexico City folk) garden party surrounded by a wealth I'm unaccustomed to or in my own (modest by comparison) dusty house; whether I'm spending the afternoon with Americans or Europeans talking about pleasantries and minutia, or having an equally evasive conversation with urban Mexicans, something essential is being avoided. None of us are talking about what's all around us. None of us are acknowledging our own ease of life and its morally problematic positioning. We're not talking in personal terms about the reality of poverty that flanks us on all sides; sometimes I'm not even sure we're letting it trouble us. We recognize it systemically, intellectually, and beyond this we excuse ourselves. The violent realities of Chiapas are not a secret. Even the World Bank acknowledges that half of the population of Mexico lives in poverty and one fifth in extreme poverty (as of 2002). Less conservative sources report poverty and extreme poverty rates to be even higher. An article published by another mainstream source, the BBC, noted the extremity of wealth differential in Mexico by likening parts of the country to Germany and other parts to the most disadvantaged areas of Africa. We, as politicals, recognize that this poverty and inequality exist, analyze economic systems, denounce them, and call ourselves anti-capitalists. Unfortunately, it seems that we don't push ourselves beyond this systemic comprehension or personalize our understanding. When we blame an economic structure without reflecting upon our own position within that structure we falsely outsource the culprit. It's the corporation (Coca-Cola), we say; the system (Neoliberalism); the government (corrupt); or the rich (or at least the richer-than-us.) The problem is everywhere, but it is never acknowledged to be, also, within us. We are here in solidarity, we are different, we renounce our privileges (although they brought us here and we continue to enjoy them) and we are in league with the oppressed, the dispossessed, the poor and indigenous. We, after all, are the "good-guys." (And who would those be in a multi-dimensional world?) Political personalities flock to this town, inspired by the Zapatista resistance. San Cristobal is a lacquered tourist town with its prodigious yellow cathedral in the centre and its picturesque indigenous in bright and exotic garb, the image of whom is sold at wholesale to those with an "appreciation for culture" and an interest in "ethnic groups." These tourist fables, this marketing of culture and people, apply no less to the political than to the average consumer. It's just that for the political, for the revolution lovers among us, there's the added novelty of the iconic face of Marcos, shocking poverty, centuries of colonialism and the eternally trendy Marxist-Leninist paradigm with which to be alternately horrified and enamoured. The revolutionary tourist, who comes on extended stay for 3 months to 1 year or longer, is no less a consumer of culture, a tokenizer of the indigenous, than is the traditional tourist. It's still all exoticism and image; a superficial, power-laden, exploitive relationship. As John Hutnyk writes, academic director of the Cultural Studies program as Goldsmiths College, University of London, tourism is "a huge global industry [that] spans the world, and makes objects of people, places, meanings and experience. As pleasure- and treasure-hunt, tourism commodifies." He further says that, "politics, commodification, inequality and exploitation…are the very basis of the possibility of 'third-world' tourism in the first place." Our politically motivated presence in Chiapas is no more than a well-intentioned treasure hunt for new insights and contact with what has been created as the object of revolution. As politicals, we are not beyond and superior to tourist dynamics. Our very ability to be present in San Cristobal is still deeply embedded within the paradigm of unequal power. At the same time that we are caught up in highly intellectualized egalitarian discourse, analysing the way in which systems and governments exploit and dehumanize, we ourselves are engaged in these same oppressive processes. We, the politicals, are by no means free of guilt in any arena. We cannot stand outside of the systems of the current world: the structure of nation states and power, the colonialism and economic despotism that is enacted upon the disadvantaged, the random cruelty of history. We are raised, from childhood, into world views and world positions that ground themselves in patriarchy, racism and capitalism. Our thinking and our actions are not free of these bigotries. Our lives are not free of the privileges that come from the systems we decry. We ourselves are not innocent in our solidarity. We ourselves are sometimes the "bad guys," perpetuating that we struggle against. Political consciousness does not personally exempt us from atrocity. Spending all of our days investigating and writing denouncements about the way in which other people are enacting exploitation does not relieve us of the exploitation that we ourselves engage in. Perhaps when at extravagant garden parties, gorging ourselves on expensive foods and drinks we should feel a twinge uncomfortable. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves: Who are the people outside of the gates of our party and did they have enough to eat? How did we end up inside the tall black walls and who is locked out by them? In other words, I feel that we as politicals, in Chiapas and beyond, are in need of some reflection about the ways in which our experience of privilege is actively recreating unequal social practices and reproducing systems of exploitation, be it through food, parties, alternative tourism, or any other mechanism. The systems are much bigger than us, but we must attack them from both within ourselves (resist personally) as well as from without (manifest resistance socially and structurally) if we're going to create real change. I am not arguing that we, the political tourists, necessarily need to leave Chiapas. Anywhere in the world there is inequality and anywhere in the world there will be complicated problematics about our positioning. Neither am I arguing for ideological purism or the stripping down of life; that we must be politically austere and surrender all indulgences. The process of revolution should be a joyous, people-based experience. Instead, what I am advocating is an increased sensitivity to our personal complicities and a dismantling of extremist, blaming discourses that perpetually outsource responsibility. As Emma Goldman says, "…it requires less mental energy to condemn than to think." So let's start thinking again, this time about our own roles in the systems we despise. Let's begin to manifest our personal resistance; to not only hold others responsible, but also ourselves.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Graffiti
Roughly translated, "This course is not my world."
Graffiti in Oaxaca is very colorful and visually sophisticated. Books have been written treating it as both political protest and art, for example Protest Graffiti Mexico: Oaxaca . There was quite a bit of fresh work when we were there last summer as it was only a few weeks since an unpopular governor had been voted out of office and a new "people's governor" elected. I haven't followed what's happened since, so I'm not sure how it's all worked out. As I posted before, political violence, which is rarely reported here in the US, continues unabated. I'm curious to know how things are going and will report back once I've done some research.
I was surprised in Rome by how comparatively uninteresting the graffiti was. Surprised because it's so prolific -- it's on every building, no matter how old or sacred it might be. The messages were rarely illustrated unless you count the Brigate Rosse's 5-pointed-star-in-a-circle icon, and those were few and far between on this trip. Most graffiti is sprayed in dripping letters in either red or, less often, black. The sentiments are fairly straight-forward, but a certain amount of insider knowledge is necessary to figure out what the beef is.
A banner spray-painted in red letters and hanging from an apartment balcony read, "Resiste San Lorenzo." While on the surface this suggests to the outsider that Saint Lawrence resist something (what? we wonder), it was in fact an exhortation to the residents of the working class San Lorenzo neighborhood to resist, but whether they should resist the real estate development which threatens some of the older apartment houses or rent hikes or the police or Belusconi himself wasn't clear.
Even the Berlusconi graffiti was less interesting than you would expect with such a colorful subject who presents the graffiti artist with an endless supply of bon mots, not to mention a face that has been botoxed into corpse-like rigidity. I suppose "Berlusconi, Il Buffone" is somewhat more amusing than "Berlusconi Dimettite" (Berlusconi Resign), but neither was particularly subtle or clever.
During a walk near the Pantheon, I came across the following Oaxaca-related graffiti, one fairly old, the other more recent.
Okay, so they misspelled "Oaxaca" on the second example, but my interest was piqued. Was this the work of Mexican exiles in Rome or is there a faction among the Italian Left that turns its attention outward? (Not something you see much from any political party in Italy. Why look overseas when your own issues, and now those of your former colony in Libya, are so mind-boggling?) The red star suggests the work of a Brigades-wannabe, but, as I said, their graffiti was noticeably absent even as I actively searched for it.
On my last Sunday in Rome, I took the number 9 tram along the Via Nomentana to the last stop in a notoriously active (both the Right and the Left) neighborhood past Monte Sacro called the Nuovo Salario. Again, I was greeted on all sides by the same unimaginative, red-letter cliches stating, "God and Family" or "Anti-Fascism Lives." The only difference from the historic center was the brutal ugliness of the "modern" apartment buildings and the dreary shabbiness of the concrete parks. I strolled around a bit and hopped back on the next bus to the Termini, feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
Oh, well. "Valerio Verbano Vive." Or so they say.
Friday, November 5, 2010
A hot topic
Gang killings in Oaxaca force response from governor
While drug killings are practically nil in Oaxaca province, political violence is not unknown. This is the latest in a long line of recent bloodshed, some of which was happening under our very noses last summer.
For example, the last day we were in Oaxaca, a priest in his 80's was tortured and killed in a supposed botched robbery at one of the beautiful church/temple complexes downtown. This would be odd enough since most churches' treasures are not hidden away and you wouldn't need to torture anyone to find out where they were. But this priest was also an outspoken advocate for indigenous human rights, a very dangerous position to take in a country where the oligarchy is still pretty powerful.
And then there is the ongoing situation in San Juan Copala which has gotten very little press in the US, and the murder of an American expat in August whose body was just discovered in October, and . . . . I could go on and on. Even so, if I had to choose between navigating drug violence and political violence, I'd say political violence is easier to avoid. I thought I was alert and open to what was going on beneath the surface, but I clearly missed a lot of what was happening right under my nose. However, I never felt threatened or endangered. And when you think of it, a lot goes on right under our noses in our own communities with very little effect on our daily lives.
While drug killings are practically nil in Oaxaca province, political violence is not unknown. This is the latest in a long line of recent bloodshed, some of which was happening under our very noses last summer.
For example, the last day we were in Oaxaca, a priest in his 80's was tortured and killed in a supposed botched robbery at one of the beautiful church/temple complexes downtown. This would be odd enough since most churches' treasures are not hidden away and you wouldn't need to torture anyone to find out where they were. But this priest was also an outspoken advocate for indigenous human rights, a very dangerous position to take in a country where the oligarchy is still pretty powerful.
And then there is the ongoing situation in San Juan Copala which has gotten very little press in the US, and the murder of an American expat in August whose body was just discovered in October, and . . . . I could go on and on. Even so, if I had to choose between navigating drug violence and political violence, I'd say political violence is easier to avoid. I thought I was alert and open to what was going on beneath the surface, but I clearly missed a lot of what was happening right under my nose. However, I never felt threatened or endangered. And when you think of it, a lot goes on right under our noses in our own communities with very little effect on our daily lives.
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